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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5235278" data-attributes="member: 82106">I can see many ways that it could work, and I wouldn't call them bad design either. What bothers me is that there is more to compatibility with existing material than just having classes that are built any which way. Its the fact that they are different than existing classes that CAUSES the issues.Again, if you have a mix of old and new classes they will have different resource allocation needs for instance. You'll have classes that have daily powers wanting to rest and regain their dailies and encounter-only classes that will want to do something else. One of the nice things about 4e has been that all classes have the same resources to allocate. Power points for psionic classes changed that a BIT, but they obviously considered the issue and overall they fit reasonably well with the existing classes. Even so there are some oddities like certain items that are useless for psionic classes and a few things that are even broken (like the psionic consumables which are totally messed up).There are a lot of elements of 4e that presuppose the existing power system. I'm not really that thrilled to have basic assumptions about how PCs work suddenly changing. Its going to be problematic. It is especially an issue for designers of material going forward, which is now going to have to be constrained by TWO sets of assumptions. It was hard enough to design a feat that wasn't either useless or broken before, its going to be 2x that hard now and much that would have been possible will now be unbalanced with the new stuff and vice versa. I don't think these systems will be as compatible as people seem to think. I strongly suspect that while you will THEORETICALLY have compatibility between old and new the reality is going to be different. Mixing and matching is going to be tricky and DMs are going to have to be doubly aware of what the implications are of doing it. In the long run I think we'll end up with a lot of stuff that can only be used with the new classes or only really works with the old ones and the result is effectively 2 systems. You'll sort of be able to play them together, but it may not be all that easy. It doesn't make me a happy camper.</blockquote>

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