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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lonely Tylenol" data-source="post: 3696044" data-attributes="member: 18549">The vast quantity of threads looking for mechanical changes that will serve to rebalance classes that are perceived as overpowered or underpowered speaks to a desire to have a fix that you don't have to enforce socially because the game-breaking exploits have been snipped off.  I happen to think it would be nice if I didn't have to ask my players not to break the game, accidentally or deliberately.  While I don't really see any problem with the psion, since I never run games with only one combat per day, I can see why some people would have a beef with it.There was a story a while back about some American broadband ISP (Compuserve, I think) calling customers who were paying for unlimited bandwidth and demanding that they cut down on their bandwidth usage.  The customers were rightfully angry at this, and many of them demanded to know why there was a cap on their usage if they were paying for unlimited usage.  The ISP said, there's no cap, just stop using so much.  The customers demanded to know how much was too much, and the ISP said, there's no cap, just stop using so much.It turns out that it was cable broadband, which is an utterly awful system because a particular geographical location (a neighbourhood, say) is all on the same local network.  The network partitions bandwidth to all the clients, but there's a maximum throughput.  If one client (or all of them, for that matter) has a lot of bandwidth use for whatever reason, and there are lots of reasons, it has the chance of slowing down everyone else's bandwidth.  That violates the terms of service because there's a clause that says you can't use your internet service in a way that interferes with anyone else's use of the service.  So they come down from the mountain like Moses and say, Thou Shalt Not Use So Much Damn Bandwidth, and come across like jerks because they set up a flawed bandwidth delivery system, charged people for unlimited access, and then turned around and changed their minds about the unlimited part, acting like it was the fault of the customers for screwing things up.I don't want to have to be Compuserve, telling my players not to turn their psions up past 7 or 8 (especially if it's a Wilder, and goes to 11) to smooth over the bumps in a poorly planned system.  I also don't think my players want to walk into a game where they're waiting for someone to tell them when too much is too much, and so can't manage their own resources without having to second-guess the system.Is it too much to ask that things just work for people who play a slightly not-by-the-book sort of game?  It's one of the reasons I like the trend away from "per day" resource management toward things like the warlock or the binder, which have abilities that are either balanced to be used every round all day, or which can only be fired a couple of times per combat because an average combat usually doesn't last more than 10 rounds.  A warlock functions just fine in a game that has one combat per day, and just fine in a game that has seven.  It's simply more portable, and saves the DM a lot of work playtesting, nerfing, playtesting, un-nerfing, nerfing something else, playtesting, dealing with a frustrated player, and then just giving up on the system because it's too much trouble to rebalance for his campaign style, all because he commits the error of not playing "book standard" D&D.</blockquote>

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