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

[Maxperson]

A smart player, who knows their character is going to be acting as party face, certainly does.

People don't make their characters in a vacuum; they discuss who's going to handle what role and plan for it. At least my groups do.

With what skill points. They get 4 per level and already prioritized charisma and wisdom as a cleric. They will need con for survival. Int is going to be fairly low on the totem pole.

Those points are going to be needed for concentration, spellcraft and other skills. And only diplomacy is a class skill for clerics. The other social skills are cross class, so will be taking 2 points to get 1 rank. So no bluffing, sense motive, or intimidation for the "social" replacement for the rogue.

You don't need magic mart to load yourself up with a dozen invisibility and knock scrolls. That's baseline available out of the PHB.

There are no scrolls for sale in the PHB. In 3e/3.5 you needed to scribe them, find them, or hope the DM would magic-mart them. And as I said, if the DM is running the world even remotely as a living, breathing world, encounters will happen during the scribe time and the player of the wizard will be sitting out for potentially multiple sessions. A 30 second fight often took hours and there might be more the group does after that.

You don't need unlimited downtime; you just need some. And yes, if the game features heavy amounts of urgent time pressure, than focusing on domination through item crafting isn't the smart play. But we can't assume that any more than we can assume no time pressure. I've had 3.5 games with a lot of urgency, and 3.5 games that were basically "choose-your-own adventure" sandboxes.

No. Not heavy amounts of urgent time pressure. Just the occasional situation arising during the course of any given day, like happens during an RPG session. Once the wizard has sat out multiple sessions or had his scribing ruined by deciding to stop and join the group, the player will self-edit and stop trying to scribe scrolls unless he is assured of that time. Which does occasionally happen.

 

[Pedantic]

I spent most of 2007 advocating for a core of warblades and warmages, with unified spell slot progression across all classes, to be the core of the nascent 4e.

"Make everyone casters" was, to my mind, the single best advance of 4e. Casters are simply more fun to play.

I don't really know that we can honestly say it did. Certainly to some extent for combat, but the adventuring game outside of combat was pretty wholesale removed. We got skill checks for everything, up to and including a bunch of rituals, and the general scope of magic problem solving was narrowed. My 3e experience was essentially repeated heist planning and/or reaction to unknown environments, with intermittent fights.

 

[Tigris]

I don't really know that we can honestly say it did. Certainly to some extent for combat, but the adventuring game outside of combat was pretty wholesale removed. We got skill checks for everything, up to and including a bunch of rituals, and the general scope of magic problem solving was narrowed. My 3e experience was essentially repeated heist planning and/or reaction to unknown environments, with intermittent fights.

Well magic problem solving being narrowed does help to make martials and non martials less apart. And rituals, even if they include skill checks, are still non combat magic which can be used for problem solving. If you roll for a skill for a ritual or a spell check (or saving throw) for a spell is not a big difference. Sure with chances to fail, and less strong non combat spells, casters cant as often just solve situations with magic, but this is intended, and the good 4E campaigns (especially streamed ones) include lots of non combat.


And Blades in the Dark which is all about running heists, is using clocks, which are inspired by 4E skill challenges. So you definitly do not need overpowering non combat spells to do heists etc.

 

[billd91]

And that is why the game was broken. Because many many MANY campaigns have down time. If inserting downtime break's the game....then yeah the game is broken.

I played 3.5 across every level, and yeah high level wizards had a scroll for every occasion. Especially any spells level 1-2, whose costs for a scroll were completely trivial by that level.

Is that because the game as a whole is broken or because the magic item creation rules are broken? The magic item creation system in 3e was transformational in how 3e D&D could be played compared to AD&D.

 

[TwoSix]

With what skill points. They get 4 per level and already prioritized charisma and wisdom as a cleric. They will need con for survival. Int is going to be fairly low on the totem pole.

Those points are going to be needed for concentration, spellcraft and other skills. And only diplomacy is a class skill for clerics. The other social skills are cross class, so will be taking 2 points to get 1 rank. So no bluffing, sense motive, or intimidation for the "social" replacement for the rogue.

