"I want to play a druid with Natural Spell" is sufficient to be "willing" to dominate the game, and very few DMs I know of are willing to ban Natural Spell since, as stated, it is PHB-only.
“PHB only” is no guarantee in my experience. Going back to the late 70s, I’ve played at tables that barred Paladins, Monks, Bards, Assassins, all races except humans, all races except humans, elves and dwarves, certain alignments, and even certain spells.
As for Natural Spell, no one has chosen it. I’ve played several 3.X Druids, and never took it- it never meshed with my character concepts.
Likewise, someone wanting to play a Cleric with cool domains, like Luck, or who happens to worship a war god with a nice weapon (which can be purely innocent, no desire to break the game.)
I’ve never played Luck clerics nor been in a group where someone did, AFAIK. I
have played War clerics. Didn’t break the games.
Ah. Then yes, that explains a lot. If you don't actually play 3.X, but instead play "3.X as if it were 2e/etc.," then several of the problems go away, because that is how it was designed. They removed the guardrails, but still assumed most of those guardrails were present.
Let’s not be uncharitable with our rhetoric, please.
It’s still playing 3.X. Especially when the players are fully conscious of what options are available. And I know how to design many of the builds like Pun-Pun and CoDzilla. That I chose not to do so does not mean I’m not playing 3.X. It means I’m playing the characters I actually want to play.
Go back upthread to my example of the 2-headed Fey Hengeyokai fighter or the “Swamp Thing” Geomancer. You can’t make those PCs without understanding how the system’s various parts interact.
You also can’t make them in prior editions. They’re purely 3.X constructs.
Still doesn't alter much of the "Druid with Natural Spell"/"Cleric with stupidly powerful domains" thing, since those can both happen purely innocently and, at least for the former, without any need for non-PHB sources. But it does..."fix," for a given definition of "fix"...some of the other classes, if you simply fail to actually use the rules as written for them.
“Can happen” =/= “Will happen”.
Choosing not to use a spell because it doesn’t fit your character concept is not “fail(ing) to actually use the rules as written for them.”
It requires more thought per performance, at the very least. Again: Druid with even moderately smart spell choices, form choices, and Natural Spell--all of which is pure PHB content--can easily outperform a Fighter. I mean, for goodness' sake, their bear companion is already almost as good as the Fighter is all by herself!
Denigrating the choice of choosing to realize the character in your head as opposed to DPR optimization (etc.) isn’t going to win me over to your POV. You do realize that, don’t you?
There’s no end of resources on how to optimize spellcasters. I actually own one book laying out the math for optimizing 3.X PHB Sorcerers & Wizards. I first used it to see how closely my friend’s Wizards hewed to having an optimal spell list. (His choices were virtually identical to those in the book.) Besides that, I’ve used it to see if any of the ideas within worked for any of my concepts. It’s helped with one or two.
But by and large, it just gave me minor tweaks, or helped me decide between similar options. And no, not always to the more powerful option.
If I were only interested in optimization, I’d never have played a Sorcerer in scale mail with a maul in a PHB + 2 other sourcebook’s campaign. I wouldn’t have played an Indiana Jones inspired Spellsword with a Diviner as his casting class.
