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Message: <blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 6056377" data-attributes="member: 22424">A couple of things about his examples:- He pits an optimised wizard against a non-optimised dragon, gives the wizard an arbitrary amount of time to prepare, lets him choose the time and the place of the confrontation, and grants him a free ambush. Of course that skews things in the PC's favour! And what's more, doing so skews things further in the favour of spellcasters than it does non-spellcasters, because they benefit more from preparation.- That's a planned assassination, not an adventuring encounter. It would be just as valid to have the dragon ambush the party, use a quickened maximised breath weapon attack plus a bite in the surprise round, followed it winning initiative in the first round and launching a full attack... and then declaring that the barbarian and the rogue are clearly the most powerful classes because everyone else is dead.- The shivering touch spell is hideously and spectacularly broken. I mean, disgustingly so - it should never have been published.(Incidentally, it also appears that he's ignoring the limit on controlled hit dice for animate dead. And his interpretation of explosive runes is ludicrous.)No. And, honestly, I don't care to - it seems to be a massive mental effort in order to make the game actively less enjoyable.The thing is, as soon as the PCs started to pull that sort of one-upmanship, I would feel duty-bound to have the game world respond logically. That is, every BBEG in the land would sit up and take note, conclude that the PCs were (a) a threat and (b) uncontrollable. At this point Machiavelli, Sun Tzu, and the Evil Overlord List all agree - they must be eliminated. And that doesn't mean some happy fight against level-appropriate assassins; it means the successful BBEG takes off and nukes the whole site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.The problem with playing one-upmanship against the DM is that the DM always has a bigger stick.Besides, it's inevitable that there are problems. Although 3e pretends to a high level of mathematical rigour, it's now quite obvious that at least three areas in the core don't actually possess that rigour (those being the multiclassing system, item creation, and high-level play in general). Additionally, everything outwith the core is at least suspect, on account of simply not receiving even as much playtesting as the high-level core materials.It's not that you can't have a specific item, but because of the Wealth-by-Level guidelines, you can't prepare for every eventuality. Buying a wand of spider climb means you can't then apply those funds to a headband of intellect, a ring of evasion, or whatever else you want. I'm not convinced that it ever becomes the better investment.And while you're free to disregard Wealth-by-Level in your campaigns, doing so means you're not engaging in a like-for-like comparison. If your character has significantly more gear than WbL allows for, then the comparison is not between him and characters of the same level; it's with characters with several more levels under their belt - your 6th level Wizard with 100,000gp worth of gear is actually equivalent to a 10th level character... and that comparison is much less kind.</blockquote>

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