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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kaisoku" data-source="post: 5319708" data-attributes="member: 58447">System Mastery has been really well addressed I feel.A lot of the "poor choices" in 3e have been addressed quite nicely:- Skills! Between the consolidation and removal of the "4x at 1st level" business.. even if you find that you need something levels-down-the-road, you can pick up a skill concept fairly easily.There's some hidden stuff too... Skill Focus increases at 10th level/ranks (+6 instead of +3), and the +2/+2 feats have a boost also (to +4/+4). A low/normal Wisdom Fighter wanting to be good at Perception, and having feats to spare, can easily catch up to someone with a class skill and decent wisdom.- Feats! You get more, and faster (one every two levels), which means if you find yourself needing a feat from gameplay experience, you'll see it sooner. Fighters having the ability to retrain built into the core rules is nice too.But not just that, as noted with the Skill feats, a lot of choices have been "bumped up" in bang for the buck. Toughness defaulting to +1/level, and the APG gives extended feat trees for some old feats much more worthwhile (like blind-fighting).- Classes! The design intent of making classes valuable at all levels, especially the high levels, makes needing to multiclass or prestige out no longer necessary.In fact, the design intent behind "PrCs are different choices, not power choices" can be seen with the APG's archetypes. Want a weapon master? Pick a weapon master fighter. Want a sniper? You've got a number of options between rogue talents, archetypes, and ranger options.If you know the type of character you want to play right from the start, you can pick it... without needing to wait until an arbitrary 7th level with specific choices you apparently had to know about ahead of time.- Game Mechanics! The size bonuses being drastically reduced, and streamlining of the Combat Maneuvers, has really let people test the waters for alternative tactics without needing to specialize to get any benefit. Note, it'll still be hard to grapple that colossal creature, but if grappling the BBEG so he can't set off his death machine seems like a good idea, you've at least got a chance these days, even if you didn't focus on the feats or builds.I've found Pathfinder to be far more forgiving, and have a hard time finding a character choice that will always result in "a bad idea". Short of weapon specialization (net), of course. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />There's still ways to optimize to get really really good at a specific thing. But if you don't, it's more likely to mean that you are more versatile, than down right useless like it tended to be in 3e.</blockquote>

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