NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 6241262" data-attributes="member: 87792">All correct <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />  Gygax's campaign was basically a sandbox with a  rolling group of players and different numbers turning up each time.   This is very different from an Adventure Path.  Tomb of Horrors was  designed to challenge Rob Kuntz (Sir Robilar's player) and Ernie Gygax  when they were claiming Greyhawk was too easy - and the results of its  first run were that Rob Kuntz and Ernie Gygax defeated the tomb, took  all the loot and didn't lose a single henchman.  Which is unsurprising  as the Tomb isn't actually hard once you know the trick to it and years  of playing with Gygax will have probably made the trick very obvious.(My source for the story behind ToH is Mike Mornard/Old Geezer on RPG.net).As  for fighters vs spellcasters, Gygax spent a lot of time balancing  fighters with casters for oD&D.  He failed because the main fighter  player was Rob Kunz - who amongst other things had a superb working  memory and a lot of skill as a player.  But most of the fighter  balancing mechanisms were subtle and included rigging the loot table  hard towards fighters by making it mostly swords (which clerics couldn't  use), making swords do extra damage against large creatures, putting in  a de facto level cap round 10th level, and giving fighters the best  saves in the game.  There was also a lot in the game to subtly weaken  wizards - like save or suck and save or die spells being much easier to  save against, spells known coming under the heading of loot that was  assigned by the DM, a very limited number of spells per day,  spellcasting disruption, powerful spells having drawbacks, and much  more.Every single one of these boosts to the fighter was either  massively reduced or eliminated by 3.0.  And every single one of the  wizard restrictions was either removed or eliminated by 3.0.  And they  didn't go far enough - Gygax posted on these very boards that the reason  for the seemingly overpowered fighter variants in Unearthed Arcana  (like the Cavalier) was for balance, giving the non-casters a much  needed boost.But what really demonstrates the fighter/wizard  balance problem is that we're talking about it.  It should be an  apples/oranges comparison.  For balance purposes, the fighter should be  compared to the spellcaster who can heal (therefore bringing far more  endurance to the party than the fighter ever will) and bring down  blessings for the rest of the party - but doesn't have many strong overt  magical effects.  The wizard should be compared to the lightly armoured  utility guy who has a tendency to go squish in combat and hides in  shadows pretty well.  If the wizard is being compared to the fighter in terms of combat potential something somewhere has gone deeply wrong.</blockquote>

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