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Message: <blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 5996637" data-attributes="member: 22424">There's a way to have both, and to have both be viable options, even in the same group.The way you do it is to first set out the skills and feats separately, and balanced in their own right.Then, package them up into bundles (specialities and backgrounds), where the "blacksmith" bundle has that Item Crafting trait and Professional Lore skill.But here's the key thing: provide a (small) "price break" for accepting the bundle, but don't allow any substitutions or alterations from the bundle - you either take it as-is, or not at all.And so, switching out that Professional Lore for "something more useful" is a no-no - if you want to get rid of that, then you have to choose a la carte... and that means paying more for the individual bits.(The reason you can do this and have it remain balanced is precisely because the bundles are non-optimised. The char-op people will thus have numerically 'weaker' characters, but can be assumed to have gained more bang for their buck, whether due to system mastery, or because they've consulted the boards, or what-have-you.)It is, however, important that the designers are conscious of this, and that they don't proceed to create bundles for every conceivable combination of skills and feats! Providing price breaks like this only works if the bundles are reasonably but not perfectly optimised - if you can just select "a bundle of what I would have chosen anyway", then it's potentially a problem.</blockquote>

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