So Let's Balance from the Top Down instead of the Bottom Up

[Doctor Despair]

So I've seen a lot of attempts to work from the ground up to improve mundane classes, but from what I've seen this eventually amounts to thoughts that if mundanes wanted to be useful, they should have been casters. Now, I have mixed opinions on that, but that led me to reflecting on all the cheese one can do with magic by RAW. What sort of houserules would be necessary to stop a caster from actively breaking a campaign?

Craft Contingent Spell may create one contingent spell on each piece of equipment you wear that fills a slot by itself, maximizing out at twelve contingent spells. If more contingent spells are created, they begin to replace the older spells.

An ice assassin made of yourself gains the benefits of being the caster of the ice assassin spell; in short, it also has total control of its actions, which effectively means that neither of you do, resolving that it is a normal creature.

Any usage of spells that yields a NI or I statistic without also consuming NI or I time and resources causes the recipient to be subject to ancient divine abilities put in place by the most elder of deities for some negative consequence. This is triggered when such a chain of events begins, not when it ends, so a Pun Pun-type character that begins his ascension to omnipotence but stops at an arbitrary but measurable point would still be stifled. Likewise, uses of Fusion or Ability Rip and Astral Seed in conjunction with one another trigger these spells after more than one use.

Time spent using Astral Projection attracts increasing numbers of Astral Dreadnoughts that have increasing statistics, ability scores, templates, etc. They inherently sense when someone has spent more time in astral form than they have spent in their physical body and identify such a person as easy prey.

Dweomerkeeper's Supernatural Spell consumes experience as per ususal.


Thought Bottles cannot recover experience lost due to death.

Metamagic can be applied to divine spells without the use of any feats or abilities, but Divine Metamagic itself is removed.

[Segev]

The reason nerf-based solutions tend to get short shrift is that it's a lot less fun to tell players (or be told as a player), "No, that cool stuff you see isn't something you get to do." It's more fun when it is, instead, "Yeah, you get this EXTRA stuff!"

That said, I'm not sure how this is "top-down" as opposed to "bottom-up," as you propose it. Can you elaborate on what those terms mean to you, please?

[Cerefel]

I believe the OP is referring to class tier with the "top down/bottom up" thing.

[Doctor Despair]

The reason nerf-based solutions tend to get short shrift is that it's a lot less fun to tell players (or be told as a player), "No, that cool stuff you see isn't something you get to do." It's more fun when it is, instead, "Yeah, you get this EXTRA stuff!"

That said, I'm not sure how this is "top-down" as opposed to "bottom-up," as you propose it. Can you elaborate on what those terms mean to you, please?

While some campaigns will be designed around players abusing RAW for Tippy-class shenanigans, I don't think I'm alone in thinking a majority of people wouldn't want to play that way. Rather than just veto silly things as a DM on the spot partway through the campaign, potentially messing up character builds and decisions, I was curious what sort of pre-established rules I could use during session 0 if I ever were to DM to preempt any misunderstanding.

As for the "top-down" thing, I'm just referring to lowering the ceiling for casters from "can do literally infinite amounts of anything and can't be killed" to "can do more than any other classes and are very difficult to kill." This is opposed to raising the floor of lower tier classes by giving them more things in otherwise game-changing fashions. I feel like attempts to make mundanes stronger inevitably turn them into casters since DnD is biased towards casters at a fundamental level, which I think defeats the purpose of trying to rebalance the system at all and isn't in the spirit of mundanes.

[Grod_The_Giant]

actively breaking a campaign?
This is, I think, the key part. The more I look at 3.5, and systems in general, the more I see a distinction between game-breaking and campaign[/I-breaking. The former is in many ways a numbers game. A game-breaking character is too good at killing (ubercharger), skills (diplomancer), control (god wizard), whatever, to the point that either everything has to scale to their level or they effortlessly end encounters. A campaign-breaking character, on the other hand, can [I]bypass large sections of plot entirely, to the point that the plot has to be written with them in mind.

Example: compare a standard, not-particularly-optimized wizard to an ubercharger barbarian. The former avoids thoroughly broken cheese like Ice Assassin and Craft Contingent Spell; heck, he doesn't even take stuff like Polymorph or Planar Binding. Maybe he even specializes in Evocation. The latter goes for a no-nonsense Dragonborn Orc Barbarian (Spirit Lion Totem, Whirling Frenzy, Heedless Charge)/Frenzied Berserker with Leap Attack and Shock Trooper.

In a fight, the Barbarian flies around, charging everything in sight for OMGWTFBBQ damage. Enemies evaporate as soon as he so much as looks at them. The DM has a hard time designing combat encounters, but outside of combat things work pretty much like normal.

