D&D 4E 4E Rogue for non-4E enthusiast

[ruleslawyer]

Yeah. I'm sorry, but the worst sources of abuse are right there in the PHB.

Time stop. Wild shape/Polymorph/Shapechange. Haste. Divine Favor/Divine Power/Righteous Might. Your choice of all-day buffing spells (3.0) or Natural Spell (3.5).

Blaming PHB2 for anything is really off the rails, though, given that the primary abuse favored in the PHB is CoDzilla.

 

[AllisterH]

Yeah. I'm sorry, but the worst sources of abuse are right there in the PHB.

Time stop. Wild shape/Polymorph/Shapechange. Haste. Divine Favor/Divine Power/Righteous Might. Your choice of all-day buffing spells (3.0) or Natural Spell (3.5).

Blaming PHB2 for anything is really off the rails, though, given that the primary abuse favored in the PHB is CoDzilla.

Actually, I was agreeing with you.

The biggest reason why monsters in later MMs got tougher wasn't because of splatbooks but because WOTC realized that their sample characters using the core rules were so far off the track from what a sample character was ACTUALLY like using the core rules.

PHB itself was the biggest source of powercreep.

 

[Jim Williams]

Actually, I disagree with blaming splatbooks for powercreep...

My definition of powercreep here is the slow addition of new abilities (classes, feats, spells, etc.) to the orginial source. If the original source is the 3E PHB, it cannot be responsible for powercreep. But the follow-on splatbooks necessarily add complexity in new rules, prestige classes, and feats. Inevitable rules loopholes and exceptions are more likely to be exploited by the system master than the casual player.

For certain, there were powerful options available in the 3E PHB. The system master will always be able to take care of himself. My original point was that there were also incredibly ineffective options, some of which could be gotten to by choice or inexperience, others because of poor design inherent in the system. If 4E is moving in a direction that insists combat efficacy out of every character class, then we are less likely to have a non-participant occupying the fourth spot at the table.

 

[ruleslawyer]

Actually, I was agreeing with you.

Oh, I was agreeing with you too! (Strange how signals get crossed on the Intarweb like that...) The "yeah, sorry" applied to the (hypothetical) pro-splats are broken core is fine group.