Edena_of_Neith said:
In 1E, the monk was unplayable, in my opinion.
In 2E, they put the monk in Oriental Adventures.
Now the monk is back in the Core Classes. Is she better now? Hmmm ...
(puzzles through the monk entry)
No, the 3.x monk is still nothing special. It doesn't know what it's niche is. There are people writing up alternate monks, some of which are likely to be good. Of all the D20 sources I've personally looked at (which isn't all that many, to be fair) only D20 Modern does it right, and that's by leaving the flavor of the class entirely up to the player. (You can have two soldiers with completely different personalities, so why not martial artists?)
The Fighter is a Feat Class. That's pretty obvious. If you like Feats, be a Fighter.
Not so fast. DnD doesn't have higher level feats for fighters. After about 12th-level, the value of each feat drops. This is one reason why high level fighters are considered weak compared to, say, high level barbarians. The fighter is more flexible at high level, but he's using the same tricks he could have used at 4th level.
A Druid worships primordial nature. Does this mean a Druid can't worship a Deity?
In some settings druids can worship nature deities. However, the rules for such druids don't change.
What chance does an animal have in the gritty, rough and tumble mess of adventuring?
Not much. An animal companion gets tougher over levels, but they tend to have lame saving throws and AC scores. Players rarely spend money on magic items for their pets, because the rules for that aren't clear (is my tiger proficient with a mithral breastplate?), they're obvious (that tiger is wearing a mithral breasplate?
KILL IT!) and because players don't want to die ... meaning they spend money on magic items for themselves. (Despite the obvious RP penalties for losing a companion, the in-game penalties are pretty weak.) I think 3.x requires you to spend too much on magic items, resulting in ridiculously large treasure hoards, etc etc. However, this is probably better than in 2e where the amount of guidance on treasure acquisition was like this:
"[ Picture of Invisible Stalker ]"
The problem with the spiked chain wasn't one of damage, it was one of synergy, and a commonly misapplied rule. You could trip people with it* from 5 or 10 feet away, and you could Finesse it with Combat Reflexes as well (so keep on tripping!). Being two-handed it worked with Power Attack
very well, unlike most finessable weapons, which in 3.5 don't work with it at all. It gave a +2 bonus to trip, and any such bonus is huge. (To trip, you use your Strength modifier against your opponent's Strength or Dexterity modifier. If your Strength is the same as your opponent's Strength or Dex, you have a 50% chance of tripping them. However, any kind of bonus to this check becomes huge, as stats don't change as fast as BAB or other such numbers. So, a +2 is big. The +4 you get from Improved Trip is huge.)
If you have Improved Trip, you can (in addition to the +4 bonus) trip someone, hit them as they fall down, then when they get up ... here's where the rule was often misapplied.
It looked like you could trip the person as an attack of opportunity when they tried to get up, and because you probably succeeded and they fell, and you had Improved Trip, you could hit them again... now your victim can't get up. Possibly ever. (Insert "I've fallen and can't get up" joke here.) And they take a lot of damage. This was murder to characters who used melee weapons, unarmed attacks or longbows, and somewhat nasty to spellcasters. This was fixed by the FAQ - they said the person getting up was still treated as prone (you could hit them, but not trip them). In fact, a careful reading of the rules may have rendered this bit of FAQ unnecessary, but the rules should have been clearer in the first place.
* The trick has its bonuses and penalties, altered by the style of the game. Monstrous opponents frequently have high Strength, great size and multiple legs ... these kinds of creatures are very hard to trip. On the other hand, classed humanoid NPCs, a staple in just about any fantasy genre, are
easy to trip unless they're specifically designed to avoid tripping. They also tend to use lower point buy and have fewer magic items to boost their stats with. Most DMs aren't going to give NPCs special bonuses to resist tripping as that's practically cheating (or hidden nerfing of the spiked chain wielder, or whatever you want to call it).
As mentioned earlier, the spiked chain gets really broken with spells like
enlarge person. Honestly, I hate that spell for many reasons. I would make it a 5th-level spell that gives all the bonuses of being one size category larger (+8 rather than +2 Strength, for instance) and have it work on any creature type instead of just humanoids. (Apparently, making it only work on humanoids is some kind of "balance technique".) Of course, I wouldn't let it "stack" with
polymorph.
Being one size category larger gives you +4 to trip attempts (and to resist tripping).
Enlarge person also gives you +2 to Strength, so that's another +1 bonus. Before, I was saying you could get a +6 bonus over your opponent (+4 from Improved Trip, +2 from the spiked chain). Now you can get +11. At this point, it's hard
not to defeat your opponent, if he's a classed NPC with reasonable stats who isn't abusing size-changing spells and isn't a dwarf.
Many games don't use classed NPCs that much, more because the lower value of magic items carried by NPCs makes them weak, rather than because of the tripping issue. However, classed NPCs are flexible, and DMs often try to use them as its easier for players to discern their motivations, easier to draw up their strategies, etc - and DMs often want to be players as well, and playing NPCs gives them that feeling. However, I don't think a potentially broken rule should "require" DMs to use fewer classed NPCs.
I don't run DnD anymore, but I still play it. I run Modern, where the "use monsters option" wasn't available. In my Modern game, a spiked chain would have been horribly broken, especially before hearing about the FAQ.
Wizards have an immediate advantage in 3.5. They are not limited to how many spells per level they can know.
Not only that, they learn two spells for free, at no risk of not "getting them", every level. So, if your wizard wants
fireball, they don't have to kill another mage and leaf through their spellbook, then face a 20% (or whatever) chance of not learning the spell. They can just learn it through research.
