My post on Wizard's boards...
The main/major problems I found with 3.5 and had to house rule out are found below. I'm hoping and praying these issues are cleared up in 4th Ed. I'd written emails and posted on various message boards and had long lengthy debates on many (not all) of the below points and after years of playing 3.5 had to make slightly drastic changes to the rules. The first post in this thread said 'not RPG core books' and I'm sure many of these issues apply to exactly that, but my strong desire to see these issues addressed and fixed in 4th ed leaves me no choice. So here they are:
1) Damage Reduction, and Magic Weapon Pluses (and also the so called 'golf bag' syndrome). Monte Cook wrote an excellent article (and subsequential fix) for this issue where he basically makes getting a +2, instead of say, +1 and flaming, worthwhile again. With the new idea of the 'axe fighter' or the 'sword fighter' this seems like a much more important issue to address than ever before. Please make +5 weapon enhancements worthwhile again, and cut down (or even eliminate) the need for fighters to carry golfbags with different damage types around...
2) Darkness. Come on guys, what happened to this spell in 3.5? Also, a major beef with all darkness in general was the fact that Devils had 'darkvision' out to 60 feet, as well as undead, leaving the somewhat comical image of Devils walking around battlefields unable to see the Demons on the horizon in the Abbys because it was too dark for them to see... so they'd do what, cast Light spells...? Please make undead/demons be able to see perfectly in their 'natural' habitat. I don't want to have to read from a module 'The Dark Lord casts...um... Light...' Those 'cool' Demons had Darksight (in the Fiend Folio at least). I just gave all Demons/Devils/Undead unlimited darksight range, and all such creatures could see clearly through even magical darkness (which was 'dark', not 'shadowy illumination... )
3) Evards Black Tentacles. Such a major issue in my game it deserves its own entry. In a nutshell, this single spell nearly derailed my campaign. In 3.5 it was ridiculously overpowered, near impossible to overcome by spellcasters and subsequently was nerfed from my game forever. Not only was it overpowered it required nearly a dozen dice rolls for a handful of caught victims. Horrible, horrible spell in 3.5 both to DM and for game balance. The more powerful 'cold' version in BoVD made it even worse...
4) Please explain 'extradimensional' and 'Non-dimensional' spaces more clearly. Are they the same or different? If you use Rope Trick, and take in a portable hole, what is the 'bad' thing that happens exactly? Please clear up the confusion of this topic of non-dimensional and extra-dimentional.
5) Summoned creatures (through spells), their actions and their languages. First off, what do creatures do when summoned? Do they simply instinctively sense who the enemy is and attack that enemy (my houserule, also, they only attack perceived enemies of the caster at time of casting, for example they do not suddenly turn on a deceitful/evil NPC the party has been adventuring with). Or, do they only attack upon command? Does the spellcaster need to speak their native language? ALso, by current rules: Most Celestial creatures speak common, not Celestial, especially if they only speak one language, the default language is Common... um weird. This was also very hard to figure out in the core books. You had to first know that a creature needs an intelligence of 3 or higher, then find that the default language would be common for a summoned creature etc etc. You had to really search hard to figure this stuff out. It needs a bit more attention methinks.
6) Item Availability: By current rules, if a village had a gp supply value of, say, 200g, a single village could supply an army of 10,000 troops. In fact, in the current rules, there was no limit to the number of objects available if the population could support one single item's gold piece value. This I think needs to be addressed, and can be with the below suggestion.
What would be nice is to have some tables made up for dealing with shops that sell magic and weapons in particular, and could have categories such as:
A) Name (of the shop)
B) Name (of the store owner)
C) % chance of an item's availability based on scarcity (perhaps determined by popluation/alignment of town etc, not just gold piece value = everything in any quantity under said value)
D) dice roll multiplied by time it takes to get said item should it not be available
E) possible markup values of items, could be based on Diplomacy checks, alignment, charisma, affiliations etc.
7) For Campaign Settings/Modules
Please, please please include three basic things very often missing from every campaign sourcebook/module: FULLY FLESHED OUT Inns, Temples, and Magic Shops.
Let's face it, PC's spend almost as much time in these places as they do in a dungeon. Please include more maps of Inns, complete with the Innkeeper, maybe a table for random patrons, and a menu with price lists! Yes, you could do this as a DM yourself, but then you could also write your own campaign settings. I've always found it surprising the amount of time (and space in sourcebooks) devoted to things like 'primary trades: Timber, cloth, coal...' and other less used information. The first and most used places in any city a party is going to make use of is nearly always the Inn, the temple for healing and the magic shop. We need easier ways to make up the details of these places. Yes, you can make it up but this is hard to do on the fly, and can slow things down considerably if the DM is caught unprepared. "This town has a gold piece value of 10,000 gold... um... I guess everything's available. Sure, buy 1 million cure light wounds for your army, I guess... uh... what's the shop look like...? hmm... well, his name's, uh... Zed. Oh that's the temple cleric's name too sorry uh... his name's... uh... one sec..."
To me, Inns, Temples and Magic Shops always seemed something most useful and more important than a lot of the other information included in sourcebooks. Either add tables to the DMG or directly write more details in the campaigns/modules!
8) Spells with no save.
Silence, Choke, are just two spells that, due to their lack of any saving throw, are to me, very broken. If a spell absolutely must have no saving throw, there needs to be an easy way out for a subsequently high level monster/NPC to overcome the affliction. Silence and Choke are two such spells that could potentially confound the most powerful of spellcasters, and both are very low level spells. It shouldn't take something as drastic as spell resistance or meta magic rods to be the only alternative to being rendered out of all non-verbal spells, no save.
9) Simplify Appraise skill. Nuff said.
10) Nerf Invisibility, or at least provide easier/simpler ways to overcome it. It should either be a much higher level spell or needs more mundane ways of eliminating its potency. One simple suggestion is to give it a much shorter duration, perhaps rounds/level.
For now, I think that's it. These might seem like minor things, but for me personally, these were the biggest problems I found as a DM and caused more problems than anything else in the years I've played 3.5.
