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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 7927029" data-attributes="member: 8461">There's another aspect to casters which is somewhat tangential to the specific issues brought up in this article, but which is an important aspect to their overall spike in power in Third Edition: making magic items became formulaic, which in turn made it player-facing.Although the ability to make magic items was feat-restricted in 3E, rather than being baked into spellcasting classes the way it had been before, and the magic items themselves were in the DMG, everything else lowered the barrier for player-characters making magic items. Whereas before the process had largely depended on unspecified rare materials, it now consisted purely of expenditures of gold and experience points. Now, those were still something of a cost restriction, but not in the way that rare materials had been. Worse, the entire process detracted from game-play rather than added to it.I'm generalizing here (though, to quote Dave Barry, as is often the case when I generalize, I don't care), but in prior editions of D&D, if you wanted to make a wand of fireballs you told the DM, who told you that after some research (largely conducted by hired sages off-screen while you and your group were adventuring), making one would require the feathers of a phoenix, the blood of a noble efreet, and a ruby that had been dipped into the heart of an active volcano. And just like that, you had several new adventure hooks for a player-driven quest, presuming that the wizard could convince the other PCs to go help them collect what they needed.In 3E, the player just made sure they had Craft Wand, and then declared that they were taking twelve days to make it, paid the 11,250 gp and 450 XP, and went adventuring with their new wand. Which was just like every other wand, unlike how a lot of magic items in 1E and 2E often had small twists that made them unique. In 3E, your wand of fireballs shot fifty fireball spells at minimum caster level for 5d6 damage, with a DC 14 Reflex save for half. (That's another issue that changed how things worked for casters in Third Edition; how the target numbers for saves were calculated.) In 1E or 2E, that wand would have been Kerrigan's wand of flames, that cast fireball so many times, but also provided a +2 bonus on reaction rolls for creatures from the Plane of Fire and granted a +1 bonus on proficiency checks to start fires. Those were incredibly minor bonuses, but they gave the wand its own unique identity, rather than being something that might as well have come off of an assembly line (which gave us the <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20070306073342/http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/dd/20070302a" target="_blank">"Big Six"</a>).There was no "magic market" either, where you could just buy the magic items you couldn't make for yourself, but that tended to work in everyone's favor, even if spellcasters seemed to benefit more (in my experience) from being able to buy cheap scrolls of whatever spell they needed.</blockquote>

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