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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5434391" data-attributes="member: 4937">I don't consider my opinion of whether or not it is broken all that relevant.  But, also, I don't consider myself anywhere near alone in noticing that the 3rd edition was broken, breakable, and got more and more frustrating the more and more books that were added.  I've seen many posts by people who said, "My game stopped being fun, and then I did away with so much of the drek I'd accumulated and when I did I remembered why I liked 3e", and I've seen many many posts where people complained of frustrations with 3e that I haven't and don't think I will have. Honestly, don't you think that if I thought I could achieve what I wanted by working within the system, that I would have done so?  Do you have any idea how nice it is when a player says, "Hey can I take this and this and this?", to be able to say, "It's in the rules, isn't it?" and "Then, yes, you can be a wolverine changling shaman with misanthrope (humanoids), and yes, crazy as that combination may seem, I think fey nursemaid to a fallen noble house is a cool character concept."If I thought that the stock D20 and PrCs helped me achieve flexibility and balance and contributed to my Grimm's Fairy Tale/Lovecraftian/Tolkienesk world, then I'd have ate it up.  Well, you've gained a little streamlining and that's something.  But you've also reduced the total size of the rules and you've on the net reduced the steep power curve D20 experiences especially optimizing like that, and you've on the net reduced the system mastery required to move from concept to implementation.  You've also all but elimenated the imbalance issues, that come from loading up builds with more and more power and more and more goodies.  I mean that sample build is almost in every fashion superior to a 20th level sorcerer save at the cost of 1 spellcaster level (and the fact that that might almost matter says alot about the problems with trying to balance everything up to the spellcaster).  You've got more skill points, more class abilities, more of just about everything.  And you haven't just helped the game out in terms of making it easier to make the PC you want, but you've streamlined the process of making competitive and interesting NPC's as well.  And if it shaves 10 minutes or 30 minutes off the time that it takes to stat out a high level NPC, well I'm all for that too.By late 3.5 it seemed everything was in a power race.  Everything from straight spellcaster on down was just getting better and better, and monsters were getting powered up further and further in response so that early 3.0 CR weren't even remotely in line with late 3.5 CR's.  Everything was getting more and more optimizable.The longer I stayed at EnWorld the more moaning I heard by people about how 3e had lost its charm, and the more sure I was that I was going in the right direction. It's wrong in the sense that I think it is the system and approach that ended up killing 3e D&D and which, for all the good direction they took it, will probably end up killing Pathfinder eventually if they aren't careful.  If someone enjoys it, fine, I understand a lot of people enjoy it.   But I see it more as making a virtue out of a vice, than a thing necessarily good in itself.  It's the system you have, so you might as well make the most if it.  But if they hadn't taken the system that way, the radical overhaul of 4e probably wouldn't have been nearly as tempting or necessary.</blockquote>

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