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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5028330" data-attributes="member: 4937">I think that alot of you are running with this 'system mastery' idea a little far a field.  I've yet to discover a gaming system that allows choices - even if only 'which class do you want to play' which doesn't have a degree of 'system mastery' to it.  But we do ourselves a disservice to describe that with shabby marketing terms like 'system mastery' which makes it sound like that is a feature instead of a bug.  I'm glad to see that 'system mastery' which was a term that WotC seems to have invented to excuse itself for deliberately printing combinations of deliberately overcosted trash filler cards and deliberately undercosted 'chase rares' in Magic the Gathering as a way of extorting the player base into buying more of their product has gotten the negative reputation that it deserves, but I don't actually believe that WotC deliberately built 'system mastery' into 3.0 because it makes no sense for them to have done so.  Instead, I think 'system mastery' crept into the system the same way it shows up in every other RPG - it's hard to perfectly balance a game system and the more options you have the more likely it is that you haven't perfectly balanced it.  Let's call it what it is, poor balance.  I don't think that it was ever intended that toughness was supposed to be a poor option, and I hope it was never intended that power attack was to be so dominating.To claim that 'system mastery' was the root of the problem is to claim that WotC designers were sitting around saying something like, "It's clear Toughness is too weak for what it is, but I'm ok with that because in the next development cycle we can introduce a new feat called 'Hardy' that will be strictly superior to Toughness and that will encourage peope to buy the PH2.  On the other hand, I don't think we've got enough flash in this first offering.  I think its obvious alot of people will gravitate to power attack without thinking through the math.   Why don't we go ahead and give it the upside those players intuitively think it has, and make it the feature ability of this release?  And if it is too broken, we can always print a feat that explicitly nerfs power attack."   I just don't think the developers were that cynical when 3.0 or even 3.5 was being designed.  I just don't think they'd fully thought it through or play tested it enough.I don't think there is an inherent suckitude to the idea of 'toughness' or an inherent brokenness to power attack.  Tweaking them one way or the other could reverse that and make 'Toughness' a 'duh' choice and turn 'Power Attack' into 'the suck'.   I think the trouble is tweaking them such that they both are interesting choices (especially without having seen them in play) is hard.</blockquote>

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