Opinions Concerning BESM?

[power_word_wedgie]

I was jsut curious what everyone's opinion was of the 3rd edition of BESM. MY wife and I played in a gaming session during GenCon and liked it in some ways. It looks pretty customizable and has some pretty simple mechanics.

[User3]

BESM is a "fun" game. It's extremely flexible (though that's largely because it's very simplistic-- one "Special Attack" attribute with a bunch of options and flavor text you make yourself is naturally going to be easier to play with than taking a series of class/PrC abilities to try to do the same thing.

It's also fairly rules-light, with an abstract combat system that's not hard to learn. Unfortunately, that simplicity comes at a price (in our IRC BESM game yesterday one guy wanted to pick up an APC and throw it... and there's no rules for distance, let alone how to throw when you don't need to grapple, for example)... the GM has to make a lot of judgment calls that in D&D are spelled out.

That being said, it is an extremely poor game mechanically.

Class imbalance in D&D tends to be pretty minor, aside from casters > noncasters... that is, there's not really that much of a difference between a Barbarian, a Warlock, and a Rogue... they all have their uses, and none are grossly dominating. But BESM pure CP-driven system has power directly proportionate to the amount of CP you are "free" (that is, not in preset abilities, unless they give you exactly what you want) to spend.

That means that an Adventurer (freely spends CP) can pick up Partial-Powered Alternate Form (3 CP for 10 CP return) and nest the Magic Attribute (4 CP for 10 CP effective return) to become much more powerful than any preset class (especially poor arrays like the Giant Robot and Samurai) can possibly be. Since both my examples cost less CP than they return, you can essentially get infinite power at chargen.

Basically, BESM is Frank's well-founded complaints about stat replacement and the power of options taken to their logical-- and unfortunate-- ends. BESM can be quite fun, but there's such a tremendous gap between powergamers and "casual players" in the game that the kids in the romper room can't even pretend to be in the big leagues, while in D&D the delusion lasts until at least level 9. If you're willing to houserule it heavily, though, it's enjoyable.

(Note that that's not even getting into really bad twists on d20 System rules. For example, the old standbys of Disarm/Sunder. Disarm is now a Str check... opposed to the attack roll. One of those you can assign skills to, and one you cannot. :[ Sunder is worse, since there's a new rule that if you ever deal target armor*5 (x4 for Penetrating 1 weapons, x3 for Pen. 2, etc.) in one blow you instantly destroy it. (For DBZ fans they even include the Earth's Armor value.) Unfortunately, BESM also has "Combination Attack," an Attribute that lets multiple people go "With your powers combined!" and, if the weakest attacker hits*, total up their damage... and double it. And if any one of those is Penetrating, you scale down the total Armor multiplier... yeah. In BESM the Power Rangers take down Star Destroyers. That's not cool.

*Thus, the guy with the lowest mods has his SpAtk Linked to a Touch attack, or uses a Mind/Soul Attack (an attack that is opposed be a Will save instead of defense).

BESM is chock-full of stuff like that. It makes me cry.

[RandomCasualty]

Well he's actually talking about Tri-Stat BESM, not BESM d20, so there are no classes as far as I know. BESM Tri-Stat is a whole different system that uses 2d6. Basically the system itself looks very similar to GURPS but is much more rules light and heroic oriented.

That being said, I've played 2E BESM, but have not yet had an opportunity to play 3E so I cant exactly give my opinion on it.

[User3]

...now I feel like a moron. I never took to Tri-Stat, but one of my friends has 2E BESM (which is Tri-Stat)... I figured 3E was BESM d20, especially when he said that he'd played BESM at GenCon recently.

Well, in that case... totally ignore everything I just said. >_> This is why I mostly lurk, heh. Oops. *chuckles*

[Josh_Kablack]

I'm so out of the loop I didn't know there was a 3rd ed. A few years back, BeSM was the #3 most popular game system around here (right behind d20 and storyteller), so I played it a couple times in pickup games. Not enough to have any in-depth rules analysis, but enough to know I didn't like it.

