Does 3E/3.5 dictate a certain style of play?

[JRRNeiklot]

How about that 14th level bard with a good THAC0, good thief skills, great druid spell-casting, and 150 hit points? Meanwhile, his adventuring buddies are around 11th-12th level.

A 14th level bard used the attack matrix of a 7th (at best) level fighter. He had (at best) 7d10+1d6++10d6+3+con bonus. He may have a lot of hit points, but the straight druid can cast 7th level spells compared to his 5th, not to mention a ton of lower level spells, has the exact same attack matrix, immunity to disease, can shapechange, etc. The bard gets some decent charm abilities, a few low level thieving abilities that he'll never get to use if there is a monk or thief in the party because they will always be better at it. Oh yeah, and he gets to use a longsword instead of a scimitar, which only matters when facing large sized creatures. The bard also must have the following minimum attributes: S:15 D:17 C:10 I:12 W:15 CH:15. That's a 43 point character using point buy. Good luck with that. Now when you're comparing him to the 3e bard, the 1e bard wins in spades.

 

[Lanefan]

I wondered why you were agreeing with my until I noticed my typo. I find single class characters to be the norm. Far more so than in 1e, for which you could make excellent combos like fighther/magic user/thieves.

In my first 3e game, we had no multiclass characters.
My second, long-running 3e campaign featured 1 multiclass character out of 6 or so.

In 1e, single-class was the norm. A few people tried fancy 3-class builds but they were the exception, and double-classing was and is usually done for character reasons rather than power (except at 1st-level).

In 3e we mostly play single-class characters mainly because that's what we're used to, and we don't have any powergamers hardcore enough to sacrifice characterization for numbers. In fact, come to think of it, I - who usually detest multi-classing - have the only multiclass PC in the party! My tank Ranger, for various in-game character reasons, has taken Cleric as a class and will build that until it matches the Ranger in level (though I suspect the game will end first).

Whenever I see a 3e build with more than 2 base classes and at least one of those is 1st-level, my first thought is the build was done for power rather than character; and my second thought is sadness that my first thought was probably accurate.

Lanefan

 

[buzz]

Whenever I see a 3e build with more than 2 base classes and at least one of those is 1st-level, my first thought is the build was done for power rather than character; and my second thought is sadness that my first thought was probably accurate.

Enworlder rowport is in my Saturday group. He regularly makes massively multiclassed PCs. Like 4-5 classes before even hitting 10th level. It's a running joke between us how incredibly ineffective these PCs often are. He doesn't really care, because he's more focused on creating interesting combos and unique characters.

Personally, I've had much more success with single-classed PCs in terms of RAW butt-kicking potential.

I'll also leave aside the issue of what the heck is wrong with wanting to build powerful characters.

 

[Voadam]

My personal experience in ADnD with multiclassing was that a multiclass cleric was never as good a healer as a single class, that a multiclass wizard was never as good as a single class a multiclass fighter never had as good an AC as a single class etc etc.

* Now lets look at these posts about how my 6th level character has AC 61 or whatever it is and tell me it's all the same.

Really? Mine was that the drow cleric/MU rolled as well on his dex and bargained better to gain first dibs on the best magic armor found so he had a slightly better AC than the two weapon double specialized in short sword drow fighter.

As for a spellcaster, he had twice the spells of the single classed MU with his clerical hold persons being real power house multi foe stopping ones. He still had to ration out his spellcasting though because of the pacing of the number of encounters each day. He had more clerical slots to devote to healing than he would have as a straight cleric because he could use his full complement of MU spells to fill the other casting niches he would have used his clerical ones on. His AC and hp were far above that of the straight MU.

