HoboGod
First Post
Not to defend the system--it's horribly unbalanced--but actually using a CR3 monster as a level 3 pac was broken. That's because of soemthing they learned and changed into 4e: monsters can have tons of out-of-combat abilities that have NOTHING to do with combat. Charm Person at will, for instance, is useless in the hands of a CR 3 goblin but broken in the hands of a level 3 PC. Further, some combat abilities are far more powerful in the hands of PCs. A well-prepared divine spellcaster can bypass almost any type of 3.5 damage resistance, but a huge number of monsters simply cannot hurt a PC with a high resistance bypassed by, say, Silver.
Oh, no doubt. I've seen many PCs abuse a high level adjustment race to do something ridiculously overpowered in a specialist role. However, an overpowered specialist isn't an effective player. I had a player wanting to be a succubus, he specialized the succubus to utterly crush any encounter that involved baddies of human intelligence. However, any animal, undead, or construct seemed to send the succubus running due to her sheer worthlessness against them. So, type A encounters are pushovers and type B encounters are a tougher encounter level than the party might like to fight because one player backs out. Trading general proficiency for circumstantial pwnage makes for a bad PC.