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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6882686" data-attributes="member: 4937">3.5 Core only will work fine provided...a) You don't allow magic items to be treated as part of character build.  Fully fungible wealth as magic items allows a player to optimize builds and make up for otherwise severe shortcomings in it.  1e tended to deal with this problem by having magic items firmly in the hands of the DM, and even having random magic item tables largely geared to providing gear for martial classes.  Keeping control over what magic items the party has access to, allows you to tweak the effectiveness of individual party members as needed.  In my current campaign for example, the most powerful spellcaster in the party is still dealing with having a 10 AC because gear to fix the AC is hard to come by, and tends to be prioritized by those who expect to be on the front lines.  It's hard to feel OP, if you could get one shotted if you ever find yourself in a situation where you don't have another party member face tanking for you.b) You don't have players optimizing spell-casters.  If you read most of the discussion of why Cleric, Druid, or Wizard is tier 1, a lot of it comes down to a list of mostly non-core spells that lets them solve every possible problem.  If you stick to core, it's not terribly obvious to the average player how you break casters.  If you have characters slinging fireballs and the like, you are golden.  Watch out though for the player that does things like take 3.5 Alter Self, and uses it to shapechange into a Troglodyte to get a +6 natural AC bonus.  That's indicative of a player that is going to break the game at higher levels, and may require preemptively house ruling some spells.  (Note that in 3.0 Alter Self, you couldn't pull this trick, so how you house rule Alter Self is obvious).  But, you made a good choice; so much of the broken is gone.  No whisper gnomes; no strongheart halflings.  No Arcane Thesis.   No Domain Wizard.  No Uncanny Forethought.  No Wizard variant subclassing.  No split ray.  No twin spell.  No Incantrix.  OMG just so many fewer headaches.   You may still have problems with players who really know how to abuse battlefield control (web, glitterdust, stinking cloud, etc.), but the degree of brokenness is still down and the nice thing about battlefield control and buff/debuff strategies is that the spell-caster is playing nice with the rest of the party, so even if they are what makes the party work the other players are in on the glory.  Likewise, you may end up with a player that goes into crafting his own stuff, and that is also very optimal, but the XP costs of self-crafting tend to mean that the character lags behind the rest of the party in levels, which in turn means again that they can't hog all the spotlight.</blockquote>

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