SwordGuy wrote: There's an interesting and highly off-topic point I'd like to bring up regarding that. I have an uncle, Jon Pickens, who worked at TSR and WotC during the late 80's, 90's, and until just after 3.0 was released. I've asked him about play balance in 3.x several times, and he's got a great deal to say about it. The part of this that concerns us at this moment is this:
WOTC playtested D&D under their own preconcieved notions about what D&D should be. A fighter SHOULD run up and hit things. A cleric SHOULD stay in the back and heal, unless the fighter goes down, and a Wizard SHOULD primarily be a blaster. They did this because that's how they had been playing for years. The same thing happened with the DM: when the BBEG got run at by the fighter, who starting whaling on him with a sharp object, the BBEG did not immediately Dimension Door away and ignore the fighter - the DM ran the encounter in a particular style that predicated this from happening. The "balance" in D&D 3.x is only supposed to work when the players take on the party roles that the WotC playtesters assigned them. In short, if you don't play the game the way the playtesters did...it's not ever going to balance! They didn't playtest for Batman, or Pun-Pun, or CoDzilla. The ideas behind an arcane caster (and I quote uncle Jon on this) "Why would anyone NOT want to do lots of hitpoints of damage? That's what mages are for."
Of course, this is just some random person on the Internet claiming that their uncle was a playtester at WotC, so it's pretty much the definition of hearsay. However, if true, it goes a long way to explaining all things we'd already figured out looking at the places where the rules break.
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Johnathan Tweet wrote:
More generally, spellcasters are stronger than nonspellcasters, and your "any-ability" rule is going to tend to help spellcasters. But the spellcasters don't really start pulling out in front until around 5th level.
From the horse's mouth. It really doesn't get much clearer than this, folks.