D&D General D&D 3.5 - splatbook power creep or no?

[Maxperson]

That requires me to understand every nook and cranny of rules to know that when player says a combo they do it is actually broken and not all of them are as simple and obvious as Cancer Mage with Festering Anger.

Game play quickly reveals it. Broken things can't be kept secret and aren't hard to spot when they rear their ugly heads. There's simply no need to know every nook and cranny to recognize when something is broken in play.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Even with a cohesive vision, there's just too much content to assume it'll all play nice together.

I mean, a cohesive vision would also have resulted in somewhat less content being made, right?

Like...that's kind of the point of having a cohesive vision. To cut down on the chaff and increase the wheat.

I think in this regard 3.x is like GURPS. Trying to throw in everything is just a bad idea. Start with a small core of stuff you like and slowly expand it over time.

And my response is and will always be that anything which starts from "the PHB" is already starting from a foundation so broken, it will never produce a balanced result. At best you can be constantly patching (or banning, if that's your thing) the newest fire that's broken out, but you'll never actually get it to the point where it's gotten any closer to a balanced experience than "the GM is constantly fixing problems that crop up".

I get folks like leeway. I do too. But there's a big difference between a system built with flexibility in mind, and a system that contains actively archetype-negating features.

Druids literally are a class with another class as one of its class features.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Game play quickly reveals it. Broken things can't be kept secret and aren't hard to spot when they rear their ugly heads. There's simply no need to know every nook and cranny to recognize when something is broken in play.

In my experience?

No, no it does not "quickly reveal it", unless it's something so horrendously stupidly broken that even the person DOING it will usually admit how broken it was and accept that it was a one-time-only thing.

Instead, for the vast majority of it, it builds up slowly, one brick at a time. Every brick seems reasonable, if granting some little bit of power. And by the time you've realized what's happened, there's an entire wall of precedent that now DOES actually result in the player having a legitimate grievance if you do something about it only now, months and months after they started building their character.

Worse, the vast majority of fixes end up actually being such massively punitive nerfs, you've basically taken the player's character away. So you're damned if you do, damned if you don't. If you didn't catch these 7 slightly-OP things a year ago, you're now stuck with the choice between ruining the most successful player's experience, or making everyone else feel like dead weight because the one hyper-optimized artificer (or whatever) solves multiple entire challenges single-handedly every single day.

And, yes, some of the very broken things absolutely come from splats/supplements. Spell-to-power Erudite, for example. But none of those things is radically stronger than Druid + Natural Spell; they are at best very small upgrades over it. A smartly-played Druid, even stuck with only the PHB, is an absolute monster.

 

[GrimCo]

Cleric to his God: Daddy, this nasty thing is mean and it's bullying me.
God: My sweet child, take this divine juice to grow big and strong, and some divine pre workout for good measure. Gotta hit that gains.
Cleric receives Righteus might and Divine Favour. Cleric casts them.
Cleric to Fighter: Boy, hold my water bottle. It's time i show this bully what holy beatdown fueled by divine juicing looks like.
Clreric proceeds to beat ever loving crap out of it, leaving poor natty Fighter in corner crying.

And that's 3.5 base class from PHB, using PHB only spells.