Hello Versatility Nut and welcome to the boards. I'm confident we've not spoken before. Thanks for dropping in. I am surprised anyone noticed, to be honest. Just an FYI I'm probably not going to do the other 50% dumping of the metacompendium today or tomorrow.
All I did was my normal check of unread posts since last visit, which shows new threads, and saw
seven full pages of micro-threads, several being just the title, with the only content of the post being the page number and source and "is banned". And I
despise bans because it wreaks of kneejerk reactions and lack of thought. Because I can usually figure out how to replace something with a more balanced version of the idea fairly easily.
Because then it's too difficult to find. I've looked through other (who throw the baby out with the bath water) and think. Okay, let's test if everything is fixed. And then I ctrl+f and find no reference to thought bottles. But I know they have to be thrown out because they break one of the major currencies in D&D: XP.
You say they "throw the baby out with the bathwater", and yet you go and remove Rogue's immunity to Dex-to-AC-deprivation to replace it with Ref-save-againt-saveless-spells. Which consist of practically nothing
at all, with the Improved Uncanny Dodge covering only a single spell I know of. But my problems with your rewrites will be reserved for a separate part of the post.
You could stick them into threads covering topics, like I said. Then link to the post in there, possibly from the central table of contents. Then people looking for particular things still have the table of contents to ctrl+F in to find the thing, while people looking at topics can go over the compiled changes of those topics instead of being stuck rereading all of it.
Also, Nonsi's rewrite over on GiantITP is literally a separate system. Cross compatibility is not intended. In general, people pay attention to core first, then
sometimes work their way out from there. Some just expect DMs to be knowledgeable of the system and able to tell what needs banned from splatbooks and not, instead focusing on fixing the fundamental problems of the system, rather than digging for
every broken item and trusting their individual judgement of what Must Not Be in a game where you have people who actually
like roleplaying as the nigh-omnipotent absurdity of high optimization characters.
Ideally, no. I'd prefer the ability to use subboards to organize things as I have in my already released download. But it was taxing to the already generous mods, and I was also told I should 'stop caring' so much about what others might think of my organization. I promptly put this down for a month; perhaps I did care too much. I figured some distance would help. I haven't decided either way. But a least this way I have confidence that I can link individual fixes for any particular fix. I am also wary of trying to overload information in clumps; I err on the side of modularity.
If you err on the side of modularity,
why have a ban list?Why is what I do over here a problem? Are you implying there's a limit to how much may be posted per day? For months before and during my hiatus, I've made no secret about my intention to dump a lot at once.
Look at Unread Posts since Last Visit. Each one of your micro-threads is a seprarate thread entry, meaning your posts are eating up a large mass of space in one of the quick-search presets.
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My comments:
In general, you seem not to actually understand what separates 3.X from 4e and 5e, as you're trying to make a fair and balanced game out of a system that is literally
intended to be unfair and imbalanced. Or at the very least copies far to much from a system designed to be (TSR era D&D) to make it fair and balanced without a complete rewrite of the classes and/or spells. You're doing a lot of small, fiddly changes filled with catches and exceptions that get increasingly convoluted and nonsensical
in universe. A Bard taking levels in Sublime Chord has no logical reason, anywhere, to be suddenly losing a bundle of ability score points they chose in character generation. You're commiting the very same act of balancing that made people despise 4e by making the rules
bend over for balance, instead of changing them to be balanced by default, or accepting that they're unbalanced and giving advice to make sure the imbalance doesn't ruin the experience. And the experience is what matters, not game balance. Some people like playing ludicrously overpowered characters, you know? Some DMs are perfectly fine trying to outwit their players in the rules that are written, or trying to come up with a situation built from existing rules that can thwart their players.
