What exactly constitutes a "Rule Exception"?

[Agamemnon]

This more than anything is what I tended to dislike about 3.x. I hate "building" characters. As a player, I hate the idea that my experience of the game is going to be overwhelmingly influenced by how much time I spend learning the combinations of things to stack together, and that to do it "right" I'm going to spend a couple hours sifting through the rules to find the best combination of things to put together.

As a GM, I hate the idea that my players are going to come to the table with their character completely plotted out in their mind, with the next ten to twenty levels of advancement more or less set in stone because of the "build" they are going for. It produces relatively static characters, and creates a sense that the events of the story should not affect the characters mechanically because god forbid something messes up the build.

This isn't every character, every player, every game.. but it is an incentive built into the system.

Which is precisely why I overwhelmingly prefer TSR era D&D... and also why there really is no "build optimizing" to be done in 'Bastards. If you want to be good at combat? Take an A priority in combat, and make sure your attributes are decent. Done.