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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Grayhawk" data-source="post: 1469284" data-attributes="member: 11288">It's true that if you only see the Fighter as being unbalanced against the other classes, it's simpler to fix him than all the others. But I like the Fighter for it's simplicity and think it makes for a good power baseline. The Fighter is also the class that got the fewest changes in 3.5. (Isn't it?)I'm playing a houseruled mix of 3.0 and 3.5, so in deciding which parts of the 3.0 and 3.5 rules I wanted to use, I tried to make my choices based on balancing the classes against the Fighter. The best thing about this, is that I don't have to make everything in the game totally balanced - just the stuff we actually use. For instance, the party has no Wizards at this time, but if someone wanted to play one, I would propably do as you suggest and remove their bonus feats and maybe their free spells. Besides, we all grew up on Wizards (Magic Users) being weaker at low levels, but stronger at high levels, and I'm not totally against 'imbalances' like that.Here are some of the changes already in play: I feel that the core rules offer enough character building options for me to bother with PrC's, and my players don't feel like they're missing out, as hardly any of them know that PrC's exist! (Being adults with jobs and families and only having access to the PHB works perfectly to this end <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />  ). I have a variant Ranger that doesn't get a lot of bonus combat feats. The Barbarian is currently off limits for PC's due to campaign specifics. And I've restricted the Rogue's sneak attack to once per round. (Please don't make this into an argument about whether this is a good idea or not. I'm aware that the Rogue's sneak attack is 'balanced' as is, but sometimes balance must take a backseat to flavor, and to me the Rogue is a skill master first and combatant second. For me, the argument that he can't stay in melee for long, doesn't make it OK that he can outdamage the Fighter.) I have many more changes, but I don't want to post them all now, as many of them only makes sense for me and my group, which they're taylored for.That's true. But for my group specifically that's not a problem. My players don't like to multiclass very much and the concept of multi'ing one fighter class with another still seems foreign to them (most of us started playing 1e some 17 years ago, when you couldn't multiclass Fighters with Rangers, etc). That said, if the current campaign goes to higher levels (they're about 4th level now), I might look into expanding some of the Fighter's feat chains.Of course, this won't make those 'empty' levels more appealing, but as my other fighter classes don't have a stacked list of new abilities each level either, I don't think that's a problem (especially at our current level of play).In the end, I find that much of the 'balancing' is the DM's responsibility in-game: If I've seen to it so that the Fighter is the best at straight up combat, I can give him a chance to shine by the placement of high SR melee encounters that play up to his strenght, or more encounters in a day (when the casters have run out of spells), just as I need to use social encounters to give the Bard some time in the spotlight as well.We're certainly having fun so far!   <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /></blockquote>

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