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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5802401" data-attributes="member: 54877">I don't necessarily mind the effects of a hard cap. But a hard cap is an admission that the diminishing returns or other intentions of the design are not fully met by that design, and thus must be enforced by the hard cap. So a hard cap is "settling". I prefer soft caps via rules that encourage the expected range of choices explicitly, whenever possible. They are less brittle than hard caps, and they encourage players and groups to find their own, natural limits, instead of everyone of a given character type pushing for the cap immediately. That is, the problem with a hard cap of 18 or 21 or whatever is not that people can't get beyond the cap, but that the existence of the cap implies that the design team thinks that an inordinate number of people are going to hit the cap. Still, sometimes the cost of avoiding this are more trouble than the cap itself. The max of 4 skill ranks per skill at character creation in 3E was another example of the same issue. It isn't awful or insurmountable, but it does indicate a hole in the 3E skill rank design--and in that case, a hole that had subtle but real bad side effects throughout the design.</blockquote>