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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tessarael" data-source="post: 1565796" data-attributes="member: 12909">Unfortunately, Clerics and Wizards can sometimes be better combat tanks that the characters (e.g. Fighters) built for that purpose. This is a problem with the 3E and 3.5E rules as written. My suggestion is to allow/use the buff spells on the party tanks, rather than just personally. In our campaign we have an Eldritch Knight who buffs himself mostly. The result was that another Fighter-type character died. This is where both characters should have been buffed, and it was a mistake by the Eldritch Knight to not help buff fellow party members. In that sense, it is important to be a team player and help everyone, rather than outshining.So sounds like the Cleric doing 100 damage/attack was a problem. Two fixes: (a) allow these buffs to apply to the party tanks so they can shine too (b) fix the rule mechanics that allow too much damage.Ok, getting back to the case in hand ... sounds like   the current character isn't overly powerful. So maybe you're prejudging unfairly. The Minotaur Fighter/Barbarian and the Dragon Slayer will probably be the tanks of the party. The Gnomish Barbarian/Rogue will be useful when flanking, but not as good. This should be fine.Frankly, if a party tank was doing say on the order of 200 damage/round at around 12th-15th level it would be high, but not unplayable. Keep in mind that they're not usually taking down more than one or two opponents per round, and that the party's spellcasters are just as effective (e.g. Hold Person takes out one opponent, Dominate is even better).Other stuff ... tweaking an encounter is entirely reasonable. He has no right to complain that the Draconians were hard to spot. If this happened all the time, or his character never got the chance to shine, then he would have a right to complain.I guess many players don't come from a background where they are playing a home brew system or game where the DM makes lots of decisions on the fly. I do come from that background: as a DM I'll make the rules fit where they should and I'll substantially tweak encounters (Draconians mahahaha - you really think they'll be the standard Monster Manual entry that you use metagame knowledge for???). I don't want to railroad PCs or make rules which muck up their characters, but by the same token I don't want the same tweaked combination to work in every encounter. If that happens, change the encounters or fix the rules that allow the tweaking (e.g. disallow the Improved Trip feat - not that I have needed to do this). By the same token, if the PCs have the appropriate skills/abilities, they should be able to shine (e.g. If he makes his Knowledge roll for info on the Draconians I would give him some info on the non-standard version).To give a brief example along these lines when I was DM recently ... the players encountered an enemy spellcaster who cast a spell they could not recognize with a high Spellcraft roll. I did tell them that it was most probably a unique spell, and allowed them to figure out some info about it. (It was indeed an entirely unique spell to that spellcaster that they could not possibly have seen before - using the Unique Spell feat in Arcana Unearthed.) I think one of the players was trying to go exactly by the rules and wasn't used to my DM style, or things that might be outside the rules he was expecting in a metagame sense.The most important thing is to have fun ... sit down, sort it out so everyone has their share of the spotlight and are happy.</blockquote>

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