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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manabarbs" data-source="post: 6115542" data-attributes="member: 6717251">There's additional complication when you look at the whole edition in that the design itself doesn't treat various features as having a constant cost. There are two strains of design in 3.5 expansion books (with some stuff in the middle.) The first recognizes that the PHB is home to most of the strongest and most of the weakest classes in the entire edition, and essentially abandons the PHB's valuation of the relative worth of different features, shooting for a middle ground. The drawback of this design is that it tended to produce classes that were either obsolete on arrival and mostly thematic choices as a result (Warmage), in the cases where the class was a fairer version of a very powerful class, or classes that made the PHB classes look like chumps (Warblade). The second strain of design treats the PHB classes as acceptable baselines and bases the relatively value of things around that. These designs essentially agree to roll with the PHB's estimates, which means that the designs produced by this method tend to fall fairly close in power level to the PHB classes they're based on. The drawback of this design strategy is that it produced additional crazy powerful monster classes (Archivist) along with more total wastes of space (Samurai).Designs that use the first strategy essentially are reassigning the abstract "point values" that the PHB picked; they recognize that no, having a large HD and a full BAB is not on its own around as good as having access to a massive spell list.It's also difficult to weigh things across the edition's lifespan because the value of things changes over time, although not all things. If "d10 HD" is a 20-point feature with just the PHB, it remains somewhere in that range even when you throw in all of the edition's material. If "unrestricted access to the cleric spell list" is a 600-point feature with just the PHB, though, it might be a 1200-point feature with everything accessible  because that's more spells.</blockquote>

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