The Gaming Den

K wrote:Considering the "What mechanics are you 100% done with"," I think I'll just state in threads that "I'm 100% done with [this mechanic]. "

I'm 100% done with linked attributes. They poorly emulate the characters that people are trying to emulate and they lead to conformity of PC design.

Yeah. I'm sick of every fighter being some 18 strength juggernaut, every rogue being super dexterous, every wizard is a genius, and so forth.

The number of ability scores should be cut down and those that remain need to play into every class. Classes abilities need to be spread over the stats, so you run into different permutations with different stats. Dexterity should help you dodge/hit, Strength should help you damage/soak, Intelligence should give you more maneuvers/spells. Charisma could perhaps give you some kind of Edge points that can burn to reroll bad rolls. It could also grant you magic resistance.

For spellcasters, dexterity could help them hit with ray spells and strength determines the damage of their spells. Intelligence gives them more slots per day/spells known and charisma helps them breach spell resistance.

Cyberzombie wrote:

K wrote:Considering the "What mechanics are you 100% done with"," I think I'll just state in threads that "I'm 100% done with [this mechanic]. "

I'm 100% done with linked attributes. They poorly emulate the characters that people are trying to emulate and they lead to conformity of PC design.

Yeah. I'm sick of every fighter being some 18 strength juggernaut, every rogue being super dexterous, every wizard is a genius, and so forth.

The number of ability scores should be cut down and those that remain need to play into every class. Classes abilities need to be spread over the stats, so you run into different permutations with different stats. Dexterity should help you dodge/hit, Strength should help you damage/soak, Intelligence should give you more maneuvers/spells. Charisma could perhaps give you some kind of Edge points that can burn to reroll bad rolls. It could also grant you magic resistance.

For spellcasters, dexterity could help them hit with ray spells and strength determines the damage of their spells. Intelligence gives them more slots per day/spells known and charisma helps them breach spell resistance.

I generally support any idea that results in hulked-out, pretty wizards.

Cyberzombie wrote:
Yeah. I'm sick of every fighter being some 18 strength juggernaut, every rogue being super dexterous, every wizard is a genius, and so forth.

I think the interesting thing is how quickly both the fiction and supplements diverge from this core assumption.

I mean, Dragonlance is the cutting edge of 1e fiction and even it has Dex Fighters in the form of Kitiara or others.

How did it take for 3e to have Dex fighting guys like Swashbuckers? Int fighting guys?

If I had to write a fantasy heartbreaker, I'd make all base stats into saves. Let the Fighter just do his to-hit and damage at base rate and then flavor it as "so cunning that he predicts where blow will go, do fast he moves before others, or so strong as to power through even the most sturdy defense." The actual reason is immaterial.

K wrote:This bit is the flaw in your assumptions. Assuming that different options makes other options redundant only happens if you don't make the options actually different from each other in a real way.

For example, if you enter a situation and have have no options, like a fighting vampire in a social situation, then getting even one option from a limited investment in an ability that opens up that single option is huge. Enter Presence.

That doesn't invalidate the fact that the social vampire has many options in that circumstance. That's because those options are different and many will be radically better in some situations.

Imagine both the Social Vampire and the Fighter Vampire With Presence is trying sneak into one of the Prince's properties, but they get caught. Killing or attacking the ghoul who caught them would be considered an act of war, so both need a way to smoothing things over before the ghoul calls the vampire cops.

Social Vampire gets several of the best options. Convincing the ghoul to not talk about this to the Prince results in no loss in social capital and opens up the best options like the ghoul just showing them where the thing they are searching for is hidden or doing something to cover for them, but it takes all of the social skills available to Social Vamp to get the best options.

Fighter Vamp has one option, and that is to mind-fuck the ghoul with Presence. He'll "succeed" at this social test, but he won't get any of the good options like getting to convince the ghoul to set a fire after he's left in order to cover the theft. The ghoul will be sitting addled in a corner somewhere instead.

