Frank Trollman's page

And before anyone chimes in on this point: Yes I did deliberately move some spells from one level to another level for the Sorcerer special lists. This was not done willy nilly and there is a method and purpose to it. In many cases spells are moved because they genuinely appear on different lists at different levels, and as a Sorcerer is pretty much stuck with the spells he has, getting spells at the "have not" rate is pretty sad. For example, plane shift is a 5th level spell for Clerics while it is a 7th level spell for Wizards (a holdover, by the way, from the days when Wizards had more total spell levels than Clerics). That means that a Cleric gets the spell at level 9 while a Wizard gets it at level 13. The Sorcerers who specialize in this sort of thing (most of the ones with extraplanar power sources) get their plane shift at level 10 - which is still behind a Cleric, despite it showing up much earlier than for other characters selecting off the Sorcerer/Wizard list.

The second common reason is that frankly a lot of spells never see play because they are terrible. Or at least, that they are very weak for the levels that they appear at. People generally don't cast sunburst, because doing small amounts of damage and blinding opponents isn't really that important for a 15th level character. These underperforming spells are showing up early for these specialist Sorcerers because it genuinely doesn't matter. Giving a character access to slow at 4th level isn't going to hurt anything, and it will make their magic look very different from that used by other characters of their level.

And finally, many spells are highly level dependent. To the extent that if they showed up at lower character levels it wouldn't matter at all because the spell effects scale down smoothly to whatever level you happen to be. Greater Dispel Magic is a great example. It gives you a 50/50 shot at dispelling spells of your level (which when you think about it, is a pretty bad deal), at every level. So it could seriously show up at any level and it wouldn't matter in the slightest.

-Frank

Polar Ray is an insult to god and man. It's not a long legacy, it was introduced in 3.5 and before that it was merely one of several options for the much lower level Otiluke's Freezing Sphere. And of course, in Pathfinder, that would have to be called Freezing Sphere for copyright reasons, but that is neither here nor there.

The point however, is that in the conversion from AD&D to 3e D&D, the amount of hit points and energy resistance that creatures have has increased literally exponentially. And damage output from Evocations has not kept up in the slightest. And while we could plausibly attempt to push the envelope and pump up damage output to match, that would only be an arms race that no one would win.

Evocations in 3rd edition rules are primarily spells which serve to devastate low level opposition or to slowly but surely chip away at the defenses of opponents that pose reasonable threats. These are sometimes valid tactics, but they are not valid tactics to use one's highest level spells to accomplish. It takes a lot of magic missiles to bring down a Shadow, meaning that there is frankly no way that any Wizard is going to have enough spell slots to dedicate to doing that to make it a viable way to eventually beat such an opponent.

So here's the solution: reduce the spell level of these underperforming evocation spells. Since they scale in damage to your level, nothing actually bad happens if you get these spells early. Even a dozen or more levels early is perfectly fine because the damage scales to something level appropriate at low level. A polar ray cast by a 1st level character does just 1d6 of damage - half the damage that the same character could achieve by purchasing a vial of alchemist frost and throwing it at a target (same to-hit roll as well at any kind of close range).

So here's what the Evocation list should look like:

Evocation Cantrips

• Burning Hands
  
• Dancing Lights
  
• Light
  
• Magic Missile
  
• Shocking Grasp

• Fireball
  
• Floating Disk
  
• Gust of Wind
  
• Lightning Bolt
  
• Polar Ray
  
• Sending

• Chain Lightning
  
• Cone of Cold
  
• Continual Flame
  
• Darkness
  
• Daylight
  
• Flaming Sphere (this spell badly needs to be better than it is, but that's another subject)
  
• Scorching Ray
  
• Shatter

• Delayed Blast Fireball
  
• Ice Storm
  
• Shout
  
• Tiny Hut
  
• Wall of Fire
  
• Wind Wall

• Fire Shield
  
• Interposing Hand
  
• Resilient Sphere
  
• Wall of Ice
  Evocation 5th Level Spells
  [list]
• Forceful Hand
  
• Freezing Sphere
  
• Mage Sword
  
• Sunburst
  
• Wall of Force

• Contingency
  
• Grasping Hand
  
• Shout, Greater

• Clenched Fist
  
• Force Cage
  
• Prismatic Spray
  
• [/i]

• [i]Crushing Hand
  
• Meteor Swarm
  
• Telekinetic Sphere

• 9th level Spells must be written for this discipline. Seriously, timestop? Shapechange? Wail of the Banshee? Astral Projection? Shades? Weird? Most disciplines have two game defining, god-fighting spells to choose from at 9th level. Evocation hasn't been given anything remotely decent for their top tier, so new, mountain leveling spells must be written for Evokers to have.

