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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 5295675" data-attributes="member: 996">Sure, it's a cooperative game, not just for the players, but for the players and the DM.  That's why having the rules come down on one 'side' or another doesn't help, you still have to find a way to all 'play nice' together.There absolutely were.  Treasure was random-rolled.  An item that you got by rolling a '15' on percentile dice on a sub-chart you had a 1 in 12 chance of checking was a lot rarer than an item you got by rolling a 12-33 on d% on a sub-chart you had a 1 in 6 chance of checking.  DMs were free to pick items, but it was very obvious which items were rare and which commonplace. The general rule in AD&D (1e & 2e) was that items couldn't be made or bought.  As with Essentials, though, there two different classes of items.  There were potions & scrolls that could sometimes be bought and were fairly straightforward to make.  Then there were charged and permanent items which were much more involved and required hard-to-acquire components that were often a quest in themselves to find.  That's exactly the sort of thing Essentials is doing.  The line between make/buy and 'special reagents' is drawn a little differently, but it's the same aproach. Because of the way D&D handles resource management by 'day' as well as by encounter.  A class with daily resources will perform more strongly in some encounters than others, when he chooses to use one or more dailies.  A class without daily resources will perform the same in all encounters.Balancing two such classes requires that the non-daily class be better than the daily class when the daily class doesn't use dailies, and that the daily class out-perform the non-daily when it expends it's dailies.  Depending on how much each out-performs the other in either case, that requires balancing the /number/ of encounters, so that the daily and non-daily classes will each have a chance to shine.  The decision whether to use a daily also depends on the circumstances of the current encounter and expectations about the number, type, and circumstances of any additional encounters.To, classes with different daily resources balance only at an intersection of relative daily/non-daily effectiveness, number of encounters per day, nature of encounters in a given day, and predictability of forthcoming encounters in a day.  Deviate from the magic combination, and you have class imbalance.The saving grace in this case is that 4e substantially reduced the power of dailies, and gave everyone some unlimitted-use abilities, so imbalances, while as likely as they were in prior eds, may very well be of lesser magnitude.3.x is a perfect example of that, yes.It /could/ use the existing system - you pick 3 and buy the rest (all of which would have to be common).  At Epic, you're supposed to have 3 rares, anyway.  It might be slightly dangerous to let characters pick rares, though.  Possibly the DM would have to assign those 3 items.It will only be imbalancing if the player has already tried to abuse the make/buy rules by acquiring a lot of cheap-but-useful item dailies.  And, if you let that happen, you'll probably let bad things happen under the new system, too.I wonder how many lapsed gamers realize how much the hobby has 'advanced' while they were off having lives?</blockquote>

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