Over the course of a few sessions, that wizard:

Scries on the villain's henchman, leading them straight to the enemy base without one or more sessions worth of asking questions and doing favors to uncover it.
Teleports the party straight to the Island of the Dragons, bypassing what should have been several sessions' worth of travel and naval campaigning.
Casts Legend Lore to uncover the secret history of the McGruffin, meaning no-one has to journey to the Monks of History's mountaintop temple and petition them for knowledge.
Uses Animate Dead to create a disposable army to distract the villain's forces while the party slips inside to deal with him, saving months of effort to rally the local population.

Meanwhile, the Barbarian's main plot derailment is killing the BBEG in a single combat round.

So... yeah. Making sure everyone's combat game is on the same page is one thing, but it's much more difficult to get rid of casters' ability to derail campaigns.

((But to answer the original point, cutting everyone down to 6th or 7th level spells, progressing fairly evenly over 20 levels, does a lot to help. So does a gentleman's agreement, though))

[Crake]

So I've seen a lot of attempts to work from the ground up to improve mundane classes, but from what I've seen this eventually amounts to thoughts that if mundanes wanted to be useful, they should have been casters. Now, I have mixed opinions on that, but that led me to reflecting on all the cheese one can do with magic by RAW. What sort of houserules would be necessary to stop a caster from actively breaking a campaign?

Craft Contingent Spell may create one contingent spell on each piece of equipment you wear that fills a slot by itself, maximizing out at twelve contingent spells. If more contingent spells are created, they begin to replace the older spells.

An ice assassin made of yourself gains the benefits of being the caster of the ice assassin spell; in short, it also has total control of its actions, which effectively means that neither of you do, resolving that it is a normal creature.

Any usage of spells that yields a NI or I statistic without also consuming NI or I time and resources causes the recipient to be subject to ancient divine abilities put in place by the most elder of deities for some negative consequence. This is triggered when such a chain of events begins, not when it ends, so a Pun Pun-type character that begins his ascension to omnipotence but stops at an arbitrary but measurable point would still be stifled. Likewise, uses of Fusion or Ability Rip and Astral Seed in conjunction with one another trigger these spells after more than one use.

Time spent using Astral Projection attracts increasing numbers of Astral Dreadnoughts that have increasing statistics, ability scores, templates, etc. They inherently sense when someone has spent more time in astral form than they have spent in their physical body and identify such a person as easy prey.

Dweomerkeeper's Supernatural Spell consumes experience as per ususal.


Thought Bottles cannot recover experience lost due to death.

Metamagic can be applied to divine spells without the use of any feats or abilities, but Divine Metamagic itself is removed.


You know most of those things are just considered sensible limitations that people silently agree not to do, though in some cases you're actively going at things backwardly. For example, the thought bottle is INTENDED to recover xp from death. What it's NOT intended to do is recover xp from item creation for example. Ice assassin on the other hand, you can just make one of your friend wizard instead, and he makes one of you, so that is likewise a pointless nerf.

Craft contingent spell is already limited in number by character level, and making it take up item slots just means that all the items the wizard has just need to be upgraded to be slotless, which achieves nothing but making party wait around for EVEN LONGER while the wizard crafts up his arsenal.

[ben-zayb]

Does this stem from the idea that products of TO exercises are staples of actual games? Because To is just that, TO. Some people may use them on their table depending on the Op level of the rest of the party, but that would likely mean such games have TO party in the first place, so nobody gets left out.

[Fizban]

Over the course of a few sessions, that wizard:

Scries on the villain's henchman, leading them straight to the enemy base without one or more sessions worth of asking questions and doing favors to uncover it.
Teleports the party straight to the Island of the Dragons, bypassing what should have been several sessions' worth of travel and naval campaigning.
Casts Legend Lore to uncover the secret history of the McGruffin, meaning no-one has to journey to the Monks of History's mountaintop temple and petition them for knowledge.
Uses Animate Dead to create a disposable army to distract the villain's forces while the party slips inside to deal with him, saving months of effort to rally the local population.

Meanwhile, the Barbarian's main plot derailment is killing the BBEG in a single combat round.

So... yeah. Making sure everyone's combat game is on the same page is one thing, but it's much more difficult to get rid of casters' ability to derail campaigns.
Counterpoint: campaigns can be more easily re-railed than combat can be unbroken without completely changing a character build (assuming you're not running a pre-written campaign). Furthermore, the DM should know perfectly well what the wizard can do to the campaign, and can use or invent in-world counters. . . if they're willing to actually understand what their players can do as in: the spells. Most people (including myself until I recently felt like making some lists, and certainly our straw DM here) just can't be bothered to actually look at what's there and how it all interacts and anticipate it rather than reacting after the campaign is already derailed.

