/me resurrecting a point long since passed.
Mask_De_H wrote:E: @Tussock-At that point, why the fuck do you even have the resource allocation systems? You're making a character that's shitty at a bunch of things, steps on the toes of other classes, and has abilities that are non-functional with the basic chassis of the class (rage).
As others said, and I'll add for truth, classes are a set of abilities running on the same basic system (or two) that should work well together and should help designer to keep shit useful, and players to build something useful without knowing the whole damn book.
Designers just have to make sure that class powers are good for the class that they're in and generally less good for other classes as they go. As they would when considering intra-party synergies anyway.
There are other ways to solve this problem, instead of shoving a square peg through your thick skull. For fuck's sake man, I asked this exact same question you are belaboring and got a reasonable, concise answer earlier in the thread.
For what you want to do, go free ability selection on one resource allocation style. Apply class after the fact. This isn't a goddamn difficult concept to grasp.
It's a terrible and bad idea and whoever suggested it is a bad person for doing so. If I'm using a build-up-rage pool, I can't choose to spontaneously take ten minutes to craft a new Golem before it wears out, that's nonsense. Golems have to bind up your necro pool. If I've got a necro pool, I can't choose to take permanent rage features for myself with it. Rage features would need completely re-written to be permanent, or even more readily available at the start of a fight, it's a different balance point.
The abilities have to be written for the pool they use, or they're not even going to make any sense, let alone be possible to balance. But characters can totally have two pools.
/why resource balance is tricky, and powers need tied to specific schemes.
The threat your typical enemies pose wears down over a combat as you defeat each one. First there's five monsters attacking, then four, etc. Ideally you focus fire and the sum of the threat goes 5+4+3+2+1 = 15. Normally you can't focus perfectly, so it's more like 5+5+4+3+1 = 18. If you can't focus at all, it's 25, and you're idiots.
Basic math there says powers which turn up on round one are worth vastly more in terms of threat reduction than powers which arrive on later rounds. If you kill two monsters before the fight starts, the threat drops to 3+2+1 = 6. If you only suddenly kill the
last two monsters it's 5+4+3 = 12.
Cute trick: a power that automatically kills everything after round ~2, drops the sum monster threat to 5, after they all get a hit in on average. That's not substantially more powerful than a power that takes out 2 of 5 monsters before they can act.
Going first, like Hold Person in the surprise round, is awesome. Nova casters are powerful in large part because of when the nova happens. Early kills are very,
very good, even if it's just at a little better rate than the at-will guys.
Then you get into melee being inherently self-delaying, ranged strikes are easier to concentrate, movement negating certain threat types (and threat negation/delay options in general), area spells need to do much more damage in total, spells that potentially hurt the party can be very damaging indeed and still be overall balanced because of the added threat. And so on, and so on.
Then you get how all that changes with fight difficulty, where end-game triple-size fights benefit from daily explosions that would end a regular one, just to tone them down into a quadruple-threat fight before everyone dies, where someone like the Barbarian can shine bright if the party can keep them on their feet (while the necromancer pets get quickly chewed up despite being "all day" effects). Half-size fights are over before the Barbarian even gets any steam up. How area powers scale with numbers, but action denial scales with individual power.
PC, SJW, anti-fascist, not being a dick, or working on it, he/him.
