D&D 3E/3.5 Issues that might arise from a "core book only" 3.5 campaign and possible fixes?

[Ridley's Cohort]

Celebrim,

I do not really disagree with any of your points. I am coming at the issue from an orthogonal direction: I am trying to give fairly easy to execute practical advice on how to run a successful campaign using 3.5 rules, to address the OP's concerns.

So rather than delve into a laundry list of issues with 3.5, I am pointing to one particular thing a DM can do that will band-aid over the worst of the problems without much effort. My suggestion is: give REALLY cool weapons and armor (and ignore the WBL to accomplish this).

My observation of players at the table is that they do not care about abstract notions of balance. They care about having fun. As long as they are having fun, they can easily be distracted away from power balance considerations. Interesting and powerful weapons will do a good enough job of helping the fightery classes seize enough limelight time to not care about how much more powerful the wizard is.

 

[Grogg of the North]

Just to touch on what [MENTION=545]Ridley's Cohort[/MENTION] said, I once DM'd a game where the party found a magical sword. The grip, pommel, cross guard and rain guard were carved to look like the skull of some demon with horns. Mist poured out of the eye sockets. And as your hand wrapped around the grip you could feel the blade hum with power.

It was a +1 sword.

The players loved it and never got rid of it. One of my players, the veteran of the group, was astonished by the sword. Especially since he had had a string of DM's that described magic swords as just "shinier" and "sharper".

Even something mundane, if described cool enough, can be coveted by the players. "He's a knight in armor" is so weak compared to "The swordsman steps forth clad in glistening, gilded, hardened steel. Two griffins raise up on his breast. The beasts' wings are spread and their claws bared...." Now you can see your group fighting over who gets to wear that masterwork plate armor.

Yes, sometimes you have to speed things up. It's late, the group is tired, and you need to finish up. We've all been there. It's something that I still struggle with. But sometimes being verbose can do so much to help a game.

 

[Celebrim]

Celebrim,

I do not really disagree with any of your points. I am coming at the issue from an orthogonal direction: I am trying to give fairly easy to execute practical advice on how to run a successful campaign using 3.5 rules, to address the OP's concerns.

So rather than delve into a laundry list of issues with 3.5, I am pointing to one particular thing a DM can do that will band-aid over the worst of the problems without much effort. My suggestion is: give REALLY cool weapons and armor (and ignore the WBL to accomplish this).

I understand where you are coming from, but the entire point of my post is, "That won't work." (Well, ok, in theory it could, but I'm not sure that it would be in any way intuitive what that really cool weapons and armor would be like, and ultimately it would be isometric with my analysis. Suffice to say, core items don't skew toward the "really cool" things you'd actually need, nor is the effective implementation of them that maintains interesting gameplay obvious.)

Or putting it in other words, you can't fix the problems using the core rules, and the rules bloat of late 3.5 makes the problem worse.

If I had to make a one sentence solution, the one single house rule that would solve the most problems, it would be, "Spells and spell-like effects no longer increase the DC of saving throws by their spell level." In a stroke, you're going to eliminate a decent portion of the spell-casters dominance of the action economy and their ability to subvert ablative hit points to hit 'win buttons'. That's not enough, as that's only one bullet point in a fair sized list that only addresses one of 3.X's problems, but its amazing how much balance that one change picks up.

My observation of players at the table is that they do not care about abstract notions of balance. They care about having fun. As long as they are having fun, they can easily be distracted away from power balance considerations. Interesting and powerful weapons will do a good enough job of helping the fightery classes seize enough limelight time to not care about how much more powerful the wizard is.

This is self-contradictory. The whole point of balance in a game is that imbalance is not fun and becomes more and more unfun the more studied and understood the game becomes. The whole point of interesting and powerful weapons is that they attempt to restore that balance at least enough that it doesn't become a huge distraction with players with little experience or system mastery, and/or little desire for challenge as an aesthetic of play. The fun doesn't distract from power balance considerations. Quite the contrary, as long as they are distracted from balance considerations, they can easily have fun. But maintaining that becomes a more and more delicate dance, and frankly ends up involving more and more addressing of the balance problems.

 

[Tony Vargas]

If I may remark: In my experience. the scaling of attacks by enemies in 4e was an illusion. Everyone's attacks scaled in 4e, a +1 every two levels. Everyone's defenses ("Saves" in other words) also scaled at exactly the same rate. So as characters advanced, their numbers got bigger, but the target numbers scaled at exactly the same rate, since the adversaries were (presumably) advancing at a similar rate.

It was closer to 1:1 once everything was factored in, but yes, that's the 'Treadmill' and it was only as true as your DM was committed to invariably using only exactly-at-level-challenges... ....which could have ranged from absolutely true, to laughable...

Celebrim, I do not really disagree with any of your points. I am trying to give fairly easy to execute practical advice on how to run a successful campaign using 3.5 rules, to address the OP's concerns. My suggestion is: give REALLY cool weapons and armor (and ignore the WBL to accomplish this).

That might help, especially if they had additional spell-like abilities built into them over and above existing weapon/armor echantments. Things like the old Helm of Brilliance and Plate Mail of Etherealness or intelligent magical weapons....

My observation of players at the table is that they do not care about abstract notions of balance. They care about having fun.

Sure, and designers obsessing over abstract notions of balance can provide a firm foundation for that fun. Or, not. When not, it's up to the DM to do something. Fixing all the balance (and other) issues with 3.5, as you note, is probably not practical - though Core-only E6 isn't that hard to implement and takes care of a lot.

That leaves the DM using circumstance, 'force' and rulings to make his own fun. Cool items for the PCs that'd otherwise be marginalized could be part of that.

If I had to make a one sentence solution, the one single house rule that would solve the most problems, it would be, "Spells and spell-like effects no longer increase the DC of saving throws by their spell level." In a stroke, you're going to eliminate a decent portion of the spell-casters dominance of the action economy and their ability to subvert ablative hit points to hit 'win buttons'. That's not enough, as that's only one bullet point in a fair sized list that only addresses one of 3.X's problems, but its amazing how much balance that one change picks up.

Interesting option.

 

[Nezkrul]

Another option is to allow a player actually intending to play a martial class without multiclassing is to let them take feats from splat books. It opens up lots of builds for them that overtime can help them be more powerful, but not as game changing as the pure casters.