I haven't actually used it, but this (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?210623-3-5-Magic-Remix-The-Philosopher-s-Stone) set of simple adjustments does a good job of clamping down on a lot of power if that's what you're after, primarily by torpedoing range and duration so that spell slots and tactical positioning matter. Seriously, look at those ranges: most spells only reach 20' and the longest is 100', 200' with Enlarge Spell. When you think of it from that direction, the original spell ranges were always ridiculously long and of course casters never care about combat, newer editions do not give ranges anywhere near that and 3.5 monsters rarely have anything reaching that far except their own spells.

Alternatively this (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?211407-Minimal-Intervention-balance-fix-%28PEACH%29) fix is more complicated and has some holes that weren't updated, but instead limits access to high level spells by restricting casters to Adept totals except under certain situations. It's better if your problem is with campaign breaking rather than combat and want to delay access to the higher level spells that start doing that, but ultimately if the DM doesn't have a grasp on what the PCs are capable of it doesn't matter what limits are used.

Edit: oh, and regarding Craft Contingent Spell, neither of the above links addresses individual problems. If you actually want to change the balance of the game you need sweeping changes which will still never account for individual problems. Craft Contingent Spell is stupid overpowered, so ban it, ban or nerf individual things when necessary, but remember that if you don't actually check all the spells and game elements available then obviously you're going to miss something. Actually now that I read the OP properly (yeah I just wanted to respond to Grod) I see why people are going on about TO not being used in actual games. If your players do in fact want to play at full TO level and you're not capable of running a game to match then you are not obligated to do so. Optimization level and degree of "game-breakery" should be discussed by the group and agreed upon so that it never needs specific rules to begin with.

[Uncle Pine]

Craft Contingent Spell may create one contingent spell on each piece of equipment you wear that fills a slot by itself, maximizing out at twelve contingent spells. If more contingent spells are created, they begin to replace the older spells.
This doesn't solve anything: having 12 contingent (Greater) Celerities that go off whenever you say "Swordfish" followed by the appropriate cardinal number (a free action that can be done even when it's not your turn) or having 20 of them is effectively the same. Especially if you use one of those contingency to Plane Shift to the Far Realm and recharge all your other contingencies.
Curiously enough, this nerf actually benefits 11th level casters, as they can now have one more contingency.


An ice assassin made of yourself gains the benefits of being the caster of the ice assassin spell; in short, it also has total control of its actions, which effectively means that neither of you do, resolving that it is a normal creature.
No, it means that the ice assassin obeys both you and itself at the best of its abilities. You also get to make an opposed Cha check in case of conflicting orders. See here (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/magicOverview/castingSpells.htm#stackingEffects). There are also several methods of gaining control over a creature (an entire school of magic, even) and even if you don't have control over the ice assassin you are still free to create an ice assassin of your enemies, meaning that they now have to deal with you and possibly several exact copies of themselves.


Any usage of spells that yields a NI or I statistic without also consuming NI or I time and resources causes the recipient to be subject to ancient divine abilities put in place by the most elder of deities for some negative consequence. This is triggered when such a chain of events begins, not when it ends, so a Pun Pun-type character that begins his ascension to omnipotence but stops at an arbitrary but measurable point would still be stifled. Likewise, uses of Fusion or Ability Rip and Astral Seed in conjunction with one another trigger these spells after more than one use.
Actually, this is more or less the premise of every campaign of mine. Except that no players actually know about it, since it never came up. Still, should anyone ever come up with a NI or infinite loop the following would happen as soon as he/she were to use it: "For an istant, time seems to stop. Suddenly, a glowing spherical portal opens up and a minuscule brownish creature rapidly crawls out of it. The creature approaches you and touches your thumb before crawling back into the portal, vanishing into nothingness. As the time starts to flow again, you disappear."
The above also applies to resemblances of wish looping.


Metamagic can be applied to divine spells without the use of any feats or abilities, but Divine Metamagic itself is removed.
So every divine spellcaster now has 100+ bonus feats. I fail to see how this is a nerf. :smallconfused:

[Grod_The_Giant]

Counterpoint: campaigns can be more easily re-railed than combat can be unbroken without completely changing a character build (assuming you're not running a pre-written campaign).
Oh, to be sure. The overall point was that casters have a large amount of power that's entirely separate from high-op encounter-winning cheese. Power that really has to be addressed by the DM, one way or another.

