D&D 3E/3.5 3rd Edition Revisited - Better play with the power of hindsight?

[Maxperson]

Toughness was revised in this way in my own house rules:

TOUGHNESS [GENERAL, EXPLORER]
Benefit: You increase your maximum hit points by an amount equal to 3 + your base fortitude save. (As your base fortitude save improves, so does the hit points you gain.)

A fighter at 20th level would get 5 hit points from toughness at 1st level and 15 hit points at 20th level.

Great Fortitude explicitly increased your base fortitude save by 2 rather than giving a bonus to your fortitude save and so (like a few other feats) comboed with Toughness to increase your hit points. I prefer this to scaling on HD since I want fighter types to retain the "I'm much less squishy than you." thing they had going in 1e that they've sort of lost in later editions as non-fighter classes HD increased and constitution bonuses equalized the playing field.

That gives you +15 at 20th level. Improved Toughness gives you +20 at 20th level. Isn't the latter causing the fighter to retain the "I'm much less squishy than you." thing even more? Or better yet, take both!!

 

[James Gasik]

While flipping through the DMG again yesterday, I saw that Toughness is one of the feat prerequisites for Dwarven Defender.
A class aimed at fighters. For a race with Constitution bonus. That has d12 hit dice. And whose main ability gives it a +4 bonus to Constitution.

Also Endurance, for a class whose main ability is to keep standing in place. And that definitely won't be able to swim.

Any time I look at a prestige class, I hate the concept even more.

Prestige classes are an example of emergent game design. As originally pitched in the DMG, a Prestige Class was a unique class that had a special role in the campaign- a member of a mysterious Assassin's Guild, or a Sorcerer who has sacrificed magical power to become a Dragon...the idea of the Prestige Class was to give players a path to become such a unique character. This never meant all Prestige Classes are available in all campaigns- if you look at even ones published later, each has their own unique lore!

Prestige Class design states that there should be special requirements, and these were chosen for conceptual reasons, not mechanical ones, beyond "you should be this level to ride this ride". Not every character was intended to gain a Prestige Class (originally), nor would every character want one.

As the game progressed, however, the idea of using Prestige Classes to be things players would actually want to have, making them "advanced classes" developed- as did the idea of using Prestige Classes to patch weak areas of the rules, like multiclassing. And both kinds of Prestige Classes continued to be printed throughout 3e's history.

Instead of sitting down and redefining Prestige Class requirements to be something sensical, they continued to use the same paradigm- a paradigm that exists with Feats themselves (just look at Combat Expertise, and how it generally has nothing in common with Feats that require it). Maybe they thought changing it would wreak havoc with previous content, I don't know.

That having been said, one of the books did try to offer an option, where instead of needing mechanical requirements, you could replace them with challenges- instead of needing, say, 7 ranks of Basketweaving, the DM could say "one of the tasks you need to do is make a DC 22 Basketweaving check as part of the trial to become an Epic Weaver". This never became popular, since it was only ever mentioned in one book, and to be honest, had it's own problems-

If you have to do something special to get the powers of a Prestige Class, then the possibility of cheesing your way into getting one without any real cost would be dead on arrival at most tables. Not because there's a problem with the system, but because WotC increased the power level of Prestige Classes.

Like, nobody is excited to become a Green Star Adept, which, unless you built your character in a very specific way, might actually be detrimental to them (the example GSA is a Barbarian, who will eventually have no Constitution score...ouch!).

But when the game has stuff like Planar Shepherds as options, yeah, that's something you really need to put tough requirements on.

Compare and contrast Pathfinder 1e, where almost nobody takes a Prestige Class because they're mostly terrible and in many cases are worse than not having one at all...but they continued to make them difficult to qualify for.

 

[James Gasik]

That gives you +15 at 20th level. Improved Toughness gives you +20 at 20th level. Isn't the latter causing the fighter to retain the "I'm much less squishy than you." thing even more? Or better yet, take both!!

That's when you start taking Giant's Toughness or Dragon's Toughness for more hit points!

 

[Yora]

You could use dispel magic or there was a feat that allowed you to use any spell of the same level and school. However, none the lipstick they came up with could make the pig not a pig.

I played 3e/3.5 from the day it came out all the way through late 2019. In all that time I saw counterspell used exactly 0 times. It just wasn't worth it to give up an entire round of spells to maybe counterspell something. Even if you knew the enemy had this spell you wanted to counter, he wasn't guaranteed to use it in the round you were waiting. If he didn't, you lost a round and the next round you had to decide if you were going to lose another round of spells for a maybe, or actually start participating and affecting the battle with your spells.

You convinced me to purge Improved Counterspell from the feat list of my custom players' document.
It only adds noise that distorts the actual signal.

 

[James Gasik]

You could use dispel magic or there was a feat that allowed you to use any spell of the same level and school. However, none the lipstick they came up with could make the pig not a pig.

