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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6347992" data-attributes="member: 4937">Agreed.  My experience with point buy is that it works primarily when the players are approaching the system from primarily a method actor perspective.   Balance problems are usually extreme and intractable in point buy, and over time that diversity of options tends to seem more like traps where you can choose to gimp yourself or choose to be effective.  Incentives don't have to be direct.  If I'm a 1st level fighter with Cleave, the best AC in the party, and the highest hit points in the party, there are non-mechanical incentives to 'drawing aggro' from multiple foes.  The 'Paladin' in my current PC party (actually homebrew Champion class, but a 'Paladin' replacement), frequently drives into the middle of enemy forces precisely because the party as a whole benefits if more of the foes are focused on attacking him.  This is straight forward 'meat shield' tactics that have been used in D&D since forever.  I have no desire to edition war with you.The key is 'in my experience'.  In my experience, the players that believe that had very particular experiences of play that don't match mine.  There experience was that monsters tended to be passive foes that didn't plan or act proactively.  Dungeon crawling tended to be rare.  Often 50% or more of all foes are humanoid (which low level casters are quite effective against).   Terrain tended to be unimportant, with the vast majority of fights occurring on what was effectively an open wall-less plain.   One good indication of this type of game would be if you played an urban campaign with a large number of fights occurring 'on the street' or in the BBEG's lair (a large room, effectively an arena or tournament floor) and you didn't do a lot of mapping as players.  In general, there were a predictable number of fights per day, usually one large fight where the caster could 'go nova', and often as not one that occurred at a predictable time.  In general, most of the play experience was at 10th level or higher.  Often, most characters are started at 10th level or higher. A wizard that is casting Sleep or Color Spray can contribute well to a fight, provided they aren't facing things like oozes, undead, and constructs regularly.  But if they are doing so 3 times per day, they don't have many slots left for Shield, Mage Armor, and other highly important things.  That means that they almost certainly have to be scribing scrolls if they don't wish to be defenseless, which means also that to compete equally with the other classes they have to slow their advancement by spending XP.   I've had several players of low level Wizards bitterly complain about this, where wizard is the 'only class that is forced to be a level behind'.   To a certain extent, they have a valid point.  In 14 years of playing 3.X edition D&D I've never once had a pure Wizard survive past 6th level.  For that matter with 30+ years experience I've never seen a pure classed Wizard/M-U survive to high level in any game whether player or DM.  And this includes the group I was in that was sufficiently power gamey to regularly placed highly in DragonCon tournaments.  But beyond that something like Color Spray when it works dominates the action economy and is basically a 'win button'.  But its also just a 15' cone that offers a saving throw.  It also has some of the same problems of wieldiness as a fireball in that often its hard to catch a large number of foes in it and not catch party members.  Trying to do so forces the Wizard to the front line where they are toast if things don't work out.  Eventually after pushing the 'I win button' once too often, I see so many Wizards get a failure and then just die.In my experience, the spell-casters have problems with sustaining their momentum, being both effective and protecting themselves, and dealing with situations they aren't prepared for.  The non-spellcasters make up for these deficiencies, buy the spell-casters time to do their thing, and reduce the XP that the spellcasters have to spend out of their pool to maintain readiness.However, I won't argue that the most optimal 3.X party you can have is probably divine spellcasters built around a smaller number of arcane caster problem solvers.  I agree on the teleport, but not much else.  At 5th-7th you have something like parity IME, with the edition of 4th level spells only then pulling them into a lead.   Prior to that, spell-casters have too few spells to make major contributions in every situation while still protecting themselves.  They have to be very selective about their spell use, and they are squishy because they've not yet acquired the defensive magic items they need to replace the mundane items they can't use.Yes, but at low level the Cleric is often gaining even more endurance if most of his CLW castings or on a party fighter.  In general, I find that the gap is greater than you suggest because the Cleric must devote significant points to Wisdom rather than physical skills.  Typically this means dumping either Str or Dex depending whether you are going for a more caster or more melee style cleric.  So this means that the fighter typically so has either more to hit and damage or else more AC and better ranged attacks.  Also, War Domain aside, the Fighter also tends to have a superior weapon worth basically +1 damage per attack compared to the cleric's weapon, and has 1-2 more hit points.  And in terms of casting CLW, that's a spent action that roughly negates one attack - ei, you are trading an action for an action.  It's more important in terms of party endurance than in terms of winning a combat until you get to higher level cures that negate multiple enemy attacks. I'm not sure I agree Wizards pull away faster than clerics.  Wizards are really squishy.  Clerics can rely on normal armor items.  Clerics can replace non-casters far sooner than Wizards can barring optimal abuse of shape changing spells (particularly the 3.5 revision of Alter Self).Going into how you fix that is a tangential discussion.  Nevertheless, this rule of thumb only matters if you are regularly playing above 11th level.  They did an exceptionally bad job, but that is a different discussion.That is certainly true to a certain extent, but Gygax is the primary editor/writer of 1e PH and DMG, and that sets a completely different tone.  It is the tone set by those books which we must take as the one adopted by most groups, and as being the designers main preferences when he could get his own way.  For example, the 1e DMG utterly squashes the idea of playing a monster as being utterly undesirable and not fun, and generally not to be allowed.   The cleric makes it into the text as a class - the vampire doesn't.As for what you say about the balance between swashbucklers and heavy armor types, I think its very telling in what you think play looks like.  A more pertinent statement might be that 1e drawf in plate mail had a move of just 3" and couldn't reasonably remove his armor when needed.  As such, the higher AC didn't necessarily equate to higher survivability.  This is even more highlighted by the addition of a skill system.I'm not going to edition war with you, but I disagree.  All the playstyles you think are so radical are encapsulated in just my current PC party, and 4e does a much better job is smoothing out when the individual class gets to shine by leveling out the 'I win' buttons and reducing the weaknesses.  Anyway, I like where you are going with your homebrew 4e variant, but I can equally tell its not really for me.  I might enjoy it as a player depending on the GM, but I'm not going to jump out and adopt it.</blockquote>

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