(Personally, I suggest adding mundane limits to magic. Divinations can't penetrate lead, running water wears down ongoing spells, salt circles can repel undead, that sort of thing. It's flavorful and gives you a way to counteract magic without requiring every villain to also be a high level caster)

[Fizban]

Even if the main villain wasn't a caster I don't think I'd ever not have at least one caster of equal strength to the PCs somewhere in there, doesn't make sense to me. Lead does block scry n' die actually, all [scrying] spells, but I would have sworn it didn't until recently. Spells that ignore lead aren't good enough to let you teleport unless your DM lets you use binary searching to find coordinates based on yes/no answering spells and/or teleport based on maps. Find the Path can't get you through a barred door or anticipate the actions of defenders who might go around messing with doors. Discern Location might be considered enough for teleport, but it's the 8th level ultimate option and requires you to have seen the creature firsthand/touched the object personally. So when it comes to scry 'n die all you really need is lead, the best the party can do is Dimension Door an exact distance and hope they guessed right. Incidentally, I don't think it says anywhere if [scrying] is allowed to go around corners and stuff. Since the point is restriction I'd rule that it checks a straight line between you and the target, otherwise it's practically useless.

Running water damaging spells is a fine idea (some of that in what I was just reading), but there is the slight problem of magic being the required solution for characters functioning underwater so you have to decide what spells are water-tight. What sort of mechanic did you have in mind? I'm also curious as to what you'd do with the salt circles, though I expect that was more of an example since undead can be sworded already.

[EldritchWeaver]

As others have mentioned, if you really want put the classes on the same tier level, you need to change more than a few things. In fact, for my Pathfinder game I've been using Path of War and Spheres of Power to replace/modify martial and magical core classes alike. Instead having 5 tiers, I have at most 3 to contend with, removing the most problematic tier 1 and 5 out of the box. If you are playing D&D, then Tome of Battle might be the to-go replacement. SoP likely works with 3.5 as well or at most requires minimal adjustments. Of course, my approach has been quite holistic, the other links provided might be more to your taste.

[Triskavanski]

Some of my biggest problem spells are the ones that cause GM domination over a player character. Like Dominate Person. Its like, BLAM, now you can't do anything fighter, because you're full of suck loser sauce. Go and kill your party's mage.

In combat some of the biggest issues really is the ability to cast defensively is very low DC. Sure its hard when you're like level 2-3, but after that nothing the fighter can do will interrupt you.

The dc for casting a 9th level spell is 33. A wizard with 20 int (Which is pretty low) at level 17 would have a 22+1d20. Meaning they fail that check 50% of the time. Of course most wizards are going to have closer to 24-26 int if not more by this level (due to leveling, rolls, race and magic items)

That makes the check closer to about 30~35% chance of failure. And mind you of course that a 9th level spell isn't needed to take down a fighter. A 6th level or lower spell would do easily enough, and then you don't suffer any chance of failing. Unless the fighter has disruptive, adding a measly +4 to the Concentration DC. Easily avoidable with Combat Casting.

If you don't wanna blow a feat on CC, you could just pick up spell guard Bracers to be able to get a +2 and 3/times a day you can roll twice on the concentration check.

[ericgrau]

I tend to file rules like "no pun-pun" under common sense (and yes, I know, everything similar), and it is difficult to list them all. It's hazier for tricks near the spot where you draw the border. Just do everything case by case until you and your players get a feel for it all, rather than listing out 503 things while still having loopholes. This is actually how most groups play, and in practice balance is much less of a problem than it is in theoretical forum discussions.

Mild power creep and where precisely to draw the border is the bigger issue. They won't shatter the multiverse but they are far more likely to actually become a problem and a matter of discussion rather than agreed to be avoided within 0.3 seconds. Come to an agreement and enforce it strictly as a DM, saving almost all discussions for after the session is over unless it's a major point. Some of these may actually wish to write down, though again for the sake of brevity you may want to be general about it or merely give players a rough idea of what might be accepted case by case.

Boredom is also an issue for players who are more experienced but don't want to learn the mundane tricks. The typical solutions are to either always play the more interesting classes or learn the mundane tricks. Nerfing the more interesting classes is extremely dangerous here, as you could ruin all their fun. You can also bring in more magic items, or open up splatbooks to add more variety to mundane classes. Not to mention a little power creep for them.

[Arbane]

Even if the main villain wasn't a caster I don't think I'd ever not have at least one caster of equal strength to the PCs somewhere in there, doesn't make sense to me. Lead does block scry n' die actually, all [scrying] spells, but I would have sworn it didn't until recently.

From what i remember, lead sheeting's been the mundane countermeasure to diviners since at least 1st ed AD&D.

[ZamielVanWeber]

The dc for casting a 9th level spell is 33. A wizard with 20 int (Which is pretty low) at level 17 would have a 22+1d20. Meaning they fail that check 50% of the time. Of course most wizards are going to have closer to 24-26 int if not more by this level (due to leveling, rolls, race and magic items)

Concentration goes off of Con, not Int, unless you are undead in which case you go off of Cha. A necropolitan sorcerer will be having a good time, but a wizard needs to go through more work.

