3.5 is inherently imbalanced, but is that really an issue?

[Darth Ultron]

This is not the kind of balance people are talking about. The question is whether all classes can meaningfully contribute to all level of encounters, and whether one class makes other classes completely unnecessary at certain levels of encounters.

Then it would seem everyone is talking about the wrong kind of balance.

Is the question really ''can all classes meaningfully contribute to all levels and types of encounters every second of the game time every time all the time?" See, then that is the wrong question.

It only gets worse if the question is ''can someone just 'play the game' and expect the game to be perfectly balanced for no reason."?

Assuming for the moment you mean "these are things you can do to make the game more balanced without removing breadth from the system"...

I'll admit I don't know what the ''breath" of the game is....

3) If you get it to the point where it brings the high casters down to the level of the mundanes, you've mostly put a soft-ban on magic. Also, you've removed the option of re-creating the scenes in Sword and the Stone where Merlin turns himself and the young Arthur into small animals to teach him something about the world - which is removing breadth from the game (3.5 can do that at about 7th, via Polymorph).

Well, ok, if this ''point'' exists, then simply don't go there.

4, 5, & 6) I've yet to see an example where that actually functions to put mundanes and high-fantasy casters on the same level. I'm not saying it's not possible... I'm saying "might be valid... or it might not. The only real way to check would be to try it." Care to provide an example for analysis?

Sure, though really this should be it's own thread.



Here is a thought about balance:

D&D has always been very much a 'toolbox' game: the rules are tools that let YOU build and make your own game. And even better way to describe it is D&D gives you a blank canvas, brushes and paint: you can create any picture you want. In D&D The Rules are the Canvas, Brushes and Paint: the rules tell you how to 'paint': dip brush in paint and then touch it to blank canvas. The rules, and game, DO not tell you in any way what to paint.

To continue the metaphor: people are painting a picture doing just one thing...and it's not working, and then wonder why the Canvas, Brushes and Paint are not ''balanced". It's like people are:

A)Hanging the canvas on a wall
B)Putting a huge gob of paint at the top
C)Watching in shock as the huge gob of paint slides down the canvas

Then they throw down the brush and say ''well, clearly something is wrong with this paint set!"

Then someone like me comes along and I suggest:

A)Just put the canvas on the floor
B)Use a soft pencil to draw a rough idea of what you want to paint
C)Gently and slowly use only a tiny amount of paint on the tip of the brush to paint.

Then people respond that my suggestion is ''impossible".

This has always been the big draw for D&D

[ryu]

Mage.

Not much in the tactical wargame manner. But if your storyteller is playing just as hard to do in the party as the party is to their enemies, you can easily have the same nth level wizard chess contingency fest as 3.5, with convoluted politics stapled on at every level from apprentice to Exarch/Oracle, complete with creating sentient demiplanes capable of their own spellcasting out of your soul and literally rewriting the sourcecode of the universe at the archmage level of play. Even starting characters have a weakened form of epic spellcasting (and time stop and rewinding the last turn if someone begins w/ Time 3) and it just gets crazier from there.

It shall be googled... Later.

[Hackulator]

Mage.

Not much in the tactical wargame manner. But if your storyteller is playing just as hard to do in the party as the party is to their enemies, you can easily have the same nth level wizard chess contingency fest as 3.5, with convoluted politics stapled on at every level from apprentice to Exarch/Oracle, complete with creating sentient demiplanes capable of their own spellcasting out of your soul and literally rewriting the sourcecode of the universe at the archmage level of play. Even starting characters have a weakened form of epic spellcasting (and time stop and rewinding the last turn if someone begins w/ Time 3) and it just gets crazier from there.

Mage is by far my favorite White Wolf game and one of my favorite RPG settings overall. Sadly, I've had very little chance to play it.

[JNAProductions]

Then it would seem everyone is talking about the wrong kind of balance.

Is the question really ''can all classes meaningfully contribute to all levels and types of encounters every second of the game time every time all the time?" See, then that is the wrong question.

It only gets worse if the question is ''can someone just 'play the game' and expect the game to be perfectly balanced for no reason."?

Just to be clear, you're saying that the designers are under no obligation to make the game... You know, work how they say it does?

I lack a lot of knowledge of D&D before 3.5. But, to my understanding, it was never marketed as a balanced game. There was no expectation set by the designers that a Wizard 1 is equal to a Fighter 1, or that a Wizard 10 is equal to a Fighter 10. If anything, the exact opposite.

That's not true in 3.5-there's a clear expectation that any given character of level X is worth the same as any other character of level X. Which is plainly not true.

It really sounds like you're treating D&D as something it's not-it's NOT a generic game. It's not meant to be a pick-and-choose toolbox. You're thinking of, on the crunchier side, GURPS. Or on the more narrative side, FAE. You're free to twist and contort D&D into all sorts of weird shapes (hell, I'm gearing up to run a 5E Modern game, which is not at all what was intended) but that doesn't absolve the creators of responsibility to make it work how they say it does.

