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Well, I was answering someone's question about what should differentiate fighter/clerics from paladins to justify having them as a separate class. Whether WotC will differentiate them appropriately in 5e is another question, and things aren't looking good for the paladin right now. ;)

In surprise rounds, yes, but once you get past those segments it didn't come up as often during combat itself. Compared to 3e, at least, backstabbing was quite rare, which is the point I was trying to make.

The idea that the cleric is extraneous is new to 3e/4e. In the BECMI/AD&D days, when wizards were more fragile and rogues almost never pulled their backstab off, there was a much clearer distinction between clerics and magic-users. Clerics had much fewer offensive spells, unless they were 2e...

Addressing the response to the rogue vs. goblins example from a page or so back, since I haven't been able to get to it until now: You're assuming 1 attack and no ability to chase; a 3e rogue could have TWF to trip the two closer goblins and then charge after the third after it runs away (the...

Proposal: Why not separate style of armor from heaviness of armor? You can choose to wear light vs. medium vs. or heavy armor, and you can choose to wear plate vs. chain vs. scale vs. leather vs. whatever, and the intersection of those choices gives you your armor type. Light plate is...

You are a rogue, scouting ahead in the dungeon. You run into four goblins in one room, who shout in alarm and try to run away to alert their tribe. You kill one with a sneak attack in the surprise round, then have a few options. You know you can't kill them all in time, and grappling one...

For those arguing about hard caps vs. cumulative penalties, I would point out that the latter case does not imply that you're either using it at full strength or have no chance for it to work. To use a 3e example, let's say you're a rogue with a Kick Ogre Ass maneuver that takes a -4 cumulative...

Instead of requiring two-party knowledge like 1e attack vs. defense modifications, one could modify defenses so that they generally work well against certain attacks without the attacker or the defender requiring specific knowledge of the other party's weapon/armor types. As an example, take...

As some have mentioned previously, the niche of the casting paladin and ranger is that of the hybrid. There are martial classes that can fill the shoes of either (in 3e, a barbarian, wilderness rogue, scout, etc. for the former and a knight, heavily-armored fighter, crusader, etc. for the...

Prior to the Rules Compendium's *ahem* clarification, the only miss chances that didn't stack were concealment miss chances, as the definition of concealment specified that it didn't stack with itself. Which makes sense--it's hard to be more concealed than totally concealed, so capping...

To my knowledge, there are no other sources concerning companion spirits. The paladin ACF in Dungeonscape that trades out the celestial mount for a series of summonable spirits is close, though, you might want to look into that.

I think you guys are overdoing the penalty for fast healing/regeneration just a bit. You can get always-on regeneration 5 with five feats (Troll-Blooded + 4 × Rapid Regeneration) and fast healing 4 or 5 during combat with three feats (Combat Focus, Combat Vigor, and either 1 other [Combat Form]...

While I am philosophically opposed to making monster classes that sort-of-but-not-really duplicate the monster (if you're playing a CK, play one, not an almost-CK), the class isn't as unbalanced as it might appear. It looks like the player or DM are mistaken on a few points. He shouldn't have...

Not quite. A 4e warlock's at-will powers are eldritch blast plus one at-will determined by their pact; also, all 4e warlocks have a "warlock's curse" (an at-will debuff) and each pact gives you a "pact boon" which grants bonuses when you kill enemies under the effects of your curse. For...

Most of my objections farther down in the post stemmed from the overly-broad definition of optimization you were using; if you only meant "I don't like optimization that breaks the First Law" and not "optimization is what breaks the First Law," I have no further objections. My mistake; I'd...

Three points here: 1) You're conflating "character optimization" and "min-maxing" (i.e. making your character good at what he does) with some other adjective, whether "theoretical optimization" (i.e. making a character such a good one-trick pony that he isn't suitable for a real game) or...

Here's my interpretation of the RAW. Knowledge (Local) covers "legends, personalities, inhabitants, laws, customs, traditions, and humanoids." This tells us a few things: Knowledge (Local) covers identification of all humanoids, whether it's humans from your own clan, goblins from across the...

1) Mechanically, it doesn't fix the problem of overpoweredness because, as you noted, Conjuration and Transmutation (and to a lesser extent Illusion) have tons of powerful spells and a good variety of effects whereas schools like Evocation, Divination, and Enchantment can't do much on their own...

I believe a more accurate statement would be that playing an optimized character in a party of unoptimized characters can result in a lack of fun. A party of all less-than-optimized characters can be plenty of fun; playing 3e "the way the designers intended" often works out that way. A party...

In D&D, you are your own ally. It's 3.5; the errata wasn't a 3.0/3.5 conversion document, just a few class updates.