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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5784086" data-attributes="member: 54877">A great deal of the point of my last post was that personal preferences should not dominate this gap in the game. And even in the example I used, I picked "8" for the attack bonus gap in part because it is not my personal preference, at least not most of the time. I don't think permerton, Danny A, or I, or anyone else should get this personal preference embedded into the game math such that it can't be easily tweaked.   So what are the implications of that? I see three critical ones: <ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">D&D characters are specialists. In the things that are their main specialty, they should diverge more and more as they progress, as Danny has discussed.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">D&D characters are also general adventurers. In general adventuring, they should remain more or less constant in relation to each other as they progress, though of course they may have individual strengths and weakness that are signifcant--and may become more or less so by their choices.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">There are a lot of edge cases that can't be entirely accounted for by either of the above, due to stylistic preferences, limits of reconciling the specialization and generalization, etc. The system should allow for these, but not try to hard to make everything work out perfect. That means that it can't be too "tight"; it must leave room for error.</li> </ol>In the kind of system I proposed, it is easy for everyone to get what they want. If someone like Danny has a concept for an extremely bookish wizard, high-level wizard that barely knows how to use his dagger, he can not take any of the relevant buffs--presumably trading them in for some utility magic that he finds more useful. Keep the Str low, and their you go--classic D&D wizard. Let the grunts up front handle cleaning up the orcs. And if someone else in the group has a more Gandalf-esqe attitude and wants to use a sword, then he can get that. If the group has decided they don't want the latter one at all, it is easy as pie to simply ban the relevant buffing magic--because it is explicitly in the game only to support these kinds of concepts. (Though I agree with pemerton's earlier point that my particular examples are not the best to present a Gandalf-esqe character in flavor.) In short, it is still entirely possible for a wizard in this system to totally suck at melee and/or ranged weapon combat, and not at all hard to see how to do it or even enforce it.  OTOH, if someone like pemerton wants to run a game with a more 4E-style "we are all competent adventurers", he can by banning those extreme bookish choices, or at least the group can strongly discourage them by social contract. You can do something very much like what 4E does by default--keep the attributes from being too extreme, silo some minor combat ability into the power choices, etc. Meanwhile, you can do this secure in the fact that the big guns of each class are still intact, and that the specialists niches are preserved. That only leaves the soccer objection of divergence over time. My experience says this is too narrow a reading of reality, never mind genres. Because the range I am proposing is the range of reasonably competent adventurers. There are explicitly characters outside that range. That is, you go to put together a grade-school sports team, and you've got people that barely qualify, people in the middle, and people that excel. Then occasionally you get some bookish kid that doesn't even hit that minimum threshold. Or you get some monomanically focused, extremely talented kid that doesn't even belong on the same field. It's merely that in grade school, the selection is often limited enough that you may not have any of those extremes. The sharp divergence that comes later is part talent/ability, but also the human socialization form of "natural selection" that occurs when you expand the pool of candidates. And again, I'm not in anyway claiming that exactly what I proposed is the exact way to go. In fact, I'm sure it is flawed. I am claiming that those three competing principles--specialization, general adventuring skill, and wacky edge cases left as wacky edge cases--must all be addressed by the system, if it is to cater to a wide audience.</blockquote>

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