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The only thing a Dex monk really has going for him is extra AC. Combat Reflexes is a red herring. Surely even most Str monks have a 14 Dex, or eventually do. High Dex is only an advantage here if you believe you are going to get 4 or more AoOs in a single round. On the offense, you could go...

Duels are a little fiddly. Making a 10th level PC and calculating the average damage dealt against AC 20, AC 25, and AC 30 would give us a sense of the offensive weight of the builds. There are a few things that are apples to oranges. The effectiveness of special tactics like Trip, Grapple...

If I ever played a Monk, it would only be in a party with Rogue played by someone with excellent teamwork skills. Then I would optimize for the highest possible Stun DC. Dex or Str as the next choice, either could work. Spring Attack might work well, too. The nice thing about Spring Attack...

I am not saying you are incorrect, but such conclusions tend to be highly dependent on the specifics of stat generation method, campaign wealth, and availability of the optimal magic items. MAD is usually a significant detriment to the class. Monks have the most severe case of MAD. But under...

My thoughts exactly. Irresistible Command becomes very efficient when there is substantial devil fodder milling around. Given the pit fiend's lofty political position, that would be the norm (unless you can force the pit fiend to come to you). Now we have a flavorful tactical problem: Do you...

Good point. It is okay to apply different standards in my book if one is open about it, and not apparently pretending otherwise. I try to judge 2e and 3e by the same standard. I judge 1e by a different, more lenient standard. IMO that is fair and appropriate.

I do not think this double-standard is justified. IMHO. 1e was one of the first to be so ambitious. I may criticize it, but I actually cut it a lot of slack (although I understand I might not sound like I do sometimes). IMO 3e is the game that 2e theoretically could have been, the sole...

It could be one or more of three things: (1) I live in an edgy pre-pyschotic rage and I am likely to go postal at any moment. (2) I can get my dander up about certain issues more than is really necessary. (3) You should worship every word I say. Bow before me! I think it is probably somewhere...

LotR gives a very distorted first impression of Middle Earth. You must read the Silmarillion and read between the lines of LotR to see the full picture. As for the rings, the sole reason the One Ring was not instantly identified was precisely because it gave the impression of being one of...

3e saves are very different from 2e. IME middling level 2e PCs and NPCs save successfully 75+% of the time. In 3e you are likely to see similar results for in the strong saves, but many more failures in the weak saves (unless you choose to spend significant resources to rectify the problem)...

This here looks like a glass half empty, glass half full kind of issue. The is no such thing as "magic item economy" in 2e out of the box. The DM must make it up out of whole cloth. Unless he is running an extremely magic poor world, this will eventually become a necessity. 3e does have an...

Using "mythical" here seems rather too strong. It is more than reasonable to challenge whether a very strong concept of balance is genuinely desirable. It is certainly not always a necessity. My personal opinion is that a good degree of balanced design is practically always desirable in...

That raises an important point I would like to mention. To be fair, if one were to complain about the stack of 3e splatbooks, would not it be logical to compare to a 2e campaign with a stack of P&O books? (I am not referring to you, in particular.) I am getting the very strong impression that...

Fair enough. I, too, am finding the extreme hype not convincing. A reasonable point that I do not feel the need to agree or disagree with. Many feel this way, and a number appear to have some good reasons. If for the sake of argument I concede your point, there is no logical connection to...

Gothmog, I am grateful that you took the time for such a detailed response. Thank you. Of course you had to keep both hands on the wheel. You slayed a number of sacred cows there! Furthermore, many of them would inevitably tend to add complexity, regardless of which edition you are running...

Of course. A related point is that having built-in assumptions has significant informative value to the DM even you choose to not use those built-in assumptions. An integrated system reacts to change predictably. The predicted results can inform. The PCs are weaker than by the book PCs...

It would be no more difficult than to do the same in 1e or 2e. I see no obstacles here. Are you claiming that the Core classes in 1e and 2e were mechanically balanced? By 3e standards, they were not.

The thing called "balance" as some kind of automagic property of the system is 3e-speak. You are gulping down the Kool-Aid...while complaining about it at the same time. If you are going to use a significant degree inherent mechanical balance as a yardstick, then 2e is completely broken out of...

If you removed THAC0 from AD&D or its functional equivalent, I am not sure you even have a game anymore. At least not one worth playing...go find an even simpler game that does more instead. The funny thing is it would be entirely plausible to remove Feats and Skills entirely from 3e. That...

I would like sometime to play this marvelous game called "2e" where you can remove heavy armor without hurting Fighters, yank out the skill system without a negative effect on Thieves, remove magic weapons without worrying about monsters immune to non-magical weapons, run a low magic campaign...