Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Runestar" data-source="post: 4463867" data-attributes="member: 72317">I feel it refers more to the complexity of the build, rather than the degree of skill needed to run it properly.I think mechanically simple refers more to the class being more or less idiot-proof, in that it is hard to screw up. An example would be a 3e warmage, cleric or barb. However badly you screwed up with regards to inappropriate feat selections and the like, you could still function decently because your core competencies were more or less already locked in and pre-selected for you. Assuming you at least bothered to sink a decent score into your key stat, the warmage still has full access to his vast array of direct damage spells, the cleric can spontaneously cast cure spells how badly he opted to prepare his spells, and the barb retains rage, fast movement and dr.Conversely, there are character builds which require a high degree of system mastery to play properly. One such example is the 3e fighter, easily one of the most complex classes to play. Why? Because you got nothing but bonus feats, and there are easily hundreds of feats he can choose from, but little/no guidance as on how to go about selecting them, and many of them are traps and not really worth the paper they are printed on. Unless you know exactly what you want for your fighter, it is all too easy to go haywire and end up selecting inappropriate feats, thus screwing him up. It can still be quite straightforward and intuitive to run in combat, only problem is building him that way.I admit to liking 3e-style optimization for the intellectual challenge, even though they usually never end up seeing actual play. I don't know how to describe it - there is this inexplicable sense of immense satisfaction when I come up with a custom character concept, then go about thinking of how best to represent it mechanically using material from an assortment of splatbooks, and then finetuning/adding finishing touches to refine it. Sometimes, I think I actually enjoy preparing to play the game more than actually playing it...<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /></blockquote>

Verification