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Message: <blockquote data-quote="dkyle" data-source="post: 5897203" data-attributes="member: 70707">It is absolutely guaranteed that skilled cherry-picking will produce something at least as good as the Themes, because cherry-picking can exactly duplicate the Themes.There is no absolute guarantee that Themes will be inferior to custom feat selection, but it is very close to guaranteed. Basically every pre-gen, example character ever made bears this out.Whether the disparity will be "game screwing" is less certain. That's a matter of degree, and highly subjective. But if the Simple option is almost always inferior to the Complex options (and never better), then Simple gains a reputation of being a trap for newbs. I'd put the odds of that happening at around zero. Game designers are terrible at picking the "best" choices. And even if they do, it's highly unstable, since the early themes can't use any of the feats that come out in later splatbooks. So those early themes not only need to be the "best" of the existing feats, but also the best of future feats as well.I think it's just absurd to expect any of that to work out correctly.</blockquote>