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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hamburger Mary" data-source="post: 4125198" data-attributes="member: 17363">I think it's a question of design philosophy and attempting to ensure an optimal game experience for the majority of players. Essentially, 3E allows the player who wants to create a character who is suboptimal in one field of play the ability to do so. As shown in the CharOp boards, through things like prestige classes and multiclassing it also allows advanced players to create characters who are ridiculously effective in a particular arena. From my experience, 4E is flattening both of these. It's making it harder to intentionally make a character who is weak in combat - but that also makes it more difficult to accidentally make a character who's weak in combat. Assuming that a core goal of this design is to make the game more accessible to new players, I think that's a sensible decision. Making a fighter is simple, straightforward, and unless I do something that's OBVIOUSLY an odd choice - for example, deciding to fight with a dagger and not wear any armor - my character will be effective. I have choices that make me different from other fighters, both in and out of combat - but I'll have something to offer in both areas. Meanwhile, the power and paragon system makes it easy to make my character different from other fighters - but in comparison to 3E, it should be more difficult to stack together things that weren't intended to be combined to create the crazy charOp scenarios you can find out there - which again prove to be a problem for the inexperienced player who sits down at the table and finds that his simple character is useless next to the guy with the +28 Diplomacy at second level and the guy inflicting 1,000 points of damage. Yes, it robs the advanced player of the chance to make that character who can do 1,000 points of damage - but given that most of these crazy CharOp scenarios are accidents as opposed to the designers' original intent, I can't feel too bad about that. I think it's good that characters are balanced... all the more so because 4E places greater weight on noncombat encounters than 3E does, actually treating them as being as significant as fighting a battle or disarming a trap, as opposed to just a throw away "And if PCs do something cool out of combat, consider a story award."The rules won't let you make every possible character, because that was never the promise of D&D; it's the promise of a flexible, classless system like GURPS. How would you make Dalan? As an NPC, because he's not intended to be a PC. Even in 3E, he'd presumably be an expert - an NPC class. Sure, you could always choose to play an expert as a PC. But you can absolutely do that in 4E: Make a rogue and then throw away all of the class abilities and powers. Pow, you've got an expert class.From my experience - and as you can see in Hellcow's description of his party - it's possible to make a wide range of interesting characters. The system is designed to make it challenging to make UNBALANCED characters - either unbalanced in your favor or against you. But in doing that, it prevents people from making crappy characters by accident, and I think that's an important goal. Advanced players who WANT a challenge can always take my Expert approach - "I'm a rogue with no powers". But you can't have the player who thinks he's made something cool discover that actually he's all but useless in a fight or doesn't have anything to do for half of the game.</blockquote>

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