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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 7823559" data-attributes="member: 8461">I'm not sure what to call an "important" difference per se. My impression is that a lot of little tweaks got made that, taken together, were notable in a way that none of them were on their own.The thing is, for all the good work that the 3.0 designers did, little things fell through the cracks. That is, there were various corners where the rules seemed to be written without fully comprehending the scope of how things worked under the new d20 System. The result left some areas open to rather odd exploits, while other areas were neglected.For example, druids and rangers in 3.0 didn't receive animal companions as part of their class features. Admittedly, it was technically listed on their class tables, but the listing just noted how they had the animal friendship spell, which was only on the druid and ranger spell lists and which they cast to receive a number of Hit Dice worth of animal companions equal to their caster level, divided up among however many animal companions they wanted. (Non-adventuring characters, i.e. NPCs, got twice that many.)Now, that doesn't sound so bad overall; that was how things had worked in AD&D 1E and 2E, basically. But this is where the 3E mechanics come into play. Since animal friendship was a 1st-level spell unto itself, you can put it on a scroll or even in a wand. At that point, someone with the Use Magic Device skill can come along and get a free animal companion (or several, if the magic item was made with a higher caster level). That wasn't quite as bad as it sounds, because UMD was a restricted skill in 3E; only bards and rogues could take any ranks in it at all. But that just meant you only needed to level-dip into bard or rogue, and you could buy up to four ranks in it (and add your Charisma modifier on top of that). Since there wasn't really a penalty for failing a UMD check (even on a natural 1 you just had to wait a day before trying the check again), there was no reason why you couldn't try the skill check again and again until you succeeded, so long as you could potentially hit the target number in the first place. So it was basically free animal companions for everyone until 3.5, when the animal friendship spell went extinct and animal companions became a pure class feature.Another one was multiclassing. Remember those "patch" classes for multiclass spellcasters? Eldritch Knight, Arcane Trickster, and the Mystic Theurge? Those weren't in 3.0. It was like the designers were all remembering the way dual-classing worked in AD&D and didn't fully grasp what multiclassing did to spellcasters in 3E.Little things like that were all over the place.</blockquote>

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