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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FourthBear" data-source="post: 3864771" data-attributes="member: 55846">I definitely recall many, many discussions of class balance back in 1e and 2e days, not just one or two.  Heck, don't you recall the uproar about Unearthed Arcana and the barbarian and cavalier classes?  And the proliferation of magic items and their importance to character power was also noted many times, as in the many complaints about Monty Haul campaigns and "munchkins all with the Wand of Orcus, the Hand of Vecna and the Invulnerable Coat of Arnd".  While we may not agree with their solution, I believe that the designers of Third Edition were trying to *control* abuse of magic item proliferation (or at least work it into the game system).  In 1e and 2e, magic item creation and appearance in campaigns were all over the map.  Some campaigns stripped magic items out of modules and you were lucky to have a +2 weapon by the time you reached 12th level.  In others (and I am a direct witness to many of this in First Edition), magic items were found on every guard, looted off every enemy and found by the gross in dragon hoards.  A very common complaint about many 1e and 2e modules (both independently published and in Dungeon magazine) was that they were far too free in having available magic items and that characters who played through many of them would be hauling around bags full of them.  I believe that Third Edition's "item slots" were more conceived to control and restrict the number of items that a character could have.  I do agree that they ended up being simply the minimum number of items your character needed.    Further, the expected wealth level of PCs in 3e I feel also was intended to control Monty Haul syndrome, which again preexisted 3e by a long period of time.  I think that experience of 3e's design decisions has led to changes in 4e that I'm sure the designers are hoping will do a better job of preventing this.</blockquote>

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