Why should it matter what order you gain your abilities in?

[Zerovoid]

Alot of people seem to be misrepresenting what I said.

I never said that high level characters shouldn't be better than low level characters. When I made the comparison to the demihuman level limits, I was referring to how making a character that is weak relative to his level at low level is often necessary to make a character that is powerful relative to his level at high level.

Second, I said players would be allowed a complete rebuild, as long as they didn't lose any current abilities. A sorceror would not be able to drop the sleep spell when it is no longer useful, because that character wouldn't be able to forget sleep. For them to no longer be able to cast the sleep spell would introduce an inconsistency in the game. Consider instead, a sorceror who takes the Extra Spell feat at 6th level. This is pretty nifty for them, because they can have two 3rd level spells, say Fireball and Haste. At some later level, when the sorcerors spell progression chart indicates that they get another 3rd level spell, the player might assign this additional known spell to the spell that was learned with Extra Spell, and then reallocate this feat toward a 4th level spell. At no point is consistency broken, because the character doesn't lose any abilities.

 

[ciaran00]

Be warned: at higher levels, this could take a _long_ time. Also, this belongs in House Rules.

Not with excel or a pdf form

ciaran

 

[Nightfall]

Uhm okay if you want them to be able to take down gods, fiends and dragons, hey it's you call.

 

[The Spectrum Rider]

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I think characters should be independant of path.
***

Well, that's interesting. I think the character is the path; and I also think that, if we do it your way, we'll see far less variety among characters of a given level than we do now. I like the fact that the game causes players to make difficult choices with respect to character building. If they were simple choices, or fewer choices, it just wouldn't be as interesting. And making those choices and knowing the characters' histories gives the players more of an emotional investment in the game.

At least, it has in my game. But we have more emphasis on role-playing than powergaming. I've had players complain about the difficulty they've had figuring out where the Third Gem of the Triple Chalice might be. I've never had a player complain that, because of some choice that he made earlier, he was now "forced" to be one caster level less than somebody else in the party.

***
I can't express how much this bothers me. It really offends me that the system should allow for such mathematically impure results.
***

It may bother you, but it is NOT mathematically impure. It's just that the character's development over time is part of what is expressed by the mathematics of the game. I speak here as a mathematician....

I do agree with the poster who said that new characters at high levels should be brought in at about one level less than the party average - that seems fair. But I've never felt the need to enforce it.

To me, the pleasure of playing a character that has developed over time from level one far outweighs the thrill of creating an optimal high-level character from thin air when everybody else's character has a real history. YMMV.

The Spectrum Rider

 

[Viktyr Gehrig]

This does not strike me as a particularly bad idea, as long as the stipulation that you cannot lose your former abilities is maintained-- it's rather like trading in Weapon Focus in one type of bow for the other.

Since I hand out Point Buy points (for ability scores) every level, there's a very similar feel in my game. Every level, the character's ability scores are reselected based on a new point-buy total, as long as none of their scores drops below what they had before they gained that level. (I use this as a substitution for stat-boosting magic items, and to allow myself more leeway in giving out little magic while still using a lot of heavy encounters.)

As long as this principle were followed with every character ability-- you cannot rebuild in such fashion that you have fewer skill ranks in any skill, you must have all of the previous class abilities you possessed, your total attack bonus remains equal or better (with every weapon), none of your saving throws are reduced, your hitpoints increase by at least one, and you don't lose the benefits of any feat you've taken-- then I don't see how this drastically unbalances the game in any fashion. The only caution I see necessary is making sure that in the rebuild, every feat the character takes is one they were qualified for at that level.

I would, of course, be a little forgiving about feat choices that simply don't do much for a character.

I use fractional BAB and saving throws to keep multiclassing from allowing stunts like having a Fortitude saving throw higher than your level and no BAB.

The biggest problems I see in a system like this is reshuffling feats to move Toughness from 1st level to sixth, and then take Giant's Toughness instead, and similar tricks. The easiest solution, in my opinion, is to either disallow the better Toughness feats, or to add to the prerequisites of each improved Toughness feat that ones that give smaller bonuses-- making the Toughness feat chain similar to how Inner Strength functions.

Honestly, given how complicated the whole process seems, I doubt it'd even come up as an issue in the game, since noone would want to make more than small tweaks.

 

[jmucchiello]

I thought 3.5 sorcerers could swap out an old spell every even level after 3rd level? So why are they stuck with sleep?

Also, no one mentioned Monte Cook's Arcana Unearthed. In those rules, a player may swap out any feat (regardless of its past usefulness) for another feat at 10th and 20th level. You still must meet all prerequisites for any feats or prcs you have after the swap.

Back to the original topic: If you learn calculus before you learn physics, physics is a lot easier to learn. Teaching a second language to a 4 year old will take 2-5 times less time than to teach it to a 20 year old. And the 4 year old will retain knowledge of the language longer than the 20 year old. These are real world examples of the path affecting how much an ability "costs". Why do you assume that learning to Tumble has the exact same cost and time constraint for a 10 year old, a 20 year old and 50 year old? In the real world, when you learn a skill has a great impact on how fast and how good you become with the skill. D20 reflects this idea extremely well.

Hope that helps. If you still think the path is unimportant, play a point buy game like HERO. (GURPS has differing costs at character construction versus in play point expenditures. HERO doesn't.) Of course, hong (and others) will tell you to just wait for D&D 4.5 when D&D will be indistinguishable from HERO.