airwalkrr said:
So in other words, it was felt by you and the other designers that classes like the paladin (which typically required more XP per level) were more powerful than classes like the thief (which was the power-leveller of the game) and that they needed to level at different rates to remain equivalent? Was that the rationale, or is there another element of balance I am missing?
Not only did they feel like the Paladin was, they were right! It gets a lot more powerful when/if they ever get the Holy Avenger.
Personally, I like the different xp for each class approach instead of trying to keep each class equally balanced so you can have one xp chart. So take the two extremes. If I remember correctly, at high lev3els the wizard takes 375,000 xp to level up. The weakest character class was either the Thief or the cleric, and took something like 225,000 xp to level up. So the weakest class earned darn near two levels for every one the Wizard earned, keeping the thief in the "power level" ballpark.
This makes a lot more sense to me than to try and say a 10th level rogue in 3E is just as powerful as a 10th level wizard. Stripped of all magic items and just class abilities versus class abilities I would bet the wizard comes out alive and the rogue comes out fried 10 times out of 10.
Differing the xp requirements, and therefore rate of advancement of the powerful classes, is the closest your ever going to get to a fair and equitable balance of power between classes that are inherently on different scales of power to begin with.
Then, once you get that worked out, how do you balance the powers of magic items when possessed by a character? You can't. The only thing a rational DM can strive for is a close approximation.
I don't even want to talk about how feats complicate things even more. Or certain skills. The idea of evenly balanced classes is a goal that is a mythical dream. It does not exist in D&D, or any other system that I am aware of. It is only something that we can only get close enough to that everything works well enough that we play it.
All these discussions of balanced and unbalanced are funny to me. There is no "true" balance, only a close approximation.