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

VHawkwinter said:

Mine is 3.0, but I knew very few people who liked Bo9S. Some people thought it was too shonen anime; others like myself didn't like encounter powers; but I remember it as the book everyone banned.

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Funny, cause my experience is quite opposite. Most people i know loved Bo9S. Specially people who liked playing martial characters. Myself and couple other people i know replaced Fighter with Warblade as default martial class in their home games. IMHO, it's best supplement with player options in 3.5 gameline. It finally gave martials options that aren't just - charge, grapple, full attack. If your game stayed under say level 10, it fixed problem of linear fighter, quadratic wizard.

5e Battlemaster fighter is just pale, watered down, weaksauce version of Warblade.

I find it funny thst people complain about later 3.5 material to be not well playtested, when in the PHB itself the monk released as well as the druid, a full caster which has a pet which is almost as strong as a monk in low levels and who later can turn into animals being almost as strong as the monk (while fulling healing themselves) while still having full casting. This does not sound like well playtested either.


About "late 3.5 material was 4e playtest" well as far as I am aware this is only true for the book of 9 swords, I found no officia statement about other books where this was the case. And the book of magic also, which is sometimes mentioned by people, looks mechanically nothing like 4e (unlike the 9 swords)


Also the book of 9 swords is one of the best balanced 3.5 books. All 3 classes from it are in tier 3 not too huge discrepancy between them, nothing non functional/too weak or op. So making martials good, but not too strong. (Like even still far away from sorcerer which is a fair caster not like the top 3).

Tome of magic had some interesting experimental ideas. They looked solid on paper, not so much in the game. True namer, omage to mages from LeGuin's Earthsea wizards, were specially lame in play cause DCs scale too fast and as you level up, you get worse. Only good class was Binder, and even he had it's problems in that some Vestiges were just plain better than other.

DeadlyUematsu said:

It rewarded system mastery but based on what was actually published, it falls more into the bucket of a supplemental treadmill than an intentional puzzle. So optimizers come ahead in largely unexpected ways (Rainbow Brite trumping over Fireball Man) due to the lack of coherent vision of what system mastery meant across the line.

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It was an intentional mess.

The designers wanted players to feel better when they picked better feats, spells, and prcs.

It also meant yhey wont be criticized for making OP or UP product.

So it was less a treadmill and more, the "rest of your build" is in further books you must buy. The baseline was never in the cocreeper. Power creeped.

GrimCo said:

True namer, omage to mages from LeGuin's Earthsea wizards, were specially lame in play cause DCs scale too fast and as you level up, you get worse.

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I think the truenamer gets a too bad name. It was clearly just designed with optimization in mind. (It is not that hard to get more than +2 to a skill per level) You can see this from the quicken metamagic feat as well. It only makes sense if you come over 100% chance, which you can't with the base class but can easily with. I agree this would have been better if the class just had most bonuses built in (like item enhancemenr bonus equal to class built in). If a GM allows joining a society and making (and improving) custom items (according to the rules), your skill scales fine. If the GM then also allows you retraining of spells on levelup (which is missing which is a bit a problem), the class is finish. It has not as strong spells as other casters but more of them and the have (at least at the beginning) higher success chance (like 100%) and you get a big boost with the quicken metamagic.

Yes, there was some power-creep, and yes simply adding more options necessarily increased the ability to optimize (which led to more powerful, but more specialized characters). So adding all those splats did generally increase the power level.

That said, it's absolutely true that the most powerful options tended to be in the core rulebooks - there was very little that could match a single-class caster for raw power.

Tonguez said:

The good Splatbooks were great for adding cool options and expanding the game

The bad Splatbooks were terrible for adding power without considering how they might balance with the rest of the game

It required DMs to police what they would allow in to their games - which becomes yet another point of tension between DMs and demanding Players.

The sheer quantity of stuff, release schedules and human need for Kewl probably made power creep inevitable

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easiest rule for DMs was:
everything is allowed, but I keep the power to ban/change something if I see that it is breaking the game.

delericho said:

That said, it's absolutely true that the most powerful options tended to be in the core rulebooks - there was very little that could match a single-class caster for raw power.

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Look no further than good old Cleric. Full casting, heavy armor, d8 hit dice, spontaneus heal spells. On top of that, cast Righteus Might and Divine favour and you are outfighting the fighter. And that's PHB stuff.

@Tigris
Yes, you could squeeze that +2 per level. Problem is, you need heavy optimization just to reach baseline level of class competency. And then, you also need to bypass SR in later levels. While regular caster spent feats and gold on items to bypass SR, you spent it on raising skill. To be fair, problems are mostly at levels 10+. At levels 1-5, Truenamer functions no problem.

GrimCo said:

Look no further than good old Cleric. Full casting, heavy armor, d8 hit dice, spontaneus heal spells. On top of that, cast Righteus Might and Divine favour and you are outfighting the fighter. And that's PHB stuff.

@Tigris
Yes, you could squeeze that +2 per level. Problem is, you need heavy optimization just to reach baseline level of class competency. And then, you also need to bypass SR in later levels. While regular caster spent feats and gold on items to bypass SR, you spent it on raising skill. To be fair, problems are mostly at levels 10+. At levels 1-5, Truenamer functions no problem.

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cleric was a powerhouse, luckily, most people found it boring or played them as a healbot, so in most instances it didn't break much.
Most usages for cleric I was was a 1 level dip for domains and devotion feats powered by turn undead.

but probably worse was wizard+incantatrix+persistent spell+metamagic effect+"craft +20 spellcraft item".

Just a reminder 3.5 was so bad a single book could power creep all on itself, without interacting with others. The Muscle Wizard exploit to get Infinite Strength is entierly within Book of Vile Darkness - 1 level of cancer mage, followed by contracting Festering Anger disease.