Making the various options produce authentically different outcomes makes them all valuable. Social Vampire also wants Presence because being able to force minor successes in social situations does synergize with what he does because getting to do something after a social check has failed is huge, but Fighting Vampire wants it because it covers a lot of social situations with minimal success options when he'd otherwise have no options.

The fact that the same Presence power is also a nonlethal and untraceable and concealed weapon combat option also makes it valuable to both of them because there is nothing else in the game that offers that particular combo.

This is basically a really long and quite artful dodge, and I am having none of it.

Presence makes people who wouldn't otherwise talk to you talk to you. That is what it fucking does. If you have a power that does something other than that, then it is not Presence and is instead some other fucking power that does something else.

You use Presence, and now you are talking to someone. Either having mundane social abilities is now useful or it is not. There is no, and can be no option 3. That's really all there is, all there ever was, and all there can ever be. No amount of you positing weird bullshit scenarios can change this fact.

If having the mundane social abilities is useful, then having Presence and the mundane social abilities together is synergistic and people who don't have both will be less powerful on that axis than players of the game will expect. If having the mundane social abilities is not useful, then having Presence and the mundane social abilities together is counter-synergistic and people who have both will have spent more of their resources for less real capabilities and will have less character breadth than players expect. And that is fucking it. Nothing you can possibly say will change this fact.

You can talk about things that are genuinely orthogonal (like firearms and subterfuge or stealth and library research) until you are blue in the face, and all that tells me is that you are afraid to talk about things that are actually relevant to this conversation - which is exclusively about things that accomplish identical tasks. If the hill you want to die on today is really that we can't have abilities that work anything like Presence, then we'll just go to anything else that accomplishes identical tasks. Fuck it, let's go to the task of "killing people with damage" and consider the abilities of "skill with firearms" and "grows deadly claws out of hands." Kindly explain how that is something which neither stacks nor is in any way redundant.

Or eat your god damn crow. Either way.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:
This is basically a really long and quite artful dodge, and I am having none of it.

Presence makes people who wouldn't otherwise talk to you talk to you. That is what it fucking does. If you have a power that does something other than that, then it is not Presence and is instead some other fucking power that does something else.

You use Presence, and now you are talking to someone. Either having mundane social abilities is now useful or it is not. There is no, and can be no option 3. That's really all there is, all there ever was, and all there can ever be. No amount of you positing weird bullshit scenarios can change this fact....

By saying "Presence is the power that does exactly what social actions do", you've literally created the problem where people with social skills shouldn't take Presence. You've even made that problem worse by letting people use alternate skills for Presence.

The option 3 is to make abilities that offer different potential results in the same mini-game and to make those results unique. I understand that this is a more complicated system than Storyteller games use, but solving problems often requires not taking the simple and wrong choice.

If you won't even entertain the idea that there could be a rigorous mini-game with variable outcomes more nuanced than win/lose and that various abilities would be the ways to reach those different outcomes, then I think I can save myself a lot of time by assuming that you can't transcend or even work with the flaws pre-baked into Storyteller games.

I'm not trying to insult you, but I think you can't have this discussion because you won't depart from a series of easy and bad design choices made early in your process.

It's pretty straightforward, Frank: There's no such thing as redundancy. Firearms is rock, werewolf transformation is scissors, and pyrokinesis is paper. Now it makes absolutely no difference if you have a werewolf, a gunslinger, and a pyrokinetic, or a pyrokinetic werewolf gunslinger, and either way your party is spending a lot of resources on combat which is going to lead to deficiencies in other areas. If a power you're importing from Storyteller is redundant, change it so that it is not. K has said some pretty crazy things in the past, but this is not one of them.

Frank Trollman wrote: Fuck it, let's go to the task of "killing people with damage" and consider the abilities of "skill with firearms" and "grows deadly claws out of hands." Kindly explain how that is something which neither stacks nor is in any way redundant.

I can see how 'killing people with damage' might include 'melee' and 'ranged' options. They do not stack, nor are they strictly redundant... Sometimes one offers an advantage over the other, but both may require character resources.

