It's different/It's easy, therefore it's powerful

[Cadfan]

Conventional wisdom dictates that it is the Wizard, Cleric and Druid. Sometimes Wizard, Druid, Cleric. Anyway, those three.

Conventional wisdom offline, in my experience, seems to often involve counting up how many "d6 damage per level" spells a character can throw in single digit levels, and concluding that the class with the highest number is the most powerful.

Obviously that's reductive and wrong. But I've often encountered that thinking.

 

[Halivar]

I've never cared about relative power-levels, except insofar as some classes are underpowered. The only reason I can see a player caring about another player being over-powered is if we're talking about PVP, or if the "over-powered" character is a lone wolf who shrugs off teamwork. Both of which I discourage at the table.

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

Also, traditional 'Vancian' casting isn't hard to understand, IME. I'm saying this as a DM who has introduced a fair few players to 3e, over several years. Sure, YMMV, and I respect that. But, what you're saying doesn't necessarily apply beyond your own experiences. Or maybe, not very far. *shrug*

It's not hard to understand. It is, however, hard to master and very unintuitive.

Hard to master is obvious. Planning for what kinds of things you're going to see is not something a newbie can do. But reactively choosing from a relatively short list? If you have 2 brain cells to rub together, you can pull that off almost as well as a genius.

Sorceror: Zero learning curve, pretty easy to master
Wizard: Not bad at low levels, learning curve as the number of spells available scales logarithmically better than number of spell slots... gets tough. And there's a lot of non-linearity in matching your spells to your assumptions of what you'll face that day.

If you're not a particularly great DM, you're going to see the newbie wizard sort of get confused a couple levels in while the sorceror continues to fry things and decide the sorceror is more powerful than the wizard. If, like most games, you never reach the high levels, the wizard never gets the chance to show the benefits of his better feat selection and overall versatility.

Unintuitive is also obvious, and since you've introduced many people to 3e, I'm surprised you're not familiar with it. You don't see magic types in most literature able to do something only once or twice a day unless it's really hard to do. And they seem able to do simple things constantly. You say you've never met a new player who was confused by Vancian magic. On the other hand, I've never met a new player who wasn't confused by the entire concept.

Somewhere inbetween us, reality probably lies.

I've rarely seen anyone have trouble figuring out how to do it, but I don't remember ever introducing an adult to the game who didn't wonder why it would work like that.

Man... heavy duty case of deja vu. I think I remember typing almost this exact post back when 3e was newish, and some of us were wishing they had just thrown out Vancian then.

 

[ProfessorCirno]

Also, traditional 'Vancian' casting isn't hard to understand, IME. I'm saying this as a DM who has introduced a fair few players to 3e, over several years. Sure, YMMV, and I respect that. But, what you're saying doesn't necessarily apply beyond your own experiences. Or maybe, not very far. *shrug*

So...my personal experiences are wrong and incorrect...because of your personal experiences?

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

I've never cared about relative power-levels, except insofar as some classes are underpowered. The only reason I can see a player caring about another player being over-powered is if we're talking about PVP, or if the "over-powered" character is a lone wolf who shrugs off teamwork. Both of which I discourage at the table.

You'd be surprised. A lot of players will silently be annoyed that another player is doing better than them. It depends on the type of players you play with. "Actors" and "Storytellers" will often not care. Most "Slayers" do care. Their goal is to do as much damage as possible killing as many creatures as possible. If another player is consistently outdamaging them, they begin to feel useless and the game becomes less fun for them.

I know, due to playing in a group of almost entirely slayers.

 

[Jhaelen]

So the psion is limiting the kind of encounters you can throw at the party, he can do things no one else can and he deals more damage. That's pretty much all the indicators that the character is OP.

Of course he is - compared to the rest of the party. That doesn't necessarily mean psions are OP in general.

And as has been pointed out:
Simply having four encounters a day will show the limitations of a psion character. It's just something I rarely do because combats are taking so much time and I don't want to have so many encounters per session. We've had a couple of sessions where the other players wanted to press on even though the psion was out of PP. We also quite often have encounters interrupting rest.

The fighter player's PC is pretty much OP, too. I made the mistake to allow him to play the 3.0 lasher prestige class... I really understand now, why it wasn't updated to 3.5!

But the point I was trying to illustrate: Being OP or not doesn't really matter if it doesn't affect the playing experience for the players.

As the fighter player recently said to me: "I'm surprised you still manage to challenge us in new and unexpected ways after all this time." It might take more careful planning, but there are always ways to challenge a party - even if it's made up of CoDzillas.

 

[Theroc]

It's not quite the same as what you guys are discussing mostly, but in a PbP here on Enworld, I asked the DM whether or not he'd allow the Warlock class (He does not have the books, but said he would try to look at the material even if he did have it.)

When he got his hands on the information, he immediately balked at seeing the warlock's "At will" nature of invocations.

I started a thread in the 3.X rules area to discuss whether or not Warlocks were 'OP' or "broken", and showed it along with my own observations from theory on the subject, and the DM seems more amenable to the idea now.

Basically, it came down to showing him that the at will powers are generally weaker than the powers other classes have.