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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Psion" data-source="post: 3220200" data-attributes="member: 172">The XP penalty is a flavor enforcement thing more than a bona fide balancing factor, though it does tend to catch people doing "level dipping", which is a good thing.At any rate, I disagree with your premise, so I'll move on.IMO:1) Metamagic rods are expensive, as they should be. 5th level mages won't be using them. But for the cost, I don't think they are overpowered.2) Metamagic has great potential, but IMO, it's too costly. There have been some sloppy workarounds too this, but I think that some mitigation of some sort is needed to keep them useful.My preferred solution is:1) Allow sourcebooks only as appropriate for the campaign, depending on campaign theme.2) DM approval on anything outside the core books.This is one I agree on. Though I do tend to think that it balances out a bit at higher levels. A shield is like an extra magic item slot. But still, I think sword-n-board needs better options.IMC, bonus from Power Attack operates under the same rules as strength bonuses do (x1.5 two-handed, x1/2 off hand.) This was one of my first rulings in 3.5.Not sure what you are getting at here. Though there is more per-encounter balancing in later products, I don't see this as being a problem. I'm certainly not obsessed with running multiple encounters per day, but on occasion I'll push a party to their limits to keep them on their toes. I don't think weaker per day abilities are going to break this. Yeah, warlock is dumb IMO and I don't allow it, but it's not like we haven't always had fighters and archer builds that are effectively repeatable resources excluding HP, and they have been there all along. New books are just about affording that sort of resource philosophy to other types of abilities.I think part of the strategy is balancing the use of your expendable resources versus your persistent ones.Never bothered me. Liberal use of dispel magic and heavy need for healing will quickly bring those who abuse this in line.This strikes me as just nitpicking. Most likely, unless the player is really analyzing minutia in game, most players just pick a mod they are comfortable with and be done with it.If they try to analyze mid-combat, institute a time limit for announcing actions.You'll get massive disagreement here, but I don't. I enforce a narrow spread of ability score modifiers and a dice system that minimizes dump statting, but overall, I feel that the blandness and point-niggliness that comes with point buy is not worth any gains in "player freedom".As someone who feels dumped upon by the dice gods, I don't see the problem here. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />Old chestnut, and I disagree even more now than I did years ago. Because now, you see, you can never lose enough XP that you could lose a level, so you don't unlearn anything.What is happening is that you lose some of your personal vitality and drive that pushes you on to greater things. Having seen smart people that could have done so much more with their lives if they had that drive, it makes sense to me that if this quality was metaphysically tapped, it would hamper that.I think if you can't handle the concept of personal essence and drive as a metaphysical concept, there are lots of other D&D concepts you shouldn't think too hard about else the figurative house of cards that is D&D metaphysics might come tumbling down...Edit: That said, I do allow exotic components to defray this (and other) costs, but mainly for flavor reasons.</blockquote>

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