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Message: <blockquote data-quote="airwalkrr" data-source="post: 5503836" data-attributes="member: 12460">OP, let me chime in here to be the voice of reason in a discussion of wildly varying opinions. There is nothing wrong with the paladin as presented in the standard 3.5 Player's Handbook. It works very well with the other 10 classes presented in the book.If you run a simple 3.5 campaign and your DM just uses the Player's Handbook and doesn't allow prestige classes, the paladin is a great option unless all of your opponents are neutral.If you run a more permissive 3.5 campaign and your DM lets you use feats and prestige classes from some official D&D sources, the paladin is STILL a great option unless all of your opponents are neutral. Plenty of options from those official D&D sources give the paladin a significant power boost.If you run a very permissive 3.5 campaign and your DM allows just about everything from any source, the paladin is as good an option as any. There is some wacky stuff out there.Oh, and if your DM lets you use your mount even half the time... yee gods.Some people might think the paladin could use some improvement. I think the general perception among those who find the paladin weak is that with the plethora of options available out there, such as newer base classes with a "one level-one new power" philosophy, the wide variety of feats, and the great number of spells, a simple paladin built only using the 3.5 rules is gonna look a little unimpressive. That may be true. But this whole discussion is relative to the campaign being played. I doubt a DM who lets a wizard use the Spell Compendium, Complete Arcane, and Complete Mage is going to deny a paladin the ability to use Complete Warrior, Complete Divine, and Complete Champion. So the paladin is fine. Maybe you could tweak it a bit. Add some flavor to the "dead" levels. But it doesn't need a massive overhaul.Neither does the monk for that matter.[sblock=Tangent on Linear Versus Exponential Power]As RPGs have matured, there has been a marked increase in the number of gaming companies out there who try to convince you that every character must be "balanced." Unfortunately, that often means games producing characters that are not so much balanced as they are mere reflections of each other in different skins. That's why you have 4th edition D&D where players can walk around as Dragonborn Warlords or Tiefling Warlocks but when you get down to the fundamental mechanics of the game there are more similarities between characters than there are differences.In older RPGs like the original version of D&D there were some stark contrasts to the way characters like wizards and paladins (who were a sub-class of the fighter) were played. Wizards started off relatively weak on paper with abysmal hit points, terrible bonuses to hit, and only one lowly spell per day. Meanwhile the fighter began with a substantial number of hit points (he couldn't be killed by a cat quite so easily), the ability to wear armor and wield impressive weapons. As these characters leveled up the fighter simply earned more of the same, more hit points, more weapons, more to-hit bonuses. The wizard (or magic-user, as it were) gained substantial jumps in power every few levels however. They continued to gain a smaller number of hit points and smaller bonuses to hit relative to the fighter, but every time they earned access to a new level of spells, they obtained the ability to re-shape the world in a bigger and more powerful way.The good DM was supposed to balance this out in play to keep both types of characters interesting at all levels. Perhaps at low levels the wizard found a wand of fireballs with enough charges to get him through to mid-levels. Meanwhile after the fighter broke into higher levels he earned access to a keep and an army of his own so that he obtained real political power and could change the world in his own way. Along with that he probably acquired more than a few magic items with powers not unlike spells that the wizard was already casting. Both types of characters were played very differently but were balanced out by the DM and the campaign.Apparently enough of the modern game designers suffered through bad DMs in the 70s and 80s who let the wizards suck at low level while racking up all the interesting power at higher levels that they decided that the DM shouldn't have quite so much power over the players. They wrote new games in which "balance" was written into the system such that even a bad DM couldn't screw it up... in theory.This is an old discussion. And modern systems can't make up for a bad DM any day. I'd rather play 1st edition with a good DM than play 4th with a mediocre one. Even though I play 4th edition now (rather reluctantly; it's just easy to find players because it is "the current edition"), I still think there has been a consistent attempt by game designers to wrest control over games from the DM. On a certain level, I understand that players have certain expectations. But I disagree about the limit of those expectations. It is the job of the DM to make the game fun. It's a hard job. Not everyone can do it, and not everyone should.[/sblock]</blockquote>

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