Of all the complaints about 3.x systems... do you people actually allow this stuff ?

[harlokin]

In my experience of of 3e/3.5e was that after about level 3, martial classes were useless except as pack mules. Clerics melee'd better than fighters. Druids outpowered EVERYBODY after 6th level when they got Natural Spell. Even the Druid's animal companion was more powerful than the Fighter. Wizards ended entire combats with a single action because of 'save or die' (or equivalent status effect) spells.

 

[SlyDoubt]

The statement about building up trust with your players is not a version-specific one. However it is pretty obvious that 3rd Edition has a lot more built-in ways for a party to exploit resting, and more incentives to do so.

Right but it's the exploit part that has to do with trust. Unless you the DM are encouraging it, your players should trust you and you them not to exploit things in ways you didn't intend.

That develops over time but really there's no difference like you said. What you said definitely applies to being dropped into a group of players you don't know though. I agree with you there.

 

[pemerton]

The big one is the what... 20 minute adventure day ? Rules as written yes, this "theoretically" could be a problem. The thing is , I have been running campaigns for about 15 years now and I can honestly say I have never had this problem. This brings me to my question, does this ACTUALLY happen in your games? If so, why do you allow it?

Yes, it was a big feature of my Rolemaster campaigns. And the reason that I "allowed" it was because I play a game in which it is the prerogative of the players to make choices and act on them.

The other thing is the so called "Caster / Melee" rift. Where wizards and other casters are basically much better than every one else. Has anyone ever actually encountered this in their games?

Yes - I've encountered it in AD&D and in Rolemaster.

it just seems to me that given RPG's that have so many rules these type of things are bound to happen

I don't agree with this. My group tweaked RM in varius ways to make caster's less dominant. It worked. And I haven't found this issue in 4e.

In my opinion characters need some sort of drawback, in the form of ability scores or powers or whatever.

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In my opinion, all characters should have drawbacks

I'm indifferent to drawbacks. I think that PCs should face adversity. But there are a lot of different ways that can be done, and a lot of ways the mechanics can feed into that.

Here is a story that links the 15-minute day to drawbacks: in one of my RM games, the PCs were all wizards, and all but one was a meditation expert, meaning that they could recover their spell points even more quickly. The one who was not a meditation expert therefore looked for an alternative way to start regaining spell points quickly, and hit upon an enchanted herb called "hugar". Unfortunately, hugar is both expensive and highly addictive (RM uses a mechanic called "addication factors", and has mechanics for withdrawal as well) and the PC ended up losing his house, his job, his dignity etc, and eventually sold out his home town to a rival empire in return for a promise of house and (better) job back.

No one playing knew in advance that failure to have a strong meditation skill would turn out to be such a signficant element in character or plot development.

that's where the DM comes in. The DM is there to be a referee, he is there to reign in things that may be game breaking. The DM should not allow free reign in their game letting players get what ever they want.

This is one way of thinking about the GM's role. It's not my preferred approach. I prefer to follow the lead of the players in building and playing their PCs, and to present situations that oblige those PCs, and therefore the players, to make choices. What choices they make are up to them.

 

[pemerton]

the basic assumptions of D&D are this: wizards can teleport, control minds, and grant wishes. That will never be balanced with nonmagic abilities

Wishes are hard to top, but teleport can be partially matched, at least, by climbing, jumping and flying. And controlling minds can be matched by social skills.

 

[pemerton]

On the topic of "monsters replenishing" - this is highly scenario dependant. A lot of my first high-level Rolemaster campaign involved exploring various ruins etc. These are essentially static sites waiting to be explored and looted.

 

[Ahnehnois]

Wishes are hard to top, but teleport can be partially matched, at least, by climbing, jumping and flying. And controlling minds can be matched by social skills.

I'm not sure what you're getting at here. Are you suggesting that nonmagical abilities and magical ones are fundamentally similar?

Even the best manipulator is a long way from Dominate Person, and one can't fly, climb, or jump through walls or across the world in a second. Nor is a firebomb the equivalent of a fireball, a keen eye the equivalent of True Seeing, a solid disguise comparable with Alter Self, or Summon Monster spell the same as calling in a friend.

I feel pretty safe in concluding that most D&D spell effects are things that could not reasonably be duplicated without the use of magic.

 

[Rechan]

Well 4e did manage to balance it with non-magical PCs. It's just that people dislike that they did so.

 

[Stalker0]

the 20 minute adventuring day I've had issue with a few times, but not that bad in my games. As others have mentioned, it normally occured once teleport was in the game.

As for melee vs caster, I have definiately seen this one. The highest level game I have ever run turned into this. Fortunately the melee guys had story to keep them involved, but when it came down to power time, it was the wizard doing buffs, the wizard breaking down the magic traps, the wizard destroying enemies with a single spell, the wizard (or cleric) divining the BBEG next move tc.

 

[Ahnehnois]

Well 4e did manage to balance it with non-magical PCs. It's just that people dislike that they did so.

To whatever extent balance was achieved, it was done by radically altering the basic capabilities of the magical characters that I alluded to above, and granting nonmagic characters the ability to do sometimes supernatural things on an arbitrarily use-limited basis (i.e. magic).

In other words, what people dislike is not that the issue was "fixed", but that the distinction was largely removed.

In any case, my point is that perfect balance between magic and not magic isn't feasible while maintaining said distinction. That isn't necessarily a problem. Discounting the underlying D&Disms, the common meaning of the word "magic" is pretty incompatible with the notion of "balance".

 

[Rechan]

and granting nonmagic characters the ability to do sometimes supernatural things on an arbitrarily use-limited basis (i.e. magic).

Not really. I mean you could make that argument about the PHB1 martial classes. But the Essentials martial classes really had very little that wasn't an always on effect that modified a base attack. They're very much like prior edition Fighters and Thieves.