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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gothmog" data-source="post: 1197170" data-attributes="member: 317">Its not as dumb as you might think.  3E was engineered with a dungeon adventuring environment in mind ("back to the dungeon" sound familiar anyone?).  That means spellcasters were balanced against fighters in 3E/3.5 with the assumption of 3-4 encounters in a row before a break was needed and rest required.  If you stick to that formula, 3E is very balanced and plays pretty well.  If you don't focus on dungeon-delving and lots of fights however, 3E is even more lopsided balance-wise than previous editions in many cases.  Spellcasters have more spells per day than in previous editions, so allowing more rest periods means more high firepower spells being used in every fight and spells being in situations where they might not have been in the dungeon hack style.  If you don't follow the baseline assumptions the designers did when they designed 3E, the vaunted balance goes right out the window.House rules then become a viable option if your play style differs from what the 3E designers inferred.  This doesn't mean that house rules have "no value" or are "butchering" the system- in those cases where they are introduced, they are present to patch a hole the designers didn't consider that suits that group's play style better.  The fact that 3E has trouble handling other styles is a design fault- and the fact that it is integrated into the core system makes it that much harder to rectify without changing a lot of variables.As far as my house rules go, I said I had 5 pages in 2E, and over 70 in 3E.  If I cut out new spells, feats, monsters, and PrCs I have made up, I'm still left with over 30 pages of houserules.  These include the spellcaster classes for my world (I don't use wizards and sorcerers- I have 13 different magical traditions), domains than un-vanilla clerics (not needed in 2E), alt hp system, spellcasting roll rules, magical aura interactions, weapon skill grouping rules (similar to proficiencies but with classes of weapons- not needed in 2E), etc.  Granted my world has developed over the years since my 2E houserules, but its still a big increase in houserules compared to previous editions to fix holes and/or bring D&D more in line with my world and playstyle.  The 70 pages of houserules AREN'T my campaign setting though- that occupies over 700 pages of material. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f615.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":confused:" title="Confused    :confused:"  data-smilie="5"data-shortname=":confused:" /> Oh, and Ashrem- I have Midnight, played it, love it, and even played a session with Jeff Barber.  <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=";)" /></blockquote>

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