<shrug> I don't know what to tell you. We always managed just fine without a rogue. MC dips, feats, UA class replacements, and PrCs all made it pretty easy to be a skill monkey with a caster chassis if desired.

Nothing you're saying changes the underlying calculus that if you want to be the most effective, you'll run as a hybrid skill-focused caster chassis rather than playing a rogue or its variants.

There are no scrolls for sale in the PHB. In 3e/3.5 you needed to scribe them, find them, or hope the DM would magic-mart them. And as I said, if the DM is running the world even remotely as a living, breathing world, encounters will happen during the scribe time and the player of the wizard will be sitting out for potentially multiple sessions. A 30 second fight often took hours and there might be more the group does after that.

No. Not heavy amounts of urgent time pressure. Just the occasional situation arising during the course of any given day, like happens during an RPG session. Once the wizard has sat out multiple sessions or had his scribing ruined by deciding to stop and join the group, the player will self-edit and stop trying to scribe scrolls unless he is assured of that time. Which does occasionally happen.

I think we just played differently, ultimately. If our group said "Hey, that adventure was rough, let's rest up and recharge for the next two weeks before we go back out", that's what we did. We'd occasionally get ambushed or attacked, sure, but not every single day for 2 weeks.

 

[TwoSix]

I don't really know that we can honestly say it did. Certainly to some extent for combat, but the adventuring game outside of combat was pretty wholesale removed. We got skill checks for everything, up to and including a bunch of rituals, and the general scope of magic problem solving was narrowed. My 3e experience was essentially repeated heist planning and/or reaction to unknown environments, with intermittent fights.

Well, I definitely see that as feature, not bug; I hated the "magic problem solving" elements of 3.X. I was much happier moving the non-combat aspects of the game into skill checks and freeform narration.

"Magic problem solving" generally boiled down to avoiding confrontations and conflicts, which is very much NOT what I'm looking for out of a D&D session.

 

[Pedantic]

Well, I definitely see that as feature, not bug; I hated the "magic problem solving" elements of 3.X. I was much happier moving the non-combat aspects of the game into skill checks and freeform narration.

"Magic problem solving" generally boiled down to avoiding confrontations and conflicts, which is very much NOT what I'm looking for out of a D&D session.

I couldn't disagree more. My favorite memories are all things like prepping a druid grove for an attack, or trying to figure out how to read a delicate map underwater.

 

[Alzrius]

But I agree that the DM can dispense down time IAW the story and control it's potential abuse.

What I'd like to see more of is ways to give other classes things to do for downtime.

For instance, one of my favorite third-party products (admittedly for Pathfinder 1E) is The Rogue's Guide to Capers (affiliate link), which outlines a series of checks that rogues can make to pull off heists during downtime, earning extra GP (which can then be spent on additional gear, much like how the wizard's ability to craft scrolls at half the cost of buying them is essentially extra gear). Even if the rogue fails, then you've got a potential new adventure seed all lined up. Win-win!

It's also not that hard to reskin the product for other martials; jousts for fighters, for instance, or bounty hunting for rangers, etc.

 

[TwoSix]

I couldn't disagree more. My favorite memories are all things like prepping a druid grove for an attack, or trying to figure out how to read a delicate map underwater.

Yea, that's a big NO for me, lol. I remember games where the group would spend hours pouring over their spell lists and features, looking for ways to solve a specific encounter or problem. I had a lot of the spells and features, and I was still bored out of my mind.

"You cast wall of force, you cast a summon, you cast fireball, let's go!" is about the amount of planning I can stomach.

 

[Brendan Byrd]

As an aside, since we are on the topic of 3e for newbies, Justin Alexander made that like a decade ago. It failed to crowdfund for art and printing so he released the text without art on his site for free. A new GM could do worse than to use that free book and the 3e DMG to get used to things.

Link please?
(Couldn’t find it.)