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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5777173" data-attributes="member: 4937">Good question.Two reasons.  First, not every player has the same primary goals I have.  Typically when you put the LEGO peices in the hands of a gamer who is focused on winning that subgame, you get a character which is basically a well honed weapon and only a well honed weapon.  Every superflous peice is stripped off the character sheet in order to get the optimally honed high performance character you can have.  Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with that, but what it tends to do is make groups with mixed gaming styles more incompatible than they would be if you had them work within the constraints of a somewhat flexible set of peices - a 'class' if you would.  One of the great advantages of D&D in my experience is that it supports not just a variaty of styles of play, but a variaty of styles of play coexisting at the same table.When you have a class you are ideally ensuring that the resulting character has a bit of breadth to it.  You can attach of minor abilities to the class which rarely come up but which make any character that is a member of the class more well rounded.   Enforcing versitility is hard to do in a point buy framework.  You are also ensuring a bit of archetypal power at the level of starting character.  You can have concepts built right into the game.  You'll note that even point buy systems like M&M go out of there way to make an initial presentation of the system in terms of archetypes - the speedster, the vigilantte, the brick, the paragon, etc.   And you also speed up character creation a bit.  Really in depth point buy systems can take hours to put a single character together.  That's not such a big deal from the stand point of the player, but its a huge advantage from the standpoint of the DM.Secondly, point buy systems are notoriously hard to balance.  Brokenness is usually around every corner.  With a class based system that has a reasonably small number of classes (say under 20), it's a lot easier to play test and tweak the game until they all are roughly balanced.  Also, in practice, point buy doesn't necessarily ensure more diversity than a class based system precisely because of the lack of balance.  Pretty quickly in a point buy system there is a gravitation towards a small number of 'best builds'.  This is kind of equivalent of the feat tax issues you sometimes see in 3e and especially 4e.  Everyone has to do certain things to make the build work well, and so you end up with relatively few points to actually differentiate your character from someone else.I've been both places and depending on the game I might go with point buy or classes.  But classes are the right choice for D&D, and frankly even if a good point buy system could be devised despite the tradeoffs, the game wouldn't feel much like D&D if it didn't have them.</blockquote>

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