[Mechalich]

The Fighter is notable because, in addition to being mechanically subpar, it has serious conceptual problems. Notably, the name gives the class a mandate to ... fight. But every class fights, so really what it does is define the character as not being part of other important aspects of the game like "exploration" and "negotiation" and it fails to give the character a shtick to actually use in combat. There are classes that are worse (like the Monk), but those classes are generally worse for contingent mechanical reasons, not fundamental conceptual ones. The Monk is bad, but if you declared that the Monk could do Exalted-style (or even Tome of Battle-style) magic kung fu, it would be substantially less bad. But for the Fighter to be good, it has to stop being a Fighter.

The Fighter ought to have, at a minimum, all of the skill-based capabilities of the Aristocrat class, and also some sort of 'leadership style' mechanic like the Ranger's combat styles where they get something like the Teamwork feats available in Pathfinder (the Inquisitor class, hilariously, has a mechanic like this) - divided into archetypical warrior types like 'Duelist,' 'Tactician,' and 'Thug.' The fact that you can't build a character like Game of Thrones' Jamie Lannister or Jorah Mormont using purely fighter levels is just embarrassing.

The degree to which high level Wizards are "boring invincible nerd superheroes" and beyond the scope of any source material is pretty massively overstated. The level of optimization where Wizards overshadow mundanes is much lower than the level where they become unkillable TO monstrosities (and, as I have often noted, the fact that abilities like teleport are Wizard-exclusive locks you into some degree of Wizard balance point unless you throw those abilities out wholesale). And while the Wizard is more powerful than a lot of fantasy stories, there are still plenty of fantasy stories he is appropriate in, and (again, as noted) twenty levels is really a lot of levels. You're not spending all of that on the difference between the Mountain and the Hound. A 10/5/5 split between Heroic (purely mundane), Paragon (lower end superheroes), and Epic (full gonzo) is enough to cover pretty much any character in fantasy reasonably well. There's really nothing you're losing from having ten levels of mundane warrior instead of twenty levels of mundane warrior.

You can certainly say 'mundanes only got to level 10, casters got to level 20.' That can work at the party level, but it produces world-building issues. Unkillable TO monstrosities are a world-building problem, because they render the contribution of millions of people irrelevant and produce world-building distortions. Exalted, as a game, is a tour de force demonstration in how not properly managing the deployment of non-mundane powers can produce a setting and a system that fundamentally does not work. In fact, most higher-powered settings have this problem. Malazan, which is explicitly based on D&D, is a world-building disaster of untold proportions that rob its storytelling of any meaning because nonsensical fiat things happen one after another and there is no coherency.

Honestly, many of the higher-level abilities, including teleport, should be thrown out. Not wholesale, but they should be rare abilities useable one or two times per campaign, not daily. Or if you're going to have them, you have to have a limited world-building timeframe like Wheel of Time does because the proliferation of such abilities is not compatible with traditional fantasy medieval stasis.

This isn't a D&D problem really, so much as it is a general problem of scale. The much referenced Conan actually serves as a good example. Conan is a wholly mundane character - though he has more abilities than the average fighter for sure - but he regularly encounters extremely powerful wizards who can, and do, had him his head. These beings are on two completely different power scales, and it's difficult to construct a system where they can both interact with the same world as PCs. Many sword & sorcery settings are primarily compatible with having high-powered wizards as NPCs only, and if the PCs need access to abilities like teleport, they have to be provided by an NPC. It's a tricky puzzle.

Yes, specifically the fact that "multiple balance points" is an absolutely terrible way for the game to work. It's not just that having it be non-obvious sucks, it's that the paradigm sucks flat out. Most obviously, it means you are committing to an extraordinarily inefficient ratio of "content printed" to "content anyone uses". Imagine that you launched with a game with three distinct tiers. There are only eleven classes in the core rules, so even assuming a perfectly even distribution of classes, there's going to be a tier where you can't put together a full four-man party. Unless you're skewing towards one tier (making the other problem even worse), there's no tier where you can have more than one party composition. And the actual tier system has six tiers!

And even getting into expansion material -- which, again, you need for everyone to get their own class -- you still have to write everything three times. I don't care that you can make a Wizard-level character that is Barbarian-ish by speccing your Druid appropriately, the fact that we had to write that Druid ACF/ability suite/PrC/whatever means that we didn't get to write one that lets your Druid be a Vermin Master or a Dragonlord or whatever they might aspire to be in a world where the Barbarian class could actually cover the whole system's needs for people who get angry and smash things. Not to mention that we have as many as four other tiers that are notionally supported and all need some version of "angry warrior" that is going to take up even more space and mean that even less concepts actually get covered.

And that's not even discussing questions like "how the hell is CR supposed to work in this system" (hint: it won't) and "what balance point should non-class options be at" and "what happens when someone really likes one of the abilities of a class in a different tier from the rest of the party". Making the game actually balanced is simply the overwhelmingly superior option according to an reasonable analysis.

