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="d20Dwarf" data-source="post: 2909323" data-attributes="member: 314">At some point the "Christmas tree full of magic items" became synonymous with "1e is just as bad as 3e!" when it really misses the point entirely. I think it's addressing the character abilities versus magic items when defining what you can do, which isn't the problem in general. In my opinion, there's a specific problem when every character has to have cloak of resistance +x, stat boost +x, weapon +x, and AC +x just to be able to fight the creatures the game assumes you can fight. Even if the wealth by level was reasonable (it's too low at the bottom and too high at the top, imo), much of it is sucked into these mundane items that don't carry a lot of excitement with them.Personally I loved the amount of magic items available in 1e and 2e, and it didn't matter that they defined your character's abilities...they were, in my experience, unique. Only one guy in the party might have a +2 weapon, so if you encountered a monster that took that to hit it, that guy was up front no matter who he was! Now there's this weird egalitarianism going on among characters so that nobody's feelings are hurt or left out of combat. It all comes back to the wealth/CR system restricting game options and the level system shooting characters through levels so fast that it becomes its own end rather than something cool that happens occasionally. Up until 3e I had a grand total of TWO 16th-level characters and ONE 12th-level character, and I remember them fondly. In 3e, however, those are no big deal, and I can whip up a 16th-level character in no time flat, thanks to the Easy, Cookie Cutter Character Creation System (TM)! Playing 16th level in 3e feels the same as playing 2nd level, except that everyone in the party has to be flying, invisible, displaced, ethereal, hasted, using a silver/cold iron/adamantine weapon with a base damage of 37, and with 17 potions injectable as a free action just to be able to survive, since all the monsters at that CR assume they are. <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=":)" /></blockquote>

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