FrankTrollman wrote:Fuck it, let's go to the task of "killing people with damage" and consider the abilities of "skill with firearms" and "grows deadly claws out of hands." Kindly explain how that is something which neither stacks nor is in any way redundant.

I hate social mechanics, so I'll bite on this one.

You've got three vampires. I'm gonna use the boring old Alice, Bob, and Charlie.

Alice is a combat monster with both Firearms and Claws.
Bob has Firearms, and relies on Celerity to keep himself out of arm's reach.
Charlie has Claws, and uses Obfuscate to sneak up on people he wants to shred.

(I know that's not exactly what those disciplines do, but it's variety and I want to demonstrate that taking fewer murdering skills means you can have other things.)

Situation 1: Bob and Charlie spot each other and fly into a feral rage, because nWoD's inner beast rules are shite. Bob uses Celerity to go first and fills Charlie with a few pounds of buckshot. Charlie burns all his blood points to survive and cries for mercy.

Situation 2: Charlie talks his way out of being Final Death'd, then comes back a few nights later to kill Bob in revenge. He uses Obfuscate to get in close before Bob sees him. Up close, Bob's firearms skill is useless. Bob takes $TEXAS aggravated damage and dies horribly.

Situation 3: Alice sees Charlie julienning Bob, and threatens to go to the prince. Charlie charges her, but Alice wins initiative, and gets a good shot on Charlie. Charlie pounces on her, but Alice uses her claws to parry his attacks. They trade blows, but that first shot turns out to decide the fight and Charlie runs out of boxes first.


There you go. Three ways to "deal damage in combat" that neither stack nor render each other redundant. You can rearrange the fights into any order. Alice still stomps the boys into angsty paste because she can fight at any range and take the fight to where her opponent has a disadvantage.

K wrote:By saying "Presence is the power that does exactly what social actions do", you've literally created the problem where people with social skills shouldn't take Presence. You've even made that problem worse by letting people use alternate skills for Presence.

The option 3 is to make abilities that offer different potential results in the same mini-game and to make those results unique. I understand that this is a more complicated system than Storyteller games use, but solving problems often requires not taking the simple and wrong choice.

K, you're just dodging the argument. Presence is the power that makes people who wouldn't talk to you talk to you. That is what it fucking does. Things that do other things are not Presence. They are something else. Saying that it is entirely possible to make a game that does not have Presence is trivially true (hell, even a game about Vampires in an urban setting: there is no Presence equivalent in Nightlife), but it does not even address the underlying argument.

So if you refuse to even have this discussion about Presence, we'll stick to the magic claws vs. firearms skill example. Because I'm pretty sure you can't have a game with magic monsters in it where no one has magic claws, and I'm even more certain that you can't have a game in a modern setting without people being able to be skilled at shooting things.

You can certainly contrive situations where having a gun is useful and having magic claws is not. You can also imagine circumstances where having claws is useful and having skill with a gun is not. Here, I'll give you one of each for free: situation A is that the enemy is on top of another building and you can't reach them with your claws. Situation B is that you are being attacked in an airport bathroom and already had to pass through security so you don't have access to any guns you might own. That's not even hard. But while those two methods of killing people are not fully redundant, they do significantly overlap. There are really a lot of circumstances where you would be served equally well by shooting or clawing and gain no perceptible advantage by having both abilities.

Let's look at Zaranthan's attempt:

Zaranthan wrote:He uses Obfuscate to get in close before Bob sees him. Up close, Bob's firearms skill is useless. Bob takes $TEXAS aggravated damage and dies horribly.

Oh wait! If he used a stealth ability to get the drop on his opponent, he could have dropped his opponent with a sniper shot instead. The situation where supposedly claws were useful and guns weren't was a actually a situation where either claws or guns would have been useful and having both was totally redundant. Charlie in that list of examples gains nothing from having magic claws. He wins zero battles that he wouldn't have won with a gun.

