D&D General 50 Years. The Least Popular Class Is......

[tetrasodium]

The powergamers I had didn't know the best combos, lacked the required book or had the self restraint not to do the Uber broken stuff.

At least after 3.0 anyway. That broke a lot earlier maybe 7 or 8 with the right prestige class.

Likewise. It's a shame that the current edition pretty much looked at symptoms of a problem that mostly only existed as thought experiments & memes then designed in ways that encourage those symptoms. I think that there were a couple factors that went into the reasoning keeping it away from the table where actual play happened & most of them no longer apply.

Most importantly is the fact that most people wanted to play effective characters and it was rare for someone to deliberately sabotage their PC in ways that a simple "Hey GM: I messed up & feel like I should have prepared better so I could take x&y instead of [thing that seemed good], can I rework my pc like so?" → "sure/lets sit down &work this out, might as well include Alice in the talk to help guide you". That has kinda changed in modern d&d because the bar is set so low it results in almost any PC being more than effective enough to feel reasonably competent. It was easier for players to recognize the need to talk to their gm/party powergamer(s) so they can back up & fix things back then than it is now because of the difference in "ick I messed up.. HALP!" vrs "wow bob is soooo much more effective than me but I guess my PC is still ok". In fact we even have folks telling newbies that the bar for a true scottsman/real roleplayer is to deliberately shiv your PC in celebration of stormwind to make them even more reluctant to have that "hey GM" talk.

Secondly on the optimized end there were a lot of reasons why it was usually considered polite to hold back on the big guns until something went sideways or someone might die (like the ease of designing encounters to dial down or outright block the efficacy of those big guns & the way it felt to sidekickize/minionize fellow teammates/players they needed to rely on). But because death was a very real possibility if things went badly or the party tried to bite off more than they thought they could there was an extra incentive for optimized PCs to hold back the (usually) limited resource super mode for when it seems do or die. Now nobody needs to rely on anyone & even "limited" use abilities at the extreme end of CharOp are rarely things that feel all that limited.

A lot of optimizers would tell you that some of the most busted things in 3.5 were right in the PHB, not limited to, but including things like simulacrum, wish, Natural Spell, and the item creation feats.

IME other than GM granted wishes (ring of 3 wishes/luckblade/NPC sourced/etc) type wishes, spells like wish & simulacrum tended to be deep into MAD territory where both sides just passively agree to pretend that those are off the table or locked behind a "break glass in case of extreme emergency" while the MiC provided the hard to source esoteric material component framework & CoDzilla was handled as above just like every other extreme edge CharOp build.

 

[Zardnaar]

Likewise. It's a shame that the current edition pretty much looked at symptoms of a problem that mostly only existed as thought experiments & memes then designed in ways that encourage those symptoms. I think that there were a couple factors that went into the reasoning keeping it away from the table where actual play happened & most of them no longer apply.

Most importantly is the fact that most people wanted to play effective characters and it was rare for someone to deliberately sabotage their PC in ways that a simple "Hey GM: I messed up & feel like I should have prepared better so I could take x&y instead of [thing that seemed good], can I rework my pc like so?" → "sure/lets sit down &work this out, might as well include Alice in the talk to help guide you". That has kinda changed in modern d&d because the bar is set so low it results in almost any PC being more than effective enough to feel reasonably competent. It was easier for players to recognize the need to talk to their gm/party powergamer(s) so they can back up & fix things back then than it is now because of the difference in "ick I messed up.. HALP!" vrs "wow bob is soooo much more effective than me but I guess my PC is still ok". In fact we even have folks telling newbies that the bar for a true scottsman/real roleplayer is to deliberately shiv your PC in celebration of stormwind to make them even more reluctant to have that "hey GM" talk.

Secondly on the optimized end there were a lot of reasons why it was usually considered polite to hold back on the big guns until something went sideways or someone might die (like the ease of designing encounters to dial down or outright block the efficacy of those big guns & the way it felt to sidekickize/minionize fellow teammates/players they needed to rely on). But because death was a very real possibility if things went badly or the party tried to bite off more than they thought they could there was an extra incentive for optimized PCs to hold back the (usually) limited resource super mode for when it seems do or die. Now nobody needs to rely on anyone & even "limited" use abilities at the extreme end of CharOp are rarely things that feel all that limited.


IME other than GM granted wishes (ring of 3 wishes/luckblade/NPC sourced/etc) type wishes, spells like wish & simulacrum tended to be deep into MAD territory where both sides just passively agree to pretend that those are off the table or locked behind a "break glass in case of extreme emergency" while the MiC provided the hard to source esoteric material component framework & CoDzilla was handled as above just like every other extreme edge CharOp build.

CoDzilka was mostly theoretical with the excepti9n of the D part.

Druid plus natural spell was bad the various feats that put templates on summons were terrible.

One of the few times I started over riding player freedom was a Druid player who insisted he had an infinite amount of time per round to read the MM each round looking for the perfect summon.

He didn't realize it was my MM and I just started saying no to him using it. Solved the problem. Way to cheap to buy his own.

 

[TheSword]

illusion magic is always the biggest mother may I?
Its soo fun to play if your dm plays ball, but its utterly about player creativity and lacks hard and fast rules. If you dm doesn't wanna play ball, everything ignores your illusions and your pointless.

I think a big element of that is being modest about what you want to achieve. If players try to use illusions to defeat foes then they are often going to struggle. Delay foes a round or two, escape them, avoid them entirely then they might be in more luck.

 

[James Gasik]

I think a big element of that is being modest about what you want to achieve. If players try to use illusions to defeat foes then they are often going to struggle. Delay foes a round or two, escape them, avoid them entirely then they might be in more luck.

Sure but that brings you back the original question- why illusions and not other spells that can defeat foes?

If I can play a character who can actually cast a wall of fire to hold back my foes, why futz around with "illusory wall of fire" that apparently any dumb NPC will be able to poke holes through and disbelieve?

If the answer is "well, you can cast illusory wall of fire with less effort or earlier in play", then I'm forced to put the final nail in the coffin of the Illusionist class-

Magic-Users can cast illusion spells too! Sure, the Illusionist gets then faster and has more illusions to work with in 1e, but that idea of aping what an actual caster is doing proposed upthread?

A Magic-User could do that by himself! "Ok, so I cast a wall of fire this turn, then next turn, after they burn themselves on that, I'll make one over here with phantasmal force!"

There is one instance where I could see the Illusionist really working, and that's in a lower power or lower magic campaign where the Magic-User is banned, but Illusionists are available for play. Suddenly every "magician" has to be very careful to not let the populace realize that magic is really nothing but smoke and mirrors and "wizards" are nothing but conjurers (sorry, no Conjuration allowed) of cheap tricks!