Core concept or rule that just bugs you beyond your ability to put up with it?

[Patryn of Elvenshae]

Thr problem with letting players create magic items is that they don't do this sort of thing. They're more like " yeah, +25% chance to hiznit!! My character'll be da bomb now, yo! Hook me up magic-man! Here's the cash."

Boy, reanjr, you sure must have been sitting in on my group's last few sessions, 'cause that's exactly what we did, what with an artificer in the party and all.

Not.

Please, at least try to not be insulting! Your points are very occasionally relevant, but then you have to go and pull some BS like this.

 

[Seeten]

Would you want cleric and wizard levels then to stack and be able to cast lots more cleric and wizard spells then? So a wizard/cleric 5/5 would cast as 10th in each class?

Call me crazy, but here is my fix:

Yes, they stack, but you only get x spells per level, as a 10th level caster. If you use wis bonus spells, 1 spell per level must be cleric. So lets say you get: 5/5/5/5/3/2(made up at random) you could choose 1 per level as per wis bonus, and the rest as either cleric or wizard, at your choice. More versatile, not twice as powerful, and you dont get the level up bonus feats/etc or enhanced turning. But you do stack the caster level.

 

[mmadsen]

The classes should be balanced with one another. Period. They shouldn't be balanced if the party comes up to five encounters a day. Or if magic items are being distributed properly. Or if most of your adventure is dungeon crawl. Or if don't primarily fight humanoids. That's the part that irks me. The rules are written left and right to dicate what campaign I am playing in.

The classes cannot be "balanced period" if they differ at all. Think about it.

Well, I didn't mean to imply perfection of balance in all situations. What I meant was they should be balanced in group-based conflict no matter the source without campaign-style assumptions. If they would drop things like vancian magic, times per day, and +X magical items then the classes would maintain balance independent of play style.

I'm not sure how your solution solves the problem. Obviously, any class that specializes in anything (e.g., fighting undead, sneaking past guards, casting limited but powerful "artillery" spells) will have an advantage in a campaign featuring that ability -- and will have a disadvantage in a campaign that doesn't feature that ability.

Also, any class whose abilities replicate abilities found in treasure (e.g., spellcasters) will have a relative advantage in a campaign with little such treasure -- and a disadvantage in a compaign overflowing with such treasure. Unless you integrate equipment into characters thoroughly (as in, say, Champions, where super-equipment costs character points).

Of course, many of these "problems" go away if you treat D&D like any other unbalanced game.

 

[D+1]

Level advancement is too quick, but slowing the pace of advancement screws with the amount of treasure that is owned and used by the bad guys and how much of it gets taken by the good guys. That's my only real peeve.

 

[Testament]

The problem 3e has that the old editions didn't is that the players are in control of every magic item they get. They synergistically put together absurd combinations of items that just wouldn't have happened in older editions without the DM's support. Magic items have been commoditized. They're a shopping list.

How are they in complete control? The GM still has to give them access, its still their choice if they have Magic shops.

 

[SteveC]

I had to spend some time thinking about this question. After all, I spend a fair amount of time running/playing D&D, so I really don't hate any part of it. But then it hit me, so here's my thought:

I abolutely hate, with the intensity of 10,000 suns, the balance of the game when it comes to running out of resources. Here's what I mean: you're moving through the dungeon, fighting things and taking their stuff and so on, and then you have to artificially stop and rest for 8 hours every so often because the wizard/cleric/bard and so on are out of spells and have to reload.

Now I know why it's done that way: characters are balanced by some being able to have more power, but only for a limited time, but it completely blows my suspension of disbelief. I can't think of a single movie or book where characters did the "stop, rest up, regain power, get back in there" scenario.

It also makes some kinds of scenarios very improbable. For example, I played in a game recently where we had to rescue a kidnap victim. We snuck around many of the bad guys, but got into several combats that were seemingly unavoidable. By the time we were about to get to the main combat we were spent! The group argued that we should find a place to hole up and rest, so that our spellcasters could recover their spells! We were on a time critical mission and the game broke down into a discussion about resources!

So that's my beef. Aah, that feels better to have said!

--Steve

 

[woodelf]

But with option 3 you're setting yourself up to fall into that hideous hideous trope of "Golden age long since past that we can only ever hope to faintly emulate". FRealms is the biggest offender there I think, with the Elven Kingdoms like Myth Drannor, and frickin' Netheril.

Not necessarily---look at Earthdawn: "Random horrors from another dimension periodically say waste to civilization."

 

[Testament]

Not necessarily---look at Earthdawn: "Random horrors from another dimension periodically say waste to civilization."

Maybe so. I don't know Earthdawn, but I wasn't aiming to make a blanket statement.

The fact is though, that the "Golden Age" is a very common cliche. Like so many other things, I blame Papa Tolkien.

 

[Undead Lincoln]

Sonic Damage. All other magic makes sense in the fantasy paradigm, sonic just seems to only fit in Sci-Fi (if at all).

The five main types of damage are fire, elecrticity, acid, cold, and sonic. Sonic just dosn't belong. For starters it does not come up often even in the modern world (and the modern world is louder). It also begs a lot of questions. How far away can that sonic spell be heard?

 

[Ralts Bloodthorne]

Two pet peeves in d20 Modern...

Weapon Ranges.

The Vehicles. Specifically, the fact that with an M16A2 set on burst fire, I can damage an M1A1 Main Battle Tank and eventually disable/destroy it.

d20 Future
Starships, Mecha, Cybernetics, well, ALL of the high-tech stuff, when you get right down to it. I'd kill someone for possession of the original writeups of the rules governing that stuff instead of the bland, "downgraded for autistic kids" crap that is in there.

d20 Fantasy
The fact that many of the problems lie with operator headspace and timing, but are blamed on the rules.

d20 in general.

The rules lawyers have defeated Fun, gentlemen and ladies. And they have begun to beat us with Fun's severed head.