It seemed to be a decent rules-lite system, which is cool, because the market is dominated by big clunky rules heavy syutems, but it seemed to be absolutely nothing special in regards to fulfilling its designated purpose of running anime styled gaming, which essentially meant that it failed at its primary design goals.

Mekton and Teenagers From Outer Space do really good jobs of replicated specific subgenres of anime, and HERO, Mutants and Masterminds and Feng Shui can all be tailored to replicated others better than BESM does out of the box.

[power_word_wedgie]

1125851503[/unixtime]]It seemed to be a decent rules-lite system, which is cool, because the market is dominated by big clunky rules heavy systems, but it seemed to be absolutely nothing special in regards to fulfilling its designated purpose of running anime styled gaming, which essentially meant that it failed at its primary design goals.

Ok, I'll bite. What would have been "special" that the game was missing? I'm just curious because that might have been something that they added since the earlier editions to this edition. It seemed anime~styled in the gaming session that I played at GenCon, but that might have been due to changes in 3rd edition.

[Crissa]

I'm not sure, power, since all the examples and methods specifically work to make the story-driven adaptable settings with power accumulation.

That last bit is really the only 'special' I can think of for 'anime'.

-Crissa

[power_word_wedgie]

I see what you are saying. However, wouldn't it just be easier to ask your GM to start at more points, and thus be more 'special'? (Just curious)

[RandomCasualty]

Here are some problems I had with BESM 2E.

-The wound system worked a lot similar to D&D, and critical hits were absolutely devastating. No defense allowed, plus up to 4x damage. The made for a very high lethality combat system.

-Hand weapons pretty much sucked. Bad. If you wanted to be competetive you had to take special attack advantage in which case you could pwn everyone dumb enough to use a sword. This game really screwed you if you tried to fight with anything other than special attacks.

-The system really tended to set the difficulty way too high for things. An average stat score was 3-4 and to succeed on an "average task" you had to roll under your score on 2d6. Now, it doesn't take a math major to figure out that the odds of rolling a 4 or lower on 2d6 are real bad. To make things worse, there were no general guidelines for what the DC on various actions should be, making it really easy to put your DCs too high for anyone to accomplish by labelling them "Average".

-The skill system was a powergamer's playground that purely encouraged people to put all their points in combat skills, solely because skills were the cheapest way to get combat bonuses.

-Altogether it shared the same problems every point based system has, namely that people can put all their points into one bucket and create a real super specialist combat monster.

-It required a ton of DM adjudication on everything.

From what I hear about BESM3, it's moving into a roll high system which should eliminate the problem of having impossible DCs. About the only other mandatory fix I think it needs is ditching the stupid hit point wound system, and moving to some fixed health wound system. Hit point systems just don't scale well at all. You buy 10 hp and you have 10 base, you're doubling your toughness, you have 100 hp base and you buy 10, you're only gaining 10% more toughness, yet paying the same. Hit points in a point based system just don't work unless you want to price them with some crazy formula.

[PhoneLobster]

You know, I thought I had some rant somewhere in here about tri stat 1 or 2 from ages ago.

I sure do hope they do something with their base roll mechanic. The whole 2dx thing makes for some really annoying ranges of results, (further proof that dice rolling mechanics people sometimes like to refer to as "curved" are a bunch of ass).

And just as mentioned it suffered from the usual points based character building problems, I mean seriously its like they didn't even begin to to bother with anything like sane caps on spending or non interchangeable categories of abilities. Could someone at least TRY to alleviate these problems?

I liked the convenience of shopping in the special powers, but the actual mechanics for them sucked and it wasn't just possible to build broken characters but in the context of the anime setting a wide variety of traditional character concepts (like the extra specialist one trick human fire bomb) is the very image of the path that leads to the guy who kills you all with the biggest stack of points on a single ability.

