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Was that a "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" pun? Shame on you.

It's been mentioned, but go after the weak saves of your targets. Knowledge ranks help you do this, and as a Wizard you should have plenty to go around. Also, whenever possible have spells available that will still be some level of inconvenience to anyone that makes the save. When possible, get your allies magic items to negate the effects of your meanest AoE spells, too.

Napoleon the Clown wrote:Was that a "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" pun? Shame on you.

It's been mentioned, but go after the weak saves of your targets. Knowledge ranks help you do this, and as a Wizard you should have plenty to go around. Also, whenever possible have spells available that will still be some level of inconvenience to anyone that makes the save. When possible, get your allies magic items to negate the effects of your meanest AoE spells, too.

Yes, do target the weak saves when possible and depending on what flavor of D&D you're playing get abilities/items to shape AoEs. AoEing into melee and missing the guys on your team is hilarious bullshit.

This thread really makes me want to play some D&D. Or Pathfinder, I suppose. No experience with that system, though - think we could round up a DM and some players on this forum?

Lvl 3 Wizard in dnd 3.5

Rnd 1: cast Sleep, have familiar fly up 90 ft
Rnd 2: Benign Transposition target and familiar

Every session after asked to teleport enemies into the air.

Esquire wrote:This thread really makes me want to play some D&D. Or Pathfinder, I suppose. No experience with that system, though - think we could round up a DM and some players on this forum?

Pathfinder is 3.5 with a lot of exploits removed so if you've played 3.5 you can hop right into 3.5 and just understand some of the broken stuff your used to is gone and there's new stuff added in (Like 50+playable races, everything from Anthros to Frogs to Pony's to Toads yes there are in fact two races of Toad people)

As I'm in a Wednesday game and a Saturday game I wish you luck on finding a group, try Reddit's LFG subreddit to find one of the most active places for random pickup games.

Mr Bean wrote:

Esquire wrote:This thread really makes me want to play some D&D. Or Pathfinder, I suppose. No experience with that system, though - think we could round up a DM and some players on this forum?

Pathfinder is 3.5 with a lot of exploits removed

Nonsense. There is a whole lot of other differences including but not limited to some of the skills being lumped together. Pathfinder is basically a mid point between 3.5 and 4 ed. If you like 4ed you'll like pathfinder but if you hated it than you'll hate pathfinder as well. And if you are the kind of guy that has no strong preferences you'll probably fall in love with it.

Pathfinder is a cleaned up 3.5 that put more effort into balancing things. It's extremely different from 4th Ed. 4th is basically MMO style gameplay, except there's only a handful of people and you have to visualize what's happening instead of having the pretty lights dance in front of you.

Napoleon the Clown wrote:Pathfinder is a cleaned up 3.5 that put more effort into balancing things. It's extremely different from 4th Ed. 4th is basically MMO style gameplay, except there's only a handful of people and you have to visualize what's happening instead of having the pretty lights dance in front of you.

I am not sure that balanced is the right word. Pathfinder messed up the whole skill tree for no good reason and introduced a whole host of new mechanics, races etc. which bring with them their own instabilities. If anything the caster to melee gap in PF is even worse in PF than it is in 3.5. That's why I newer could take to it. Everyone keeps saying its more balanced when actually its just broken in different ways.

Purple wrote:I am not sure that balanced is the right word. Pathfinder messed up the whole skill tree for no good reason and introduced a whole host of new mechanics, races etc. which bring with them their own instabilities. If anything the caster to melee gap in PF is even worse in PF than it is in 3.5. That's why I newer could take to it. Everyone keeps saying its more balanced when actually its just broken in different ways.

Purple I question if you've ever played 3.5 before... The skill tree changes made in Pathfinder are one of the things D&D should have done between 3.0 and 3.5. Having stealth as a skill instead of making the rogue spend points on and roll for hide and move silently was massive for making non-magical stealth more viable. The same goes for rolling spot, listen, and search into perception, it makes very little sense to have three skills for essentially wordings for doing the same thing. Aside from that rolling jump and tumble in acrobatics makes the skill more attractive to to certain builds and removing concentration as a skill is a rather serious nerf to spell casters. So I don't see where you get off on saying the skill changes had no reasoning behind them.

The new races do bring some imbalance, but that is easily corrected for if your DM is worried about it. You can simply give the other players a few racial bonuses to match them to the points cost of the highest powered race in play. You can call them blessings, heroic bloodlines, and random genetic luck to justify these tweaks. Besides, none of these races are as specifically or radically broken as certain 3.5 builds, such as a venerable Dragonwrought Kobold or the much more humble Goliath.