[Triskavanski]

Oh I was using Pathfinder's rules there. Sorry, I should have stated. Cause in 3.5 its even worse.

dc 15+Spell levelS

So that level 17 wizard with 10 con who's been buffing up all the skill ranks in concentration would have 20 ranks, needing to only make a dc 24 for his concentration check. A simple Skill focus concentration gives +3 meaning you only fail on 5%

At least in 3.5 they gave the ultimate counter of "If you threaten, mages can't cast defensively" with the mage slayer feat.

[MyrPsychologist]

Nerfing is never good game design and only breeds contempt without actually addressing the problem of the power differences.

IMO, the only houserule that should ever be used in this situation is your right as the DM to okay the classes that people want to play. Not okay with wizards? Then don't let anyone play a wizard. Bam. Problem solved. And this way nobody has to feel like their balloon was taken away or they're being specifically targeted. Personally, I ban all of the tier 1 casters and also ban anything above tier 4. It's what I'm comfortable with and my players understand this. In my experience this creates the most balance without creating "false choices" for people to fall into and feel like they can't contribute.

[Fizban]

From what i remember, lead sheeting's been the mundane countermeasure to diviners since at least 1st ed AD&D.
When I said recently I'd meant that I only properly looked it up recently, sorry if I wasn't clear. I'd always known lead blocked detect and locate spells, but I figured the whole point of [scrying] spells was that they didn't care about what was between you and the target so lead wouldn't matter. Then I'm making a list of spells and countermeasures and right there under the [scrying] tag it says they're all blocked by lead and I'd never noticed. After that the list of working locator spells is rather short. It makes me wonder how many hardcore scry 'n die-ers/DMs missed that bit.

[Psyren]

Oh, to be sure. The overall point was that casters have a large amount of power that's entirely separate from high-op encounter-winning cheese. Power that really has to be addressed by the DM, one way or another.

(Personally, I suggest adding mundane limits to magic. Divinations can't penetrate lead, running water wears down ongoing spells, salt circles can repel undead, that sort of thing. It's flavorful and gives you a way to counteract magic without requiring every villain to also be a high level caster)

I second this. One of the biggest campaign-smashers in particular, teleport, contains an often-overlooked clause that allows both magical and non-magical energy to mess around with it. You can put your boss lair behind a waterfall or in a volcano, deep underground where seismic activity is constant, stick an evil ritual or abyssal portal in the basement, put the Evil Artifact at the very center, or any number of other reasons why the players can only teleport so close to it.

This doesn't stop Greater Teleport of course, though even that is not foolproof thanks to the "misleading/insufficient information" clause.

[Segev]

It's also always worth noting that, once a game-changing (or breaking) power shows up in the hands of the PCs, it becomes kosher to plan for them to use it. This does not always mean, "Plan ways to foil it." Au contraire, it can often mean, "Plan for them to use it as part of the solution, and feel free to make the problem require it."

So if they have greater teleport, plan the adventure such that the race against the clock is to find out where they need to get. They can get there in an instant, so it's no longer a problem that it's at the bottom of the ocean behind a sea-elf fortress-vault that would require a long time to sail to and then be difficult to descend to. It's only a problem that they don't know that it's the sea-elf fortress-vault Itluntos, and not any of the others (or, indeed, the red dragon's lair in the Murdadon Volcano).

Or have the pieces of the MacGuffin scattered so far apart that, without teleport or its bigger brother, actually getting all of them would take years of travel by themselves. But this is a short arc in the campaign, because teleport makes it doable to just gather them. Kind-of like how gathering the dragonballs eventually became an easy task in DBZ. So easy that the threats were actually taking into account the dragonballs as a viable resource!

[Willie the Duck]

There is no simple answer, because if there was, WotC would have implemented it in 2004 or so. Case-by-case analysis is required. The best thing to do is warn your players, "if you're building your PC around a single, specific gimmick or combination, you should check it with me now."

That said, two major issues seem to have come up in this thread repeatedly --scry and die (i.e. divination and teleport), and action economy (through contingent spells). If I were to make a blanket ruling that would readily stop game breaking, it would be to tell your players that recon is going to be tough in your game, and you need good recon to drop in on your enemies with teleport (but, thankfully, that means you needn't fear s&d from your enemies either), and no, you aren't going to be getting off many multiple spells per round (sorry, just the way it is). I think those are both really good limits on spellcasters that move them closer to moderately optimized melee types.

[bekeleven]

That said, two major issues seem to have come up in this thread repeatedly --scry and die (i.e. divination and teleport), and action economy (through contingent spells). If I were to make a blanket ruling that would readily stop game breaking, it would be to tell your players that recon is going to be tough in your game, and you need good recon to drop in on your enemies with teleport (but, thankfully, that means you needn't fear s&d from your enemies either), and no, you aren't going to be getting off many multiple spells per round (sorry, just the way it is). I think those are both really good limits on spellcasters that move them closer to moderately optimized melee types.

