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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Keldryn" data-source="post: 4145463" data-attributes="member: 11999">One of the major things that I think needs fixing in 3.x is in part a side effect of how the math scales as characters progress in level.3.x is all about specialization.  It rewards extensive specialization excessively and makes characters with more generalized skillsets feel useless.Now, every version of D&D has had strongly-defined roles, and that's part of what makes it D&D; I just find that 3.x has taken it to an extreme.  Many have complained about the way that 3.x allows for very freeform multiclassing, and how that leads to characters who are good at everything and how nobody has a distinct role to play, and such -- but in reality, it often doesn't work out that way.  The "one-level-dip" that gets complained about so much ends up severely hindering a character after a few levels as often as it helps.  There are certainly cases where it is beneficial, but those cases are generally when such a dip reinforces the specialization that you are going for.Many skill DCs increase to the point where if you're not maxing out the skill as you advance, then you might as well not even bother to attempt a skill check.  Cross-class skills make this a huge pain for multiclass characters.  And you can pretty much forget about the charismatic Fighter who acts as the "leader" or "face" of the party, unless he takes levels in other classes and/or spends a couple of feats just to not get hosed.  In doing so, he's likely to lose a fair bit of effectiveness as a Fighter.  Monster ACs scale up to the point where you've got a pretty poor chance to hit if you don't have a full BAB progression.  Spellcasters get really screwed by taking levels in anything that doesn't increase their caster level and progression.  At low levels, characters with a bit more breadth don't seem to out of place, but as they start to hit the middle levels, they are severely outperformed by specialized characters, and it just gets worse into the higher levels.  I don't think that every character should be able to do everything, as that would be boring.  But the payoffs for specialization result in the focus on character builds with a couple of levels in 4 prestige classes, decked out in boring stat-boosting items.  A lot of interesting character concepts lead to players mainly sitting there, feeling ineffective while the tweaked-out specialists dominate everything.When you have to create dozens of prestige classes that are essentially an archetype of a common core class combo just to make the concepts not suck in play, then you know the system is broken.  Some gamers have always been into build optimizations, but it's gotten kind of ludicrous in 3.x.</blockquote>

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