Oh definitely. A game has a responsibility to tell you what challenges the players are expected to face and what types of characters they can make as individuals that will help the team face those different challenges as a group. I feel that I fell well short on this exact point for After Sundown. But a lot of games don't go there at all.Mechalich wrote:Compare that to something like Exalted, where high system mastery is required just to figure out what a viable build even is, never mind to actually make a party composed of relevant and functional characters.
Exalted is a good (bad) example. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ is pretty much all you can say as to what the individual or the group should be capable of doing in any context. I don't know what challenges you are expected to face, and I don't know what abilities or skill numbers you'd need to contribute on any axis to completing them. And most damningly of all, even the actual authors of the books can't answer that question.
In any skill based system, you're going to have a weird time explaining to the players what skills they are going to need as individuals and what skills the group is going to need one (or perhaps some other number) of the team members to have. Sometimes, you'll plain get it wrong, like when Eclipse Phase levels with the players that they are all going to need to put ranks in Fray, even though that is in fact totally not true. And this is all necessarily going to take longer in the book and at the table to do right than "Someone plays a Cleric."
There are advantages to skill based systems. It allows players to settle in to secondary and tertiary roles in a manner that they find pleasing and appropriate to the characters they want to play. But there's also real advantage in layering some fucking archetypes onto that like Shadowrun does so that you know whether your team is operating without a Street Samurai before you commit to starting the game.
-Username17