There. It's pretty much completely backwards compatible, but nonetheless puts Evokers in at being able to do something legitimately valuable - Killing Fools.

And no, having unlimited magic missiles or shocking grasps is not ungamebalanced at 1st level, or any level. Magic Missile tops out in damage at level 9, when it does 17.5 damage against any opponent who doesn't have concealment, cover, or spell resistance. But at level 9, a Rogue is literally inflicting 17.5 points of sneak attack damage with every single attack. And that's not total damage for the round, that's just the extra damage from a sneak attack. He still gets to do his weapon damage, and make his other attacks for that round. Shocking Grasp is very likely to hit, and it does a d8+1 damage. A Longsword in the hands of a Fighter is also very likely to hit and does a d8+4. While the shocking grasp is quite likely to have a better chance of hitting an orc warrior than the longsword is, it is also much more likely to do insufficient damage to drop the orc. Indeed, the Orc Warrior out of the SRD is more likely to drop in one attack from the 1st level Fighter than he from the 1st level Wizard - even factoring in the discrepancy in hit chances.

And no, casting fireballs at 1st level isn't unbalanced either. At 1st level it only does a d6 of fire damage, it's barely worth doing against many opponents. It certainly isn't putting color spray out of a job.

-Frank

Polar Ray is an insult to god and man. It's not a long legacy, it was introduced in 3.5 and before that it was merely one of several options for the much lower level Otiluke's Freezing Sphere. And of course, in Pathfinder, that would have to be called Freezing Sphere for copyright reasons, but that is neither here nor there.

The point however, is that in the conversion from AD&D to 3e D&D, the amount of hit points and energy resistance that creatures have has increased literally exponentially. And damage output from Evocations has not kept up in the slightest. And while we could plausibly attempt to push the envelope and pump up damage output to match, that would only be an arms race that no one would win.

Evocations in 3rd edition rules are primarily spells which serve to devastate low level opposition or to slowly but surely chip away at the defenses of opponents that pose reasonable threats. These are sometimes valid tactics, but they are not valid tactics to use one's highest level spells to accomplish. It takes a lot of magic missiles to bring down a Shadow, meaning that there is frankly no way that any Wizard is going to have enough spell slots to dedicate to doing that to make it a viable way to eventually beat such an opponent.

So here's the solution: reduce the spell level of these underperforming evocation spells. Since they scale in damage to your level, nothing actually bad happens if you get these spells early. Even a dozen or more levels early is perfectly fine because the damage scales to something level appropriate at low level. A polar ray cast by a 1st level character does just 1d6 of damage - half the damage that the same character could achieve by purchasing a vial of alchemist frost and throwing it at a target (same to-hit roll as well at any kind of close range).

So here's what the Evocation list should look like:

Evocation Cantrips

• Burning Hands
  
• Dancing Lights
  
• Light
  
• Magic Missile
  
• Shocking Grasp

• Fireball
  
• Floating Disk
  
• Gust of Wind
  
• Lightning Bolt
  
• Polar Ray
  
• Sending

• Chain Lightning
  
• Cone of Cold
  
• Continual Flame
  
• Darkness
  
• Daylight
  
• Flaming Sphere (this spell badly needs to be better than it is, but that's another subject)
  
• Scorching Ray
  
• Shatter

• Delayed Blast Fireball
  
• Ice Storm
  
• Shout
  
• Tiny Hut
  
• Wall of Fire
  
• Wind Wall

• Fire Shield
  
• Interposing Hand
  
• Resilient Sphere
  
• Wall of Ice
  Evocation 5th Level Spells
  [list]
• Forceful Hand
  
• Freezing Sphere
  
• Mage Sword
  
• Sunburst
  
• Wall of Force

• Contingency
  
• Grasping Hand
  
• Shout, Greater

• Clenched Fist
  
• Force Cage
  
• Prismatic Spray
  
• [/i]

• [i]Crushing Hand
  
• Meteor Swarm
  
• Telekinetic Sphere

• 9th level Spells must be written for this discipline. Seriously, timestop? Shapechange? Wail of the Banshee? Astral Projection? Shades? Weird? Most disciplines have two game defining, god-fighting spells to choose from at 9th level. Evocation hasn't been given anything remotely decent for their top tier, so new, mountain leveling spells must be written for Evokers to have.