Well anyway, all the flaws of a standard points based system, but pretty straight forward and without a billlion questionable extensions (like Fudge or Gurps) so if I WAS going to use an off the shelf system like that I would choose BESM/Tristat. Of course, then I would regret it.

If you want to run a simple rules system thats highly customizable its probably wiser to sit down and write a homebrew (and don't put in too much effort, no need to work up a sweat here). It will be riddled with major flaws but likely be no worse.

[Essence]

At that point, play Everway. It's 100% DM-adjudicated, so the only thing you need is a perfect DM and the game is flawless.

[RandomCasualty]

1126444375[/unixtime]]
I sure do hope they do something with their base roll mechanic. The whole 2dx thing makes for some really annoying ranges of results, (further proof that dice rolling mechanics people sometimes like to refer to as "curved" are a bunch of ass).

Yeah, the base roll mechanic actually gives more advantages to people who happened to whore bonuses, why they don't just shift to one dice is beyond me.

And just as mentioned it suffered from the usual points based character building problems, I mean seriously its like they didn't even begin to to bother with anything like sane caps on spending or non interchangeable categories of abilities. Could someone at least TRY to alleviate these problems?

Point based systems are stuck in a rut. They're all based on faulty thinking.

First, they want to consider all abilities linear in cost, which they're not. Getting extra attacks for instance can never be a linear concept, it's actually worth as much as your base offensive power is worth in one attack, meaning you can never tack on a straight flat cost to it. Still every point based system from BESM to GURPS tries to do this, and it fails not surprisingly.

Second, to allow being able to deal with really big things, like Starships or big killer robots, there aren't any caps on anything, meaning you can pour as many points into stuff as you want. Since the first principle isn't true, you can't reasonably create a balanced character by allowing him to freely put all his points in one bucket.

Third, everything starts at zero and goes to infinity. This means that the ability gap gets worse the more points you pile on, and because of the second problem, the ability gap gets bad fast. It doesn't take long for people putting everything in one bucket to throw others off the RNG.

Fourth, they allow people to trade combat and noncombat stuff with the same pool of points, often taking noncombat flaws like "Antisocial" or whatever to further fuel their combat machine. Again, a stupid concept and it makes points meaningless from a design sense. If the idea isn't that a 200 point character can beat a 100 point character, then why have points at all? Before point systems can ever work they absolutely must break things into the combat and noncombat catagories.

Overall, they rely a hell of a lot on the GM to control everything. And what annoys me the most is that nowhere do you ever see a list of decent character creation guidelines. Every point based system I've seen seems exclusively balanced by the false hope that nobody will ever try to min/max it.

[PhoneLobster]

Some of the points you mention are'nt specifically unique to point based systems (but yes, they mostly do for inexplicable reasons continue to plague them).

Every point based system I've seen seems exclusively balanced by the false hope that nobody will ever try to min/max it.

Which is insane because of course this in particular is supposed to be an anime system, power whores are a valid character concept more than they ever were.

Anyway the point I was trying to make by saying why don't they do SOMETHING about the typical point based system problems (specialist kicking generalist but, combat skills kicking non combat skills, offense kicking defense, etc...) was that damnit they didn't even try ANYTHING to fix those problems.

Not one damn thing.

Even if the problems are unfixable or fundamental to the design or what have you there are at the very least some half baked means by which to begin to reduce problems.

Like points caps, which BESM at least then, did not have.

Or separate categories for skills and powers. Tri Stat clearly seemed to be under the delusion that every character would spend a certain amount of points on attributes, some other points on skills and further points on powers... only they weren't distinct categories, you could damn well just trade out points in one for points in another, BAM...

Its like you said, its only balance system is all based on some strange idea that everyone who builds a character will build some form of strange half crippled generalist through their own personal choice.

And then that sucks because of the roll mechanic punishing low points investment...

[Lago_AM3P]

Third, everything starts at zero and goes to infinity. This means that the ability gap gets worse the more points you pile on, and because of the second problem, the ability gap gets bad fast. It doesn't take long for people putting everything in one bucket to throw others off the RNG.

