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Message: <blockquote data-quote="wayne62682" data-source="post: 5553790" data-attributes="member: 40455">Disclaimer: I've only given themes (DS and the new batch) a cursory glance and haven't played with them yet.I think the problem is that Wizards is devolving back to the 3.5 days of forgetting to balance things against all sourcebooks.  I remember the days of 3.5 where every new book that came out was only balanced on the assumption the only books used where the Core 3 + Itself, and this lead to $DEITY knows how many loopholes because most people used more than 4 books in their game.Now, from what I've seen and read about the design intent of themes, the DS themes meet that goal (important character choice) and the other themes do not.  IMO themes ought to be either one or the other - either they don't influence much at all and are almost all flavor with some minor mechanical benefit so there's a reason to take the theme in the first place (let's face it, you can say "Pick a theme for RP reasons" until the cows come home but most people will want some mechanical benefit) or they all need to be powerful choices and built into the game rules.As it stands right now, only DDI people even know what themes are and DDI people are the large minority compared to gamers who have no idea there is online content for D&D - that alone is going to cause issues because I, as a DDI subscriber, turn up to a game with some online content and I'm automatically more powerful than everybody else (even picking one of the worse Themes, because I'd be the only person to have a theme).To be honest, I like the Essentials format.  I want them to follow that format from now on, and make all new "classes" really subtypes/builds of existing classes wherever possible and save actual new "classes" for things that require new mechanics (for instance if they brought back the Incarnum classes).  I also want to see more builds that offer a different role to a base class instead of just the same role with a new twist.These themes, though, are weaksauce compared to the Dark Sun ones; they fall short of the goal of themes being the "third pillar" of character creation.  Either there are really good choices that anyone with half a brain will choose for the mechanical benefits, and there are the "fool's gold" choices of 3.5 that trick newbies that think a theme sounds cool but really is mechanically inferior.  I thought we had gotten away from that; offering subpar choices under the guise of "flavor" is ridiculous and is going to hinder those people simply because they don't know or won't choose superior themes.</blockquote>

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