Furthermore, a lot of your anti-caster measures aren't actually solving any real problems, as the fundamental problem is the spells. If you've fixed the spells, then no other fix is needed, because then the casters are then balanced. If you haven't fixed the spells, and the casters still retain access to the full 9th level spells, then the game is wildly imbalanced. There's no way to balance the game when spellcasters retain their existing spells and Martials aren't given their own abilities to directly compete. The tier system is a horrible balance point, because it's how many problems one can solve, with combat being a very small subset. An Ubercharger can win virtually any combat encounter with only a Flight and Plane Shift item. The Wizard's tier comes from solving
everything else, not being beyond an Ubercharger in damage. And because it's non-combat capacity, then everything not relevant to spellcasting is utterly unneeded. The spells do
everything, and it's beyond you to fix all of them... Without restarting them from scratch to have only what you cover exist in the altered system. Like Nonsi did over on GiantITP, listing only what's valid in the altered system to cover
exactly what characers can have, without worrying about some edge case from a splatbook ruining the attempted fix.
A massive problem is penalizing players by tier, it's mechanically unusable because the DM has no possible way to judge where a player's casting will stop with multiclassing or PRCs
and players are capable of playing tier 1 classes to lower-tier competencies. A player might want Druid instead of Wildshape Ranger because of Druids
having spells at the first four levels of the game and/or getting access to a better Animal Companion, then play their Druid as nothing but a better Wildshape Ranger, style of spell use included. A Cleric could focus on being a buffbot/healbot instead of ever touching the self-buff abilities, possibly using a Paladin multiclass or PRC Paladin as the source of their melee abilities. A player might want to play a Wizard just because of Intelligence-based casting and the spellbook, something found only on t1 classes. By penalizing the higher tiers in a blanket fashion, you kill a
lot of character concepts because of the fact that too damn many are fused to t1 classes at the hip. If you want to balance the game, then
rewrite the classes and their ability lists. The problem lies on the end of the classes, not the core rules, and making huge piles of exceptions and clauses to make the game "balanced" won't work, only adding
exceedingly finicky complexity to an already headache-inducing system.
You also seem to fail to understand the feel of D&D 3.X, given the flat-bans on large categories of items for the
side rules based on them, rather than digging into those side rules to work out the problems with them to render the item acceptable. Take
everything that exists for PCs and work out how to balance the
idea of it. Thought Bottles are a problem for negating XP costs, so make them do a different thing based on the same idea, like undoing negative levels and mental score damage, something attainable through regular spells, made easy with a small XP cost attached. Yes, this still can work around XP costs, but that's a problem with the rules for Negative Level restoration, not this altered Thought Bottle. Then you go and change that problem rule situation.
There's also some problems with interactions between your own altered rules. What's the "penalty" for players to take a dead PC's items, and therefor wealth, when they get the XP to match it, like you mentioned in Strict WBL Guidelines by saying that
Profession of all things gives XP to keep you on track for WBL? Furthermore, how do you solve all the problems wealth generation making XP gives? You'd have to remove every fast wealth loop, and I see nothing about Fabricate on here, so a Wizard can powerlevel forever by mass-producing Masterwork Full Plate and keeping it in their armory. And Wealth by Level
is a fucking guideline. Just like the Custom Magic Item "rules". Actually identify this before you make rules respecting it, because people are
not going to ever use rules that give a strict XP to GP ratio mandating that you be locked to a line on a graph with no deviation. What the heck happens when you Wish for an item within the cost limit? You've
gained total wealth, where does your XP land in the end? What if a DM wants to break the
guidelines of WBL to give underperforming characters items that make up for minor deficiencies?
You're not understanding that the point of 3.X is to play a role, and it's built from a system that respects the utterly plausible result of Sword Guy ending up utterly useless in a fight between reality warping madmen able to steal and/or surpass the power of gods. The game's about more than combat, so combat balance need only be within a limit of functioning in general, not be a well-oiled machine like Essentials era 4e. The rules need to permit fun plots, but also resolutions to those plots for bored players, so while some DMs might want to remove Divination for ruining their drawn-out mysteries, others like coming up with the clues most Divination are
supposed to give, or working out how to have the resolution offered begin another plot thread to continue with the overall story. E6 exists for keeping magic below derail territory and restrain the game to where the balance doesn't fall apart completely. It is, in no small part, an admission that
the game does not accept mundanes beyond 6th level.