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Now it should be noted: in After Sundown, there's actually a "Combat" skill. This means that getting good at shooting people additionally makes you better at cutting people up with monster claws. So in AS, gun fu and claw fu stack and people who want to be good with claws also happen to be good with any other weapon they happen to be familiar with. Guns and claws are not redundant in that system, but rather are synergistic.

But it's not possible to create a system where being good with a gun and having magic claws is neither synergystic nor redundant. It literally has to be one of those two things because the end result of both is the same in so many circumstances (the pointy end goes in the other man as a result of you taking combat actions).

-Username17

It seems really easy to imagine how claws and guns might be neither synergistic or redundant, either that or I am confused. If claws deal heavy damage at close range and guns deal moderate damage at close, medium, or long range then they are neither synergistic nor redundant.

Let's abstract this, because we're adults and adults can do logic.

Combat is a function of how good you are at combat and how good the other guy is at combat, and based on those it can return various results.

Thus Combat = f(C1, C2) where C1 and C2 are the Being Good In A Fight scores of the two people. C1 and C2 are both a gestalt of many other factors, including stealth and tactical ability and combat drugs and the +2 they got from Aunt Mavis's fruitcake and whatever else. However, what's important is that they exist and can be said to be static over the duration of the combat, and one may be larger than the other.

f(C1, C2) can return many values. However, if it's a good system, it will only return those values which make sense within the world. For example, if I am using a sniper rifle, I cannot take prisoners uninjured because that's not how being shot in the head with a high powered rifle works. On the other hand if I'm using ju-jitsu or some other grappling martial art, then taking prisoners uninjured becomes an entirely reasonable answer for the combat function to return.

Thus combat must be a function of at least two other variables, which are the lists of acceptable outcomes for the combat if either party wins.

Thus combat must be at least f(C1, C2, O1, O2) where O is the range of acceptable Outcomes if either party win.

But it gets more complex than that, because it must be possible to constrain the opponent's list of acceptable outcomes. For example, if I can regenerate my limbs then "loses a limb but survives" cannot be an acceptable outcome. Similarly, if I have a power that says "this guy never surrenders, not ever, not in a million years" then even if my opponent wins, he cannot make me surrender. He can kill me instead, but he can't make me surrender because that power exists and I have it.

Thus, combat must be at least f(C1, C2, O1, O2, U1, U2) where U is the range of Unacceptable outcomes if either party win.

There are probably other things that need to go into it, but I feel my point is made.

If C1 and C2 are the only values that go into f(), then yes, I would agree with Frank, character skill is fundamentally one-dimensional and thus redundancies are redundant. But in order for the rules to create a believable world, you need to be able to constrain the possibility space of acceptable outcomes, and that means that O and U need to exist.

deanruel87 wrote:It seems really easy to imagine how claws and guns might be neither synergistic or redundant, either that or I am confused. If claws deal heavy damage at close range and guns deal moderate damage at close, medium, or long range then they are neither synergistic nor redundant.

I have no idea how that is neither for you. You're in combat, you either close the distance to use claws or stay the distance to use the gun. Having both is redundant. Alternately, if you're regularly forced into a fight at a particular distance, combat specialists take guns and maybe augment that with claws if close combat is common and the advantage is that large. So I suppose you found a third option of making one or both skills required to be good at combat, thus making the question a lot more academic.

schpeelah wrote:

deanruel87 wrote:It seems really easy to imagine how claws and guns might be neither synergistic or redundant, either that or I am confused. If claws deal heavy damage at close range and guns deal moderate damage at close, medium, or long range then they are neither synergistic nor redundant.

I have no idea how that is neither for you. You're in combat, you either close the distance to use claws or stay the distance to use the gun. Having both is redundant.

I don't see how that's redundant. You may get in situations where you can't close to melee range (so the gun is better) and situations where you can close to melee range (where the claws are better).

The only time you have a redundant action is when one of them is superior in all situations compared to the other, and that only happens if ranged damage is equal to or greater than melee damage.