If you want to shut off strategic-level spellcasting, you can do a lot worse than saying the following:

1. No spell functions at longer than long range. No, not even that one. Yes, this pretty much means the [Calling] Subschool is dead. Various planar travel spells would likely be the explicit exceptions.

2. You can't cast more than 1 spell per combat round. No, not even then. Nerveskitter the initiative roll? Cool, you can use that surprise round to pull out your crossbow. Time stop? 1D4 free rounds to run away.

My PbP Houserules (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?361894) nuke casters from orbit, which is more extreme than you seem to be looking for.

[Psyren]

It's also always worth noting that, once a game-changing (or breaking) power shows up in the hands of the PCs, it becomes kosher to plan for them to use it. This does not always mean, "Plan ways to foil it." Au contraire, it can often mean, "Plan for them to use it as part of the solution, and feel free to make the problem require it."

So if they have greater teleport, plan the adventure such that the race against the clock is to find out where they need to get. They can get there in an instant, so it's no longer a problem that it's at the bottom of the ocean behind a sea-elf fortress-vault that would require a long time to sail to and then be difficult to descend to. It's only a problem that they don't know that it's the sea-elf fortress-vault Itluntos, and not any of the others (or, indeed, the red dragon's lair in the Murdadon Volcano).

Or have the pieces of the MacGuffin scattered so far apart that, without teleport or its bigger brother, actually getting all of them would take years of travel by themselves. But this is a short arc in the campaign, because teleport makes it doable to just gather them. Kind-of like how gathering the dragonballs eventually became an easy task in DBZ. So easy that the threats were actually taking into account the dragonballs as a viable resource!

I agree with this too, but with a caveat. One of the dangers of putting your campaign behind these kinds of "caster-gates" is that they can make the caster-martial disparity even more pronounced; it makes it very evident to the group just how vital the caster is to their success as a whole when he's their only hope for gathering the macguffin pieces or what have you.

This becomes especially apparent if you plan the session around the group having teleport or flight and then the primary caster's player is sick that day. You're then forced with calling off the entire session due to that one person being absent (which wouldn't necessarily be the case if, say, the paladin or bard couldn't make it), or clunkily introducing a NPC taxi to try and get the show on the road. This isn't impossible to pull off, but again, the more visible things behind the curtain become the more contrived the world can feel.

[Segev]

My various groups' usual solution to the "one vital person missing" problem, at least when they're only vital for essentially providing a NPC-able service, is "black-and-white syndrome."

A PC whose player is absent who cannot be conveniently shuffled off-screen to have their activities accounted for either in a brief description or with a small side-session is "black-and-white" for the session. They're there, and can be interacted with, but interaction with them is minimal. They do exactly enough that nobody has to contrive an explanation for why they didn't do it despite being there, but fade into the background for more proactive, creative, and personal initiative type things. They don't really participate in combat unless it would be painfully glaring that they didn't; they'll put up "standard buff suites" on fellow party members, and if the party has some sort of plan for a pre-planned combat (e.g. an ambush) wherein they'd play an integral role, they do their part more-or-less on autopilot. But they otherwise stay out of the way and let those who aren't suffering the dreaded black-and-white disease take the spotlight.


That doesn't answer the caster-martial disparity that Psyren brings up, of course. That's best handled by accepting that it exists, but that magic items are not unheard-of rarities in D&D 3.PF, so high-level martials can typically simulate the strategic-level caster effects if they have to by judicious item usage.

A more thorough solution requires deeper redesign. A project that is...rather enormous in undertaking. (I tend to be of the "elevate the capabilities of non-casters" school, myself.)

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Test of Spite started off as an attempt to swing a nerf bat to balance the classes...

Two years and 95 pages of house rules later, Legend RPG was born as a result.

Long story short: Your ability to swing a nerf bat will not match a player's ability to exploit yet another mechanic within the expected time frame of a campaign. If a player with a Tier 1-3 class wants to break your game, he's going to do it. Your best bet is to come to a gentleman's agreement beforehand.

[ericgrau]

Test of Spite started off as an attempt to swing a nerf bat to balance the classes...

Two years and 95 pages of house rules later, Legend RPG was born as a result.

Long story short: Your ability to swing a nerf bat will not match a player's ability to exploit yet another mechanic within the expected time frame of a campaign. If a player with a Tier 1-3 class wants to break your game, he's going to do it. Your best bet is to come to a gentleman's agreement beforehand.

That's my biggest criticism of hey I just came up with some random balancing house-rules, whaddya think? Lack of testing. I never realized the Test of Spite rules transferred over to a system. That sounds pretty cool considering how many duels they've had over those two years. If I ever end up playing high op or semi-high op that sounds like the rules to play with.

