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Message: <blockquote data-quote="howandwhy99" data-source="post: 3816261" data-attributes="member: 3192">I can talk to these points as I find both Feats and Skills, as they stand now, both limiting to PCs and play.  Before I get into that though, how exactly does removing one aspect of play, per-day resources, open up new areas to explore?  Perhaps the game has become too heavily dependent on magic?  If Spells are the only Per-day resource we are talking about here, then the 1 spell per day M-U of old must seem worthless after 1 round of combat every day.  That's so far from the truth it makes me think no one has actually played that game at 1st level.  The difference was, that spell could often win an entire encounter on it's own.  Or alter the strategy of needing to have an encounter, maybe any encounter.  Or, as was the basic quality of magic, the spell was used in to succeed  in ways without relevance to any combat whatsoever.  As to the feats and skills restriction, these both limit players' imaginations on what their characters can do.  How is that possible?  First, each tells them what they can do.  If I say you have 5 options, then you will only choose from those 5.  If I say you can do anything you can think of, then your options just became vastly more open ended.For skills, general competency is bantered around on messageboards on occasion.  This is what I believe they are trying to solve with 4e skill rules.  All PCs will be basically the same in all skills and that level will be competent from the start.  A few skills may be more effective based on class, but basically everyone is the same.  That's reminiscent of 2nd edition Skills & Powers play.Prior to that everyone was as competent in every skill as any other.  Rogues were the exception as "Skills" were their special class ability.  (I still believe the game was better off before these were added)  What this "general competency" does is allow PCs to actually engage in whatever type of play they wish to Out-of-Combat.  They are not restricted because of arbitrary limits on what they can learn.  Or how much they can learn.  Erc.  In combat, of course, team work is required based on the sword/sorcery/healing synergy balance.  OO-Combat everybody gets to aid eachother as they wish without restriction (other than the way the world works).  3e Feats are an embedded system of special ability increases.  Instead of having special abilities advanced however and whenever gameplay and game-time dictate (based on accomplishments in the game), these "feats" are placed on an arbitrary arbitrary scale: character level.  Sometimes this makes sense, sometimes it doesn't.  Embedding these into class levels may allow the designers greater predictability about the relative power of PCs at certain XP points, but such balancing is and was a futile endeavor away from any particular DMs table.  The 3e rules bent over backwards to keep the game balanced for every class, race, level, etc. so each could only be the same exact power at each level.  They could not see power as measurable outside a 20 pt aggregate scale (the levels).  This simply ignored XP points and required such an absolutely strict playstyle gold and magic items had to be given to players PCs regardless of whether their actions rewarded them with such or not.  3e was/is so very brittle for me.  It breaks even when I'm following every one of its' constrictive rules. IMO, feats are: "things you learned in game that your PC can now use to be better".  Having the flexibility to reward these feats only when gameplay accomplishments dictates means the game is both more realistic and more about rewarding good play.My dislike of arbitrary ability score advancement stems from the same argument.</blockquote>

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