MAD Madness

[Bard for Kicks]

What do you think is the base class with the most MAD in the game? All base classes from any 3.5 book allowed. No homebrew.

Personally, I think it is the monk or paladin. But I'm wondering if there are any others that people generally don't consider.

[Aegis013]

Favored Soul is fairly MAD too, since the casting stat is two stats.

[Toy Killer]

Favored Soul and Paladin are two of the worse offenders in the MAD department. aside from Int and maybe Dex (if you don't multi-class *Sigh*) Paladin Needs everything. Charisma can be ignored by a cleric that doesn't care for turning, but a paladin needs it for saves and lay on hands. Wisdom for spell casting, Strength and Constitution for the normal reasons. I thank Dragon magazine for releasing Serenity and making paladin moderately tolerable in the regards to MAD.

Favored soul isn't much better, but you can ignore combat and alleviate the strength and dexterity side of things.

[Cog]

Favored Soul is fairly MAD too, since the casting stat is two stats.
Meh. A Favored Soul can do just fine while ignoring any spell that offers a save. They're pretty SAD so long as you treat them as a more martial, less castery Cleric.

I'm going to throw in with Monk.

[Greyfeld85]

Monk. It's absolutely required that a straight monk equally focus on Strength, Dex, Wisdom, and Constitution. The Paladin can get away with only focusing on Strength, Constitution, and Charisma.

[Zaq]

While it doesn't outdo the Monk, I would say that Rogues are more MAD than a lot of people realize.

STR for hit and damage (you can take Weapon Finesse, but that's a precious feat)
DEX for AC, init, and skills, and possibly for the TWF tree
CON to keep your lightly armored, d6 HD self upright
INT for precious skillpoints (and mods to a few skills)
WIS you can dump if you're OK with a bad Will save
CHA for skills

You can take steps to mitigate this (Weapon Finesse lets you drop STR if you're OK with SA damage alone, but it takes your level 3 feat, since it has a BAB prereq; you can choose to have a low CHA and be a non-social Rogue; you can narrow your skill horizons and lower your INT—that sort of thing), but they have a solid use for pretty much every stat out of the box, often to a degree that most classes don't. (Everyone needs CON, for example, but not everyone is a d6 class in leather who likes getting into flanking.) Weapon Finesse is a big deal, but the fact that it takes your level 3 feat hurts.

Spellthieves arguably have it worse, since they really can't afford low CHA. They can get away with slightly lower INT, though (they're just going to be more specialized by nature), so that helps a bit.

[FMArthur]

Bards are pretty MAD sometimes, but it mostly just restricts what they can do outside of their area of expertise. A melee Bard needs Constitution, Charisma and Strength but is also going to want a decent Intelligence because they'll be expected to skillmonkey a bit.

Binders are in a similar boat. To actually be as versatile as the vestige variety you have, you do need to have quite a stat spread, but if you just want to focus on certain vestiges over others it works out to be less MAD.

[Voyager_I]

Bards are pretty MAD sometimes, but it mostly just restricts what they can do outside of their area of expertise. A melee Bard needs Constitution, Charisma and Strength but is also going to want a decent Intelligence because they'll be expected to skillmonkey a bit.

I think Rogues are in a similar boat, actually. Their class can do more things than they'll really be able to support with a typical stat spread, but that just means they need to pick what kind of Rogue they're going to be. That's not inherently a bad thing. Every class doesn't need to be able to do everything they're theoretically capable of at the same time, so long as they can still get enough abilities to fulfill a useful role.

[FMArthur]

Yeah, Bards are probably what can be called a good kind of MAD, that promotes diversity in character creation. The bad kind of MAD is having one job and being unable to do it without 4 or 5 good stats.

[Voyager_I]

Yeah, Bards are probably what can be called a good kind of MAD, that promotes diversity in character creation. The bad kind of MAD is having one job and being unable to do it without 4 or 5 good stats.

I agree, but I don't think that counts as MAD. That's just a flexibility. MAD specifically refers to the latter case, where the character can't do what they're meant for without a 40 point buy.

[eggs]

Commoner, or for PC classes, Samurai.

There are very few cases where a class's features punish a character for low ability scores - a Paladin with straight 8's isn't penalized for the low stats; it's just not deriving a meaningful benefit from certain features.

As far as which class uses the most ability scores most directly, I'm going to say a melee Cloistered Cleric. Between spells, Knowledge Devotion, its Turning Pool, its light armor, its HP and its attack rolls, every ability score is directly applied to its standard functions, and with a melee placement, all of those abilities are relevant every round.



The problem typically meant by MAD is a combination of two features:
-1- The ability to benefit from multiple abilities.
-2- Low-powered class features.
Without the first, a class is just a bad class (like the Samurai or Soulknife); without the second, the class is fine, and doesn't really depend on those abilities (like the melee cleric or the Factotum). The problem is often overgeneralized and applied to situations where only #1 applies (so the Favored Soul might be "fixed" due to sharing that label with the Paladin, or someone might try to fix the Monk by condensing the abilities it uses - leaving the real problem of weak class features unaddressed).

[Bard for Kicks]

Yeah. So far I'm seeing Favored Soul, Monk, Pally most...

I can see why Favored Soul is extremely annoying to play. Generally, I imagine Favored Souls as buff+destroy type characters so I suppose it would be impossible for them to dump con/str/dex as well as their casting stats. But, honestly, if they had decent stats, wouldn't they function better than a paladin with decent stats or even a monk?

But why rogue? If you give them 18s in every stat, I think they would still be ultimate suck.

[Bard for Kicks]

The problem typically meant by MAD is a combination of two features:
-1- The ability to benefit from multiple abilities.
-2- Low-powered class features.
Without the first, a class is just a bad class (like the Samurai or Soulknife); without the second, the class is fine, and doesn't really depend on those abilities (like the melee cleric or the Factotum). The problem is often overgeneralized and applied to situations where only #1 applies (so the Favored Soul might be "fixed" due to sharing that label with the Paladin, or someone might try to fix the Monk by condensing the abilities it uses - leaving the real problem of weak class features unaddressed).

Oops. Sorry, I meant the class needs several attributes to be decent at anything. And I completely agree that both issues need to be addressed. Perhaps, we can add that to the list as well. Thanks for the clarification.