There's actually an example of all this happening: Exalted 2e. The various different Exalted types: Solars/Abyssals/Infernals, Lunars, Sidereals, Dragon-Blooded, plus lesser options like enhanced mortals, Dragon Kings, and Alchemicals, all function at different power levels using different mechanics and each have their own core books. Which means in order to properly run the world you need a literal bookshelf full of material. Huge amounts of information was printed that was only useful for Solar gameplay, or only for Dragon-Blooded. There are literally hundreds of pages of nothing but different charm sets for the various types of exalted, when there should ultimately only be one single charm set that everyone uses with slightly different costs.

[Bartmanhomer]

Maybe this game wasn't meant to be balanced. I can't speak for older and newer editions because I never played it. But I can say this: 3.5 have so many flaws and problems.

[Cosi]

The Fighter ought to have, at a minimum, all of the skill-based capabilities of the Aristocrat class, and also some sort of 'leadership style' mechanic like the Ranger's combat styles

That sounds more like "the Fighter should not exist, and should instead be replaced with a Marshal". Which, sure, but you're still binning the Fighter.

Unkillable TO monstrosities are a world-building problem, because they render the contribution of millions of people irrelevant and produce world-building distortions.

No one said "unkillable TO monstrosities". There is a wide, wide, range between "mundane" and "TO". Indeed, that range is pretty much all of fantasy, particularly modern fantasy.

In any case, the notion that very powerful people make other people's stories irrelevant is simply absurd. Consider Shadowrun. In Shadowrun the PCs are somewhere between street thugs and low-tier superhumans and they run around doing jobs that range from "corporate espionage" to "terrorism". And in the background of the setting there are megacorps and nation-states that have political, military, and economic power vastly in excess of what the PCs can hope to wield. And yet no one considers Shadowrun campaigns meaningless.

What's more, having high level mages that do world-shaking things isn't really in conflict with mundane characters, because mundane characters aren't going to be doing world-shaking things since the mundane humans whose capabilities they are constrained to don't do that. Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan were powerful leaders, but they still conquered only portions of Eurasia. What's more, they did so at the head of powerful empires and in command of might armies, and giving PCs access to those tools is going to let them change the setting whether they have magic or not. Putting a player with even rudimentary knowledge of history and human development in charge of an empire is going to change the setting unrecognizably even if their character has no magic.

Malazan, which is explicitly based on D&D, is a world-building disaster of untold proportions that rob its storytelling of any meaning because nonsensical fiat things happen one after another and there is no coherency.

No more so than Game of Thrones or other similarly complex low-power settings. Malazan is over three million words. That's an enormous amount of stuff to keep straight regardless of how powerful the stuff is. I'll certainly grant that the story is complicated, but there are rules, and it (mostly) does follow them.

Honestly, many of the higher-level abilities, including teleport, should be thrown out. Not wholesale, but they should be rare abilities useable one or two times per campaign, not daily. Or if you're going to have them, you have to have a limited world-building timeframe like Wheel of Time does because the proliferation of such abilities is not compatible with traditional fantasy medieval stasis.

The notion that the campaign setting should be in stasis in the first place is a pretty weird one. Of course it's going to change, that's the whole reason you have a campaign. And the changes brought on by magic are not incomprehensibly hard to reckon with, they're almost all analogous to relatively small advances in technology. teleport is a big deal for the PCs, but it's not all that impressive for a society. It just doesn't actually move all that much stuff. You can't move an army with teleport, and you can't supply a city with only supplies brought by teleport.

It's not even the dominant assumption in fantasy any more, really. I don't think that in the past year I've read a single book that was set in a world with enforced medieval stasis and no major magic. Even The First Law, which is a pretty direct LotR riff in many ways has gunpowder showing up and changing the calculus of war and an empire built around supporting the needs of its magic users.

[Hackulator]

I mean look, in pretty much every high fantasy series of books that exists, the magic users are just better than everyone else. Lord of the Rings, Wheel of Time, Shannara, Mistborn, The Belgariad (might be digging a bit deep with that one), the list goes on and on and people with powerful magic are almost always stronger than people without it. This is just a fact of the genre.

[Jack_Simth]

No you're not. Those classes were given as proof of concept that you can balance "uses a sword" and "uses magic". You can then adjust the power of those classes to be equal to whichever other classes you care about (or vice versa). So the onus is on you to show that either:

A) The identity of the Warblade and the Warlock is intrinsically tied to their current power level, and the classes would become unrecognizable if the power of their abilities was increased to be on par with a Wizard.
B) It is literally impossible to write a list of maneuvers or invocations that can produce characters on a power level comparable to the Wizard.

Those claims are very much not obvious, but I invite you to explain why you believe at least one of them (or something similar). We know of balanced subsets of the game that individually have whatever properties we might want. It's on the anti-balance people to show that those subsets can't be extended to an acceptable breadth without losing the properties we care about.

A couple of things....

