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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aenghus" data-source="post: 6535608" data-attributes="member: 2656">That's interesting, as it's not something many RPGs wholeheartedly encourage, including a number of versions of D&D. A lot of RPGs encourage specialisation for those interested in their PCs being successful. In most RPGs individual tasks are "all or nothing", success or failure. Failing tasks like disabling traps can kill the PC so there is a strong incentive to be as good as possible at the relevant skills to maximise chances. Also, a significant proportion of players like succeeding in what they do, and/or dislike failing in-game, and given a chance prefer to stick with what they are good at to portray themselves as "competent at X" with a good record of successes in-game.Specialists will have higher numbers available to them than generalists and providing the DM doesn't raise the numbers to maintain the challenge might breeze through adventures that would chew up and spit out a team of generalists, and will probably have a easier time of it. This is something I've seen happen, a bunch of generalist adventurers get TPKed in a dungeon, and the players work together to create a team of complementary specialists which return and take it apart.Generalists are discouraged by many systems as the difficulties are fixed too high for the generalist to solve them reliably. "Spreading yourself too thin". Their breadth of capabilities were often not rewarded by adventures which could be most easily solved by a carefully chosen subset of the skills and mechanics, the ones most attractive to specialists. This demotes the generalist to a backup role quite often. Rare abilities may never become relevant to the game.Specialists do have potential disadvantages depending on your perspective. Specialists can stress the mechanics they are using, as edge cases are less playtested. If the numbers are higher than expected in play they can trivialise task DCs. If the speciality is in something like magic, which can do anything well in e.g. 3e, you can end up with a specialist who is better at almost everything, given sufficient system mastery.Specialists have strengths and weaknesses and need cooperation from other adventurers to cover all bases. This assumes the PCs will be mostly cooperative, which is a safe assumption from my personal experiences of D&D but YMMV. If a specialist is disabled there may be no backup in that speciality.From the very start of the RPG hobby there's been a tension between the adventuring party as a cooperative team or a loose group of competitive individuals. I wasn't playing in the early days when gp was xp but can see there was potential incentive to take money for your own PC and cheat the party.The latter style is an incentive towards generalists as you can't rely on the other players any more and may be competing with them. This makes individual PCs more self sufficient, but potentially reduces the raw power of the party. My earlier games as a player tended to the cooperative more than the competitive - thief types were "expected" to take a bonus but watched carefully as a consequence. PCs who were seen as betraying the party were expelled at best, sometimes killed as traitors.From what I've seen of 5e it's swingy and doesn't reward specialisation as much as either 3e or 4e did.</blockquote>

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