Fourth, they allow people to trade combat and noncombat stuff with the same pool of points, often taking noncombat flaws like "Antisocial" or whatever to further fuel their combat machine. Again, a stupid concept and it makes points meaningless from a design sense. If the idea isn't that a 200 point character can beat a 100 point character, then why have points at all? Before point systems can ever work they absolutely must break things into the combat and noncombat catagories.

These are two extremely valid points. I think that the best way to fix these two things are, as FrankTrollman eloquently suggested:

Completely forget about investing points into abilities. Abilities are henceforth binary. Rogues no longer invest points in move silently and hide--they have the ability to not be heard except in extenuating circumstances and they gain unlimited uses of the status effect of being invisible as long as they aren't being observed when they use it. Upgrades to this ability might be that you can go invisible even when people are seeing you.

The reason why wizard spellcasters still keep up and exceed the power game with druid and cleric point whores are because of their huge collection of binary abilities. Rogues eventually so far exceed almost everyone in ability and it's so cheap for them to do so that it's essentially binary.

A barbarian who has cross-classed ranks in diplomacy shouldn't eventually lose this ability just from gaining higher level.


Unfortunately so far I haven't seen any system that does this. The closest system I've seen towards games that offer a binary character ability set is Dungeons and Dragons 3rd Edition, and that is a goddamn shame.


As for combat and non-combat specialization, the solution is embarrassingly easy.

Force everyone to have combat and non-combat abilities. None of this 'fighter only gets sword-based abilities' bullshit. The party members are an innkeeper, a sailor, a blacksmith, and a doctor and the blacksmith and doctor don't see their combat abilities go up and the innkeeper doesn't suck.

To further make this work, you can never trade abilities from one set into the other except in the barest ways (for example, using your awesome skills as a cook to bake bread so you won't get hungry and face penalties for the combat). I'd rather have it at zero but that's probably impossible.

Of course, this was also suggested by FrankTrollman and as we all know if Frank suggests something the masses will reject it out of fear and fanboyism, even if his name isn't attached to the prokect. Frank could suggest pasteurization, beer, and wonderbras through a ghostwriter and the diggits would still reject it.

[RandomCasualty]

Basically all the issues are problems that every RPG has to deal with:

-Numbers versus options (aka Specialist versus generalist)
-Combat versus noncombat

The only difference is that they tend to show up a lot more pronounced in point based RPGs than in a class based RPG because it's a heck of a lot easier to put all your points in one bucket and it's easier to trade noncombat for combat. D&D makes you find some class ability that gives you a bonus as opposed to just letting you directly buy the bonus, but the end result is the same really.

Class based systems don't tend to have as many problems early on because they don't give you many options, where point based systems flood you with options at high or low level, so you're going to see problems right away.

As for trying to solve the problems, I'm honestly shocked that no system yet has separated combat and noncombat abilities. Why systems continue to allow people to trade knowledge skills for sword skills is dumb. Unless the system is aiming for having almost no combat, allowing a trade of this kind is disasterous. But every system allows it. Whether it's D&D allowing people to take power attack or skill focus, tumble or knowledge (religion) or some point based system like BESM allowing you to spend your points where you want. It's crazy that nobody has made any effort to fix this problem because it's a rather easy fix. It just entails creating two types of points and two types of abilities. Heck, D&D already has it easy, they already have feats and skills, they've just managed to fuck it up.

On the other hand, the second issue, Generalist versus specialist... that's a real bitch to try to fix. It isn't just about preventing people from putting all their points into sword skill, it's about about removing imbalancing synergy. To do so you need to either have no synergy occur or create equal unisynergy (in which every ability equally synergies with any other combat ability). Either is very difficult to do, though things do become easier if you're running a game like BESM that doesn't have tactical combat, as tactical combat opens up a great deal more synergy options.

