EVERY class has special abilites they do EVERY round. Why swing a sword when you can perform some Saturday-morning-kung-fu-theater move EVERY ROUND!

Here’s an idea: let’s take a 30 year strong, established game with several deeply developed worlds and tropes, ignore the award-winning designs and culture-shaping ideas that have made it the iconic hobby that it is, and swizzle all the races/classes/monsters/abilities, top it off with a hackneyed pseudo-christian mythology that ignores a tremendously rich encyclopedia of ideas and slap some flashy game art on the pages. That ought to get 12 year old Johnny “5 second attention span” and his older brother Timmy “callus-kneed corporate stooge” to efusively praise this bastard spawn of the MMORPG for spastic, undisciplined twits who’s parents still can’t keep the sugar out of their twitchy mitts.

Nobody has mentioned the possitive side of this though. (And it took me a while to find it but there is one,)

The majority of my players prefer arcane spellecasters like wizzards over all other classes and most of them try to make their characters into this role of spellcaster. In 3rd edition, this was disasterous when I gave in to group pressure and allowed a party of virtually nothing but wizzards to go on an adventure. The new balancing, which I agree is somewhat overdone, allows the player to play the class and race they want without having to necessarily cfompromise their favorite kinds of characters. Oftn I forced my players to play as fighters and rogues and similar classes and I was greatly disliked for it. With the new rules, It is feasable for a party of wizzards and warlocks to hold their own in combat without having a fighter to protect them. I persoanlly like the diverse party idea more but I think things should be made sort of like they are now to allow for parties not to be crippled if their membership is not formulaic.

As for the way combat used to work, I am glad it has changed. With fighters and rogues having a much greater array of combat options, I salute the designers from turning the fighter and melee classes from simple beaters into classes that require just as much strategy as wizzards. They have simplified wizzards, which is unfortunate, but now fighters don’t simply bull rush, power attack, parry, counterattack, and regular attack. They now have a wide variety of different swings and maneuvers which give them a greater degree of freedom on the battlefield to act in a wider variety of ways.

My overall synopsis of the balancing is that it does have problems but was much better than 3rd edition. As for the adjustments for classes. The melee fighters have been greatly improved at the expense of the spellcasters.

I think Wizzard’s motivation behind the balancing was to allow more flavored characters in battle. When a fighter and a warlock have some similar abilities in several areas, a player’s role in the story is not dependant on their role in combat.

Keep in mind however that the game is young and has few sourcebooks at this time. Within a few months. More arcane, and martial aspects will be added to increase the variation in the game and many more races and classes shall appear. Also keep in mind that this month, the new forgotten realms player guide brings a swordmage class that also ups the variety. There are undeniable negatives with the balancing of the classes and races but I also see a few plusses.

Couldn’t agree more. Game balance has become the holy grail of the D&D designers since they were designing 3rd edition. So now, not only must characters start out the same (e.g. standard array/point buy stats), they must remain exactly as powerful as each other forever. Enforcing game balance in this way actually makes it less interesting as a game! To me, it’s the unbalancing factors (like magic items used to be, e.g.), and how your GM and players deal with them, that make D&D interesting.

3.5’s problems, in my experience, nearly always lay between the chair and the dice. Changing the rulebook, therefore, has no chance whatever of solving those problems.

I once read a suggestion in the 2nd edition DM’s Guide to award bonus xp to adventurers who played their roles well. I have always followed this advice and with some groups it has led to some characters advancing in level much more rapidly than others, but it eventually leads to role-playing excellence by all involved.

lastly, You complain that the lower and higher ends of power have been removed. You will here no argument from me on this subject. What you will hear though will not come just from me. Take a look at some of both the strongest and weakest monsters in the monster manual, they too have had their lower and higher ends removed so in theory it continues to balance.

actually one last thing.
Be creative with your encounters if you want a better challenge.

The rules for a hydra for example state that the creature gains an extra head when it takes a certain amount of damage rather than actually having a head foreably removed. Thus, somply have a monster that can heal heal the hydra during battle in order for it to exceed the normal miximum number of heads.

Thank you.

Paul, 14 years ,,,