1) "You can't do X without Y" is one form of a null hypothesis. They're fundamentally unproveable. They're disprovable, though, by finding a counterexample. The classic null hypothesis is "unicorns don't exist." That hypothesis cannot be proven - there will always be somewhere you haven't looked, and to prove it, you would need to look everywhere (sorry, that should be "everywhere at once", because unicorns could potentially move). However, it's opposite is straightforward to prove: Provide one for examination (alive or dead, doesn't matter). Onus is on the one who's seeing unicorns. A balanced version of 3.5 that neither forces players into wuxia or anime levels (at a minimum), nor removes options from the game? That's a unicorn. Doesn't exist.
2) I'm not saying you can't produce a balanced game. I'm saying I don't believe you can balance 3.5 without doing at least one of two things:
a) Removing options from the game (reducing it's breadth)
b) Boosting the mundanes to a point where I'd call them wuxia or anime.

To prove me wrong, all you need to do is produce such a game. Try. Please. I'd like to be proven wrong. I've seen quite a few attempts, but so far all have fit into one or more of three categories:
1) Failed at providing a balanced game (in which case, the other two don't matter).
2) Reduced the breadth of the game via removing options (usually a rather lot).
3) Boosted the mundanes up to the point of wuxia or anime - at which point, I can't in good conscience call them mundanes anymore.
Pick any 2, and I've probably seen a balance attempt for 3.5 that doesn't reasonably fit either category. I've yet to see a 3.5 fix that doesn't fit any of the three.

I think you can have a game where all of the options are available, but you can't reasonable use them all in the same group. So effectively you need to label abilities to be able to determine if an option is appropriate.

So something like "Here's the teir-1 rules for the tier-1 table; here's the tier-2 rules for the tier-2 table; ..." and so on?

You're still removing breadth from the game - you'll never end up with the conversation between the wizard and the fighter.

I'll admit I don't know what the ''breath" of the game is....

You missed the "d". It's "breadth" - in this context it means "range": how many different things you can do with it.

Well, ok, if this ''point'' exists, then simply don't go there.

Trouble is, you fall short of balance when using the "weaken the casters" approach if you don't go to the point of removing things you can model.

Sure, though really this should be it's own thread.

Great! Show me your counterexample.

Mostly, though: Tables find their own balance point, and then the game works. The unbalanced bits of the game mostly only matter for shuffled groups or new players (also not nice meanie people, but you shouldn't play for long with those anyway). Shuffled groups, because then you've got folks accustomed to one balance point mixed in with folks accustomed to another; there will be conflict on balance as a result. New players, because they haven't found the table's balance point yet, and you'll get folks accidentally (usually) overshadowing others. In theory, if the game were balanced, neither scenario would be a problem... but from what I've seen, it wouldn't look much like 3.5 anymore.

[Cosi]

I mean look, in pretty much every high fantasy series of books that exists, the magic users are just better than everyone else. Lord of the Rings, Wheel of Time, Shannara, Mistborn, The Belgariad (might be digging a bit deep with that one), the list goes on and on and people with powerful magic are almost always stronger than people without it. This is just a fact of the genre.

Yes, that is why "mundane" is a character concept that limits you to less than 10th level, and high level martial characters (like Thor) get upgrades which give them magic (like Thor).

Boosted the mundanes up to the point of wuxia or anime - at which point, I can't in good conscience call them mundanes anymore.

Who cares? "Mundane" is a low level concept. This complaint is exactly as valid as complaining that eventually Wizards stop being apprentice Wizards.

To prove me wrong, all you need to do is produce such a game.

No, I just need to prove it possible. And I did. So again, do you have any reason to suspect you couldn't produce additional classes at the balance level of the Warblade and Warlock? I'm looking for any argument at all for your position. The only "argument" you presented is to conflate this with a scientific experiment so you can claim your burden of proof is "literally nothing" and the other side's is "an entire functioning game". If you continue to do that, you will cease being a relevant part of the conversation, because you are making arguments that no reasonable person is going to bother engaging with.

EDIT: To expand on this slightly, the point you're making isn't about the kind of argument, it's about the framing. Consider that instead of "you can balance the game without reducing it's breadth"/"you can't do that", you could phrase things as "you can re-write any content in 3e at a level compatible with the Warblade"/"you can't do that". The claims aren't fundamentally different, you're just phrasing yours in a way that lets you neglect to provide any argument for it. And, unsurprisingly, refusing to provide an argument for your position leaves people unpersuaded by your position. So what's the counterexample to that hypothesis? Or the related hypothesis "you can move the Warblade to any power level". Or maybe this isn't a scientific experiment and you can just present some arguments like everyone else does.

[Darth Ultron]

Just to be clear, you're saying that the designers are under no obligation to make the game... You know, work how they say it does?

It's a bit of a stretch to say they ''say" the game is a way they say it is.

I lack a lot of knowledge of D&D before 3.5. But, to my understanding, it was never marketed as a balanced game. There was no expectation set by the designers that a Wizard 1 is equal to a Fighter 1, or that a Wizard 10 is equal to a Fighter 10. If anything, the exact opposite.

The whole idea of balance does not come around until 3E. Though before 3E the game was much more clear with the ''it's your game, do what you want".

