D&D 3E/3.5 D&D 3.5: Fake Choices Abound?

[moritheil]

On the other hand, with a different game from about 2 years ago, most people put a lot of effort into getting a "perfect" min/max, often involving multiple prestige classes; a standard fighter build (for example) would have been a joke in that group.

I think the current direction WOTC is taking shows that it is this group of gamers that has their attentions. In the near future, it will be the norm to have five or six classes per character, with feats drawn from ten different sources, because almost anything less will be far behind the power curve and thus a burden to the other players. (This is already the case in some places, of course, but I gather that it is not yet truly commonplace.)

WOTC does not want to avoid this future; rather, it wants to encourage it. Its profits will be much higher if everyone buys all those books and takes all those classes and feats. So unless people propose something crazy - like paying them to not publish more books - power creep is inevitable.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

A "neat and cool" player build who is a liability in the incredibly frequent combat situations most vanilla D&D campaigns feature is just as annoying for fun game play as an overpowered super maximized cheestastic PC.

I'm a quasi-min maxer. I optimize my PCs to be the best they can be at what they are, as opposed to maximizing damage output or whatever...I love the "neat & cool" builds, and frequently help people tweek their builds. Think of me as the Xhibit of PC building...

Thus, in 28 years of gaming, I haven't designed more than a handful of arcane caster PCs with Magic Missile or Sleep (I'd like to say none, but memory is imperfect).

However, even though I'm not a classic min-maxer, there are still spells and feats that I simply won't touch unless I have a REAL desire to play a particular concept.