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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dandu" data-source="post: 5531494" data-attributes="member: 85158">Magic Jar allows you to possess someone's body. Just saying.Also: Scent can ferret an impostor out iirc.I agree, it's just that most people have not had the training required to use them properly, which has resulted in an innate skepticism when someone says that they have statistical evidence for a position. I don't know about you, admittedly, so perhaps I was hasty in doubting your expertise in this area?They're of the opinion that third is more mechanically focused, but that roleplaying has always been up to the player. They certainly don't agree that "RP  gave its place to Min/Maxing, and the power hungry player is now  safe  from thinking or acting out his character properly."To be honest, old man, I think you're just complaining about us kids these days and our iPhones, and hula-hoops and solar panels and bottled water and belly piercings and...Hold on. You conclude that, simply because people take prestige classes over regular classes, that prestige classes must therefore be overpowered?That's not enough for me. The original shadowdancer, for example, is underpowered yet people often took it. The same goes for classes like Dwarven Defender, Arcane Archer, and a few others I listed. The powers those prestige classes grant are less useful than what you would have gotten if you had stayed in the base class that they were intended for, ie Rogue instead of Duelist. What they are, however, is different. They provide different abilities than the base classes which could make people interested in them. The Assassin, for example does provide some interesting abilities, most of which aren't powerful.To quote Tuvok, your logic is flawed.When you say "majority", I trust you say the majority of people you play with rather than the majority of D&D players? I am not a statistician unlike, perhaps, yourself, but I do remember that one cannot judge a large population off of a small sample size. Offhand, I'd say you'd need to preform stratified random sampling on a diverse population of at least thirty players, preferably three hundred, and correct for tons of possible statistical biases before you can even make a guess at what the playstyle of the general D&D playing populous is.You do realize that everything is subject to DM approval, right? Even core prestige classes, and especially supplemental materials? WotC has explicitly stated this before. A poor DM might let in unbalanced expansion material... but he'd also let in unbalanced core material such as Druids, one of the few classes that gets worse if you prestige class out of it unless the prestige class is called Planar Shepard.Also, most of the Complete series isn't worth the paper it's printed on (most things are underpowered), but I suppose that's an argument for another time.I will agree that WotC is a greedy corporation though. Of course, given that profits in the RPG industry are slim to none, I am having a hard time getting angry at them for that. You do know that a core only wizard is capable of curb-stomping encounters better than a fighter with tons of expansion support, right? I can demonstrate this to you if you'd like to roll up the most broken fighter you can imagine and pair him with one of my wizards in a fight against various CR appropriate monsters.To be frank, I see this problem with unprepared player than with the system itself. My friends who play 2e say that, in general, rounds took about the same amount of time for them. I personally take a few minutes to conclude a round in my D&D games when playing a spellcaster.Actually, that seems to be part of the popularity of Neverwinter Nights, whose online community is still alive with groups of PC gamers having entire campaigns on servers run by an online DM. I hear the roleplaying's pretty good on some of them.Look, I can only address a paragraph of this magnitude in the most general of terms, so forgive me for that.As I understand it, part of the problem comes from hiring English majors. That explains how parts of the game are mechanically unbalanced (though, unlike you, I consider the  unbalance to generally be towards underpowered classes and prestige classes rather than overpowered ones). As for why the roleplaying part is poor... well, I suspect most of the good English majors are writing more important literature, or teaching, or something.As for expansion material releasing new stuff, I think some of it can be justified. Some concepts are not supported by core. For example, unarmed combat was pretty bad in core. Limited ability to overcome DR coupled with no means of enchanting unarmed strikes outside of an Amulet of Mighty Fists which only added numerical enchantments and left out special abilities, which also took the neck slot that an HP boosting Amulet of Health, or an AC boosting Amulet of Natural Armor.... gah, it was a mess. The core class build around unarmed combat, the monk, had a distinct problem contributing to combat above level... 8 or so? Maybe 10?Actually, from my experience, 4e is balanced (if bland), with less mechanical emphasis on things than 3e, which should in theory promote roleplaying? I don't particularly like 4e, but I don't really have a huge issue with it either.Would you say that a "freeform" RP which has no rules and consists entirely of people roleplaying their characters to be better from an RP perspective than D&D?I personally don't think so. I have observed many of those on forums, and they generally tend towards being low quality as well. Most people aren't good roleplayers, just like most people aren't good actors, or musicians, or scientists, or statisticians. Don't blame the game system for a player's shortcomings.Would you prefer if they did it with one class, like a Druid?I apologize, but it was in a discussion that you started about how an Arcane Trickster would have a higher initiative than a character I posted.Sometimes a man will pursue art for art's sake, because he finds it beautiful.Disclaimer: I am nothing like Plato.</blockquote>

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