Concerning 3rd editions Wizard's being over powered.

[billd91]

No. This post is so incredibly utterly wrong in every possible way.

I'm going to have to disagree with you on a few points here.

2E casting was not better balanced, the spells were even MORE powerful or vaguely defined. They just had some stupid random insane negatives that could hit you. Whatever. Till it hits, nothing's happened. After it does; roll a new character. You'll still be rolling new characters less often than the big stupid fighter who's job is to act as a speed bump to the monsters. Disruption was more common, but I've seen plenty of spell disruption in 3E if the other side is willing to use the ready system - which was designed partly FOR this purpose...

I think 2e was better balanced on a number of factors. The saving throw target values, being based almost entirely on the target not on the caster's optimized casting stat, was a good balancing principle that avoided some of the problems we see in 3e. Not all values were well thought out (what is with the thief's terrible saves?!?), but the structure kept the save or die spell + maximized casting state strategy from being as strong a strategy as it became in 3e. Evocations balanced against them much better in 1e and 2e than in 3e.

Magic Items help the noncasters more than the casters, since casters actually have their spells to fall back on. Let's put this in simple terms: What is a more significant shift in power? A country going from 0 nuclear weapons to 25 nuclear weapons, or a country going from 25 nuclear weapons to 50? Magic items give noncasters access to stuff they simply DID NOT HAVE before, and they get the same wealth to spend on them as the casters do, and Use Magic Device does exist. The only problem with magic item creation is only casters can do it. I'd like to see feats to let mundanes craft magic items, at least arms and armor. Limiting or doing away with magic items is the single surest way to make the noncasters go from underpowered to completely unplayable.

Absolutely, magic items help the non-casters more than the casters. That's why 1e's treasure tables were skewed away from wands and bracers of armor and toward consumables and weapons/armor. Fortunately, ExploderWizard isn't advocating getting rid of magical equipment. But 3e's magic item creation negates the scarcity of wizardly/clerical items by making it easier for the casters to get them on their own terms. Pathfinder offers a reasonable fix to this by allowing non-casters to use craft skills to compensate. But the initial problems rest with 3e's easy item creation. I won't even get into the way magic item creation promotes the Big 6. That's another problem altogether.

Such an initiative system would have its own drawbacks. Don't think anyone wants to see the mage/preist trying to heal an ally that desperately needs it get disrupted. Binary is not a balance solution. It just means the spell's either overpowered (binary = 1; casting went off) or completely worthless (binary = 0; it got disrupted, or if an all-or-nothing effect, was saved against). That's pretty damn unfun. I'd rather the spells just be toned down a bit/bunch instead.

If we listened to what was unfun every time someone complained about a limit that affected them, we'd end up with 4e. Actually, I think we did end up with 4e and now we're already moving on to something else.

Cyclical initiative makes running combats a bit smoother, but it does come with a cost and that cost is casters with a lot less fear of being disrupted. It's not the only factor leading in that direction (concentration checks and 5 foot steps certainly add to it, as does packing most spells into a standard action). But 2e's initiative system was quite a bit better at getting casters to make tactical choices between getting a spell off or increasing the risk of disruption. This was a good thing.

 

[ExploderWizard]

No. This post is so incredibly utterly wrong in every possible way.

2E casting was not better balanced, the spells were even MORE powerful or vaguely defined. They just had some stupid random insane negatives that could hit you. Whatever. Till it hits, nothing's happened. After it does; roll a new character. You'll still be rolling new characters less often than the big stupid fighter who's job is to act as a speed bump to the monsters. Disruption was more common, but I've seen plenty of spell disruption in 3E if the other side is willing to use the ready system - which was designed partly FOR this purpose...

Magical effects were magical. Sometimes they just took people out. The price of excitement is a risk of loss.

The ready system was a joke.

