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<blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 6073794" data-attributes="member: 22424">This is actually quite an important point. For a long time, the received wisdom was that characters had to have gear (and the right gear) in order to remain 'competitive'. Indeed, even Andy Collins believed that this was the case - he refers to it in his &quot;Design &amp; Development&quot; articles about the &quot;Magic Item Compendium&quot;.However, the first chapter of &quot;Trailblazer&quot; actually analyses this 'fact' in some detail, and finds that (in the core at least), this is simply not the case. In fact, the core of 3.5e is balanced on the assumption that characters won't have access to particular items.(Note that this only applies to the core. As the edition went on, there was something of an arms race between monster books and player books - if you throw an MM5 monster against a Core Rules only party, you need to consider the CR a few points higher than MM5 says.)Disallow item crafting and purchase, and use the random treasure tables from the DMG, and suddenly the balance of the game changes quite dramatically.Now, that said...It's really not terribly good design to assume that characters won't have optimised items and then also include as a standard part of the game two easy mechanisms for characters to acquire those same optimised items.The 'quick fix' for 3e would be to remove Item Crafting and also the ability to buy items from the game. (Oh, and use the random tables for treasure placement.) But doing so is quite likely to meet with significant resistance from players.A better fix, albeit one that requires much more work, would be to fix the magic items so that they don't cause problems.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="delericho, post: 6073794, member: 22424"] This is actually quite an important point. For a long time, the received wisdom was that characters [i]had to[/i] have gear (and the right gear) in order to remain 'competitive'. Indeed, even Andy Collins believed that this was the case - he refers to it in his "Design & Development" articles about the "Magic Item Compendium". However, the first chapter of "Trailblazer" actually analyses this 'fact' in some detail, and finds that (in the core at least), this is simply [i]not[/i] the case. In fact, the core of 3.5e is balanced on the assumption that characters [i]won't[/i] have access to particular items. (Note that this only applies to the core. As the edition went on, there was something of an arms race between monster books and player books - if you throw an MM5 monster against a Core Rules only party, you need to consider the CR a few points higher than MM5 says.) Disallow item crafting and purchase, and use the random treasure tables from the DMG, and suddenly the balance of the game changes quite dramatically. Now, that said... It's really not terribly good design to assume that characters [i]won't[/i] have optimised items and then also include [i]as a standard part of the game[/i] [b]two[/b] easy mechanisms for characters to acquire those same optimised items. The 'quick fix' for 3e would be to remove Item Crafting and also the ability to buy items from the game. (Oh, and use the random tables for treasure placement.) But doing so is quite likely to meet with significant resistance from players. A better fix, albeit one that requires much more work, would be to fix the magic items so that they don't cause problems. [/QUOTE]

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