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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3798183" data-attributes="member: 4937">Yes, because it isn't the problem.  The reason it isn't the problem is Vancian magic.  You have to prepare your day's spell list ahead of time.  With enough spells, you can optimize yourself for just about any situation.  But the bane of a Wizard is the unexpected problem.  With the right intelligence, a Wizard beats any single thing except another well-prepared spell caster with a higher initiative.  'Surprised', and a meat-shield often fares better.  The problem isn't the flexibility, its the big game breaking/changing spells with gross absolute effects - teleport, raise dead, any save or 'die' spell, wish, disjunction, freedom of action, mindblank, hero's feast, disentigrate, wall of force, mord's mansion, true-seeing and all the rest of the usual high-level kit (right down to invisibility and flight).  The fighter just doesn't get anything to compete with that ever, nor would you necessarily want him too.  At least a partial solution would be toning down some of the big spells that grant perfect immunity or which turn the battle one dice.  I have some ideas for how you'd fix the rest of the problem, but I'd like to think them through and right them up at some point before floating them.No it isn't.  A barbarian's schtick is rage.  It's getting angry and passionate and defeating his foe with the sheer violence of his hatred of the offence or the offender.   The barbarian is a fanatic.  And the mechanics of 'fanaticism' (rage, furious movement, ability to ignore injury) works just fine for devotees of a religious cult, elite assault troops of a nation state, or crazed pyschopaths.  The 'primitive from a tribal secret warrior society' is just the barbarian's particular flavor of this archetype.   All I need is to give the class some flexibility in the choice of some of its skills so as to fit to the desired flavor (wilderness lore for the primitive warrior societies, knowledge religion for the religious fanatics, etc.) and with very little tweaking the same class covers all sorts of different things.  Multi-classing and feat selection can take care of the rest.Likewise, the problem with the ranger is it has _three_ schtick's - hunter PLUS woodsman PLUS divine spellcaster.  It's completely mixed up.   It really wants to be a multiclassed hunter/(spell-caster of some sort), but the multiclass spellcasting rules suck.  Alot of the characters that are archetypal hunters, you can't even do as rangers.  But if you designed it right, you could use the same base class for (unmagical) urban bounty hunter, (unmagical) sinister assassin, and (unmagical) rural trapper, and (unmagical) noble king's huntsman.  Try doing high level 'favored enemy' classes with those concepts using ranger and watch all the baggage and assumptions pile up.  If you wanted to be a magical hunter, multiclass appropriately.  Look at all the crappy classes they churned out - various specialist hunters, inquisitors, urban rangers, and on and on - because the ranger was so crappily designed in 3.0 (and basically remained that way in 3.5) they had to churn out 20 speciality classes to cover what you ought to be able to do with one base class and some multiclassing.</blockquote>

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