That's not true in 3.5-there's a clear expectation that any given character of level X is worth the same as any other character of level X. Which is plainly not true.

This would be a false expectation then.

It really sounds like you're treating D&D as something it's not-it's NOT a generic game.

I would not say it's a ''generic" game.

My point is more there are no rules about how to ''play" D&D. There are combat rules, a couple of vague 'world' rules....and that is it. ANYTHING else you do in the game, is beyond the rules.

[Cosi]

This would be a false expectation then.

Well, yes. That's why people would like things to be changed so that the expectation is accurate instead of not.

[JNAProductions]

So... You're willing to pay good money-to the tune of hundreds of dollars*, for what 3.5 ended up being-for the majority being "beyond the rules"?

I sure as hell aren't willing to! FAE is free. FATE is free. Cortex+ is, like, $20. GURPS is something like $60 for the main rulebook, I think-and GURPS Lite is free. Shooting the breeze and making up stories with a friend or handful of friends is free.

If I am paying money for a system, I expect it to provide something I can't get for free.

As for one specific point...

This would be a false expectation then.

THAT IS A PROBLEM! The system expects that, the designers expected that, it was marketed on that...

If I sold a car and said "Yeah, gets 35 MPG, AC and heating work fine, and the radio is brand new," but when you get in it, a full tank gets you less than 100 miles, the AC and heating only work occasionally, and the radio fritzes out constantly, you'd be upset with me, and probably, at a minimum, demand a refund. Because I lied to you. Lying to people is a problem.

Spoiler: Asterisk

Show

I am aware that the vast majority of 3.5 is available for free NOW. It wasn't then. And honestly, even if you JUST got the core books, that's still over $100.

[Powerdork]

I am aware that the vast majority of 3.5 is available for free NOW. It wasn't then.

It still isn't. It's for sale, up on OneBookShelf. Unless I've wasted hundreds of dollars in recent months for no good reason beyond letting Wizards of the Coast know that Eberron sells?

[JNAProductions]

It still isn't. It's for sale, up on OneBookShelf. Unless I've wasted hundreds of dollars in recent months for no good reason beyond letting Wizards of the Coast know that Eberron sells?

Huh. I was not aware.

Okay, so my point stands stronger.

[Jack_Simth]

Who cares? "Mundane" is a low level concept. This complaint is exactly as valid as complaining that eventually Wizards stop being apprentice Wizards.

A rather lot of the folks who want to play them. You've just as much as admitted your goal is to largely remove them from the game - no Conan that can keep up with Merlin (or rather, he's not Conan anymore in your updated model that allows him to do so). That, right there, is removing an option from the game. You are reducing it's breadth. In making that change, there are now less things it can model.

I've looked at lots of attempts over the years, on these very forums. Sure, you can boost the mundanes to be closer to the wizards... but then they all start looking wuxia or anime. That's not a bad thing, but it's removing the option of playing a high level mundane. Sure, you can weaken the high fantasy casters to bring them down more in line. That's not a bad thing, but basically all attempts at it do it by trimming out options, which reduces the breadth of the game.

No, I just need to prove it possible. And I did.

No, you just suggested a few routes by which it might be. There's lots of things that seem like they might work, that really, really don't.

So again, do you have any reason to suspect you couldn't produce additional classes at the balance level of the Warblade and Warlock? I'm looking for any argument at all for your position. The only "argument" you presented is to conflate this with a scientific experiment so you can claim your burden of proof is "literally nothing" and the other side's is "an entire functioning game". If you continue to do that, you will cease being a relevant part of the conversation, because you are making arguments that no reasonable person is going to bother engaging with.

Sure I have. Repeatedly, even. At least as far as you've supported your end.

EDIT: To expand on this slightly, the point you're making isn't about the kind of argument, it's about the framing. Consider that instead of "you can balance the game without reducing it's breadth"/"you can't do that", you could phrase things as "you can re-write any content in 3e at a level compatible with the Warblade"/"you can't do that". The claims aren't fundamentally different, you're just phrasing yours in a way that lets you neglect to provide any argument for it. And, unsurprisingly, refusing to provide an argument for your position leaves people unpersuaded by your position. So what's the counterexample to that hypothesis? Or the related hypothesis "you can move the Warblade to any power level". Or maybe this isn't a scientific experiment and you can just present some arguments like everyone else does.

And you're still missing the point I'm trying to make.

I'm not saying you can't boost the fighter. I'm not saying you can't trim down the wizard. Just that when you do that, you cause other effects (Wuxia/Anime "fighters" that aren't mundanes anymore, getting rid of various Wizardly-abilities, and so on), which reduce the game in various ways. You seem to be thinking that I'm trying to say you can't trim a Wizard down to a warlock's level. I'm not. That's not actually hard. You seem to be thinking that I'm trying to say you can't boost a Fighter to a Warblade's level. I'm not. That's not actually hard. You can change individual elements, no problem. Except that the sorts of changes you'll need to make to do balance will cause it to be able to model less. This will become clear once you actually try balancing the game, then turn around and try to model several sets of random things.