There. It's pretty much completely backwards compatible, but nonetheless puts Evokers in at being able to do something legitimately valuable - Killing Fools.

And no, having unlimited magic missiles or shocking grasps is not ungamebalanced at 1st level, or any level. Magic Missile tops out in damage at level 9, when it does 17.5 damage against any opponent who doesn't have concealment, cover, or spell resistance. But at level 9, a Rogue is literally inflicting 17.5 points of sneak attack damage with every single attack. And that's not total damage for the round, that's just the extra damage from a sneak attack. He still gets to do his weapon damage, and make his other attacks for that round. Shocking Grasp is very likely to hit, and it does a d8+1 damage. A Longsword in the hands of a Fighter is also very likely to hit and does a d8+4. While the shocking grasp is quite likely to have a better chance of hitting an orc warrior than the longsword is, it is also much more likely to do insufficient damage to drop the orc. Indeed, the Orc Warrior out of the SRD is more likely to drop in one attack from the 1st level Fighter than he from the 1st level Wizard - even factoring in the discrepancy in hit chances.

And no, casting fireballs at 1st level isn't unbalanced either. At 1st level it only does a d6 of fire damage, it's barely worth doing against many opponents. It certainly isn't putting color spray out of a job.

-Frank

Finally sat down and really ran the numbers on character advancement in Pathfinder, and I'm not super happy. At high levels, the difference in combat prowess between a party of one level and a party of another is not that high. I mean sure, the 15th level party can throw polymorph any object to kill anything with a Fort save or create giant huggy bears made out of magma, but that's not super different from casting flesh to stone on people you don't like. The tactical questions which go into killing a Beholder don't differ much at 11th level and 15th. And in the basic D&D rules a party of four will advance from 11th to 12th after 7 encounters with Beholders. A 15th level party will advance to 16th after 22.

In the current 3P rules, the 11th level party will still advance in 7 encounters, but the 15th level party will advance in 28.

In short, at the higher levels, the current chart makes a bigger stink about characters fighting enemies who are up or down a level or two despite the fact that at these levels an increase or decrease in level makes less difference than tactical match-up.

---

Also, I'm not jazzed about people being able to cast cloud kill at villages and ding a level. A 15th level party should have essentially nothing to fear from 20 Ogres, so giving them 4,000 XP out of the deal seems unwarranted.

-Frank

Playtest data can be very difficult to evaluate, especially in a complex system like D&D. So here's a rubric for determining how effective things actually are in an objective fashion. A character of level X is defined as being equally capable as a random encounter of the same level.

That means that if I take a level 7 character against a random CR 7 monster, there should be a 50% chance of each combatant emerging victorious. So here's how it works: if you can take your 7th level character and run test combats against a crap tonne of different CR 7 enemies, and have the character come out victorious half the time overall, your character is balanced by definition. If your character wins substantially more than that, he's probably over powered. If he wins substantially less than that, he is probably underpowered.

Teamwork Dependent Characters: Some characters are especially reliant on teamwork. Low level Rogues and Bards often fall into this category. So if you find such characters really underperforming, yo may wish to test out the same encounters with 2 characters who are two levels lower than the levels of the encounters - that's supposed to come out 50/50 as well.

Guidelines: Characters are only supposed to even survive about half the time, so obviously each encounter is going to be handled fresh. Assume that your characters have "level appropriate" gear and haven't been pulling planar binding shenanigans to have armies of demons or tonnes of gold worth of equipment. As far as buffing magic goes, assume that you can run around with any spells that you can keep up during your entire adventuring day (if you want to test characters doing the 15 minute adventuring day, go ahead - that's a useful data point).

Challenges for a 5th level (or two 3rd level) characters:

• A huge Animated iron statue.
  
• A Basilisk.
  
• A Large Fire Elemental.
  
• A Manticore on the wing.
  