Cyberzombie wrote:

schpeelah wrote:

deanruel87 wrote:It seems really easy to imagine how claws and guns might be neither synergistic or redundant, either that or I am confused. If claws deal heavy damage at close range and guns deal moderate damage at close, medium, or long range then they are neither synergistic nor redundant.

I have no idea how that is neither for you. You're in combat, you either close the distance to use claws or stay the distance to use the gun. Having both is redundant.

I don't see how that's redundant. You may get in situations where you can't close to melee range (so the gun is better) and situations where you can close to melee range (where the claws are better).

The only time you have a redundant action is when one of them is superior in all situations compared to the other, and that only happens if ranged damage is equal to or greater than melee damage.

You seem to be fundamentally confused about redundancy. Deanrule's example is indeed a classic piece of redundancy. There are available edge cases where you'd care about having one or the other to the point that you'd be glad you had both. But, there are a lot of circumstances where it honestly wouldn't make a huge difference which one you had and in any case once you had one the marginal improvement for having both instead of one would be relatively small.

Let's say you had guns already. In those circumstances where you were able to keep distance or were unable to close the distance, there would be no advantage to also having claws. In those circumstances where you were necessarily up close you would benefit from having claws, but that benefit would be considerably less than if you didn't have the gun. Even in the situation where the claws shine, the benefit is only the difference between the gun and the claws, rather than the difference between the claws and nothing. And why are you only getting that marginal benefit rather than the full benefit? Because the gun adn the claws are fucking redundant, you idiot!

-Username17

Cyberzombie wrote:I don't see how that's redundant. You may get in situations where you can't close to melee range (so the gun is better) and situations where you can close to melee range (where the claws are better).

The only time you have a redundant action is when one of them is superior in all situations compared to the other, and that only happens if ranged damage is equal to or greater than melee damage.

No. The redundancy we're talking about here is when investing character resources into two things is inferior to investing into only one. The dichotomy in what you're talking about is that either the situational benefits are large enough that having both is makes you better at killing people than one, enough to justify buying both, or they aren't and having both is redundant.

Gnorman wrote:Generally, Con + anything is boring as fuck. Constitution is a passive attribute; characters focusing on Constitution tend to be passive as a result. Hence "boring as fuck." I wouldn't really want to play the dude whose job it is to sit there and take the hits; "tanking" is not an adequate character role by itself. But try and turn Constitution into an active attribute? Now it's "overpowered" by virtue of also contributing to HP. Go figure.

Koumei wrote a Dragonfire Adept that uses Con as the primary stat to power their breath weapon, and it's not a passive class at all. In fact, you spend most rounds figuring out the best spot to stand and breathe fire on everyone. So you're moving, then you're rolling some dice and forcing saves.

I can't really think of any other compelling Con class examples, but there's that.

schpeelah wrote:

Cyberzombie wrote:I don't see how that's redundant. You may get in situations where you can't close to melee range (so the gun is better) and situations where you can close to melee range (where the claws are better).

The only time you have a redundant action is when one of them is superior in all situations compared to the other, and that only happens if ranged damage is equal to or greater than melee damage.

No. The redundancy we're talking about here is when investing character resources into two things is inferior to investing into only one. The dichotomy in what you're talking about is that either the situational benefits are large enough that having both is makes you better at killing people than one, enough to justify buying both, or they aren't and having both is redundant.

It's just a little more. Frank is also saying that those are the only two options. Either having both synergizes such that getting both makes you better or they don't and either or will do the job and that there is no 3rd option.

Lokathor wrote:

Gnorman wrote:Generally, Con + anything is boring as fuck. Constitution is a passive attribute; characters focusing on Constitution tend to be passive as a result. Hence "boring as fuck." I wouldn't really want to play the dude whose job it is to sit there and take the hits; "tanking" is not an adequate character role by itself. But try and turn Constitution into an active attribute? Now it's "overpowered" by virtue of also contributing to HP. Go figure.

Koumei wrote a Dragonfire Adept that uses Con as the primary stat to power their breath weapon, and it's not a passive class at all. In fact, you spend most rounds figuring out the best spot to stand and breathe fire on everyone. So you're moving, then you're rolling some dice and forcing saves.