But just telling someone a thing seldom convinces that person of a thing. Most folks need to try a thing to learn it.

[MeimuHakurei]

A rather lot of the folks who want to play them. You've just as much as admitted your goal is to largely remove them from the game - no Conan that can keep up with Merlin (or rather, he's not Conan anymore in your updated model that allows him to do so). That, right there, is removing an option from the game. You are reducing it's breadth. In making that change, there are now less things it can model.

I've looked at lots of attempts over the years, on these very forums. Sure, you can boost the mundanes to be closer to the wizards... but then they all start looking wuxia or anime. That's not a bad thing, but it's removing the option of playing a high level mundane. Sure, you can weaken the high fantasy casters to bring them down more in line. That's not a bad thing, but basically all attempts at it do it by trimming out options, which reduces the breadth of the game.

Can you point to a fully mundane 20th Level character (I allow you to judge by your own standards what you consider mundane), homebrew or otherwise, who can keep up with a 20th Level Wizard, Cleric or Druid? Not even the TO/loop/etc. abuse stuff, just a number of standard feats and gear with mostly baseline level spells. It's not reducing the breadth of the game to have mundanes cease to be mundane at higher levels unless you insist you want to play a 4th level character in a 9th level group and then complain you're underpowered.

[Lans]

The Fighter is notable because, in addition to being mechanically subpar, it has serious conceptual problems. Notably, the name gives the class a mandate to ... fight. But every class fights, so really what it does is define the character as not being part of other important aspects of the game like "exploration" and "negotiation" and it fails to give the character a shtick to actually use in combat. There are classes that are worse (like the Monk), but those classes are generally worse for contingent mechanical reasons, not fundamental conceptual ones. The Monk is bad, but if you declared that the Monk could do Exalted-style (or even Tome of Battle-style) magic kung fu, it would be substantially less bad. But for the Fighter to be good, it has to stop being a Fighter

Even if you stick with the Fighter motif, there are ways to add exploration and negotiation aspects to the fighter class. Sense Motive and Spot are useful in fights and other game aspects. Jumping and Climbing have cross exploration and fighting aspects. etc

But yeah the fighter name is a hold over that is not the greatest.

[MeimuHakurei]

Even if you stick with the Fighter motif, there are ways to add exploration and negotiation aspects to the fighter class. Sense Motive and Spot are useful in fights and other game aspects. Jumping and Climbing have cross exploration and fighting aspects. etc

But yeah the fighter name is a hold over that is not the greatest.

The Fighter only has seven class skills: Climb, Craft, Handle Animal, Intimidate, Jump, Ride and Swim. So even for scouting, guarding or negotiating treaties, the Fighter is wholly inadequate. Jumping and Climbing are not just quickly obsoleted by flight, they also scale very poorly.

[skunk3]

3.5e is a system that has been out for many years now and I'd daresay that *most* people into 3.5e are well versed enough with the game and all of the various splatbooks that it they are aware of POTENTIAL (not guaranteed, but potential) flaws with the system and they are completely capable of houseruling certain changes to certain classes, such as giving the fighter more class skills, skill points, et al. I see a lot of complaining about RAW not being perfect. So what? Use a little initiative (no pun intended) and just fix these problems at your table. I see a lot of bickering and complaining about hypothetical situations, situations that can be rectified easily.

Furthermore, as others have pointed out already, you can look at basically any fantasy universe in print and quickly and clearly see that the 'caster' types are almost always the most powerful. Why are we trying to make 'mundanes' as powerful as casters at 20th level? I don't understand why some people seem to think that every member of every party needs to be perfectly balanced in relation to each other. In one game you might play a pure fighter that seems overshadowed by a wizard at later levels... in another game you might play a druid, curb stomping things. In other words, I don't see the need for a lot of this complaining. Houserule basic fixes, or don't. Whatever. Either way you know what you're getting into prior to the game starting so what's the big deal?

I don't have experience with nearly as many systems as some of the people on here, but of the systems that I DO know 3.5e is hands down my favorite because there is such a huge array of classes, races, prestige classes, templates, etc. On top of that there's some really good homebrew and third party materials that can be used as well. Why are we complaining about balance when it's such an easy fix?

[MeimuHakurei]

3.5e is a system that has been out for many years now and I'd daresay that *most* people into 3.5e are well versed enough with the game and all of the various splatbooks that it they are aware of POTENTIAL (not guaranteed, but potential) flaws with the system and they are completely capable of houseruling certain changes to certain classes, such as giving the fighter more class skills, skill points, et al. I see a lot of complaining about RAW not being perfect. So what? Use a little initiative (no pun intended) and just fix these problems at your table. I see a lot of bickering and complaining about hypothetical situations, situations that can be rectified easily.

