By which I mean the tendency for WW games to be: "X situation, let the X focused guy handle it, the rest of us will sit in a corner and knit/catch up on reading/do crossword puzzles"
Especially bad with subsystems that make you take a lot of charms to function, meaning you don't have charms to cover other things, because you have limited XP.
Specialization is good, but super-specialization being optimal is... Well, it creates issues of half the people at the table turning out half the time.
This is a persistent problem in RPG design that I am increasingly annoyed by. At its core, it comes from a lack of focus in game design, but there are exacerbating issues of design that makes it worse.
Take, for example, really old editions of D&D. They are about one thing; killing people and taking their stuff. More about taking the stuff than killing people, even. So everything you can focus on in the game is killing people and taking their stuff. High STR? Carry more loot! High DEX? Kill things with a sword! High CON? Fight longer! High INT? Kill things with magic! High WIS? Help your friends kill things! High CHA? Hire a bunch of people to kill and loot for you! Fighting Man? Kill things with a sword. Magic-User? Kill things with magic. Cleric? Help your friends kill things. It's not a perfectly designed game, but there's basically no way to build a character that doesn't give them a certain level of competence in killing people and taking their stuff. This is really good design!
Moreover, the way combat works in D&D, it's always good to be a bigger group; two Fighting Men means you have double the number of people furiously swording enemies to death, and the amount of enemies you can kill increases by up to four. Three Fighting Men means you can kill between three and
nine times as many enemies as just one Fighting Man.
Also, three people can carry three times as much loot and equipment. And that's all you do in the game; kill people and take their stuff. Both of those are activities where more people means you accomplish more and better.
A lot of modern games are about more than killing people and taking their stuff. They're about, say, killing people and solving vector calculus. And in a fairly naturalistic manner, they're designed so that being really good at killing people excludes being really good at vector calculus, because few people in the real world are both elite special forces and professors of mathematics. Additionally, this discrepancy in competency means that Special Forces often end up
really good at killing people, while Math Professors aren't very competent at it at all. The result is that adding Math Professors to help Special Forces fight offers only a marginal increase in combat power. Math Professors will also often tend to be rather squishy ("not dying to bullets" has no utility in solving vector calculus, after all), so putting them in combat just means they risk dying. Roleplayers tend to be adverse to their characters dying, and as a team you don't want your Math Professors to die because you might run into a rogue vector calculus problem later. So whenever combat breaks out, all the Math Professors go hide.
A related issue comes when the party is confronted with an Eldritch Matrix From Beyond. Rarely, if ever, will Special Forces have anything to offer a Math Professor in this situation. Maybe the Special Forces gal can roll her Solving Vector Calculus 2 and add her successes to the Math Professor's Vector Calculus 15, increasing it to 16. Then the Math Professor rolls, succeeds by like 5, and the Special Forces gal sure feels that her contribution mattered against the Eldritch Matrix From Beyond.
Now, imagine a game where you can Fight, do Vector Calculus, Hack, Talk, Drive, and Build Stuff. Every point you put into being a good Talker is a point that you could have spent on being a good Math Professor, so being a Math Professor-Talker means you fail more at both vector calculus and Talking. Especially if there's a pure Math Professor on your team; any problem that is a challenge to the Math Professor will probably be far harder to the Math Professor-Talker, and any math problem that is challenging to the Math Professor-Talker can be solved trivially by the pure Math Professor. So if you like to get a feeling of competency and accomplishment, you're better off being a pure Talker, so you get a chance to shine.
The net result, of course, is that you get a team with a few Fighters, one Math Professor, one Hacker, one Talker, one Driver, and one Builder. Then, whenever there's combat all the non-combat people go hide, and whenever there's vector calculus, everyone except the Math Professor take out their phones and play Words with Friends.
There are various solutions to this. One is to make everyone play multiple characters. Everyone plays a Fighter and a Math Professor and a Talker, and whenever a talky problem appears, everyone has their Talkers help solve it. Of course, this only matters if throwing two Talkers at the problem is better than one Talker. Lots of games have single-roll resolution for non-combat things, so if Talker 1 fails, there's nothing Talker 2 can actually do... in which case only one person needs to actually play a Talker anyway.
Another solution, and this is my favourite, is to make it so that it's impossible to make a character who is not competent at one of the things you can do in the game; Magic Users kill people and take their stuff, high-CHA characters who can't themselves fight hire people to fight for them, etc. Fighters can still be useful in talking, Math Professors can assist Hackers with research, Talkers are useful labour for Builders, etc. And not just those few cross competencies; in the game about fighting, vector calculus, hacking, talking, driving, and building, every possible character is a useful contribution to fighting, solving vector calculus problems, hacking, talking, driving, and building things.