How best to fix the specialist versus generalist problem is probably going to be an issue floating around RPGs for a long long time.

If BESM got switched to a linear die roll, with a division of combat/noncombat points, the system might not be entirely terrible. It would have power whore problems, but not anymore than a system like D&D. BESM actually has the advantage over something like GURPS or D&D because it doesn't feature tactical combat, and thus doesn't have to worry about tactical synergies much.

But Frank pretty much has it right with having binary abilities as opposed to skill ranks and all that bullshit. The best way to keep the game from getting crazy numerically is to keep the amount of numbers to a minimum and enforce some caps on those few numbers you have.

[Neeek]

1126495637[/unixtime]]Basically all the issues are problems that every RPG has to deal with:

-Numbers versus options (aka Specialist versus generalist)

This problem is solvable: Eliminate the distinction.

Instead of giving the specialist better numbers, just give them more options but in a specific area. If everyone of a specific power level can do a specific number of things, and those things use the same numbers, this problem goes away. No, I don't know of any system that even attempts this. Also, it would probably be hard to do.

-Combat versus noncombat

I think we all have accepted that this is fixable as long as you can divorce the two sufficiently. Again, no existant system I'm familiar with does this, excepting some of the things I've seen here.

If BESM got switched to a linear die roll, with a division of combat/noncombat points, the system might not be entirely terrible. It would have power whore problems, but not anymore than a system like D&D. BESM actually has the advantage over something like GURPS or D&D because it doesn't feature tactical combat, and thus doesn't have to worry about tactical synergies much.

Also, in an anime game, having characters blow up the world is, you know, acceptable.

[RandomCasualty]

1126496825[/unixtime]]
This problem is solvable: Eliminate the distinction.

Instead of giving the specialist better numbers, just give them more options but in a specific area. If everyone of a specific power level can do a specific number of things, and those things use the same numbers, this problem goes away. No, I don't know of any system that even attempts this. Also, it would probably be hard to do.

The hard part is that your options can't create excessive synergy either. Because synergy creates a sort of hidden bonus and many abilities can be bonuses in disguise.

For instance, using a spiked chain with combat reflexes is a sort of synergy. And while there is no bonus to damage or attack rolls, you are getting more attacks of opportunity, which means more attacks, which indirectly means you're doing more damage per round.

Everytime you've got an ability that can be used with another ability, there's a potential for problems. Generally combat abilities should work similar to spells where every spell is relatively self contained. You can have metamagic sort of effects as well that modify combat options, but they should, like metamagic, come with a cost of some kind.

It's very difficult actually to keep someone wanting new abilities yet not in some way adding to his numerical production. If your synergy is excessive, the specialist wins, if your abilities just aren't worth it beyond the first, then there's no reason to ever specialize.

[Lago_AM3P]

It's very difficult actually to keep someone wanting new abilities yet not in some way adding to his numerical production. If your synergy is excessive, the specialist wins, if your abilities just aren't worth it beyond the first, then there's no reason to ever specialize.

Well, how about this instead:

Instead of expecting every ability to equally synergize with each other, how about coming up a huge list of combat abilities you want characters to have and split them into categories so that the abilities in the categories are expected to synergize. For example:

All characters have a physical/magic attack ability and it's further split down into melee/ranged. The same thing applies to defense. Then all characters have some kind of in-combat restorative ability (whether it's the ability to endure, regenerate, heal the wounds of others). Then characters have a transportation ability, a stealth (or counter-stealth) ability, soforth.

I mean the real problem about non-specialists is that they don't have enough points or abilities in a category to defend or strike against specialists. If you force them to put points into every generic form of attack or defense, then they can choose abilities at random.

[RandomCasualty]

1126503915[/unixtime]]
I mean the real problem about non-specialists is that they don't have enough points or abilities in a category to defend or strike against specialists. If you force them to put points into every generic form of attack or defense, then they can choose abilities at random.

