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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Doug McCrae" data-source="post: 5269365" data-attributes="member: 21169">I played in a 3e game mostly set in a city. The typical adventure would be, over the course of a day, one serious encounter followed, fairly regularly, by an ambush from a creature that was after us, a lumi paladin from MM3 that kept coming back to life, more powerful, after we killed it. With only two encounters a day the wizard, me, could easily outshine the non-Vancian fighter/rogue in both. The encounters would normally be pretty challenging, requiring the expenditure of a lot of resources. We quite often had to run away in fact. Entirely right that they should have been challenging imo, easy encounters would have been boring, and, with only the lumi ambush to consider I could've still nova-ed, there's no reason not to.Now you're saying if the pre lumi encounter was fairly easy then I should've let the fighter/rogue handle it, conserved my spells. Well, I didn't, and I don't think I ever suffered for it. I'm a wizard, I cast spells. Every round!There were times when we faced more than two encounters per day - the occasional dungeon or the time an army of squamous things attacked the town. But on both occasions we could easily see them coming, it wasn't a surprise. I continued to cast spells every round during these adventures. In the dungeon I was reduced to using my wand of magic missiles (5th lvl) at one point - this was our signal to retire. I don't think I ever used a crossbow or dagger, I was always doing something wizard-y (except when I was overcome by a ragewalker's u-go-berserk power).Bad GMing you say? I think not. This was an excellent game, probably the best D&D campaign I've played in. Good party, good rapport and teamwork between the players, great GM. His prepared material, improv, NPCs and character voices were all first rate. Lots of exciting and challenging encounters and several great moments. That's what I want in a game, not endless small encounters each day to force the Vancian casters to use their x-bows.Problem is, D&D doesn't work with this approach, not if one values PC balance, and I do.Like I said upthread the only time I've ever seen D&D work as it's supposed to, with a x-bow wizard, is in the PC game Temple of Elemental Evil. That's because I played it with a great many fights per day, a dozen or more, and the large majority are minor. Only for the big fights does one need the wizard, and in those, I noticed that the wizard spell choice was absolutely key to victory. Problem is that, for me, and most of the people I game with, lots of minor fights don't work in a face-to-face game. They're mostly boring and implausible.</blockquote>

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