• A Mummy.
  
• A Phase Spider.
  
• A Troll.
  
• A chasm.
  
• A moat filled with acid.
  
• A locked door behind a number of pit traps.
  
• A couple of Centaur Archers in the woods.
  
• A Howler/Allip tag team.
  
• A pit filled with medium monstrous scorpions.
  
• A Grimlock assault team.
  
• A Cleric of Asmodeus (with his zombies).

Challenges for a 10th level (or two 8th level) characters:

• A hallway filled with magical runes.
  
• A Fire Giant.
  
• A Young Blue Dragon.
  
• A Bebilith.
  
• A Vrock.
  
• A tag team of Mind Flayers.
  
• An Evil Necromancer.
  
• 6 Trolls.
  
• A horde of Shadows.

Challenges for a 15th level (or two 13th level) characters:

• A Marut.
  
• A Hullathoin (with its army of skeletons and bloodfiend locusts).
  
• A Nightmare Beast deep in a hedge maze.
  
• A Windghost in the sky.
  
• A Yakfolk cleric with a party of Dao.
  
• A Drow Priestess with an army of ghouls.
  
• A warparty of Cloud Giants.
  
• A Mature Adult White Dragon.
  
• A Death Slaad riding a Titanic Toad.
  
• A Cornugon.
  
• A Gelugon and his Iron Golem bodyguard.
  
• A Rube Goldberg series of contingent weirds triggered to a set of symbols of pain surrounding the artifact.
  
• A pair of Glabrezus
  
• A harem of Succubi.
  
• Twenty Dire Bears.
  
• A dozen Medusa mounted archers on Hellcats.
  
• A forest made out of lava and infested with hostile fire-element dire badgers.
  
• A pair of Beholders.

So take your character (or pair of characters) against these challenges. If it's a balanced character (or team), it should win half the time and lose half the time. It doesn't matter if some of these challenges are really bad for a specific character if another challenge happens to be really easy for them. The goal of over all balance is that the character should win half the time against challenges of his level, not necessarily win half the time against any specific challenge.

-Frank

As should now be obvious to anyone who has trotted out the Pathfinder rules at even modest levels: very small amounts of damage are very small. Seriously man, what was the thinking behind crap like the Evoker's Energy Ray? It does about 3 points of damage. You shoot it at an Orc Warrior and the Orc doesn't drop. On the other hand, the Orc is equipped with a Falchion, and if he hits you with it, the 2d4+4 damage it inflicts will drop a low level Wizard. Heck, it will often drop a low level Ranger.

Abilities like the Evoker's Energy Ray and the Necromancer's Gravetouch are offensively worthless. Not only are they extremely inferior to what other characters can do by simply using simple weapons, they are inferior to what the low level monsters do by just existing.

I applaud the idea of giving Evokers and Necromancers some love at low level, but this really obviously isn't it. The ability to do less damage than a random character will inflict with a Longsword is completely worthless. Heck, the ability to do less damage than is inflicted with an Acid Flask is fairly suspect. Remember that even an Expert can, and often will inflict 2d6 of Acid Damage with a ranged touch attack at first level. It's called purchasing some Acid Flasks off the basic equipment list and then throwing them at enemies. It even does splash damage.

Wizards can still defeat large numbers of Orcs by casting spells like sleep and color spray, but even the most casual of playtesting reveals - unsurprisingly - that a Wizard who attempts to fall back on Energy Rays is simply torn limb from limb without accomplishing anything of import.

-Frank

We have Elf, Dwarf, Halfling, Gnome, and Human. That's good. But we should have Orc, Hobgoblin, Goblin, Kobold, and Drow on the next page.

It covers a lot of bases and has a simple "fanged" version of each of the basic races. I'm pretty sure that we could get playable versions out of all of those without resorting to Level Allowance or weak player options. And Pathfinder already has nice art of all of those races.

And this is really important: we would then have a race for each of the classes to show up with an Iconic version. I would love it for the Iconic Sorcerer to be a Kobold or the Iconic Fighter to be a Hobgoblin.

-Frank

First, a caveat: the War Mage, the Dread Necromancer, and the Beguiler are not Open Content. They cannot be used without permission.

That being said, the Specialist casting classes have a lot of traction and have all but replaced the Sorcerer in everyday play. And well they should. Their method of casting ensures that they stay competitive, versatile, and thematic at every level.

