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!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="eamon" data-source="post: 5899126" data-attributes="member: 51942">A lot of it was campaign dependent.  For instance, in games I ran, I included significant utility magic items, which mitigates the need for casters; outlawed natural spell (which turned druids into crazy melee machines with spells) and imposed XP costs and some other limitations for learning new spells (in particular, no mixing of splatbooks and some houseruling on splatbook spells in general). Only the Natural Spell removal is really a house-rule, and even so, it makes a big difference.  Of course, the 3e DM books didn't warn you about this stuff, so...The thing is, if a DM was a bit laid back, well, the non-casters often couldn't get those nice magic items because they couldn't make em and because for some crazy reason people don't like the corner magic-shoppe <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />.  And then it's easier for a caster to convince the DM to make him strong: he just needs to point to a particular spell and say I want to "research" that; it's a fairly direct and reasonable request with clear in-game mechanics, whereas it's a little harder for a fighter to pull a flying carpet out of thin air...  Finally, there were many more rules for casters than for others, so finding an exceptionally powerful rule (i.e. spell) just happens by itself, particular if the DM defers to the player in interpreting the sometimes open-ended effects of the spell.  There were lots of pointless spells too; people just didn't use em.  Oh, another mitigating factor was that the real crazy stuff tended to require high-level, and 3e tended to kind of crash and burn there anyhow.  So in retrospect it would seem broken, but in play most people just didn't play those levels (very much). I'd bet levels 1-10 saw much much more play than levels 11-20.So with a bit of a gamist perspective, a DM could make 3e quite balanced, but it's easy to see where the horror stories came from.  And getting high-level play balanced was a lot of work.</blockquote>

Verification