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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5416256" data-attributes="member: 4937">I think you've both got each other pegged.Gandhi39's rules are on a solid footing IMO, but he absolutely does give too much love to the core spellcasters.  Gandhi understands simple and he gets simple right, and his spell revisions indicate that he understands much of the balance problem lies in the fact that spells tend to be better than feats (and much much better than skills).   But even so, there is pretty much no reason not to play the all spellcaster party under these rules.  In a fixed version of the rules, Druid, Cleric, and Wizard must on the net be weaker than the Core versions - not stronger.  They cannot be stronger than the Core versions and hope to have a balanced or even interesting game.  You cannot achieve greater parity between spellcasters and non-casters by focusing on combat alone, because its always been out of combat that is most marked by 'sucks to be a non-spellcaster'.  The fact that the spellcasters also more powerful in combat situations is just insult to the injury.Your feats in particular show poor analysis.  For crying out load, at the very least all of those '+2 to two skills' feats should be written up under the same entry.  Simplify.More importantly, if you take the PrC's and odd 'base' classes out of the game - which you absolutely should - you have to still leave in the rules the means to (as one of my players put it) "you don't take a PrC, you become a PrC".  The means by which you do that is feats.  Virtually anything that is a class ability can be treated as a feat.  And you need to analyze feats in terms of spells, both in terms of power and in terms of the diversity of advantages available through their selection.  That isn't to say you should turn feats into spells, or that you should be able to do everything with a feat (or skill) you can do with a spell but that should be your guiding philosophy.I'm not going to suggest 'Just use my house rules.'   First, because I've never posted significant excerpts from them and don't at present intend to, and secondly because admittedly most of my house rules are just personal preferences (right down to the races and the classes) designed to emulate my own particular vision of a fantasy world.  Alot of what I do won't work for everyone (for example, 'Barbarian', 'Ranger', 'Paladin', 'Monk', and 'Druid' don't even exist as classes in my game, which isn't however to say you couldn't play one), and I'm frankly uninterested in how the game plays much above 15th level or so as I know I'm unlikely to ever take my game there (which isn't to say I've ignored it completely).    However, I'd like to give you three suggestions:1) Don't add the spell level to the DC of resisting a spell.  (By extension of this rule, don't add the HD modifier to the saves of natural attacks of monsters.)2) Don't allow combat casting at all.  3) Don't allow a character to take a 5' step out of a threat zone without provoking an AoO, unless the opponent remains in the threat zone of the character after the attack.These by no means on their own fix the spellcaster vs. non-spellcaster problem, but are simple ways of dealing with some of the worst issues, namely, that as levels increase the chance of making a save tends to actually go down (especially without optimal magical defenses) and that spellcasters of sufficient level can basically ignore the supposed drawbacks of casting a spell in combat.  The goal of the above changes is to force a spell-caster to hide behind a 'meat wall' or die.</blockquote>

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