Magic Items help the noncasters more than the casters, since casters actually have their spells to fall back on. Let's put this in simple terms: What is a more significant shift in power? A country going from 0 nuclear weapons to 25 nuclear weapons, or a country going from 25 nuclear weapons to 50? Magic items give noncasters access to stuff they simply DID NOT HAVE before, and they get the same wealth to spend on them as the casters do, and Use Magic Device does exist. The only problem with magic item creation is only casters can do it. I'd like to see feats to let mundanes craft magic items, at least arms and armor. Limiting or doing away with magic items is the single surest way to make the noncasters go from underpowered to completely unplayable.

The lack of cheap access to wands and scrolls won't interfere at all with non-caster gear. Fighters will still have their toys. Instead casters won't have the quiver of 'render rogues obsolete sticks' tucked away so they can use all of their spell slots for firepower without having to give up some versatility. Its a good thing.

Such an initiative system would have its own drawbacks. Don't think anyone wants to see the mage/preist trying to heal an ally that desperately needs it get disrupted. Binary is not a balance solution. It just means the spell's either overpowered (binary = 1; casting went off) or completely worthless (binary = 0; it got disrupted, or if an all-or-nothing effect, was saved against). That's pretty damn unfun. I'd rather the spells just be toned down a bit/bunch instead.

No thanks. I saw what toned down looked like and it put me sleep a lot more effectively than the worthless excuse for a spell 4E called sleep.

You wanna talk unfun? Try casting sleep successfully at five targets and have none of them fall asleep.

Toning down effects means reducing everything to damage. Talk about an effective sleep spell......

I agree with common sense and limits...but your example is the worst possible example of how to do that imaginable. First off; a wizard doesn't teleport somewhere hostile/unknown alone. The whole party's going with. "The party teleports into the side of a mountain. You're all dead."

The point of such a limitation is that the wizard knows about it and presumeably won't teleport under those circumstances if he/she is worthy of the INT score. If the wizard and the party know the risks but decide to gamble anyway then heck, they might all end up as part of the landscape, consider them winners of the Darwin award.

Awesome balance there, d00d!

Like I said above, this sort of "balance" is bs, and striking it from the game was a great decision 3E made. Especially since it is a game and thus death is meaningless (raise or make a new character), balancing spells with unlikely but horrifically catastrophic repurcussions is dumb.

Fixed.

I will continue to enjoy my dumb games and plod on somehow.

 

[Tovec]

To OP, I've had more problems with psionics, Warlock and Book of 9 Swords classes honestly. More characters of those types have broken my games than wizards or casters of any stripe. Yes casters are strong but they have limitations that I as a player or DM can deal with and exploit.

I'm not saying that I don't see it as a problem, invariably a strong-built caster will be the strongest (or at least most versatile) of the group but if it weren't for the fighter of the group keeping the majority of enemies at bay that caster is toast. If the rogue didn't disable the traps then the caster using invisibility is moot. And so on.

The reason they are so dangerous is because they have so many options available when compared to martial characters. Personally I've never had a problem with that. I tend toward martial characters myself and I love that I can do certain things more effectively and reliably than the caster, that is just my preference however. For example a high level (around lvl 24) martial character once dive bombed through a colossal plus construct, dealing more than the damage needed to kill it in a single round - ONLY with physical prowess, not magical aided ability.

That is my two cents.

 

[Loonook]

Now, for anyone who played tournament Magic the Gathering around 1998-99 there were either just groans of disgust, or whimsical looks into the stars for the nostalgia.

Wizards of the Coast has created a great method of dealing with this issue in Magic... Banned and Restricted lists.

Now, Living Campaigns had these banned and restricted lists in place for 3.x, and similar lists (Prohibited, Rare, Lost, Unique spells) did appear in 2e.

Your campaign benefits from the work you put in. Banning spells that you consider 'cheese' is the complete imperative of the DM. It is also the player's right to vote with their boots and leave.

Make the entire party warriors. Play E6. Make magic do backlash. Use the Huckster rules from Deadlands d20 or any number of spellcasting prohibitions. Create flavor for your game.

Slainte,

-Loonook.

