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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Obergnom" data-source="post: 3325714" data-attributes="member: 7145">In our group, we have a simple problem, which lacks a simple solution. While some of us invest a lot of time into character building, other do not. All of us like to play useful characters appreciated by the rest of the group as worthy team members, but that’s just not possible if not all at the table invest the same amount of time into building their characters.Example: I’m quite good at the Character Building Sub Game: If I think about playing some kind of Jedi Warrior Monk, it would be something like maybe a Monk2/fighter4/Kensai2/Exotic Weapon Master2/KensaiX … this is a rough outline, I would definitely examine if there are better options. I now how to build a Fighter Mage who, at level 20, casts Spells as a 17th level Wizard (with a Caster Level of 18 or even 20) and has a BAB of +18, saves and hp roughly equal to cleric etc.Two and a half of the seven gamers in our group are like that.Than there are those gamers who do not have a long term plan for their characters. They choose feats when they get them. You now, the kind of players that sometimes chooses Toughness or similar feats, because it is a good boost at the moment. If they choose a Prestige Classes, that’s  because they think the style might fits their character or because the theme ability of the Prestige Class is pretty neat. They will try to get the prereqs as fast as possible and would almost always take all levels of the prestige class, maybe go back to their base class if the Prestige class does not give more interesting abilities.Again, two and a half of the seven gamers in our group are like that.These are the 5 of us who might take the GMs seat one time or another.Than there are those who need help for putting the stats for their characters, who do not now at all which feats to might be a good choice. They would almost never pick a prestige class or multiclass their character, except the GM or some other player tells them to.We have got two of those, and they are not beginners.The problem is, we all like to play characters that can contribute to the game, and while the gap between type 1 and 2 is can be filled with allowing an occasional rebuild, I rebuilt or built the characters of the two players in the third group while I was DMing. One of the others complained about that, because he felt cheated. He thinks that you should invest your own time to get a good character.The problem is, that in D&D’s current edition, you can easily be 50% more efficient than other characters just by investing time into character building. It is not mastery of the game at the table that makes you a superior player, it is time invested into assuring your character is just more capable than everybody else.I do not like that. I always wanted a good player to be someone who knew how to play the game. How to survive a dungeon. Who can invent brilliant strategies on the fly to beat the enemies. Not someone who spent 20 hours optimizing his character to deal twice the amount of damage that would be expected by his class and fighting style, has 5 points of armor, and a number of “tricks” which others can not use, because they did not even knew such a Feat existed, or that they need a feat to do that.I had big hopes the Quick Character Design Charts in the back of the PHB2 might help us their, but they do not. The feat selection is full of errors and just not very good.I think my main problem is this. Prestige Classes are not what they (IMO) should be. They do not really specialize your character, which would mean you get worse at some of your core abilities but better at others, they simply boost your power level. There are so many feats out there it is very hart to decide which might be good in the game before playing your character, for some players it might be better to allow a feat like Weapon Focus to be taken more than once, for the same weapon. Thus they will get their 5% attack boost over And over again, it is a rock solid boost, not as good as the tricks you can learn, but usable all day long.There are more problems of course, only the players of the first category in our group would even consider playing a multiclass character who fully combines the abilities of two classes, the oney of the second group might pick into some levels of a class to get rage, sneak or some feats, but never play a Mage/Rogue or Fighter/Mage.Have any of you had the same problem? What did you do to solve it? I am at the moment thinking about allowing Gestalt Characters with an XP Penalty that will equal a +4 ECL at level 20, to allow more character concepts to be playable without much tweaking. Aand maybe something like a bunch of bonuses you may take instead of feats… like the stacking weapon focus stuff. But that might be rather hard to come up with.I do not believe that allowing fewer books (We use Core, PHB2 and Completes) will help, you can seriously screw up a core fighter… you do not need many books to do that.</blockquote>

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