Thomasson on character creation

[pemerton]

If you want to support a wide range of mechanics, you need alot of mechanical variation. But if you drop the 'mechanically' from the sentence, it becomes much less clear that it is true.

Alot of 3.X seemed focused on giving access to additional mechanics rather than to additional concepts.

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Very very few of the feats, classes, alternate classes, PrC's, and so forth really opened up conceptual space. Mostly they were minor changes in how that concept was implemented. 3.5 tended to encourage players to see thier concept not in terms of a narrative concept or a character concept, but rather in terms of a particular package of mechanical goodies and bonuses that they wanted to collect.

3.5 mechanics didn't exist to help you mechanically simulate things that your imagination dreamed up. 3.5 mechanics weren't IMO largely inspired by the imagination, but rather by other 3.5 mechanics.

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a smaller set of mechanical variation if well done could span an equally large imaginative space. Of course, given the expectations that they have from 3.5 alot of players would mourn missing mechanics, but that's precisely what they would be mourning - a mechical advantage - and not an imaginative concept.

3.5 has been snowballing in one direction. Not just toward more choices and more variaty, but to more pointless choices. The choices are no longer about making a character unique, they are about choosing between two mechanics.

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I'd like to think that the main good thing that could come out of 4e is some better designed choices so that it wasn't necessary to have as many choices to span all the possible ideas in a meaningful way.

Celebrim, these are very interesting posts.

Your characterisation of 3.5 reminds me, in a somewhat roundabout way, of Rolemaster (especially RM2). RM is often accused of rules and options bloat. This is true in the area of action resolution mechanics - and especially, for some reason, initiative rules - where the RM Companions are full of pointless variations and epicycles on ever-more-obscure action resolution options. HARP is developing the same problem in respect of combat sytems, with 4 different options now in print.

Your posts suggest to me that 3.5 has a similar sort of problem, but on the character build side rather than the action resolution side. (Which is, of course, economically more rational - players will pay for character build options, whereas typically only GMs care about action resolution options). What I would be interested to see in 4e would be a core set of character build mechanics that allow for variety, and a wide range of viable character concepts, without unnecessary and ever-more self-referential rules bloat.