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Message: <blockquote data-quote="eamon" data-source="post: 5577496" data-attributes="member: 51942">There's just so much good stuff here!Completely.  This matches my experience to a T.  Defenses diverge (that's systemic), it doesn't really matter too much, flanking is less common, and bursts+blasts are nasty enough to impact party positioning.The power gamers I know, aren't generally out to disrupt the game, and they aren't generally even out to be more powerful than their party members.  In fact, Power Gamer is something of a misnomer; a better name would be character builder: they've got a concept, and they're going to push it to the limit.  That might be instructive with how to deal with them: you can try to impose limits and tone them down to the level of the rest of the party, or try to pull the rest of the party up.Pulling them down is much harder than improving the rest; especially if you yourself don't like to powergame.  You're going to come up with odd, inconsistent restrictions that probably come over as unfair (thus unfun), and/or are not as effective as you hoped.  End result: you probably have a less happy gamer and you still haven't actually solved the problem.Even if the absolute gap wouldn't narrow (and it really does!) notice that the gap matters less at high hit rates.  The difference between hitting 10% or 30% of the time?  Huge.  The difference between hitting 70% or 90%?  Not very significant.  In fact, the game would probably be largely playable if people always hit (there are a few exception, but you get the idea).  That's probably the motivation behind expertise in the first place: systematically high hit rates are much less problematic than systematically low hit rates.Finally, Expertise is a sneaky AC debuff: it allows using slightly higher level monsters with higher attack bonus without corresponding AC rise; so raising PC attack bonuses implicitly raises monster bonuses.So don't fear the math fix: it makes the game easier to balance, not harder.</blockquote>

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