As for the caster melee gap, I do think that Pathfinder somewhat closed it simply by getting rid of things like the DMM cleric, full caster level bards, the Incantrix, the Malconvoker and a whole host of game breakingly nasty builds. This plus the nerf to concentration checks, fewer ways to buff skills like spellcraft and knowledge arcana leads to weaker spellcasters. Meanwhile, the skill changes make the non-caster classes better as their skill points go further. Is it perfect, no far from it, but it did help make parties run smoother than they did in 3.5.

Jub wrote:Purple I question if you've ever played 3.5 before... The skill tree changes made in Pathfinder are one of the things D&D should have done between 3.0 and 3.5. Having stealth as a skill instead of making the rogue spend points on and roll for hide and move silently was massive for making non-magical stealth more viable. The same goes for rolling spot, listen, and search into perception, it makes very little sense to have three skills for essentially wordings for doing the same thing. Aside from that rolling jump and tumble in acrobatics makes the skill more attractive to to certain builds and removing concentration as a skill is a rather serious nerf to spell casters. So I don't see where you get off on saying the skill changes had no reasoning behind them.

I disagree. What these things did is make builds more boring and streamlined, basically cutting out customization for the sake of god knows what. Playing 3.5 not a year ago I had amazing fun with a character that was good at sneaking around and listen (+4) but not fantastic at spot (-1). So she spent most of her time sneaking around listening in but avoided exposing her self to a spot check. Such a build is not possible in pathfinder.

The new races do bring some imbalance, but that is easily corrected for if your DM is worried about it. You can simply give the other players a few racial bonuses to match them to the points cost of the highest powered race in play. You can call them blessings, heroic bloodlines, and random genetic luck to justify these tweaks. Besides, none of these races are as specifically or radically broken as certain 3.5 builds, such as a venerable Dragonwrought Kobold or the much more humble Goliath.

Those builds are also easily addressed by a good GM. If your GM can't set the level of "optimization" he expects from his characters and say NO to characters that are massively overbuilt for his party than he ain't a good GM.

As for the caster melee gap, I do think that Pathfinder somewhat closed it simply by getting rid of things like the DMM cleric, full caster level bards, the Incantrix, the Malconvoker and a whole host of game breakingly nasty builds. This plus the nerf to concentration checks, fewer ways to buff skills like spellcraft and knowledge arcana leads to weaker spellcasters. Meanwhile, the skill changes make the non-caster classes better as their skill points go further. Is it perfect, no far from it, but it did help make parties run smoother than they did in 3.5.

They run smoother, sure. But it's still just as imbalanced. Playing a fighter in PF is just as mechanically pointless as playing one in 3.5.

Honestly what I think should have been done is completely alter the way spells are learned. I'll get into that later today when I have more time to type. So expect a longer post explaining it.

Purple wrote:I disagree. What these things did is make builds more boring and streamlined, basically cutting out customization for the sake of god knows what. Playing 3.5 not a year ago I had amazing fun with a character that was good at sneaking around and listen (+4) but not fantastic at spot (-1). So she spent most of her time sneaking around listening in but avoided exposing her self to a spot check. Such a build is not possible in pathfinder.

Such a build is perfectly possible if you're willing to play the character rather than the stats. Fluff is much easier to alter than rules and games gain very little from having more specialized parts than they actually need.

Those builds are also easily addressed by a good GM. If your GM can't set the level of "optimization" he expects from his characters and say NO to characters that are massively overbuilt for his party than he ain't a good GM.

That's great, but the same DM could easily do the same in Pathfinder so saying that Pathfinders races are imbalanced when speaking about D&D is a complete falsehood.

They run smoother, sure. But it's still just as imbalanced. Playing a fighter in PF is just as mechanically pointless as playing one in 3.5.

I would disagree. The fighter has far more options, especially when one looks at the Archetypes system, and the redesigned skills mean that the player has things to do outside of combat. This means that the fighter can be fun to play even if they do end up lagging behind the casters once mid-high levels hit.

Honestly what I think should have been done is completely alter the way spells are learned. I'll get into that later today when I have more time to type. So expect a longer post explaining it.

There are plenty of ways to 'fix' D&D, but that's missing the point. The majority of people who started playing in 2e of 3x don't really want a massive change to the underlying system. It's part of why 4e failed so hard, it simply changed far too much, the fact that it felt sterile and lacking in any fluff also didn't help. 5e seems to be a step back towards the feel of 3.5, and the new magic system is flexible while still managing to somewhat restrict the power of caster classes. For all that I still don't seem it replacing the 3.5/Pathfinder hybrid that my group runs.