I had Castles & Crusades on one of my storage shelves and moved it to my main shelves. The SIEGE Engine felt inflexible in terms of what I wanted regarding character customization, like you made your choices at character creation, so I put it aside for a while.
Then I started reading other games and found out other games were a bit different. They only provided complicated layers of subsystems and incompatible mini-game mechanics that allowed flexibility as you improved your character.
They say they have choices and offer plenty, but as you advance, you slowly discover the game is balanced and designed for a minimal number of optimized builds. Even in Savage Worlds, a great game that offers infinite potential for customization, if you specialize in one of the game's focus areas, such as melee combat, you will discover you can optimize the system quickly.
And this choice to specialize happens when? During character creation.
Yes, I could force myself to broaden my character design choices, which is always good. But many dungeon games fall into this "hard optimization" lane and never get out of it. Either you are in the game's sweet spot for design and balance, ahead of the curve in the optimizer's area, or behind the curve in a place meant for jack-of-all-trades characters. In Savage Worlds, it is better to be the jack of all trades. In dungeon games, you are meant to optimize because the game's challenge curve is a part of the game.
This is why dungeon games have monster manuals and treasure tables; those are the points on a curve of the game's built-in challenge and progression system. You are not playing "a character." You are playing "the curve."
The SIEGE Engine is this "meta-choice" you make in the game that simulates all the time spent in other games buying feats, skills, abilities, and other powers in the areas you want your character to specialize in. In other games, you purchase diplomacy skills, negotiation, intimidation, seduction, smooth-talking, fast-talking, all sorts of social feats, and some social-focused class features - and then, after all that time and fiddling, you create a character that does well at most Charisma-based activities.
In the SIEGE Engine, you pick charisma as a primary, and you are done. All of the above is wrapped up into that one selection, and it also says, "as I level, I am going to keep making these character improvement choices focused on my charisma abilities." It puts character improvement on auto-pilot as you level. You don't miss out on a few Charisma-based activities because you were forced to make choices; you get them all.
In a game like Pathfinder 2, you read hundreds of carefully-designed options and pick the ones that match your playstyle and character concept. In C&C, you tell the game, "I make the best choices for Charisma," and then you decide what those are in roleplaying. Are you the smooth-talking halfling or the charismatic charmer? You decide. No sorting through lists and choices to optimize needed.
If you think of C&C as a version of a 3.5-based B/X that removes the clunky 3.5 skill, save, feat, and class ability system and replaces all those with a unified mechanic - you "get" the game.
This also means C&C is, by default, more party-based than other games since trying to solo means getting disappointed quickly. In GURPS, I can create a "lone survivor" easily. In C&C, you need a group with overlapping specialties, primaries, classes, and abilities to do well. Playing the curve in this game assumes party-based play.
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