Furthermore, as others have pointed out already, you can look at basically any fantasy universe in print and quickly and clearly see that the 'caster' types are almost always the most powerful. Why are we trying to make 'mundanes' as powerful as casters at 20th level? I don't understand why some people seem to think that every member of every party needs to be perfectly balanced in relation to each other. In one game you might play a pure fighter that seems overshadowed by a wizard at later levels... in another game you might play a druid, curb stomping things. In other words, I don't see the need for a lot of this complaining. Houserule basic fixes, or don't. Whatever. Either way you know what you're getting into prior to the game starting so what's the big deal?

I don't have experience with nearly as many systems as some of the people on here, but of the systems that I DO know 3.5e is hands down my favorite because there is such a huge array of classes, races, prestige classes, templates, etc. On top of that there's some really good homebrew and third party materials that can be used as well. Why are we complaining about balance when it's such an easy fix?

The reason we want to balance the fighter-types with the casters is not just that mundanes are less powerful than casters, it's that casters are like this to such a degree that the mundanes shouldn't bother even participating to begin with. And even though the Wizard will only truly overshadow the martials at later levels, the Cleric and Druid easily do so from Level 1 and never fall behind them. Question: do you want to play a fantasy hero who'll never be relevant for any task, getting slaughtered if trying to take on the same foes as your allies as well as facing challenges that require powers to overcome you'll never ever be able to get?

Also, if your argument is that it's easy to get houserule fixes, maybe you should advocate for those homebrew modifications you believe improve on the game rather than just straight-up 3.5 - chances are that a given table won't be using those fixes you claim would be easy to get.

[Mechalich]

3.5e is a system that has been out for many years now and I'd daresay that *most* people into 3.5e are well versed enough with the game and all of the various splatbooks that it they are aware of POTENTIAL (not guaranteed, but potential) flaws with the system and they are completely capable of houseruling certain changes to certain classes, such as giving the fighter more class skills, skill points, et al. I see a lot of complaining about RAW not being perfect. So what? Use a little initiative (no pun intended) and just fix these problems at your table. I see a lot of bickering and complaining about hypothetical situations, situations that can be rectified easily.

Fun fact, Pathfinder: Kingmaker came out less than a year ago. Several of the pre-generated NPCs introduced for that game - all of whom have significant story components that induce you to use them over randomly generated mercs - have extremely poor class/race/build presentations that render them unable to fight certain enemy types.

Spoiler

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In particular, all of the martial characters are completely unable to muster the requisite will save necessary to stop the Wild Hunt from paralyzing them continually during the final dungeon and are completely reliant on other characters casting Freedom of Movement on them in order to function.

If a major video game release can't avoid fall afoul of these flaws, I think you drastically under-estimate their prevalence.

[Morty]

I think D&D absolutely should embrace different power levels, because otherwise there's no real way of managing all the wildly different expectations people have of it. But there's better ways of doing it than wasting wordcount on different classes.

It could encourage starting on higher levels instead of assuming a level 1-20 advancement. It could use ways of slowing down or stopping progression past a certain point, E6 style, if people don't want to cross the line from "low-key fantasy hero" to "superhero" and then "nation-wasting demigod". It could introduce ways to add or remove restrictions to select existing classes. Like, let's say, a hypothetical balanced version of wizard could recharge on short rests rather than long rests if you wanted it to be more powerful. Or something. Seems better to me than releasing an imbalanced set of classes and then filling several books with balanced ones.

[Cosi]

So... You're willing to pay good money-to the tune of hundreds of dollars*, for what 3.5 ended up being-for the majority being "beyond the rules"?

I sure as hell aren't willing to! FAE is free. FATE is free. Cortex+ is, like, $20. GURPS is something like $60 for the main rulebook, I think-and GURPS Lite is free. Shooting the breeze and making up stories with a friend or handful of friends is free.

This point is really worth emphasizing. Making stuff up is free. Any time you pay for rules, then have to make stuff up to make them work, you're spending money to do something you could do for free. Why you would consider that not a problem is beyond me.

A rather lot of the folks who want to play them. You've just as much as admitted your goal is to largely remove them from the game

And they can. They just can't play them at 20th level, just as someone who wants to play a Wizard who casts shapechange can't play that character at 1st level. Are you going to tell me that shapechange isn't a part of the game on that basis? Of course not, because everyone everywhere who argues for Fighters does so by invoking double standards about what Fighters are allowed to ask for and what Wizards are allowed to ask for.

There's lots of things that seem like they might work, that really, really don't.

Yes, for example, claiming that you can support your position by saying "nuh uh" and expect that other people need to support their positions with an entire finished game.

Furthermore, as others have pointed out already, you can look at basically any fantasy universe in print and quickly and clearly see that the 'caster' types are almost always the most powerful. Why are we trying to make 'mundanes' as powerful as casters at 20th level?

We aren't. We're trying to make martial characters as powerful as casters, because a balanced game is obviously superior to an imbalanced one for all the reasons various people have noted.

[Jack_Simth]

Can you point to a fully mundane 20th Level character (I allow you to judge by your own standards what you consider mundane), homebrew or otherwise, who can keep up with a 20th Level Wizard, Cleric or Druid? Not even the TO/loop/etc. abuse stuff, just a number of standard feats and gear with mostly baseline level spells. It's not reducing the breadth of the game to have mundanes cease to be mundane at higher levels unless you insist you want to play a 4th level character in a 9th level group and then complain you're underpowered.

