D&D General D&D 3.5 - splatbook power creep or no?

[Maxperson]

That requires me to understand every nook and cranny of rules to know that when player says a combo they do it is actually broken and not all of them are as simple and obvious as Cancer Mage with Festering Anger.

Game play quickly reveals it. Broken things can't be kept secret and aren't hard to spot when they rear their ugly heads. There's simply no need to know every nook and cranny to recognize when something is broken in play.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Even with a cohesive vision, there's just too much content to assume it'll all play nice together.

I mean, a cohesive vision would also have resulted in somewhat less content being made, right?

Like...that's kind of the point of having a cohesive vision. To cut down on the chaff and increase the wheat.

I think in this regard 3.x is like GURPS. Trying to throw in everything is just a bad idea. Start with a small core of stuff you like and slowly expand it over time.

And my response is and will always be that anything which starts from "the PHB" is already starting from a foundation so broken, it will never produce a balanced result. At best you can be constantly patching (or banning, if that's your thing) the newest fire that's broken out, but you'll never actually get it to the point where it's gotten any closer to a balanced experience than "the GM is constantly fixing problems that crop up".

I get folks like leeway. I do too. But there's a big difference between a system built with flexibility in mind, and a system that contains actively archetype-negating features.

Druids literally are a class with another class as one of its class features.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Game play quickly reveals it. Broken things can't be kept secret and aren't hard to spot when they rear their ugly heads. There's simply no need to know every nook and cranny to recognize when something is broken in play.

In my experience?

No, no it does not "quickly reveal it", unless it's something so horrendously stupidly broken that even the person DOING it will usually admit how broken it was and accept that it was a one-time-only thing.

Instead, for the vast majority of it, it builds up slowly, one brick at a time. Every brick seems reasonable, if granting some little bit of power. And by the time you've realized what's happened, there's an entire wall of precedent that now DOES actually result in the player having a legitimate grievance if you do something about it only now, months and months after they started building their character.

Worse, the vast majority of fixes end up actually being such massively punitive nerfs, you've basically taken the player's character away. So you're damned if you do, damned if you don't. If you didn't catch these 7 slightly-OP things a year ago, you're now stuck with the choice between ruining the most successful player's experience, or making everyone else feel like dead weight because the one hyper-optimized artificer (or whatever) solves multiple entire challenges single-handedly every single day.

And, yes, some of the very broken things absolutely come from splats/supplements. Spell-to-power Erudite, for example. But none of those things is radically stronger than Druid + Natural Spell; they are at best very small upgrades over it. A smartly-played Druid, even stuck with only the PHB, is an absolute monster.

 

[GrimCo]

Cleric to his God: Daddy, this nasty thing is mean and it's bullying me.
God: My sweet child, take this divine juice to grow big and strong, and some divine pre workout for good measure. Gotta hit that gains.
Cleric receives Righteus might and Divine Favour. Cleric casts them.
Cleric to Fighter: Boy, hold my water bottle. It's time i show this bully what holy beatdown fueled by divine juicing looks like.
Clreric proceeds to beat ever loving crap out of it, leaving poor natty Fighter in corner crying.

And that's 3.5 base class from PHB, using PHB only spells.

 

[Voadam]

Cleric to his God: Daddy, this nasty thing is mean and it's bullying me.
God: My sweet child, take this divine juice to grow big and strong, and some divine pre workout for good measure. Gotta hit that gains.
Cleric receives Righteus might and Divine Favour. Cleric casts them.
Cleric to Fighter: Boy, hold my water bottle. It's time i show this bully what holy beatdown fueled by divine juicing looks like.
Clreric proceeds to beat ever loving crap out of it, leaving poor natty Fighter in corner crying.

And that's 3.5 base class from PHB, using PHB only spells.

The general problem for the cleric is that that takes two rounds of shooting up with divine steroids. When combats take three to five rounds the fighter is still generally outperforming the buffed cleric even if the cleric is a stronger closer.


This changes if the party can prep ahead of time, such as with scry buff teleport. Then the buffed cleric is generally just stronger than the fighter from the get go.

 

[Argyle King]

I think in this regard 3.x is like GURPS. Trying to throw in everything is just a bad idea. Start with a small core of stuff you like and slowly expand it over time.

Kinda, in so far as trying to jump into every option can be overwhelming. But one of the things I love about GURPS is that the system actually is modular in a way that rarely breaks. Even when it does, the underlying design is intuitive enough that it's not difficult to fix.

