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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7554979" data-attributes="member: 4937">Yeah, I 'fixed' this issue by ruling that wands were arcane only devices.  You could not create a wand for divine spells.   While some limited range of staffs from the older editions could be used by Clerics, the vast majority were M-U only.  Opening up wands to divine casters not only made wand creation easier, it provided options that they'd never had before.In my opinion, given the buffs to Cleric and Rogue in 3e, adding divine wands to the mix was entirely unnecessary.It has, IMO, always been a problem and it's something that was certainly discussed back in 1e/2e days. This argument misses the mark on two important points in my opinion.  First of all, the Wizard's spells you mention are vastly more reliable and impactful than equivalent thief (or later Rogue) abilities.  For example, spider climb according to the 1e and even 3e texts allows the user to cling to even the ceiling, a feat which in both 1e and 3e required epic levels of climbing ability.  Additionally, it has basically no chance of failure.  Invisibility is vastly more capable than 'Hide in Shadows' and allows a degree of concealment that application of mundane skill does not and in situations where the mundane skill would not be allowed.   See also for example the Cleric's 'Find Traps' ability or the 'Knock' spell for opening a door.  Suffice to say that there is nothing that a 1e/2e thief can do that a spell-caster can't do much better.This leaves you arguing that the thief has broad though not deep application, but in practice this is almost never the case.  The truth is that most of the time, during the course of an adventuring day, you run into obstacles of a particular sort only a few times.  The thief is rarely if ever called on to "do things all day".   There is probably only that one wall that really needs climbing, that one trap to disarm, that one locked door that really needs opening, and so forth.  While a thief might save a spell-caster a couple of spell slots per day, quite quickly tables tended to realize that the number of slots that a thief was saving was less than the number of slots that a character might have were the thief replaced with another spell-caster.  And since a high level thief had basically no utility beyond freeing up a couple of spell slots, and had basically no impact on combat to speak of (if you could backstab for every single attack, an unrealistic expectation, you'd still be inferior to the fighter or M-U's normal damage output).Sure, but there were plenty of wands that encroached cheaply even before 3e, and more to the point, Rogues became vastly more useful in 3e than they had been in 1e.  Their combat ability significantly improved, with better (effective) THAC0, sneak attack replacing backstab, and iterative attacks like a fighter.   They acquired a handy range of defensive abilities like uncanny dodge, trap sense, and evasion.  And skills generally became much broader in scope and more useful than they had been in earlier editions.   There was still problems with spells completely replacing skills or trivializing them, but that was more a problem with spells written to be absolutely reliable and otherwise written with naïve backwards compatibility with former editions than a problem with the rest of the system.</blockquote>

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