Remathilis said:
There can be a problem with too much open-ended flexibility in a game though...
Sure. I don't think your objections carry much weight though, at least not from my perspective.
1.) It was entirely possible to build a character that "sucks". a ftr1/rog1/clr1/wiz1/sor1/brd1/bbn1 is not equal to ftr7. Even a wiz5/clr5 was not equal to a wiz10. This isn't the "trade-off between versatility and focus" because there is no combination of 3rd level wizard + 3rd level cleric spells that even remotely came close to a 5th level wizard spell.
Yes. And? So it is possible to build a character who is sub-optimal. Why is that bad? Some people like that sort of character, and aren't always focued on seeing if they can get the most plusses.
I played a lot of the B5 CCG. The bulk of games were "standard" - get the most power and win. But on a regular basis, Precedence would run "social" tournaments in which the focus was on who provided the table with the most fun - through role-playing, doing interesting things, or otherwise engging in what might be termed "suboptimal" strategies (like the guy who sponsored cards that he could use the first letter of to spell out "Zathras" over and over).
The "social" tournaments were a blast - why is a game that ostensibly all about role-playing deciding that that sort of game element should be eliminated?
2.) It was possible to "too narrowly" focus your PC. A lot of later PrCs (for example) became "monster hunter" classes (giant killer, dragonhunter, undead slayer) which posed two problems: a.) the presence of a slayers chosen foe made any encounter with said foe meaningless (and any series of encounters a cakewalk) and b.) made the slayer PC useless against any other type of foe. So your undead slayer PC was bored to death in Against the Giants due to the lack of any option beyond " roll to hit" while the rest of the team sat around watching the undead slayer deal triple damage against nearly everyting in Castle Ravenloft.
Yes. And? Why is having the option to specialize bad? its a trade-off. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Having only choices that always pay off is dull.
3.) False choice. Assuming your game spent equal time in and out of dungeons, how welcomed was a rogue without search/disable device? A cleric who negatively channeled? A wizard without evocation and/or conjuration? A fighter in only a chain shirt and rapier? A paladin loaded on mounted combat feats?
We had pretty much all of those in the games I played in. They were fine. Heck, I played in a campaign with a rogue with a 7 Strength, 12 Dexterity, no search/disable device and who traded away his sneak attack ability for sage like skills. He was one of the best characters in the campaign. When he died, and was replaced by the player with another "standard" style character (a dwarven cleric), the rest of the party went out of its way to get the original character raised from the dead so he could go back to playing the rogue.
This lead (at least in my experience) to players often choosing the "optimal" builds for PCs: rogues with maxed out search/disable device, fighters with power attack. etc. It also lead to PCs seeking out feats/PrCs that didn't "dilute" them from their role: rogues avoided long PrCs without Search/DD as class skills, etc.
Maybe in your experience, but not in mine. The thing is, in 3e you could play the maximized character with all the "best" options, or you could play something less focused, and the system supported both as viable options. In 4e, you don't have that choice.
4.) The CR system: The CR system assumed four reasonable PCs of a given level. However, we've shown its easy to build unreasonable PCs. That meant the CR system collapsed under its own assumption. A CR 11 dragon might be a good challenge for a 9th level group of PCs if you assume a plate-and-greatsword fighter, a battle-ready wizard, a sneaky/SA rogue, and a positive-energy/healing cleric. Against a diplomacy-heavy bard, shifter-druid, an archery-ranger, and necromancy-heavy sorcerer, that dragon is a MUCH more difficult challenge.
yes. And? If you have the second party, you have to have a DM who notices the type of party he is dealing with and takes that into account. So they face lower CR foes than the "normal" optimized party. I don't see this as a big problem.
The only defense to this is to chuck CR as a measure of power and (hopefully correctly) make your PCs face enemies of CR lower (or higher) than their level but appropriate to their power-ranking. Tailored vs. status quo. Pretty soon, status quo become meaningless and your game's power level begins to look very askew compared to my generally-core-looking game.
So? Where is the problem?
So in the end, while 3e offered lots of "choice" much of that choice was bunk anyway, and people tended to focus on optimal builds anyway. Why not make that standard?
Because a lot of people like to play something that isn't a combat optimized character and would like to have that option?
All that said, I think the "restricting" of options is really just the culling of poor options masquerading a "viable choice". Is it more limiting? Sure. Will that be fixed down the road? I'm certain. However, I'm glad to know I can again look at a PCs class, race, and level and have an accurate measure of his power level and abilities without needing to know every feat, PrC and skill point allocation.
Sure, but that is the consequence of eliminating player choices. I like choices more than I like certainty. If I wanted to have this kind of certainty, I could have simply stuck with playing 1e or OD&D, where a 7th level fighter is pretty much the same as about every other 7th level fighter and a 9th level thief is about the same as every other 9th level thief and so on. I moved to a more flexible game because I
wanted flexibility. For me, as I said, 4e is a step
backwards in this regard - it just gives me what I could have had if I had stuck with older editions of D&D: limited choices and more "certainty".
So why switch to 4e, when I already had that in 1e, but decided to opt instead for 3e? If I want that sort of experience, I'll just play 1e again.
