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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3242238" data-attributes="member: 4937">It sometimes amazes me how people who play RPG's can have exactly the opposite opinion from what I see as obvious.  Along with the whole, 'I want them balanced by being more powerful in a narrow area but being less flexible..." meme, here's another one.You think GURPS is balanced?  It's far easier to twink and min/max in GURPS than it is in D&D, which I would have thought everyone who had played GURPS would know.  There is nothing enherently balanced about a point system.  In fact, point systems are harder to balance and notorious for being unbalanced and subject to abuse (as is frequently made fun of in Knights of the Dinner Table).No you don't.  You can keep archetypes in a point system quite easily.  Most of them do that successfully.  What you can't do is retain balance.  The point of points packages aka 'levels' is that you can balance the archetypes more easily than you can with a point system that lets players decide what they want and not pay for what they don't want.   The point of 'levels' is that you only have to test out a limited number of builds, whereas with points there are an infinite number of builds.D&D needs levels to stay D&D.  Levels are a great mechanic.  They aren't enherently inferior to point systems, and they have some big advantages.  It's no accident that most of the successful CRPG's out there adopt a level/class based system rather than a point based system.  It's just easier to balance and it gaurantees more diversity in the player creation because its easier to prevent there being one best build.And there I think you are correct.  I think PrC's appeal to the 'new school' RPGer who has grown up on CRPG's and is mostly interested in recreating the CRPG experience on paper.  PrC's take D&D in the opposite direction that the rest of the 3rd edition changes took it - away from a points based system rather than more towards one (in something of a hybrid system).  Now, there is nothing particularly wrong with that as a game design, but the problem is that the PrC doesn't really interface well with the rest of D&D's design.  It breaks things.   It's a cludged on addition.   If we wanted to redesign the game to retain PrC's (I wouldn't, I'm more old school), the best bet would be to redo all the base classes to just have 10 levels so that everyone eventually took a PrC, something like what D20 Modern does with 'advanced classes'.  That's not personally the way I'd want to take things, but at least its a consistant design.Kits were an attempt to add flexibility to an inflexible system.  The real analogy with kits between 2E and 3E is with feats and skills.   Kits were 2E feats.  In many ways, PrC's encourage a reduction in flexibility, because they have more limited choices than a base class (in fact, thats IMO the only thing you in practice sacrifice to take a PrC).  It results in more characters having the same build, which is the opposite of the way feats take the game (fewer characters have the same build). Cool, I'd be interested to hear it.</blockquote>

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