I can't really think of any other compelling Con class examples, but there's that.

4e's Inferlock is as decent a class concept as anything in that edition. 3e's Blood Magus is nicely thematic. A couple of the Bane Guard builds were Con based.

There is certainly room for characters who hurt themselves for power having Con based magic. I just don't think that it makes sense to try to make that one sixth of the play space.

Edit:

Mguy wrote:It's just a little more. Frank is also saying that those are the only two options. Either having both synergizes such that getting both makes you better or they don't and either or will do the job and that there is no 3rd option.

Stop being an idiot. Seriously: just stop.

Redundancy doesn't mean that it has to be 100% redundant. No one has ever said that. The point of redundancy is that the marginal improvement of getting the second one is less than the marginal improvement of getting one if you didn't have the other, which means that a character who takes a bunch of redundant abilities will have spent the same amount of resources for less meaningfully distinct abilities than another character will have.

A character who spends skill points on Sword skill and Gun skill is just a worse character than one who spent the same skill points on Guns and Stealth or Sword and Research. The marginal benefit of having a second weapon type is a lot less than the marginal benefit of getting a first weapon type. While the marginal benefit of stealth or research abilities does not go down when you have the ability to attack for damage.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:

Mguy wrote:It's just a little more. Frank is also saying that those are the only two options. Either having both synergizes such that getting both makes you better or they don't and either or will do the job and that there is no 3rd option.

Stop being an idiot. Seriously: just stop.

Redundancy doesn't mean that it has to be 100% redundant. No one has ever said that. The point of redundancy is that the marginal improvement of getting the second one is less than the marginal improvement of getting one if you didn't have the other, which means that a character who takes a bunch of redundant abilities will have spent the same amount of resources for less meaningfully distinct abilities than another character will have.

A character who spends skill points on Sword skill and Gun skill is just a worse character than one who spent the same skill points on Guns and Stealth or Sword and Research. The marginal benefit of having a second weapon type is a lot less than the marginal benefit of getting a first weapon type. While the marginal benefit of stealth or research abilities does not go down when you have the ability to attack for damage.

-Username17

Exactly what are you losing your shit over? I never said anything about 100% redundancy or anything necessarily being 100% redundant. I fucking agreed with you.

Zaranthan wrote: Alice is a combat monster with both Firearms and Claws.
Bob has Firearms, and relies on Celerity to keep himself out of arm's reach.
Charlie has Claws, and uses Obfuscate to sneak up on people he wants to shred.

Alice is very adept at delivering HP damage. And that's pretty much it.
Bob is able to deliver HP damage. He also has another ability that, in addition to synergizing well with combat, has several non-combat uses.
Charlie is able to deliver HP damage. He also has another ability that, in addition to synergizing well with combat, has several non-combat uses.

Alice is one-dimensional. Sure, she has multiple options for killing things, and will always have the optimal killing option; but spilling HP on the ground is the only way Alice is able to interact with the game.

Bob and Charlie each have a HP-spilling option. They each also have other things they can do when spilling HP isn't necessarily the best thing to do in a given situation.

In a game that has more than just stabbing/shooting things to death (but also happens to have stabbing/shooting), Alice is over-specialized, and is boring as hell. To make matters worse, stabbing+shooting has no synergistic effect.
As long as you have a HP-spilling option, you've checked that box and it's time to move on to the rest of your character.
It's an issue of opportunity costs -vs- diminishing returns. Well, that is, of course, unless you actually want a one-dimensional character.

The marginal benefit varies depending on the opponent.

Having the best 'melee skill' possible may not mean much if I'm forced to fight with a closet troll. Even having a more limited 'ranged option' would be good - that way I can fight Giant Scorpions without being killed.

You seem to be saying that spending resources on 'ranged attack' is redundant because most of the time you'll want to use 'melee attack' if that is your most effective option. But there are enough exceptions to warrant taking a second option. In some cases it may be redundant, but in other cases it will not be.