 

[billd91]

A 14th level bard used the attack matrix of a 7th (at best) level fighter. He had (at best) 7d10+1d6++10d6+3+con bonus. He may have a lot of hit points, but the straight druid can cast 7th level spells compared to his 5th, not to mention a ton of lower level spells, has the exact same attack matrix, immunity to disease, can shapechange, etc. The bard gets some decent charm abilities, a few low level thieving abilities that he'll never get to use if there is a monk or thief in the party because they will always be better at it. Oh yeah, and he gets to use a longsword instead of a scimitar, which only matters when facing large sized creatures. The bard also must have the following minimum attributes: S:15 D:17 C:10 I:12 W:15 CH:15. That's a 43 point character using point buy. Good luck with that. Now when you're comparing him to the 3e bard, the 1e bard wins in spades.

Or an 8th level fighter if he managed to get the right magical book (+1 over the 7th level fighter if you used the option on the DMG table), benefits from weapon specialization (once UA came out), his caster level was still 14th (I believe) so those 1-5th level druid spells could still pack a punch (16d8 call lightning), the thieving may not have matched the single-class thief or monk but they were still pretty good particularly with the Dex mods from his minimum 17 Dex, and while mechanically the long sword might not do more damage, fully 70% of all magical swords were long swords. So they were a heck of a lot more common than magical scimitars.
And let's not even get into the bard's unbelievable endurance when facing level-draining undead! That vampire has to suck down 29 levels just to make himself a spawn.

How does that compare in general to 3E's multi- and prestige-classing? Perhaps not as extreme, but still pretty potent and it mimicked much of the same behavior. It was without a doubt the best way to get more hit points than pretty much everyone else.

 

[ruleslawyer]

This is low magic? I've known 10th level AD&D characters who would love to have such an item.

Clearly not AD&D characters who played through T1, I3-5, S2, G1-3, or....

Oh forget it. I give up. You people return to your fun.

 

[Shadeydm]

Yep.

Now, here's the kicker - 3.xe can really only be said to encourage said behavior if we see a notable number of people engaging in this behavior who otherwise would not have done so. Or, at the very least, a notable increase the amount or degree of the behavior.

It is not enough to show that it is done. You gotta show that, in a different system, they wouldn't even try. Otherwise what we have is a system that enables success at the behavior, but that doesn't encourage it.

They are two separate criticisms. One is, "The game turns my players into munchkins." The other is, "The game makes my munchkin players too good."

I would argue that by rewarding the behavior (cherry picking for optimization) it does in fact encourage it. The very fact the people are described as not carrying thier weight for not optimizing thier characters both disturbs and disappoints me. The notion that one would have to be dumb not to grab a levels of ranger, barbarian and fighter for your rogue is not agreeable to me but is rewarded by the game.

I must confess that reading the bottom half of this page with all of you posting about single class 3.XE characters does give me a sense of hope.

 

[Crothian]

The very fact the people are described as not carrying thier weight for not optimizing thier characters both disturbs and disappoints me. The notion that one would have to be dumb not to grab a levels of ranger, barbarian and fighter for your rogue is not agreeable to me but is rewarded by the game.

Who are these people? Your group? Becasue unless they are and directly influenceiung your game why does it matter what other people in other games are doing?

I've never seen anything like this.

 

[Shadeydm]

I am pretty sure there was a thread like that on this very site reciently belittling people for making suboptimal choices for thier characters race and class combinations.

 

[molonel]

The notion that one would have to be dumb not to grab a levels of ranger, barbarian and fighter for your rogue is not agreeable to me but is rewarded by the game.

?!?!?!

I really have a hard time believing you've seen this in an actual 3rd Edition game.

I've been playing it since it came out. Every once in a while you see a heavily multiclassed rogue. One of the first characters in our long-running evil campaign was a rogue ?/ranger 1/fighter 2/assassin 1/shadowdancer 2. I've seen a couple of characters similar to it. None of them ever make it past 8th or 9th level, because when Will saves start becoming more common in the game they bend over and say, "Mama!"

Rogues are one of the hardest classes to multiclass because their strengths are their Sneak Attack Progression, and their skill points. Ranger is easy to multiclass in a couple of levels, but not very synergistic because Track doesn't do a whole lot unless you keep putting ranks into Survival.

A level or two of fighter won't kill you, and sometimes an extra feat is nice, but the 2 skill points per level generally hurts pretty bad.