Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="MoonSong" data-source="post: 6239285" data-attributes="member: 6689464">I guess bloat is relative, I don't mind twelve basic ways to make an archer, maybe because I'm not interested on building a generic archer, but speciffic flavors of character from different archtypes that also happen to be good archers. In this point I guess taste and playstyle make a big difference. (And I consider 3.x MCing an invaluable tool that allows organic growth and development of characters that is impossible to replicate otherwise)Option Bloat is indeed bad, just notice that it is a very different thing from Option Variety, a game can be extremely option bloated while still having very little Option Variety. It doesn't matter if you have ten thousand ways to fry a kobold if you have no way to distract the kobold, evade, the kobold, ignore the kobold, spare the kobold, befriend the kobold, convince the kobold not to kill you, have it wourk for you or have it hire you, then all you have is option bloat with little option variety to speak for. (For example many here agree that 4e is option bloated, yet it still incomplete and has only a narrow range of option variety that could still be expanded upon, and that is without taking into account undersupported classes that could have used more love -seeker anyone?-. And the examples can go far back still, for example, late 2e was option bloated, yet 3e had no problems coming up with new character types that weren't present at all in 2e or couldn't be propperly expressed as 2e characters, and even once 3.x got it's own share of bloat, 4e came and gave us the warlord and it's offshot, the lazy warlord)  Long story short, every single character concept that involves being bad at fighting or completely defenseless in combat while still extremely useful out of it cannot be properly played if everybody has to have the same mechanical effect in combat for balance sake. Under those circumstances balance cannot allow the character to be that good out of combat, because it isn't allowing to have a reduced combat capability to compensate for it. Let's place an example:I want to play a very classic white mage, someone who hasn't invested a single resource into becoming good at fighting and instead invested it all on becoming a superb healer and whose basic offensive capabilites are below average. But if all characters have to conform to a limited range for combat capability, my character's combat abilites will be far better than they should be, and cannot be a lot better at healing than other clerics that didn't focuss on healing, at this point the obvious answer would be "But hey just pretend to be worse than you actually are, just because 99% of your sheet is about combat doesn't mean you have to use it!" but then if my character is actually capable of more things than what the original concept needed, and the system is actually expecting me to use those abilitees to the fullest, then my character is actually hindering the party by not fully contributing to combat, and no matter how much I want to pretend to be a super healer I'm still no better than a run of the mill cleric that actually goes and kills things (And of course this also brings out even more disruption, like longer and more dangerous fights). In this situation I'm not playing a very weak and defenseless character that still manages to be an active contributor to the party's success, I'm playing a delusional bastard full of it that is feigning weakness in order to lazily be carried along by the others and leech off their success while actively hindering them, placing them in bigger danger and maybe even outright sabotagigng them, because he/she is better at combat than he/she fights and isn't significantly better at other things than the rest to compensate for it.</blockquote>

Verification