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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3783649" data-attributes="member: 4937">Yes, basically, that's the problem.  Many of the problems people complain about in 3.X don't come from the core rule books, or if they do, they aren't experienced in there worse form by just using the core material.  The real problem comes from the splat books that open up all these different options.And as for the 'christmas tree effect', the real problem isn't the static bonus items like amulet's of natural armor because with those, you just compute your AC once and then you don't look at the number.  The real problem in 3.X came from the spell buffs, and IMO it came as the unintended side effect of what was otherwise a good decision.  In a nutshell, its the side effect of 'nerfing' fireball.  In theory, you could have got yourself in the same sort of situation of tracking lots of dynamic bonuses from various spells in 1st edition, but in practice it didn't happen that often because direct damage was just so much more efficient than buffing your allies.  When 3.0 capped damage on evocation spells and simultaneously buffed monsters with big CON bonuses plus increased monsters damage dealing capacity, it created a situation where tactically buffing your party had bigger returns on the investment of resources than just blowing up the opposition.  Bonus hoarding was always a problem in AD&D, but in 3.X it became the problem.  Attempts to fix the problem by reducing the duration of buff spells as was done in 3.5 only made the problem worse, because it put you in a situation where you couldn't treat the bonuses as psuedo-static (and contributed to the 15 minute adventuring day).  Bonuses could be changing from round to round, and were certainly changing from encounter to encounter.  At low levels, no big deal, but at high levels the math became tedious if you cared about accuracy at all.But IMO the problem is managable within core.  It's only with the nearly limitless options (most of which were never playtested and certainly never playtested together) in the splat books that things start getting truly out of hand, and you start getting like 16 types of bonuses, some with durations in rounds, some in minutes, some in 10's of minutes, some effectively per encounter, etc.</blockquote>

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