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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JediSoth" data-source="post: 4040662" data-attributes="member: 13882">My main problem with DMing D&D 3.X was the power-creep that occurred with each new book.We're casual gamers. We attempt to game every other weekend, but that doesn't always happen because 75% of us have families and all of us have other things that crop up from time to time. Up until last year, I was going to school part time while working full time, so I usually adapted pre-written adventures to fit my own metaplot. Usually adaptation meant changing places and names, but leaving the encounters as-is.All of us are friends and we game for fun, so I usually would let them try out options and new classes from the newest WotC book that came out (because for a LONG time, I was the only person in the group that understood that third-party stuff was for D&D, too). The problem is (and I ran into this A LOT with World's Largest Dungeon), most adventures don't take into account the latest and greatest feats, spells, and racial & class abilities, so the PCs got more and more powerful for their level and the monsters didn't because we didn't know they'd be so underpowered until after the fact.When you game as infrequently as we do, you don't want to make a blanket statement like "OK, ONLY PHB classes and races for this whole campaign. Period." If I'd done that with the last two campaigns I ran, that would mean using only the PHB for about 80% of the time between the publication of 3.5 and the announcement of 4E.You could that with the fact that even though I owned most of the books the players wanted to use, I simply did not have the time nor the capacity to memorize and analyze (and still don't) every new option and spell (especially the spells, there are just too many for me to be intimately familiar with all of them). So, then I get blindsided when the PCs encounter a couple of vrock that should provide them with a challenge and the PCs wipe the floor with these demons inside of three rounds. It was frustrating as a DM.So frustrating, in fact, I got burned out and hung up the DM's hat.But I did get over my psychosis about limited the player resources though, and I'm ready to DM again and limit the number of books beyond the core they can access without my express permission (in fact, I would really like my next campaign to be Arcana Evolved only). So it was frustrating, but also educational.</blockquote>

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