Well, not necessarily. The main problem with specialists is that they focus all their points in one area, and eventually as point totals get higher, the numbers get so high people get pushed off the RNG.

Forcing people to put some points in all places doesn't necessarily hurt the specialist unless you control the gap. If you impose a rule like "no category may have 6 more points than any other category" then you're stopping specialization to an extent.

Mainly the specialist versus generalist problem stems from the fact that the specialist tends to be able to use all his abilities at once, where the generalist has to use them one at a time. A guy who has +5 to attack and the ability to cast magic missile can only do one of those in any given round.

The guy who has +5 to attack and another +3 to attack can use both of those in the same action since they both trigger on the same action. Specialists are generally thought of as big buckets of points, big attack rolls, big damage, whatever... but in actuality you can have a specialist without having big numbers, simply by having a lot of abiliites that trigger with one action.

You can be just as brutal a specialist having synergies like combat reflexes, spiked chain, stand still, improved trip, weapon focus and spring attack. And it's for the same reason as the big bonus character, you can use all your benefits in the same round. So when you compare him to people like the monk, who can either use his super speed or his flurry of blows but not both, the monk is definitely behind in power.

To eliminate synergy and keep things interesting is tough, because it requires a lot of effort spent to fill the game with counters. If you make all gimmicks separate and nonsynergistic (whcih you more or less have to do), then you have to find reasons why people want different gimmicks. To set that up, your gimmicks have to not work sometimes. After all, having ice bolt and fire bolt only really matters when one creature is resistant or immune to ice. Otherwise, you might as well just have ice bolt. And the same goes for every other ability. There is actualyl no difference between ice bolt and fire bolt until elemental resistances become common enough. Then having two elemental attacks becomes more important.

[Lago_AM3P]

Well, not necessarily. The main problem with specialists is that they focus all their points in one area, and eventually as point totals get higher, the numbers get so high people get pushed off the RNG.

Maybe, but isn't that what some people want to play?

I mean, the whole balancing point of a barbarian was that they got a crapload of physical offense abilities at the cost of completely sending their magical offense and defense down the tubes. The wizard was the opposite and the cleric was supposed to be somewhere in the middle.

However, as the cleric archer shows, it's quite possible to have your cake and eat it, too. And as the Genius Wizard shows, it's quite possible to completely bypass a lot of the defensive measures that characters have beyond having a bloated ability in one category (A Genius Wizard, for example, can contemptuously take down even most min-maxxed cleric archers through use of spell combos).

Another problem for the specialist is that at a certain point there isn't really any penalty for bottoming out the floor. A 20th level wizard doesn't care if his attack bonus is +11 or +6--it's so poor that he's never going to use it. While a paladin that puts half ranks in diplomacy and sense motive is equal (theoretically) to a paladin who only raises ride at first level, the paladin who raises ride continues to get a use out of his skill while the half-rank paladin eventually loses his skill.

I think more binary abilities and making a bottom floor for how much characters can suck can solve both of these problems.

You can be just as brutal a specialist having synergies like combat reflexes, spiked chain, stand still, improved trip, weapon focus and spring attack. And it's for the same reason as the big bonus character, you can use all your benefits in the same round. So when you compare him to people like the monk, who can either use his super speed or his flurry of blows but not both, the monk is definitely behind in power.

That's true. I (or rather, Frank) can't really think of a solution to this other than making every selectable attack ability come with an associated defensive bonus so that characters created randomly can default to defensive specialists.

Will try to come up with a better idea later.

[Neeek]

1126573248[/unixtime]]

Well, not necessarily. The main problem with specialists is that they focus all their points in one area, and eventually as point totals get higher, the numbers get so high people get pushed off the RNG.

This is a problem, yes. And, honestly, they don't have to be pushed off the RNG. A +10 on a D20 is significant enough that either +10 guy is hitting nearly all the time, or the +0 guy is missing neary all the time.

The scary thing is that DnD is actually better than a lot of system on this. I had a starting character with a similar discrepency in a LotR game I was in, and I was only using the basic book.

