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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(Psi)SeveredHead" data-source="post: 3293809" data-attributes="member: 1165">Not power creep, since it's within a campaign.Strong potential for power creep.It would unbalance any core material present within the campaign, for instance, monsters. How do you balance regular Monster Manual monsters within the campaign if the PCs are getting extra power? Can you be sure that method will remain balanced? What if you use adventures not specifically written for that setting and the PCs steamroll their opponents? Does the blame lie on the setting for restricting access to core rules and advntures, or the DM for not modifying said adventure?Having said that, if you could separate from the core rules you could avoid power creep. That is difficult. I know the Dark Sun setting tried to do this fairly successfully (it was generally messed up in terms of balance, but that was only within the setting, except for it exporting even more powerful psionic powers outside the setting - it had its own Monstrous Compendium and you were not supposed to use other monsters in the settings; it also had different rules for magic items and the like; finally it was 2e, which paid less attention to balance anyway, so any unbalance was less noticeable once you ignored the ability score inflation).I don't know if it's really possible to do that today. Who wants to have to buy a whole new set of core rules for one setting? (Well, actually, some settings like Arcana Evolved do exactly this - not that I'm calling AE overpowered, as I have very little actual experience with it. Of course, AE is d20 Fantasy, not DnD.)This is within a campaign. (I think that's a bad example; fighters are weak, but giving them more feat slots wouldn't solve their problems, and it's a ridiculous situation as well. This is almost a case of a bad DM messing up their campaign.)Yes.Note that WotC attempts to fix problems in the core rules, so maybe this should be called "power modification" rather than "power creep". The example isn't specific enough to use the term "creep", in other words.A better example would be the escalation of 3.0 save DCs. WotC released Greater Spell Focus in a couple of books. They released prestige classes that could crank the save DCs in other books, and allowed the abuse of stat-boosting spells in yet other sources (I believe that was actually Sage advice). The combination of save DC-enhancements was definitely power creep.I think power creep is a bad thing. DMs don't always buy splatbooks in order to increase the power of NPCs or their PCs; in fact, often they're not trying to do so, but are trying to gain access to rules that have good flavor, are cool, do different things, etc. Power creep is often "stealthy" in that the DM might not even notice it before it causes a problem, and furthermore a player who uses extra material to "beef up" their PC isn't necessarily trying to crank their PC's power or otherwise hurt game balance; maybe they just thought the Incantatrix was cool and didn't really think of the balance implication. (We're not all game designers, and I find it odd that DMs are expected to analyze every part of every splat book they or their players buy or allow for game balance problems (and are criticized if they don't immediately notice the problems), yet are criticized if they create their own house rules.)WotC should, IMO, try to prevent power creep, and should explain why it allows rules that look overpowered in some cases. (The reception of the PH II was largely positive on these boards, in part because many people feel fighters were too weak, so they're not upset at the power creep. For those DMs, the new fighter feats would be "power modification" instead. The reception of save DC-cranking abilities in 3.0 were another story.)DMs have to bear some of the blame, too. Sometimes power creep is barely visible, but if a DM was allowing 3.0 Greater Spell Focus and the Incantatrix or Spelldancer into their campaign and then complained that even giving monk NPCs special +3 insight bonus to save rings still resulted in them getting flattened by the PCs, perhaps they should look at their own method of analyzing game balance, and try to fix the problem by banning or modifying the overpowered material.</blockquote>

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