How unbalanced are my rules for scrolls?

[thom99]

Hmmm...sometime I must start a thread on whether anyone's actually DMing a 3.5 rules game at present. I didn't want to waste the group's time with my background before asking my question but, in short: I've been DMing D&D on and off since 1975, which almost by definition makes me "old school", to wit:

Bad idea. Everything the PCs are not allowed to have should not be permitted to baddies too.

I have zero problem with the "PCs can't do it, but the baddies can" (see old-school, above), and:

...Nerfing things tends to piss people off, particularly when there's splash damage to something they wanted to do that wouldn't have been problematic (which is pretty common).

Perhaps, but the advantage of being the only person who's willing to DM a 3.5 game does come in handy. My gaming group is so desperate to play anything that's not 5E (which we loathe) that I could probably make them wear tinfoil hats and chant "the DM is great!" every hour and they'd still want to play! However, where I live may be unusual in that respect...and I'm not that big of a d*ck.

Anyway, thanks for all the advice, especially about the non-T1 classes using wands & scrolls more. Again, that wasn't my experience when I ran my last 3.5 game back in 2005 - 2010. So I'm leaning towards letting the swift casting as a Move action stand.