So why not capitalize on that? Why even have "Sorcerers" who are basically just Wizards who are less versatile and harder to play? We could kill two birds with one stone: eliminating all the Specialist Wizard sub-classes and the Sorcerer and put in new specialist casting classes. The ones from various official WotC supplements are closed content, but we can write our own:

• Elementalist Concept: you control elemental forces of fire, water, earth, and wind. Functionally you can throw several kinds of energy damage and you summon up battlefield control like walls, clouds, storms, and grease.

• Necromancer Concept: you are a frickin necromancer. None of this crap about crawling on your tongue for seven levels shooting negative energy at people and such, you get to start stitching corpses together and raising tiny groups of zombies starting at level one. You get limited versions of Animate Dead at 1st and 2nd level, and expanded versions of Animate Dead at levels 4+. The other death magic you get does various stuff, but you get to do your actual thing from day one.

• Illusionist Concept: you are the original AD&D Illusionist, you use Illusions. While you get to throw Shadow Magic and some genuine "Reality Manipulation" around, your primary schtick is and should be illusions. Starting early on you're dumping color spray on people, and at higher level you get to shoot the prismatic line of spells as well.

Others that people think that they desperately need?

-Frank

We don't want to throw Astral Diamonds at the problem, but D&D's economics are badly in need of a serious overhaul. Here is an essay about the direction I would like it to go (note: assumes that we use 3e wish as opposed to the broken 3.5 version):

Spending the Loot: the Three (or so) Economies

"I'll give you five pounds of gold, the soul of Karlack the Dread King, and three onions for your boat, the Sword of the Setting Sun, and that cabbage…"

Life in D&D land is not like life in a capitalist meritocracy with expense accounts and credit cards. There is no unified monetary system and there are no marked prices. All transactions are essentially barter, and you can only trade things for goods and services if people genuinely believe that the things you are trading have intrinsic value and the people you are trading to actually want those specific things. Gold can be traded to people only because people in the world genuinely think that gold is intrinsically valuable and that they want to own piles of gold.

That means that in places where people don't want gold – such as the halfling farming collective of Feddledown, you can't buy anything with it. It's just a heavy, soft metal. But for most people in the fantasy universe, gold has a certain mystique that causes people to want it. That means that they'll trade things they don't need for gold. But no matter what they are giving up they aren't "selling" things because money as we understand the concept doesn't really exist. They are trading some goods or services directly for a physical object – an actual lump of gold. Not a unit of value equivalency, not a promise of future gold, not a state guaranty of an amount of labor and productive work – but an actual physical object that is being literally traded. And yeah, that's totally inefficient, but that's what you get when John Locke hasn't been born yet, let alone modern economic theorists like Adam Smith, Karl Marx, or Benito Mussolini. If you really want to get into the progressive economic theories that people are throwing around with a straight face, go ahead and check out theoreticians like Martin Luther, Thomas Aquinas, Sir Thomas Moore, or Zheng He. If you want to see what conservative opinions look like in D&D land, go ahead and read up on your Draconis, Li Ssu, Aristotle, or Tamerlain.

The Turnip Economy
"We got rats! Rats on sticks!"

Most settlements in a D&D setting are really small and completely unable to sustain any barter for such frivolities as gold or magical goods. The blacksmith of a hamlet does not trade his wares for silver, he trades them for food. He does this because the people around him are farmers and they don't make enough surplus to hoard valuable metals. So if he took gold for his services, he would get something he couldn't spend, and then he wouldn't be able to eat. So even though people in the tiny villages you fly over when you get your first gryphon will freely acknowledge that your handful of silver is worth very much more than their radishes, or their tin cups, or whatever it is that they produce for the market, they still won't trade for your metal because they know that by doing so they run the risk of starving to death as rich men.

The economy of your average gnomish village is so depressed by modern standards that even the idea of wealth accumulation and currency is incomprehensible. But the idea of slacking off is universal. There is a static amount of work that needs to be done on the farm each year and the peasants are perfectly willing to put you up if you do some of their chores. Seriously, they won't let you stay in their house for a copper pfennig or a silver ducat, but they will give you food and shelter if you cleanout the pig trough. They have no use for your "money", but they do need the poop out of the pig pen and they don't want to do it. On the other hand, they also don't want to be eaten by a manticore, so if you publicly slay one that has been terrorizing the village the people will feed you for free pretty much as long as you live. That's why people pay money to bards. Bards spend a lot of time in cities and actually will take payment in copper and gold. And if they sing songs about you, your fame increases. And fame really is something that you can use to buy yourself food and shelter from people in the turnip economy.