It becomes a question of how frequently the resources are redundant versus how often they are not. That will vary based on circumstances. All the stealth in the world won't make getting close to a melee bruiser a smart tactical choice if you're not going to be able to hide after stabbing him (assuming you can't one-shot him).

Certainly a character will attempt to force most confrontations to the arena in which he is most competent (a Diplomancer wants to talk, a Bruiser wants to bruise), but we all expect that there will be times when you don't get to choose your arena. Investing in 'alternatives' will pay dividends by preventing you from becoming a 'one trick pony' where you have no options if your 'one trick' is unavailable.

If Option A costs 10 points and Option B costs 10 points you would want a character who has both to get 20 points of value.

If A and B are guns and swords you will get less than 20. It will be more than 10, but still less than 20.

If A and B are swords and mobility, then you will get more than 20 if they each give 10 points of value.

FrankTrollman wrote: You seem to be fundamentally confused about redundancy. Deanrule's example is indeed a classic piece of redundancy. There are available edge cases where you'd care about having one or the other to the point that you'd be glad you had both. But, there are a lot of circumstances where it honestly wouldn't make a huge difference which one you had and in any case once you had one the marginal improvement for having both instead of one would be relatively small.

Well the fact that it's a marginal improvement is dependent on how much better the claws are than the gun. And that's the kind of thing you tweak in game design. If the claws aren't worth it, buff the claw damage. At some point you'll find a number where people think it's worth having a dedicated close combat weapon. If the close combat seems too good, nerf the damage or simply include more terrain/highly mobile foes. Not really rocket science here.

Anytime you have two things that both take the same kind of action, you're going to be able to claim some level of redundancy. If you can't cast hold person and magic missile in the same round, then those choices are to some degree redundant. But everything in the game is going to have that issue if you want to take it to ridiculous levels as you seem to be doing.

deaddmwalking wrote: You seem to be saying that spending resources on 'ranged attack' is redundant because most of the time you'll want to use 'melee attack' if that is your most effective option. But there are enough exceptions to warrant taking a second option. In some cases it may be redundant, but in other cases it will not be.

I'm saying that you need to prioritize, and then make the most of your resources based on those priorities.
Neither "everything" nor "everything combat" are options. "Everything" isn't an option because of scarcity. "Everything combat" isn't a real option, because now you're left with nothing else to do in the game.
There is a wide expanse of area between being "the best" at something and being "completely incompetent" at something. Most games leave you with enough resources to be "pretty darn good" at one or two things and still "serviceable in a pinch" at quite a few other things. The better your character is at one thing, the worse off you'll be at everything else.
There's generally a theoretical option/resource equilibrium, but that takes quite a bit of system master to find. But the general concept that such an equilibrium exists should be intuitively fairly obvious, as should the ideas of marginal benefit and opportunity costs.

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Having multiple abilities that do similar things, e.g., spill HP on the ground, is the definition of redundant.
The degree of redundancy can be debated, but the definition cannot.
How good melee is vs. ranged is actually kind of irrelevant to this point. If melee and ranged are different options that cost the same, choosing both is the opposite of synergistic.
For that matter, having them both be exactly equal in overall effectiveness would actually give you the best-case scenario when choosing both. The problem with that is that paradigm is ni-impossible to achieve.

Cyberzombie wrote: Well the fact that it's a marginal improvement is dependent on how much better the claws are than the gun. And that's the kind of thing you tweak in game design. If the claws aren't worth it, buff the claw damage. At some point you'll find a number where people think it's worth having a dedicated close combat weapon. If the close combat seems too good, nerf the damage or simply include more terrain/highly mobile foes. Not really rocket science here.

But if they are strong enough to be worth taking once you have the gun, then they will be too strong for a character who doesn't. Much of what they do overlaps, so they will need a big buff. However, that big buff will then be worth enough that it will be unbalancing in the absence of overlap.

You could avoid this be discounting abilities based on their overlap with existing ones. Under this, buying claws is very cheap once you have guns. However, it would be ridiculously complex.