You can be just as brutal a specialist having synergies like combat reflexes, spiked chain, stand still, improved trip, weapon focus and spring attack. And it's for the same reason as the big bonus character, you can use all your benefits in the same round.

See, here I disagree. I don't think synergistic abilities that do thing other than add another +1 or whatever are a bad idea. There should be good choices and bad choices. The trippy chain guy is a little excessive, but hey, he has weaknesses and doesn't break the game on his own by any stretch.

So when you compare him to people like the monk, who can either use his super speed or his flurry of blows but not both, the monk is definitely behind in power.

This, on the other hand, is just a consequence of a poorly designed class. It's fixable, I think. Give monks pounce when flurrying or something. Not that pounce would fix the class entirely, but it'd help.

[Josh_Kablack]

Not as much as actually giving the monk this supposed "super speed" would. Being the 8th fastest of the 11 PHB classes is not a something that should even go in the plus column.

[RandomCasualty]

1126574245[/unixtime]]
Maybe, but isn't that what some people want to play?

I mean, the whole balancing point of a barbarian was that they got a crapload of physical offense abilities at the cost of completely sending their magical offense and defense down the tubes. The wizard was the opposite and the cleric was supposed to be somewhere in the middle.

Well first, you realyl don't watn to let PCs play a total eggshell with a hammer. It's ok to have some gimmick monsters where you either counter their gimmick somehow or you die. That's the basic concept of a puzzle monster, but in PCs, it's not very inherently fun. You mostly want your PCs to have some degree of versatility.

Another problem for the specialist is that at a certain point there isn't really any penalty for bottoming out the floor. A 20th level wizard doesn't care if his attack bonus is +11 or +6--it's so poor that he's never going to use it. While a paladin that puts half ranks in diplomacy and sense motive is equal (theoretically) to a paladin who only raises ride at first level, the paladin who raises ride continues to get a use out of his skill while the half-rank paladin eventually loses his skill.

Yeah, this is the problem when a system starts at zero and keeps accumulating. The bonus gap gets bigger and bigger but the lowest point is always zero, so there gets to be a point where something is so low, you know you're off the RNG and you no longer care anymore.

And yes, binary abilities are a great way to solve the problem.

That's true. I (or rather, Frank) can't really think of a solution to this other than making every selectable attack ability come with an associated defensive bonus so that characters created randomly can default to defensive specialists.

Well there are a few solutions to the nonnumeric synergy character.

Desynergize: This simply means he can only use one of his feats a round. So he can either elect to use combat reflexes to get a ton of AoOs (to stop an oncoming horde for instance), improved trip (to trip and attack someone), stand still (to stop someone) and so on. The problem here is that eventually it doesn't become even worthwhile to pick up more feats since the situations you'll need them become more and more specialized.

Counter System: Having a ton of spiked chain AoOs is contingent on the fact that your opponents provoke AoOs from moving in the first place. So quite simply you have some widespread ability that lets you get by AoOs. Right now, D&D has only tumble, which pretty much sucks because it's a classed character only ability, meaning a spiked chain PC doesn't have to worry at all about monsters having it. But if you expand the counter system to the point where your AoO reach monkey is going to not be able to use his gimmicks sometimes, then it becomes a lot more strategic to generalize.

Basically it comes down to either preventing people from putting lots of stuff in one bucket, or creating other abilities that prevent them from using that bucket in certain battles.

All in all, I tend to prefer the idea of counters because I don't think going the pure anti-synergy route is going to be sustainable over the course of several levels. A counter system, if designed right, could theoretically stretch over a lot of levels.

Now, this isn't to say you can let synergy go totally wild with a counter system, but it allows for some synergy while at the same time making it somewhat risky to put all your points in one place. After all, if half the creatures in a D&D game had tumble, the spiked chain character just isn't going to be all that impressive. In some battles he may be better than the generalist, in others he's going to have a bunch of useless feats.