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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ahnehnois" data-source="post: 6006988" data-attributes="member: 17106">And should be. If all the D&D classes functioned equally well in all possible scenarios, I'd say something was very wrong. The question is, if you instead fight a campaign with a lot of straight-up battles back to back, are Tanky McGreataxe the Barbarian and Holyman Healbot the Cleric doing better. They should be. Well it's a good system as written, and incremental revisions like PF's are nice, but I'm not arguing that more serious revisions to the system and classes aren't needed. I just did precisely that for my home game, and have moved on to non-core classes. My fighter now gets an ability every level, improved saves, and action eceonomy advantages, as well as various other goodies. The main changes to spellcasters, OTOH, were knowledge bonuses and splitting their ability score dependencies, along with existing cutbacks on abusable spells. Revisions are good. Incidentally, barbarians and bards received some of my more substantial changes.I simply don't think that a common mechanical structure or daily use-limited abilities is a positive development. In fact, I took out all the daily mechanics and made spellcasting more fluid. If someone else did a substive revision to the 3.5 classes and made them better, I'd sure look at it.I don't think that's true. I hardly ever have to do anything to maintain those types of balance. It would take active effort on someone's part not to have them.I prefer to work with a system that I know and have material for. Given that my preferences evolved over years, my home game has evolved with them. Were I to start over again, I would not use 3e as a base, but I have no desire to start over again.Also, I would not use as my primary gaming system a non-open ruleset, which is most of them.I'm skeptical that this applies to current D&D players, particularly given the vehemently negative reaction to 4e's take on hit points with daily martial healing and healing surges (taking them seriously as a metagame mechanic, in your words). I think that an equally huge step in the opposite direction would at least be received no worse than 4e, which has had some success, and might be received better. But that wasn't really what I was getting at.I know a lot of intelligent, creative twenty-somethings who enjoy nerdy fiction-George R.R. Martin, comic books and their movies, Dragon Age and The Witcher, Battlestar Galactica, etc.-who have no idea what D&D is. When I explain the hobby to them, their main reservations aren't about '80's-driven moral panic, and they definitely aren't about fighter-caster imbalances or lack of access to healing. It's because they don't take it seriously. Their cultural touchstones are R-rated movies and HBO shows, they like shakycam and nonheroic protagonists. They want verisimilitude and real-world relevance in their fiction. They don't want anime style art or miniatures and battlegrids. WotC's mistake is in both oversimplifying the stereotypical "gamer" as being a person who spends all their free time on charop boards but also in ignoring anyone who doesn't play WoW or Warhammer or some version of D&D and yet could be very interested in roleplaying. 3e feels very reflective of certain cultural shifts in the '90's, but 4e does not feel like post-9/11 D&D. As I said, it seems like the people at D&D HQ (and in the industry as a whole) are simply out of touch with the times.</blockquote>

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