"Costs" in the turnip economy are extremely variable. In lean times, the buying power of a carrot is relatively high and in fat times the buying power of a cabbage is very low. It is in this way that the people in tiny hamlets get so very screwed. No matter how much they produce or don't produce, they are pretty much going to get just enough nails and ladders and such to continue the operations of their farms. However, such as there is a unit of currency in the barter economy of the turnip exchange – it's a unit of 1000 Calories. That's enough food to keep one peasant alive for one day. It's not enough to feed them well, and it's not enough to make them grow big and strong, but it's enough so that they don't actually die (for reference, a specialist eats 2000 Calories a day to stay sharp and an actual adventurer eats 5000 Calories a day to maintain fighting shape). In Rokugan, that's called a Koku, and in much of Faerun it is called a "ration". It works out to about 2 cups of dry rice (435 mL), or a 12 oz. steak (340 g), or 5 cups of black beans (1.133 kg), or 4.4 ounces of cooking oil (125 g).

Higher Calorie foods like meat and oil are more valuable and lower calorie foods like celery or spinach are less valuable because a lot of people exist on the razor's edge of starvation. The really fatty cuts of meat are the most valuable of all (it's like you're in Japan or Africa in that way). The practical effect of all of this is that people who have a skilled position such as blacksmith or scribe get enough food to grow up big, healthy, and intelligent. The peasants actually are weak and stupid because they only get 1000 Calories a day – they won't die on that but they don't grow as people. This also means that the blacksmith's son becomes the next blacksmith – he's the guy in the village who gets enough food to get the muscles you need to actually be a blacksmith.

When you start a party of adventurers, note the really tremendous expenditures that were required to make your characters. A 16 year old first level character didn't just get a longsword from somewhere, he's also been fed a non-starvation diet for 5844 days. That means that at some point your newly trained Fighter or Rogue seriously had someone invest thousands of Koku into him to allow him to get to that point. If your character is a street rat or a war orphan, consider where this food may have come from. Perhaps when the orcs destroyed your village leaving your character alone in the world the granary survived and your character had a huge supply of millet to sustain himself until he could hunt and kill deer to augment his diet.

A Note on Peasant Uprisings
Peasants may seem like they get a crap deal out of life. That's because they do. And regardless of whatever happy peasant propaganda you may have seen, peasants aren't really happy with their life even under Good or Lawful rulership. That's because they work hard hours all year and get nothing to show for it. So the fact that they don't get beaten by Good regimes or stolen from by Lawful regimes doesn't really make them particularly rich or pleased.
In Earth's history, peasant uprisings happened about every other generation in every single county from Europe all the way to China all the way through the entire feudal era (all 1500 years of it). It is not unreasonable to expect that feudal regions in D&D land would have even more peasant uprisings because the visible wealth discrepancies between Rakshasa overlords and halfling dirt farmers is that much more intense. Sure, as in the real world's history these uprisings would rarely win, and even more rarely actually hold territory (if lords can agree on nothing else, it is that the peasants should not be allowed to rise up and kill the lords). The lords are all powerful adventurers, or the family and friends of powerful adventurers, so the frequent peasant revolts are usually put down with fireballs and even cloudkills.

Students of modern economic thought may notice that cutting the remote regions in on a portion of the central government's wealth in order to buy actual loyalty from the hinterlands could quite easily pay itself off in greater stability and the ability to invest in the production of the hinterlands causing the central government's coffers to swell with the enhanced overall economy and making the entire region safer and stronger in times of war – but as noted elsewhere such talk is considered laughable even by Lawfully minded theorists in the D&D world. After all, since abstract currency doesn't see use and the villagers don't have any gold, it is "well known" that it is impossible to make a profit on investment in the villages. The only possible choices involve taking more or less of their food as taxes/loot as that is all they produce.

The Gold Economy
"What pleasures can I get for a diamond?"
"We'll… have to get the book."