[EldritchWeaver]

If you want to shut off strategic-level spellcasting, you can do a lot worse than saying the following:

1. No spell functions at longer than long range. No, not even that one. Yes, this pretty much means the [Calling] Subschool is dead. Various planar travel spells would likely be the explicit exceptions.

2. You can't cast more than 1 spell per combat round. No, not even then. Nerveskitter the initiative roll? Cool, you can use that surprise round to pull out your crossbow. Time stop? 1D4 free rounds to run away.

My PbP Houserules (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?361894) nuke casters from orbit, which is more extreme than you seem to be looking for.

I've looked at these rules a bit. While your stated goal (no system rewrite) may be technically achieved, the complexity seems to equal one. Just for comparison purposes, Spheres of Power does support nuking casters by dividing available magic talents into basic and advanced ones, the latter being the possibilities of breaking campaigns. It is stated that the GM decides if advanced magic talents are available and if they are, which ones exactly. So even a full progression wizard won't escape Tier 2, using RAW. It is quite easy to houserule things that characters stay in Tier 3 (limit on talents in individual spheres, limit number of levels of high-caster/high-talent classes). In addition, Polymorph has been redesigned to prevent abuses known in 3.5/Pathfinder. So this supports your play style more or less out of the box.

[Grod_The_Giant]

I agree with this too, but with a caveat. One of the dangers of putting your campaign behind these kinds of "caster-gates" is that they can make the caster-martial disparity even more pronounced; it makes it very evident to the group just how vital the caster is to their success as a whole when he's their only hope for gathering the macguffin pieces or what have you.
Yeah, this. There's honestly not much you can do to meaningfully change that, short of using a significantly different set of (mostly homebrew) base classes- at which point you're basically playing a different d20 game. Linear Warriors/Quadratic Wizards is baked into the core essence of the system.

Your best bet is, well, what I did in my Giants and Graveyards houserules: break casters down into specialist classes with drastically reduced access to games changing spells, and write new nonmagical classes WITH some amount of access to game changing powers. Casters are still undeniably more powerful, but it's less of a gap-- more of a ToB-compared-to-Beguiler than a Rogue-compared-to-Wizard.

Either that or use a very selective set of base classes, pillaging the most functional guys from both 3.5 and Pathfinder. (Because they're the same) Something like

Alchemist (PF)
Bard
Binder
Brawler (PF)
Crusader
Dragonfire Adept (upgrade breath weapon damage to 1d6/level, and note that it has a 0-round recharge for purposes of metabreath feats)
Hunter (PF)
Incarnate
Inquisitor (PF)
Investigator (PF)
Magus (PF)
Psychic Rogue
Psychic Warrior
Ranger (Wildshape or Mystic ACFs only)
Skald (PF)
Swordsage (gains Trapfinding at first level)
Totemist
Warblade
Warlock (upgrade to 1 invocation known/level, and damage to 1d6/level)
Warpriest (PF)

With all PrCs granting higher than 6th level spells removed from the game.

[Triskavanski]

Linear Warriors/Quadratic Wizards is baked into the core essence of the system.

Yeah, though PF has been doing some good stuff for the Warriors. Primarily the Martial Flexibility and other methods of being able to have feats that change.

This is one of the best things I think have come warrior's way, as it allows someone to adapt with those piddly feats that are normally way too specialized to use.

Id say if anything, this is one of the caster characters greatest strength. Just how fluid and flexible they ultimately are. Even if you removed things like Wish and weaken their campaign breaking abilities, One day they could go from firebased to cold based dmg. They could go from DMG to Save or Suck, to even just buffers.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

That's my biggest criticism of hey I just came up with some random balancing house-rules, whaddya think? Lack of testing. I never realized the Test of Spite rules transferred over to a system. That sounds pretty cool considering how many duels they've had over those two years. If I ever end up playing high op or semi-high op that sounds like the rules to play with.

The rules are free at the Rule Of Cool (http://ruleofcool.com) website. Classes are relatively balances with respect to each other because of the new track system that evolved. They got rid of the worst of the problem children from casters, Gave Melee Nice Things, and in general, smoothed things out.

Unfortunately, development was abandoned before the monster creation system was truly fleshed out, although the tools they've provided are a good skeleton to build upon. One thing I absolutely approve of: while monsters might occasionally have player abilities, there are monster-specific abilities that players simply do not have access to. Since Polycheese simply does not exist by virtue of the entire polymorph line being omitted from the game entirely, the players have no means of accessing this. Since this was about... oh, I'd say around 75% of most of the abuses around Polymorph, it makes the game much easier to balance overall. You don't have to worry 'what will my players do when they get this ability', when designing a monster.

