The Tyranny of Choice

[Fishbone]

I'm frustrated over choice. Not the limited scope of it, but rather the preposterous scope of it. Hundreds of 1-20 classes with hundreds of prestige classes, thousands of spells and races, and who knows how many bloody feats.
The information overload actually makes it harder for me to make a character. Each race choice must be carefully mulled over. Each feat must be carefully picked for relative power now, relative power later, how it will gel with my character's other feats and skills and class abilities, what it will let me qualify for, taking weaker feats and skills to get into a coveted prestige class sooner, etc. Spell upon spell to pick for optimum damage, utility, group synergy blah blah blah blah blah. Nowadays people just assume enough googly eyes and potato chips and they can con...vince the DM into allowing any crazy ass thing as long as it has WOTC slapped on it. As a DM everything must be combed over for balance, and flavor, and power to the other kabajillion choices you could reccomend to the player. I'm burnt out on all this frigging choice. I'd like to be in something I've loathed for years...
A CORE ONLY GAME!
Gasp!

 

[Odhanan]

I'm of the opposite opinion. Choices have to remain flavorful and fit the overall feel of the campaign and group of PCs, but the most choices I have, the happier a gamer I am.

 

[Crothian]

I found focusing on characters personality over power and campaign story over balance makes most of these problems go away. I think the options are good and help create the right character but can cause problems when people are just looking for the right numbers.

 

[EricNoah]

Sometimes wading through all of the choices to find a "perfect fit" for my concept is challenging. It's even harder when class names and feat names aren't as precise or descriptive as they could be.

As a DM it's even more challenging, because the DM comes up with so many characters. But what I try to do is just use one or two "differenty-feeling" feats, classes (or sometimes just class features), and/or spells from a given book just to give an NPC flavor, and then build him with core SRD parts.

 

[Vrecknidj]

I feel your pain. When I go to the store to "buy some cereal" (or, insert some other product), I'm overwhelmed by the fact that I have a hundred choices.

Geez.

Dave

 

[Aust Diamondew]

Ideally there would be enough options to fulfill any given character concept mechanically with out any redundacy or superfulous options.
Unfortunately if you allow everything it's far from that. And to comb through everything to create the above scenario is very difficult.

Fortunatley for my group though none of us buy many supplements because we realized the core stuff covers a lot of ground as is and generally whoever is DMing has only a few PRCs exist in his world so we don't suffer from this problem too often (though at times it has come up, particuarly because we have a long list of feats that we have compiled that are allowed in our groups games).

 

[shilsen]

The problem only exists if you allow it to. As a player, there's nobody holding a d20 to your head saying that you need to look at all the options. And as a DM, you get to decide what to allow in the game.

 

[Fishbone]

Okay, I see that Dave disagrees.

 

[wayne62682]

I disagree. While I feel it's necessary in some capacity to limit the sourcebooks rather than allow anything and everything, I completely and utterly loathe Core only games and find them stifling. I like choice and options to make exactly the character I want.

 

[Fishbone]

I guess my wanting a core only game could be considered a bit of an overcorrection.