 

[pemerton]

I have found that high-level 3e combat was all about researching, preparing your strategy ahead of time, entering combat and deploying that strategy. Casters would confer on what spells they had remaining, determine an optimal casting order to get the best use out of each spell, and then start casting. Meanwhile the non-casters lobbied for their favorite buffs from the casters. Sometimes I wonder if 4e really has longer combats, if you include all this prep time in 3e combat length.

High-level 4e combat so far has been all about adaptation--quickly finding out what the enemy's or environment's schtick is and developing tactics to counter it while in combat. To myself and my players it is much more satisfying.

If you substitute "Rolemaster" for "3E", this exactly fits my experience. And while I still have a very soft spot for RM, I won't be going back to it any time soon - as you say, the 4e experience of playing the game as play rather than as prep is much more satisfying.

On one hand, I totally agree that any reasonable player optimizes his character to a significant extent. What I'm referring to is things like the high-level polymorph and summoning spells that can clearly break the game if you play by the rules and exploit them to the max. A good player does not take shapechange and comb through every monster manual looking for the best abilities he can find. Taking wizard spells that are good but not ridiculously broken creates a good experience for all.

I don't think I agree with this.

In one of my RM games, one of the players built a shapechanging PC not because he wanted to be overpowered or comb through monster lists looking for broken options, but because he wanted to model Ged from the Earthsea books.

At low levels he used primarily face-shifting magic - which was better than any Disguise skill would be, but which didn't break the game at all (there was no non-magical trickster in the party with whom this PC was competing). But at mid levels, when he got more wideranging abilities, he started shapechanging into a wyvern. And suddenly he had access to attacks and defences comparable to the fighter, plus flight, plus still being able to use his spells.

My rules knowledge for the 3E shapechange spells isn't that strong, but if they're even a bit like the RM ones, I don't think a player has to set out to break the game in order to do so. Just doing very natural stuff, like turning into a wyvern (or the example of a bear or a wolf given above) can do the job.

 

[S'mon]

I hear a lot of talk about how a wizard at high levels can pretty much demolish anything. While in theory , sure they can, but how many of you have actually DM'ed or played with someone like that? Me personally ? I have never had a problem with wizards breaking the game, I dont know if it's just my players that dont know how to munchkin or min max or whatever, I just have never experience this problem.

It certainly happened to me. It got so bad that by 17th level we had an all-wizard party sometimes. The one time we had a decent fight in several levels was when a bunch of demons ambushed the three un-buffed wizards and they condescended to stand and fight rather than teleport out (then buff, then come back).

 

[Janaxstrus]

Never really had the problem with Wizards. We quickly learned what spells were bad, and adjusted them or banned them outright
Druids and clerics were just as bad, if not worse.

Banned: Bite of X spells, Orb (except Acid), Gate, etc etc

Frowned on: Glitterdust, Black Tentacles, etc

Changed: Teleport (you can set 1 teleport "beacon" per 4 Caster Levels, so at level 20 a full arcane caster has 5 locations he can teleport between)

More were changed, but that is the gist. The spells themselves were the main problems, not the classes.

Tone down the ones that make a cleric a better fighter than the fighter, adjust the ones that make a rogue useless, and fix the "I Win" spells and things come back into a closer balance.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I hear a lot of talk about how a wizard at high levels can pretty much demolish anything. While in theory , sure they can, but how many of you have actually DM'ed or played with someone like that?

The groups I played 3e with used what you might call 'subtle social pressure' to avoid the problem. That is, no one played a wizard.

Power gaming is fun, but there's a point at which it's just 'too easy.' The high-level 3e wizard & cleric and 3.5 druid (the 'tier 1' classes) all qualified. Sure, you could break a campaign with one. So could anybody. Try breaking a campaign with a Fighter, now that's a powergaming challenge.

 

[Ahnehnois]

You don't need balance between PCs and NPCs in an RPG. What you need is balance between PCs.

Wait, what? Balance is between all characters (P and NP). Why would there be any distinction here?

Now try looking at the sword and sorcery that is D&D's root. Conan eats spellcasters. The Grey Mouser might be a caster but he behaves more like a rogue. Even Jack Vance's wizards are ridiculously less powerful than D&D ones - they could hold at most half a dozen spells at a time. And needed a lot of training - i.e. were high level.