People who live in cities mostly trade in gold. This is not just because living so far away from the dirt farmers makes the hoarding of turnips as a trade commodity a dangerous undertaking – but because people living in cities are surrounded by a lot of people who provide a wide variety of goods and services they are willing and able to trade for substances generally acknowledged to be valuable rather than trading directly for the goods and services that they actually want. These valuable substances range from precious metals (copper, silver, gold, platinum) to gems (pearls, rubies, onyx, diamond) to spices (salt, myconid spores, hellcandy flowers). In any case, these trade goods are traded back and forth many times before they are ever used for anything

When someone sells an item or a service for trade goods they are doing it for one of two reasons. The first is that they want something that the buyer doesn't have. For example, a man might want a barrel of lard or a bolt of silk – but they'll accept silver coins or something else that they are reasonably certain they can trade to a third party for whatever it is that they are actually interested in. Whoever is using the trade goods is at a disadvantage in the bargaining therefore, because while they are getting something they actually want, the other trader is essentially getting the potential to purchase something they want once they walk around and find someone who will take the silver for their goods. It is for this reason that the purchasing power of gold is shockingly low in rural areas: a prospective trader would have to walk for days to get to another place he might actually spend a gold coin – so all negotiation essentially starts with buying several days of the man's labor and attention. The second reason for accepting a trade good is the belief that the trade good may itself become more valuable. Indeed, when were crocodiles take over a nearby village all the silver becomes a lot more interesting. This sort of speculation happens all the time and is incredibly bad for the economy. People and dragons take enormous amounts of currency out of circulation and the resulting economic downturns are part of what makes the dark ages so… dark.

Gold and jewels can be used to purchase magic items that aren't amazingly impressive. No wizard is ever going to make a masterpiece just to sell it for slips of silver. However, there are more than a few magicians who would be willing to invest some time in order to get a handful of gold that they can use to live their lives easier with. Making even Minor magic items is hard work, and wizards demand piles of gold to be heaped on them for producing even magical trinkets. And because these demands actually work, there's really no chance to purchase anything that would take a Magician a long time to make. That means that Major magic items cannot be purchased with standard trade goods at all. There's literally no artificer anywhere who is going to sit down and make a Ring of Spellstoring or a Helm of Brilliance in order to sell it for gold – because the same artificer can acquire as much gold as he can carry just by making Rings of Featherfall or Cloaks of Resistance.

The Wish Economy
"They scour the land searching for relics of the age of legends. Scant remnants they believe will grant them the powers of the Vanished Ones. I do not. The Age of Legends lives in me."

Magicians can only produce a relatively small number of truly powerful magic items. While a magician can produce any number of magic items that hold requirements at least 4 levels below their own – a wizard is permitted only one masterpiece at each level of their progression. It is no surprise, therefore, that characters would be vastly interested in acquiring magic items produced by others that are even of near equivalence to the mightiest items that a character could produce. A character could plausibly bind 8 magic items, and yet they can only create one which is of their highest level of effect. Gaining powerful magic items from other sources is a virtual requirement of the powerful adventurer.

So it is of no surprise that there is a brisk – if insanely risky – trade in magical equipment amongst the mighty. All the ingredients are there: characters are often left holding onto items that they can't use (for example: a third fire scimitar) and they are totally willing to exchange them for other items that they might want (magical teapots that change the weather or helmets that allow a man to see in all directions). And while the mutual benefit of such trades is not to be downplayed, it is similarly obvious that the benefits of betrayal in such arrangements are amazingly amazing. Killing people and taking their magical stuff is what adventurers do, so handing magic items back and forth in a seedy bar in a planar metropolis is an obviously dangerous undertaking.

Tamerlain's Economy: The Murderocracy
"The soldier may die, but he must receive his pay."

Let's say that you don't want to exchange goods and services for other goods and services at all. Well, it's medieval times baby, there's totally another option. See, if you kill people by stabbing them in the face when they want to be paid for things, you don't have to pay for things. Indeed, if you have a big enough pack of gnolls at your back, you don't have to pay anything to anyone except your own personal posse of gnolls.

