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Message: <blockquote data-quote="tyrlaan" data-source="post: 4665881" data-attributes="member: 20998">I don't believe it's as dismissible as you think. Playing a character that uses strength to hit for both straight up (fighter) attacks and sneaky (rogue) attacks is very different than someone who has no choice but to use str to hit for fighter attacks and dex for rogue attacks. And it's not just a fluff difference. This is a very real game mechanics difference in how it plays. In the same vein, a rogue's melee basic attack uses Str to hit. Huh? How does this make sense?These limitations are arbitrary in 4e. In 4e, it was decided that rogue's use Dex to attack and fighters use Str. It's not a balance concern, because I could play a paladin/cleric that both rely on one stat based on RAW. It makes individual classes work very well, but certain class combos will inevitably run into snags. 4e may have solved the problem of martial classes dipping into caster classes, but it introduced a different problem.Now you're just arguing semantics instead of responding to my concerns/statements. Aside from the fact that when I state "bow fighter" it should be safe to assume I mean someone who is known for their bow use, aka an archer, the ranger comes with his own mechanics in addition to fluff. Refer to my comments in response to yesnomu on this.I'm not sure how that qualifies as a breakdown in the game system, but I'm not really interested in arguing the point either way. However, this does provide a useful springboard for another notion worth mentioning.Short of an impressively robust points based system, it's exceedingly difficult to make a remotely elegant system that allows you to model all character concepts. Class based systems just can't measure up to point based, at least in my experience, in this regard. That said, if you look at 3e vs 4e, it is clear that 3e provided the tools, in just the PHB, to create vastly more mechanically and thematically diverse characters than what the 4ePHB provides. I'm not saying that 3e was all that and a +1 bag of chips, but theme takes a back seat when it comes to 4e class design. 4e classes are highly tuned for balance and role at the expense of flexibility. Sure the multiclass mechanics address this somewhat, but the same can be said of 3e multiclassing. Both rulesets exist to allow people to play concepts that a single class cannot provide. This is all inherently obvious in the nature of the 4e splatbooks. Case in point, an answer to one of my character concepts was "domains will be released in Divine Power." So basically what we're saying here is that, while in 3e, splatbooks gave me new options I never really thought about, 4e splatbooks give me the tools I /need/ to build characters.</blockquote>

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