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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jay Verkuilen" data-source="post: 7725118" data-attributes="member: 6873517">This is a very good point and a huge difference between a game like D&D and a game like Magic. Magic is very explicitly a collectible game. Buying new cards to improve your collection was part of the game from day 1. Furthermore, MtG has no pretense to a secondary reality so that kind of consistency or parity among players isn't an issue. Having some dominated, explicitly weaker cards floating around is fine. In fact, someone might decide to make a game that says "build decks from commons only" or something like that as part of the theme. Or a player might decide to self-handicap by making a clearly dominated deck. (I know someone who did that a lot back in the day. He was a good player and would routinely beat people who weren't who had objectively better decks.) Aspects of D&D might be "collectible" too, in game, such as equipment. However character features like feats, skills, spells, etc., should not typically be explicitly dominated or be dominant and more importantly the game has a secondary reality to respect. Situational utility is, of course, quite another matter. That's a good thing and a key part of the game. But one character type or character ability shouldn't always be better or always be worse, in general. Power creep is really just referring to when dominated options are introduced over time. 5E has some examples of this issue floating around, such as the really cheap "bad" armor types like padded vs. leather or ring mail. Why would anyone ever have padded armor given the quite minimal price difference? Leather is better in all ways. NPCs might, or the DM might have really tight money, but realistically this isn't likely to show up. More worrisome are some feats, like the Healer's Kit one, that are markedly better than many spells or skills. IMO the feats weren't designed that well and might have been done without a firm knowledge of the way the skill system was going to work. Of course the skill system isn't all that well designed either. The roll is fine, but what you can do with the roll is highly sketchy.</blockquote>

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