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Message: <blockquote data-quote="tetrasodium" data-source="post: 8406354" data-attributes="member: 93670">I think that ironically that bland sameiness is made worse by the decision to balance around no feats & no magic items while condensing feat chains into much more powerful feats .  The power that used to come from those feats & magic items didn't go away though & just got baked into the  base race/class/archetype.  That shift to the character sheet before the GM is involved makes the bland sameiness even worse because the gm an't do anything to crank the levers or direct it for the needs of the group & campaign like in the past.Magic items were once relatively easy to get with some limits& it's no coincidence that so many 3.5 builds/guides once tended to suggest or even go so far as to require a particular highly specific keystone magic item to even make the build work at the 300% level it was designed to operate at.  That gave the GM a lot of ways they could control limit & redistrbute power Maybe a wis/str/con codzlila build needs a specific magic item, simply limiting it to the same body slot as needed for stat items of those three would allow the GM to give the hypothetical uber-codzilla to be a choice between unlocking that uber-codzlilla ability while dropping an important stat by 2 4 6 or theoretically even 8 points while a more grounded build that was just  bit OTT might face choices between tough options  like deciding between +4 attrib item for the stat they really need or +2 with a secondary bonus like +1 to an important save or the ability to sneak attack undead.Take a couple "actually RAW doesn't allow that" builds like the well known coffeelock & more recent <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/comments/9lhgmy/insane_build_the_nuclear_wizard/" target="_blank">nuclear wizard</a> but pretend they do work like CoDzilla  & such once did.  For purposes of discussion pretend they do work for a minute.   They don't need any magic items, they get better with nearly any magic item & the designspace allocated to magic items is so narrow the GM has almost no room to create tough choices  that don't raise the power level or just make it equally if not more powerful in a slightly different way the player is willing to accept.All of that makes to ensure that the already overly simplified bland [spoiler="rockemmsockemrobots"][MEDIA=youtube]wtYGz5KWMkk[/MEDIA][/spoiler] where the vast majority of the time the players just charge in knowing without a doubt that it doesn't really matter what they do in order to win with certainty any more than the red robot player in the video. Players go through the motions with no meaningful difference & almost no chance of surprise unexpected results combat after combat.  Without tactical elements or meaningful resource attrition/depletion within the confines of of normal gameplay  there is not even a need to choose between the pros & cons of using more powerful limited use abilities in most fights vrs using unlimited at wills to save the big guns till later just in case. Add in things like an underused action economy & slapdash jarringly overused concentration as others have noted & players really don't even have the option to spice things up if things look like they might be bad.  Without that option for the players the GM winds up with a narrowly restricted band between pointless snooze encounters, entirely predictable encounters, LOLdeadly encounters, & "wow I didn't expect to tpk you that fast"</blockquote>

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