[Apricot]

I'm probably in the minority here, but the way I understand D&D magic is as a sort of toolbox. Magic shores up your party's weaknesses. Don't have a guy with Cleave? Use Fireball. Don't have a Rogue? Use Knock. Don't have anyone with appropriate knowledge fields? Use Identify. Magic can serve as a fail-safe that prevents bad rolls from utterly ending things. The problem is when people look at the toolbox, which was meant to give alternative methods for handling issues that your party couldn't handle otherwise, and decide to use it as a primary resource rather than a last-ditch supplement (which is a reasonable choice, considering that magic is, after all, extremely powerful). This is where DM decisions and gentlemen's agreements come into play. The reason why the Wizard, Cleric, and Druid are so potent in what they can do is mostly because they serve as the foundation upon which any of the more specific types of magic-user can be constructed, be it a high priest, a necromancer, an ent-tender, or whatever else might pique interest. Problems arise mostly when players treat "Wizard" as a type of magic user unto itself rather than a catch-all that they should be specializing with. Specialization and thoughtful roleplay tend to handle a lot of magic abuse right from the get-go, as you don't have a mysterious master who can comprehend all of the most powerful and complicated spells of the universe perfectly. Of course, there's no way to codify this apart from the slightly desperate attempts with Spellcraft checks and school specialization, so aside from telling people exactly what type of spellcaster archetype they can choose to play ahead of time (which is Grod's solution), I don't think there's a mechanical way to resolve this issue. I find that distasteful, because I'd much rather be allowed to imagine and interpret my own characters without making them toe the class line.

It's still the case, despite all this, that caster classes are more versatile and powerful than the non-casters no matter how much you intentionally limit them. That's mostly a problem with the non-casters just not having nice things. They only get feats and predetermined class abilities, rather than the versatility of technique that spells grant. It's fairly difficult to resolve without giving non-casters a ton of SLAs to even things out: I'd take the dungeoncrawler Nox as a CRPG example of it done right.

So, in the end, I think the idea of balancing by nerfing the top is looking at the entire issue the wrong way.

[Gnorman]

I'm probably in the minority here, but the way I understand D&D magic is as a sort of toolbox. Magic shores up your party's weaknesses. Don't have a guy with Cleave? Use Fireball. Don't have a Rogue? Use Knock. Don't have anyone with appropriate knowledge fields? Use Identify. Magic can serve as a fail-safe that prevents bad rolls from utterly ending things. The problem is when people look at the toolbox, which was meant to give alternative methods for handling issues that your party couldn't handle otherwise, and decide to use it as a primary resource rather than a last-ditch supplement (which is a reasonable choice, considering that magic is, after all, extremely powerful). This is where DM decisions and gentlemen's agreements come into play. The reason why the Wizard, Cleric, and Druid are so potent in what they can do is mostly because they serve as the foundation upon which any of the more specific types of magic-user can be constructed, be it a high priest, a necromancer, an ent-tender, or whatever else might pique interest. Problems arise mostly when players treat "Wizard" as a type of magic user unto itself rather than a catch-all that they should be specializing with. Specialization and thoughtful roleplay tend to handle a lot of magic abuse right from the get-go, as you don't have a mysterious master who can comprehend all of the most powerful and complicated spells of the universe perfectly. Of course, there's no way to codify this apart from the slightly desperate attempts with Spellcraft checks and school specialization, so aside from telling people exactly what type of spellcaster archetype they can choose to play ahead of time (which is Grod's solution), I don't think there's a mechanical way to resolve this issue. I find that distasteful, because I'd much rather be allowed to imagine and interpret my own characters without making them toe the class line.

You've basically answered your own point here about magic being a primary resource rather than a fallback, but I'd like to tack something on to it as an extension of your thought process. With the way that 3.5 was designed (as well as Pathfinder, to an even greater degree), magic was never going to be a backup toolbox. 3.5 handed the wizard a toolbox full of every imaginable implement they could possibly desire, and then gave the fighter a hammer. Is it any wonder that, when presented with something other than a nail, the fighter feels inadequate? You're right that you can't solve the problem by only nerfing the top, but certainly it helps achieve some measure of parity to limit the wizard's options to something slightly more comparable to the fighter's.

My larger point is that only spellcasters get to "imagine and interpret" their characters without toeing a class line, because the class line for spellcaster is "if magic can do it, so can you." I don't think it's unreasonable to narrow down the spellcaster archetypes to slightly more manageable ones. For example, the Wizard can easily be split into three separate classes (say, the Dread Necromancer, Beguiler, and Warmage, albeit with a few changes to round out the spell selection) without sacrificing the narrative possibilities available to the player. Sure, perhaps the Necromancer doesn't get to cast Charm Person. But when you get right down to it, isn't Animate Dead just a charm spell with a little bit of murder attached?

[Lans]

Honestly, it might be better to instead of banning things, you work from the other direction and choose what to allow for the higher tier classes. Getting them to a tier 3ish shouldn't be too hard on that front.