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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5898234" data-attributes="member: 54877">Not in my book. Leave aside for the moment the question of whether a design team can pull that off. (I know, that's like saying, "leave aside for a moment that transfer truck about to slam into you, how do you see this trip going?")  In a well-balanced system, specialization is its own reward. I see optimizing, power gaming, etc. from a broader perspective than the typical char ops perspective. What's the optimal, mechanical character in a given campaign? One that plays to your strengths, that you enjoy, that has options you use, and so forth. That's why, despite all the discussion, there is practically nothing weaker in 3E than a mid to high level wizard who takes nothing but direct damage spells, seldom even swaps those, and takes whatever feats appeal to him. That guy is infinitely better off playing a sorcerer in that campaign, even if the wizard is much stronger looked at generally. Or if you want an example further afield, in a game where everyone roleplays Diplomacy according to the player instead of the character, making your Cha your dump stat is optimal. OTOH, if there are mechanical widgets associated with Cha that help with social skills, or the group comes down hard on such play as "not playing your character properly," then dumping Cha probably isn't optimal. If themes, unchanged, are somewhat stronger, from the char op perspective, but not radically so--and themes are well designed to do what they imply they do via the theme--then you might get this:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Casual players or those who simply like that kind of thing, pick a theme that sounds right to them, and it will probably work. It's the text that keyed them to get the thing. Exceptions would be mechanical processes that emulate the theme, but not the way the player expected and wants.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">An optimizer picks feats and gets exactly what they want from that perspective. The optimizer now has more challenge, because the handicap of not getting the theme bonus is something that has to be overcome to realize any advantage. A lot of people who enjoy optimization for optimization sake will like this, even if they can only get to around 95% theme effectiveness. (History says they will beat that. But make them work for it.)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The person who likes customization but is not an optimizer has one huge advantage--they care about customization and have it. This is likely to make them less effective in general from the char op sense, but in a given campaign, the resulting character will be optimal for that player, meaning whatever advantage the character has will be exploited to their fullest.</li> </ul>The gaping hole in that logic, of course, is that sometimes you might have a player with a strong enjoyment out of two of those three, or even all three. I can't think of a game where such a player doesn't have a huge advantage, short of complete homogenity--and not even all of those, given a player that into something is usually more experienced and interested in other parts of the game too. What such a structure could mitigate, however, is the "accidental breaking" possibilities, where huge swaths of the game are distinctly sub optimal in all hands.</blockquote>

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