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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6347876" data-attributes="member: 4937">Not necessarily.  And to a large extent, you will bring out how one of the problems with a class system can be too great of similarity later on in your post.Oddly, this is the opposite of my experience of 4e.  I set down to design a module in 4e and all the options felt bland to me.  The amount of work required to build interesting options wasn't worth the results.  None of the character options looked interesting to me as a player.  I can never recall feeling so bored reading rules as with 4e.I get where you are coming from there, especially as a long time player of 1e AD&D, but I think you exaggerate the situation.   Starting with stock 3.0, the non-casters are probably stronger than the casters up until about 6th level, and hold their own well until 9th-12th level depending on the tier of the non-caster and spell-caster optimization.   It's only in high level play that you have the situation of non-casters being wholly dependent on casters for utility.   Really breaking the parity even at low level doesn't begin to happen until 3.5, particularly late 3.5, when the number of spells, items, and feats that allow for breaking spell-casters wide open really gets ludicrous.  By that time though, there are relatively potent options in what are technically at least non-casters if you are willing to go there.So keeping in mind that in my current 3.X campaign we are just hitting 7th level after about 4 years of (mostly) bi-weekly play (4-5 hour sessions), it's more than possible to play 3.X without the players feeling that their non-casters can't contribute much.Ridiculous, certainly.  But in terms of mechanics, since I don't know he mechanics, I have no way of knowing whether pogo sticks are underpowered or overpowered.  If pogo sticks give large bonuses to acrobatics, jump, and speed, and allow 'death from above' maneuvers (high ground, leaping charges, crush attacks, etc.) then fighters on pogo sticks might well be quite scary as well as ridiculous. Here is where you and I fully agree.   No game should have both tier 1 and tier 5 options presented to the players as legitimate.  As bad as you think 3.X is, RIFTS was actually far worse in this regard, but nevertheless having both tier 1 and tier 5 options presented as equal is ridiculous.  It's ok to have both in the same game, but they should be separated out by tier and clearly presented as different game options with different assumptions of play.  Nevertheless, with a little house ruling of 3.X I've managed to bring the classes IMO to a range of tier 2 to at worst tier 4, and as far as I've been able to tell all classes in my game are tier 3 up until 9th level or so when the game breaking 5th level spells come on line.  I'm not sure that it was. oD&D/AD&D was created by historical wargamers explicitly in a medieval setting where 14th century tech was high tech.  Renaissance and later archetypes, like doublet and hose wearing swashbucklers dueling with rapiers and the like were considered anachronistic.  Heavy armor was prioritized because missile weapons had just begun the slow process of obsoleting armor, and Gygax (more so than Anderson) seems to have wanted a 'pure' setting without guns.   Gygax's choice of the galley as the prototypical warship of the day and the cog as the civilian ship indicates he wants a setting inspired by technology that is earlier than the battle of Lepanto.  Under such constraints, Zorro, d'Artagnan, Captain Blood, Cyrano, and 20th century staged versions of Robin Hood in hose (the 19th century version of literature wears mail) and other archetypes of the lightly armed fighter are anachronistic and don't need to be supported.   Moreover, for complex reasons I won't go into here, IMO for balance reasons they can't be supported in the way that many people want.  Lightly armored fighter is generally inherently better than heavily armored fighter if lightly armored fighter is a viable choice in the sense most people mean.  Even power gamers in 1e understood this, and preferred if at all possible to rely on bracers rather than armor for protection when they could get them - which incidentally opened up doublet and hose presentations as viable mechanically.And yet, you prefer 4e, a system I rejected in part because it made balance equivalent to being 'samey' to an extent no other edition had.  Because it was precisely that for the first time in D&D, 4e unified all the classes under a blanket system instead of giving each class its own subsystem and set of rules unique to that class, and for the first time 4e became a game where everyone was working off the same core rules that channeled them into the same play style and incentives.  And I note that in your revision of 4e, you are precisely removing this 'feature' from 4e inspired classes and giving them their own unique rules and play style.  You are attempting to merge the best of 4e's balance with every other editions variety of play style.  And that's great, and something I wish the 4e designers had realized was necessary and part of D&D's attraction.   But it's still certainly true that 4e made the classes more 'samey', and your own chosen revisions prove you are aware of that just as my own chosen revisions of 3e prove I know that 3e's biggest problem was lack of balance.</blockquote>

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