Sure. Sort of: You just need to relax one concept on the part of the caster in question: "Competently played". "Armus" from Quertus' post largely fits the bill.

Tables tend to find their own balance points, after a while. Tier-1 caster has a much higher ceiling than the Fighter does (assuming both refrain from various tricks; if all tricks are on the table, both are scaled ones of Toril who've read Serpent Kingdoms), but they also have a much lower floor, too. A wizard that's happy with spamming Delayed Blast Fireball will often be on par with a decent charger build in battle. If the player with the greater skill is playing a class that's weaker, the table can find a balance point that way. If you make all classes roughly on par with each other, the table doesn't have that option to find it's own balance point (there's other ways to go about it, granted) - and you've removed something very useful from the game.

Yes, for example, claiming that you can support your position by saying "nuh uh" and expect that other people need to support their positions with an entire finished game.

Turn it around: What would you accept as evidence? If I pointed at a piece of homebrew, analyzed and showed how it does at least one of:
1) Fails to balance classes
2) Removes options from the game
3) Makes the mundanes too wuxia or anime for my tastes
... you'd just say "Bad homebrew, obviously they should have done it differently" or similar. AKA, "Just because that forest doesn't have a unicorn, doesn't mean unicorns don't exist".

Any variation on "You can't do X" (in this case, balance a version of 3.5 without removing something from the game or making high level mundanes very non-mundane) is a null hypothesis. Except in specialized circumstances, they are literally not provable.

I have, in fact, pointed out various bits of evidence for what I've said. Of course, you seem to think I'm arguing something I'm not, so of course I haven't given you evidence for the position you seem to mistakenly think I'm holding....

[Cosi]

Or, the game could actually be balanced. It's baffling that people who consistently claim that the experience of the game can and should tend towards balance are so adamant that having the game itself just be balanced would somehow cause the apocalypse.

[Jack_Simth]

Or, the game could actually be balanced. It's baffling that people who consistently claim that the experience of the game can and should tend towards balance are so adamant that having the game itself just be balanced would somehow cause the apocalypse.

Great! Prove me wrong! The null hypothesis can be disproven easily. A single counterexample is all it takes.

And, of course, I'm not saying it would bring about the apocolypse. Just that it would remove options, or make mundanes much too wuxia or anime for my tastes.

[Cosi]

Oh, okay, you still aren't going to present an argument. Can you maybe stop filling up the thread with posts that don't advance the conversation?

[MeimuHakurei]

Great! Prove me wrong! The null hypothesis can be disproven easily. A single counterexample is all it takes.

And, of course, I'm not saying it would bring about the apocolypse. Just that it would remove options, or make mundanes much too wuxia or anime for my tastes.

If Fighters and co. have to become wuxia or anime in order to compete with casters, I'll have them become that. It also imposes the absurd claim that Wizards are somehow not wuxia/anime if they can Ki Blast at Level 1 (Magic Missile), Kaioken at Level 5 (Rage), turn into an Oozaru at Level 7 (Polymorph), become a Super Saiyan at Level 11 (Tenser's Transformation) and pop out Ultra Instinct at Level 17 (Foresight).

[skunk3]

The reason we want to balance the fighter-types with the casters is not just that mundanes are less powerful than casters, it's that casters are like this to such a degree that the mundanes shouldn't bother even participating to begin with. And even though the Wizard will only truly overshadow the martials at later levels, the Cleric and Druid easily do so from Level 1 and never fall behind them. Question: do you want to play a fantasy hero who'll never be relevant for any task, getting slaughtered if trying to take on the same foes as your allies as well as facing challenges that require powers to overcome you'll never ever be able to get?

Also, if your argument is that it's easy to get houserule fixes, maybe you should advocate for those homebrew modifications you believe improve on the game rather than just straight-up 3.5 - chances are that a given table won't be using those fixes you claim would be easy to get.

I don't know about you, but I've had a blast playing many mundane characters. If you don't have fun in a game playing a mundane, that is most likely due to one of two reasons:

1. The DM sucks and doesn't add scenarios in the game in which the mundane character(s) feels useful and has a job to do that they are well suited for.
2. You simply can't handle being overshadowed power-wise.

If you're in a game in which the party is NEVER split up and there's ALWAYS a set amount of adventure and rest time per day (so the casters' batteries are always charged) then yeah you're going to feel overshadowed, but a creative and clever DM is going to pay attention to the power dynamic of the table and introduce gameplay elements tailored for each of the PCs, or they will find ways to minimize the effectiveness of the casters, thereby making the mundanes feel important. Everyone has a role.

As far as homebrew goes, most of the games I've played in over the last few years have some degree of homebrew specifically because we all know of the shortcomings/flaws that 3.5 has. It's not really that hard to talk with the group and DM prior to the start of the campaign and ask for certain amendments + homebrew, especially if the requests are reasonable.