I played 3e/3.5 from the day it came out all the way through late 2019. In all that time I saw counterspell used exactly 0 times. It just wasn't worth it to give up an entire round of spells to maybe counterspell something. Even if you knew the enemy had this spell you wanted to counter, he wasn't guaranteed to use it in the round you were waiting. If he didn't, you lost a round and the next round you had to decide if you were going to lose another round of spells for a maybe, or actually start participating and affecting the battle with your spells.

Counterspelling is a classic example of 3e design, where someone felt that there should be rules to do a thing, even if there's not often a good reason to do so.

If you know, for example, that Sharu Garrul, the Master of the Keep of the Four Worlds, is a lazy duelist and always opens with Lightning Bolt, then giving someone the option to plan around it is better than not (the magical equivalent of "I know how he fights, he always dodges to the left"), even if there's likely a better way to go about it (cast Protection from Elements before the fight).

This compares well with AD&D design, where the books were full of bespoke subsystems to cover corner cases (how often did anyone ever use the subdual rules in 1e, or punching/wrestling in 2e?)...except that, for whatever reason, the 3e design team never encountered a rule that they didn't immediately make painful to use, including several hurdles to ensure that it would be difficult to exploit in any meaningful way.

 

[payn]

Prestige Class design states that there should be special requirements, and these were chosen for conceptual reasons, not mechanical ones, beyond "you should be this level to ride this ride". Not every character was intended to gain a Prestige Class (originally), nor would every character want one.

Compare and contrast Pathfinder 1e, where almost nobody takes a Prestige Class because they're mostly terrible and in many cases are worse than not having one at all...but they continued to make them difficult to qualify for.

I love the Pathfinder prestige classes I think they leaned very much into the intended conceptual design and moved away from the charop nightmare of later 3E.

 

[James Gasik]

I love the Pathfinder prestige classes I think they leaned very much into the intended conceptual design and moved away from the charop nightmare of later 3E.

It does unfortunately make a lot of them wasted space in many campaigns. The benefits gained are not often worth what you gave up to get them. This is consistent with Pathfinder design, where they want you to see 20 levels in a single class as a thing most people will want to do. What's missing is, sadly the "prestige" of being a member of a Prestige Class. NPC's should be in awe of being in the presence of, say, a Harvest Tiller, because they have a role in the campaign.

That a PC can look over at their list of abilities and say "meh" notwithstanding.

 

[Celebrim]

That gives you +15 at 20th level. Improved Toughness gives you +20 at 20th level. Isn't the latter causing the fighter to retain the "I'm much less squishy than you." thing even more?

Well sure, but at first level this gives you 5 hit points compared to improved toughness only giving 1. But more to the point, this only gives a wizard 9 hit points at 20th level. The numbers are meaningless unless they are relative to something.

As for "taking both", the feats that taking Toughness open up in my game are a good deal more interesting than Improved Toughness, and are things like DR 1/-, take one less ability damage whenever you would take ability damage, whenever you take a status effect it lasts one less round, +4 saves vs. poison, and +1 natural armor and so forth. Hit point bloat isn't particularly interesting nor at some level is it super protective in a system that has ways of bypassing hit points.

 

[payn]

It does unfortunately make a lot of them wasted space in many campaigns. The benefits gained are not often worth what you gave up to get them. This is consistent with Pathfinder design, where they want you to see 20 levels in a single class as a thing most people will want to do. What's missing is, sadly the "prestige" of being a member of a Prestige Class. NPC's should be in awe of being in the presence of, say, a Harvest Tiller, because they have a role in the campaign.

That a PC can look over at their list of abilities and say "meh" notwithstanding.

Not in my PF1 experience. PF1 APs didnt go to level 20, part because high level rules and adventure writing is an absolute chore, and part folks dont care to make it. Instead they leaned into multiclassing and archetypes which allowed unparalleled customization. It's true that prestige classes often were a reduction in power, but they were thematically intertwined in setting and adventure material that just simply isnt present in D&D. YMMV.

Single classing to level 20 intention perhaps in PF2. The design sort of knee capped multiclass/archetype/prestige class with their silo'd feat system in style of 4E. The hope was folks would intend to make it to level 20. Though, I suspect folks still are not getting there. Which is why the AP system has gone experimental 1-10, and 10-20 instead of the classic 1-20 (14-16 in PF1) set up.

 

[Tinker Gnome]

I honestly would have preferred more base classes over Prestige Classes, but I like a lot of classes.

EDIT: OH, one thing I would change is the required magic items to hit certain monsters. I would change it so say a Devil requires cold iron weapons to hit, not a +3 sword or whatever. Or all undead are hurt by silver.

Also another thing I always see people bring up is monster stat blocks and I am always surprised because I thought everyone just winged it like "This orc will have AC 14 and 10 HP", no need to fill out a stat block for every little monster.