Yes, D&D wizards have too many spells and cast them too easily. That's not a fundamental flaw in game design, though. Wizards with fewer spells or more restrictions (but with all the classic spells that let you do things that fighters can't) would be the best solution.

I'll dig up my Gygax quotes later. But he considered balance to be essential to good game design.

Gary Gygax, Strategic Review 2.2 1976

In a slight tangent, what's with the Gygax references? I've never read anything he wrote and I know nothing about him. To me, quoting Gygax is a bit like a psychologist quoting Freud; sure there's some interesting historical context, but the field is far removed from where it started. But let's see what he was to say:

If magic is unrestrained in the campaign, D & D quickly degenerates into a weird wizard show where players get bored quickly, or the referee is forced to change the game into a new framework which will accommodate what he has created by way of player-characters. It is the opinion of this writer that the most desirable game is one in which the various character types are able to compete with each other as relative equals

Okay, yes. Again, there is a problem with unrestrained magic, but the fact that wizards and fighters operate off of a different platform and have different capabilities is not a problem. I'm all for reigning in characters in sensible ways. Again, there's two types of balance, one of which I think is reasonable, the other of which I think has caused problems.

Magic is definitely too easy to access, but that doesn't mean that shapechange/glitterdust/teleport/disintegrate/wish are the problem. Wizards should be able to do those things and fighters not, but wizards don't need to have so much at their disposal and pay so little in return.

Magic resistant foes aren't much of a problem in 3.X. Just pick your spells with care. And "the only answer to magic is magic" is not a good way to make the fighters relevant.

There were a fair amount of silly SR-ignoring spells, mostly in supplements, but I think that with a sensible banning or reruling of those (noncore) elements, SR is a huge factor in high-level play. And while there isn't one "answer" to magic, the "mutually assured destruction" factor of truly powerful casters has been and should continue to be important.

My rules knowledge for the 3E shapechange spells isn't that strong, but if they're even a bit like the RM ones, I don't think a player has to set out to break the game in order to do so. Just doing very natural stuff, like turning into a wyvern (or the example of a bear or a wolf given above) can do the job.

Ah, polymorph. Short answer: changing into a wyvern is not overpowered, but things quickly get out of control when you choose regenerating forms or those with powerful natural attacks and so on. Polymorph spells are ridiculously imbalaced because you can cherry-pick the best abilities out of an entire edition's worth of monsters. The thing is, achieving that imbalance consistently does require a lot of bookkeeping (transforming your stats), research, and thus conscious intent by a player to really break things.

For the record, I once played a shifter, and found a ridiculously optimized (giant squid) form, which completely dominated the game. Afterwards, everyone just steered clear of polymorph because they knew it was cheese. I've used it as a DM on occasion for plot-specific reasons.

The point is that this is one of a few truly game-breaking spells. There are hundreds if not thousands of 3.X spells, so it's a given that some are game-breaking. When I consider the power of wizards, I do not consider the top 5% or so of spells, on the expectation that most DM's and/or players know that they are overpowered and do not use them. This issue happens mostly with casters, because casters get such a variety of spells compared to the limited number of class abilities and feats other characters get. But it doesn't mean that there's something wrong with a wizard using the other 95% of spells that are not broken.

 

[Ahnehnois]

I think 2e was better balanced on a number of factors. The saving throw target values, being based almost entirely on the target not on the caster's optimized casting stat, was a good balancing principle that avoided some of the problems we see in 3e. Not all values were well thought out (what is with the thief's terrible saves?!?), but the structure kept the save or die spell + maximized casting state strategy from being as strong a strategy as it became in 3e. Evocations balanced against them much better in 1e and 2e than in 3e.

Just thought I'd chime in that the problem with 3.X saving throw spells is that the ability score that affects spell DCs is the same as the one casters use for learning spells and accumulating spell slots (and is usually tied into other benefits as well). This was a perfect opportunity to make casters use multiple ability scores and give them some MAD to think about. Once you do this (as I have) the picture does change for the better.