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I concur - make options be choosable for the player at level up, also the complex or lesser complex options.

Strangely, this reminds me of some feats that were usually seen very snarky... weapon expertise, weapon focus, weapon specialisation, etc. So just give more feats and make some that only do damage and can be stacked. Problem solved?

Jul 9, 2012 -- 12:06PM, GilbertMDH wrote:

I have a related question. How should a player choose their character complexity?

Well, the DM could choose the complexity for everyone - and even if the game doesn't give him that option, he can always modify it to work that way, anyhow.

Players choosing complexity is a matter of customizeability, which always carries balance implication.  The choices between simple and complex need to be balanced, somehow, and, historically, complex usually turns out either more powerful or more versatile or more exploitable to be made disproportionately powerful, or all of the above.  More versatile is probably unavoidable, but power needs a lid kept on it.  A class that achieves complexity by offering choices between modest-power, unadaptable, unlimitted-use abilities, and high-power, very versatile, limited-use ones is going to create balance issues. 

4e side-stepped the problem by giving everyone the same proportion of at-will, encounter & daily attacks.  But that also gave them comprable levels of complexity (though 4e archer-ranger wasn't too complex and a 4e wizard could be decidedly more so, they were on the same order of magnitude). 

One possibility is to give the 'more complex' option a variety of complex abilities that they an choose among under certain circumstances or by managing some resource (like power points or whatever), but give 'simple' characters one straightforward, powerful, ability that they can use once for each 'slot' the complex version gets.  The simple character will still be inferior in terms of versatility, but he will at least have comparable raw power.