Real Man's D&D

[jiriku]

Satyr, I skipped most of the debate but read through all the posts linked in your OP. I'm seeing a serious issue that's kind of shot through all of your changes.

Most of the changes make casters better.

If your goal is to empower Conan, you really don't want to make the evil sorcerers even more able to swat him down with a standard action. Here are the issues I see:

1. Higher stats benefit casters more than noncasters, because noncasters get bonuses, but casters get bonuses plus extra spells per day.
2. Higher hit points benefit casters more than noncasters, because extra hit points are more valuable when you have fewer of them, and less valuable when you already have lots. Moreover, it's generally easier for casters to defeat enemies without dealing hit point damage, which means this change handily helps casters defend themselves from noncasters, but doesn't do the reverse very well.
3. Reducing magic penalizes noncasters more than casters, because a caster can often cast a spell to duplicate the effects of a magic item he would have purchased, while a noncaster must simply do without.
4. Gestalting casters with anything, even NPC classes, makes them much stronger by shoring up the weaknesses that were supposed to balance them. A wizard gestalted with warrior gets a better Fort save, better hit points, better base attack, and free armor and martial weapon proficiency. A wizard gestalted with expert gains better hit points, better base attack, better skill points, and proficiency with some weapons and armor. These are not small benefits.
5. Flaws help casters more than noncasters, because caster feats are generally better than noncaster feats (compare Empower vs. Weapon Specialization or Sculpt vs. Precise Shot).
6. Eliminating psionics increases the average power of PC casters. Because psionics-using classes are generally a notch lower in power than their arcane analogues, players who would have played a psionic character are now funneled towards the equivalent, more powerful, arcane caster. You've removed the weaker casting options, funneling players towards the choices that have more dakka.

Additionally, a couple of your stated design goals, such as eliminating flying and teleportation, aren't accomplished by the changes you've published so far. Perhaps you intend to address them in the ban list.

Suggestion: To stop PCs from flying, you'll need to ban the Natural Spell feat to prevent druids from shifting to a flying animal form and using that form regularly in combat. You'll also need to ban air walk, master air, fly, mass fly, swift fly, overland flight, storm tower, false gravity, fire wings, phantom steed, lesser planar binding, planar binding, greater planar binding, lesser planar ally, planar ally, greater planar ally, gate, summon elemental, summon monster III through IX, summon nature's ally III through IX, summon desert ally III through IX, summon ice beast III through IX, alter self, polymorph, draconic polymorph, polymoph any object, shapechange, least dragonshape, lesser dragonshape, and dragonshape, to list the means of flight that I can think of off the top of my head.

I'd strongly recommend that if you want to get the swords and sorcery feel that you eliminate the wizard, cleric and archivist, and perhaps even the warmage. They just don't play nice with Conan. In an admittedly shameless plug, I'll also point up the elemental casters in my sig, which are intended to fill traditional fantasy spellcasting archetypes without the phenomenal cosmic power of the wizzie (although you'd want to prune their spell lists, as they generally do fly and teleport via one means or another).