I note that you can be proficient with all Simple and Martial Weapons if you are a fighter, or certain other classes. THAT is a huge strengthening of the fighter class: imagine had many Weapon Proficiencies you would have had to take in 2nd Edition to gain proficiency in all those weapons!
And maybe a ranger nerf? Not that I'm complaining. I just wanted to know why 2e rangers got more weapon proficiencies than 2e fighters.
Gnomes look a lot like overgrown fey of the leprechaun/grig type.
One look at a 3.5 gnome, and you know you have trouble.
Is this good or bad? Anyway, lots of people don't like 3.x gnomes as they have almost no flavor of their own. I thought of them as a squish of elves, halflings and dwarves until I read an article about them in the new Eberron setting:
http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/ebds/20041129a
The gnomes of ten thousand years ago were feral and primitive -- a far cry from the civilization seen today. The hobgoblin sages believed that the gnomes were rodents that had been twisted by a conduit to Thelanis, or stunted, thin-blooded wererats that had lost the ability to shift forms. Proponents of this theory cited the small size of the gnomes, the strong instinctive bond within a family, the gnomish preference for burrows, and the racial ability to communicate with burrowing mammals.
I'd rather go with jungle rats than crossbreeding experiments
Now, you can just ... have it. Start with an elf with 19 dexterity, go from there (actually, start with an elf of 20 dexterity, because they get a + 2 to dexterity, and they aren't capped at 19 at the start.)
You could, but it's a bad idea. It costs a lot of ability points to get that high. The point buy distribution is weighed - your highest stat will probably be a 15 or 16 (before modifications). Going above a 14 starts to cost you extra.
I don't know if anyone mentioned point buy in this thread, so I'll explain it here.
Every stat starts at an 8. Note that the last step is adding racial modifiers.
You get a certain number of points to spend: 25 is the low end of the standard, 32 is the high end. I use 28 for my Modern campaign. In many campaigns, NPCs use a lower point buy than PCs.
If you want to go up to 14, spend 6 points (one point per ability point). Going from 14 to 15 costs
2 points, and same from 15 to 16. 16 to 17 costs 3, and 17 to 18 also costs 3. Now, finally, add racial modifiers. You'll see that, before racial mods, you pretty much never see stats below an 8. The old stat system didn't work with point buy (despite perhaps a few attempts to try that).
Why the "magic 15"? If you look at low level NPCs, their highest stat is usually a 15. It's because of mages. In 2e, I didn't know how much Int to give mages. If they weren't high level, they could get by just as easily with a 9 as with an 18. Something was ... wrong, there.
A 1st-level wizard could have an Int of 15. At 4th-level, it goes up to 16. (A 4th-level mage can cast up to 2nd-level spells, easy with an Int of 16.) At 8th-level, his Int goes up to 17, and he can cast 4th-level spells. At 12th level, his Int goes up to 18, and he can can 6th-level spells. At 16th level, his Int goes up to 19, and he can cast 8th-level spells. (With an Int that high, he can now cast any spell he adds to his spellbook.) At 20th, he'll probably increase his Int again (his Int bonus will go up, giving him more spells per day, higher spell DCs, etc).
Note that this happens without buying stat-boosting items. An Int-boosting item is just icing on the cake.
I've heard stories of nerfing of magic in 3.5, but if the wizard need spend only an hour, that's a MASSIVE empowering of the class.
There was slight nerfing, in most aspects, from 3.0 to 3.5. Most of the changes were needed IMO. The amount of time to prep spells changed from 2e to 3.0 (and didn't change from 3.0 to 3.5).
Voadam said:
The 3e/3.5 nerfing is in the power of the spells compared to how they were before. 10d6 max damage for fireballs when every monster now gets con bonuses like a PC. Hold person gets a save every round to break it. It is really tough to get a high target for the saves, lots of monsters are immune to mind affecting spells, evocations mostly do less damage than a comparable level warrior, many monsters have spell resistance that makes most spells fail entirely, rogues and monks take no damage on successful saves against area spells, etc.
There's the issue of save DCs. Save-or-suffer spells got a lot more powerful in 3.x than in 2e. For starters, save DCs go up at rate that players can control to some extent. By targeting a creature's weak save, they can greatly improve their chances of getting a save-or-suffer spell to work. The spread of good vs poor saving throw bonuses makes this possible.
It is not always obvious what a creature's weak save is, but if it's a big dumb creature, it
probably means it has a good Fort and poor Will save. (As always, there are exceptions. Big aberrations are one of the better exceptions. So are liches disguised as living creatures.) It's also pretty easy to tell what a classed NPC's weak saves are.
Some save-or-suffer spells are save-or-die spells in disguise.
Hold monster is an example of this. A creature that fails its save is paralyzed and helpless. You can "coup-de-grace" them, which means that, as a full-round action, anyone doing a reasonable amount of damage can instantly kill them. (Rogues are just nastier at this, since they can sneak attack anyone who is helpless.)
While a fighter can dish out more damage than a mage, a mage can instantly take an opponent out of the fight. Fighters seem weak when they go up against NPC mages, who can easily take them right out of the fight. Whether fighters seem weak in your campaign depends, in part, on how often you use NPC mages. So I guess the moral of the story is that a 2e mage should use
cone of cold while a 3e mage should use
hold monster. (The effective nerf of its duration isn't as big as it seems - you should kill the held creature quickly anyway.)
