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Message: <blockquote data-quote="StGabe" data-source="post: 3398520" data-attributes="member: 49275">Unfortunately I've reached a threshold on the number of things I can constructively respond to.  I'll just say that I greatly disagree with most of your statements and I'm not sure that you are giving what I am writing a fair read.  For example, you are conflating the concept of character overlap and character power.  They are two seperate and concerning problems.  I.e. the fighter/mage you guys seem to be going for both overlaps the wizard's abilities (which does definitely muddy and undermine his group role, you can have two wizard's in a group but there's a reason why people tend to not do that) AND doing so with a set of abilities that is otherwise significantly better than any other abilities the wizard has.I also think that your comments about clerics and druids are completely irrelevant.  There are some issues with these classes (albeit manageable ones) and I'd love to talk about them -- in another thread.  The existence of balance issues in other areas of the game doesn't mean that I will give up on balance altogether.  In campaigns that I run, I have very specific ways that I deal with clerics and druids but really, that's a thread for House Rules and not here.As for "results", I'm absolutely concerned with results.  In my experience, campaigns that try to stick to the original design concept of 3e, modularized, balanced class levels end up being a lot more fun.  Ultimately balance is there not to make rules designers happy but because it makes multiiplayer games more fun.  You want your characters to spend time playing fun characters and overcoming challenges together, not worrying about whether they have powergamed enough to keep up with the other players.  In my experience the core 3.0 system, more or less, allows for lots of freedom to express a lot of fun characters and is reasonably well balanced (with some known exceptions).  Prestige classes are a great addition to this system but need to basically have just as much playtesting and thought put into them as any of the core classes.  Mostly, the published PrC's don't have this.  In this case, in my experience of "results", Wizard's are very powerful and, while not optimal or completely synergistic, just taking a mix of fighter and wizard (or sorceror) classes can be quite effective and there isn't a need to go any further by allowing a vastly improved Wizard subclass that gets levels with +1hp and the best BAB essentially "for free".  Nor does a fighter/mage combo need 9th (or even 7th or 8th) level spells to be competitive and "viable" and can be fine with even less as well....From such experiences playing the game I believe that you'll end up with a far better balanced, and fun system, if you say that no class should get a full BAB on levels unless they are getting, at most, 1/2 of a spellcasting level (i.e. a spellcasting level every other level) and any prestige classes that break this just shouldn't be allowed in the game.  Going further you can realize that any substantial level benefits need to come at the expense of something else, that you can't front-load the class with its best abilities at level 1, etc.  I.e. common sense design stuff.</blockquote>

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