There are people who abuse this though. There’s a big difference between not feeling like you’re fitting into your character’s combat role well enough and trying to find ways to maximize your character’s effectiveness in combat. I’ve said yes too many times in the past, and the result is that the players who tinker with their characters a lot are disproportionately powerful compared with the players who stick with every character decision they ever made.

That said, I am more than happy to let people edit the building blocks of their class. Rather have a strong willpower save than reflex? You got it. Rather boost your hit dice than have the high base attack bonus? No problem. Want to swap out some class skills for some other class skills? That’s OK, but if you want to trade out skill X, you’ll have to give up skill Y too. Are you sure you want that?

I guess you could say the system has built-in drift.

@BryanB – You’re right; as Martin explains, it’s best to give each character a spotlight moment each session. If you manage that, most players will enjoy enough parts of their character that you won’t have to rewrite much.

There are always strange setups that makes one skill critical, or another worthless– and you often have to play for a while to figure out which is which.

That being said I running Savage Worlds and enjoy playing it as well, so it’s a different mind set of character building.

I’m inclined to allow players to re-train some things, particularly in a system like D&D 3.5 where a character’s build seems so important, especially when you forgot a feat that turns out to be a major stepping stone towards what you intended to do later on. It happens.

But like Kurt says, that is one of the attractions of a classless game like Savage Worlds, where such character building is less crucial, though still somewhat present in the advancement options. I need more experience with Savage Worlds though before I can draw full comparisons.

I think it is important for the GM and Players to work together to build the character that each player wants to play. I think it is also incumbent on the GM to try and have situations where the player gets to shine in the way that they designed him to as well.

The D&D Rogue that gets turned into a second-class Fighter because the GM doesn’t like having the thief get thieving opportunities or the Star Wars Noble that never has a chance to use his persuasion talents is only going to be frustrating for the player.

You once told me about a frustrating experience where you loaded up on social skills, after being told that the game would be heavy on intrigue and politics, only to find that the game was much more action oriented and combat based. It is my opinion that the GM failed in this case because he set the table one way and then served you a meal that you didn’t order.

If I ever encourage you to build your PC one way and then run things the complete opposite, you will need to toss your tea mug at me.

I’m always afraid that I’ll unbalance something, and have to go back and fix it. I’d have ticked off most of the table by giving one player a custom class, and then ticked off that player by nerfing it later.

Which may explain why I like class-less games…