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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 8606742" data-attributes="member: 6877472">You can powergame as a 3.5 Fighter, but anything you do can be countered with ease with the right enemies.  I think the most insane shenanigans I ever saw used Karmic Strike, Robilar's Gambit, and Double Strike so that anyone having the nerve to attack you in melee provokes an opportunity attack and gets hit back twice upside the head for their trouble.  And that still pales compared to the sorts of things one can get up to with magic.So I think for a definition of powergaming, we have to go with "outstrips the other player characters and hogs more of the spotlight in encounters", which can be done trivially depending on how optimized one's group is.If one guy is playing a sword and shield Human Fighter with a 16 Intelligence (because that suits the character) and another guy is playing a multiclassed Half-Orc Barbarian/Cleric who can cast Bull's Strength on themselves and uses a Greataxe, even though that really doesn't meet the metric for "powergaming" in aggregate*, it can be a downright menace at the table when the Half-Orc goes all out and grants themselves a Strength of 30 at level 4 (32 if they have Strength Domain and the time to Enlarge themselves as well).Those resources might be better used on the Fighter in most cases, due to action economy, but if you have time to cast a spell or two before combat, you can get away with it, so it really depends on encounter design and how lenient your DM is.3.5 wasn't designed with inter-party balance in mind, because that was a new concept; AD&D didn't really balance characters against each other in any meaningful way.  Sure, your Thief might get a few extra levels over your Fighter, but they were never going to be equal to the Fighter in combat, so all they really got was out of combat utility which can't even be measured on the same metric.*not compared to Warshapers, Weretouched Masters, Incantatrixes, Planar Shepherds and really, anyone who wanted to warp the game out of shape with abuse of Divine Metamagic, "free" Metamagic, caster level boosts, Embrace/Reject the Dark Chaos loops, or any other "theoretical optimization" tricks that could only function in a white room with the DM asleep at the wheel.Or purely core stunts like scry-n-die or making simulacrums of efreeti for infinite Wishes, that require the DM to put their foot down, or assume NPC's discovered these tricks first, and were better at it than the PC's.</blockquote>

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