 

[Maxperson]

In my experience?

No, no it does not "quickly reveal it", unless it's something so horrendously stupidly broken that even the person DOING it will usually admit how broken it was and accept that it was a one-time-only thing.

If it's not quickly revealed, it's not being used. If it is being used, it's quickly revealed. You can't sneak something broken by the DM. He's there experiencing it with everyone else.

Instead, for the vast majority of it, it builds up slowly, one brick at a time. Every brick seems reasonable, if granting some little bit of power. And by the time you've realized what's happened, there's an entire wall of precedent that now DOES actually result in the player having a legitimate grievance if you do something about it only now, months and months after they started building their character.

No. You've told them at the beginning that broken will not be allowed. If the final brick breaks things, you take it away that final brick like they all agreed would happen, and then the player picks something else. No precedent other than having the broken thing removed is set at all.

Worse, the vast majority of fixes end up actually being such massively punitive nerfs, you've basically taken the player's character away. So you're damned if you do, damned if you don't. If you didn't catch these 7 slightly-OP things a year ago, you're now stuck with the choice between ruining the most successful player's experience, or making everyone else feel like dead weight because the one hyper-optimized artificer (or whatever) solves multiple entire challenges single-handedly every single day.

I disagree. The PC has clearly been good enough up until that moment. Taking something less than game breaking isn't going to nerf them into oblivion.

As for that choice, it's not yours to make. You told them during session 0 that broken would not be allowed and that player in bad faith tried anyway. If his experience is ruined because you don't allow the broken thing to happen, he has only himself to blame. HE made the choice. You're just enforcing his choice to have his broken toy removed.

 

[Mecheon]

Not really. One simple announcement in session 0 about disallowing broken uber combos like Pun-Pun and the Cancer Mage thing and they'll know that if they try it, it will fail. Then you don't have to go through anything. You just nix stuff that they try, if they're the kind of people who would make a bad faith attempt at doing it anyway.

I like 3.5E and all, but the problem is really going to come to the fact that, the crazy uber combos like Pun-Pun? They're overdoing it. There's far simpler amazing power combos that are far more subtle than the silliness from cancer mage.

1: Make a wizard, cleric, or druid
2: There is no step 2. You're powerful enough to invalidate other classes entirely to the point if someone is playing them, they will contribute nothing to the game and can just look at their mobile phone in the meantime.

3.5E plays best when you hard cut it before the power 3 become unstoppable, and even better when you just ban the PHB classes due to them being the worst culprits on each end of the power scale. Its absolutely a nightmare to GM at points, to say nothing of trying to homebrew creatures for it on the fly. So help you if you want to have a 3.5e compliant intelligent slime or insect and batter up against those rules insisting they can't be

 

[Maxperson]

1: Make a wizard, cleric, or druid
2: There is no step 2. You're powerful enough to invalidate other classes entirely to the point if someone is playing them, they will contribute nothing to the game and can just look at their mobile phone in the meantime.

I've always rejected that argument, because it's quite frankly stupid game play. The wizard, cleric, or druid can do so many different things(but not all at once), that if the player of the spellcaster is going out of his way to cover what the rogue can do instead of doing something else with his limited spell slots, he's just being a jerk and doubling up on coverage in the process.

A smart, thoughtful player isn't going to take spells that invalidate the rogue. He's going to identify actual holes in what the party can do and cover those instead.

3.5E plays best when you hard cut it before the power 3 become unstoppable, and even better when you just ban the PHB classes due to them being the worst culprits on each end of the power scale. Its absolutely a nightmare to GM at points, to say nothing of trying to homebrew creatures for it on the fly. So help you if you want to have a 3.5e compliant intelligent slime or insect and batter up against those rules insisting they can't be

Also, having played in and DM'd 3e from the day it came out until late 2019, and to high levels(15-20+) more than a dozen times, I never had trouble challenging parties with high level casters in them, or with keeping the martials having fun at the same time. It took some thought and effort when creating encounters, but it wasn't all that hard to do.

I never experienced a nightmare.

 

[Alzrius]

I've always rejected that argument, because it's quite frankly stupid game play.

It's also wildly untrue, especially at lower levels where spell slots and treasure are limited. When's the last time anyone complained about how their 1st-level fighter was being regularly outclassed by the party's 1st-level wizard?