The disadvantages of this plan are obvious – people get super pissed when they find out that you murdered their daughter because it was that or pay for a handful of radishes. But let's face it: if that old man can't do anything about it because you've got a pack of gnolls – then seriously what's he going to do? And while this sort of thing is often as not the source for an adventure hook (some guy comes to you and whines about how his whole family was killed by orcs/gnolls/your mom/ ogres/demons/or whatever and suddenly you have to strike a blow for great justice), it is also a cold harsh reality that everyone in D&D land has to live with. Remember: noone has written [u]The Rights of Man[/u]. Heck, noone has even written [u]Leviathan[/u]. The fact that survivors of an attack may appeal to the better nature of adventurers is pretty much the only recompense that our gnoll posse might fear should they simply forcibly dispossess everyone in your village.

So people who have something that the really powerful people want are in a lot of danger. If a dirt farmer who does all of his bargaining in and around the turnip economy suddenly finds himself with a pile of rubies that's bad news. It's not that there aren't people who would be willing to trade that farmer fine clothing, good food, and even minor magic items for those rubies – there totally are. But a pile of rubies is just big enough that a Marilith might take time out of her busy schedule to teleport in and murder his whole family for them. And he's a dirt farmer – there's no way he has the force needed to even pretend to have the force needed to stop her from doing it. So if you have planar currencies or powerful artifacts, you can't trade them to innkeepers and prostitutes. You can't even give them away save to other powerful people and organizations.

That doesn't mean that there isn't a peasant who runs around with a ring that casts charm person once a day or there isn't a minor bandit chief who happens to have a magic sword. Those guys totally exist and they may well wander the lands trying to parlay their tiny piece of asymmetric power into something more. But the vast majority of these guys don't go on to become famous adventurers or dark lords – they get their stuff taken away from them the first time they go head to head with someone with real power. Good or Evil, Lawful or Chaotic, noone wants some idiot to be running around with a ring that charms people – because frankly that's the kind of dangerous and an accident waiting to happen. If you happen to be powerful and see some small fry running around with some magic – your natural inclination is to take it from them. It doesn't matter what your alignment is, it doesn't matter if the guy with the wand of lightning bolt is currently "abusing" it, the fact is that if you don't take magic items away from little fish one of your enemies will. There is no right to private property. Noone owns anything, they just hold on to it until someone takes it from them.

Beelzebub's Economy: The Trade in Favors
"I'm certain that there's something we can do to help you… but eventually you'll have to help us."

Every transaction in D&D land is essentially barter. People trade a cloth sack for a handful of peas, people trade an embroidered silken sack for a handful of silver, and people trade a powerful magical sack for a handful of raw power. But in any of these cases, the exchange is a one-time swap of goods that one person wants more for goods the other person desires. But there is no reason it has to work like that. Modern economies abstract all of the exchanges by creating "money" that is an arbitrary tally of how much goods and services one can expect society to deliver – thereby allowing everyone to "trade" for whatever they want regardless of what they happen to produce. Nothing nearly that awesome exists anywhere in the myriad worlds of Dungeons and Dragons.

What one can see in heavy use is the trade in favors. This is just like getting paid in money except that your money is only good with the guy who paid it to you. So you can see why people might be reluctant to sell you things for it. And yet despite the extremely obvious disadvantages of this system, it is in extremely wide use at every level of every economy. And the reason is because it's really convenient. There is no guaranty that a King will have anything you want right now when he needs you to kill the dragon that is plaguing his lands. In fact, with a dragon plaguing his lands, the King is probably in the worst possible position to pay you anything. But once the lands aren't on fire and taxes start rolling in, he can probably pay you quite handsomely. Heck, in two years or so his daughter will be marrying age and since she's just going to end up as an aristocrat unless she becomes the apprentice and cohort of a real adventurer…

Failing to pay one's debts can have disastrous consequences in D&D land. We're talking "sold to hobgoblin slavers" levels of bad. Heck, this is a world in which you can seriously go into a court of law and present "He needed killing" as an excuse for premeditated homicide, so people who renege on their favors owed are in actual mortal danger. Of course, everyone is in mortal danger all the time because in D&D land you actually can have land shark attacks in your home town – so it isn't like there are any less people who flake on duties and favors. Of course, if people know you let favors slide they might be less likely to pull you out of the way of oncoming land sharks. Even in Chaotic areas, pissing off your neighbors is rarely a great plan.

I'm not one of those people who thinks that the Fighter in the basic book is somehow OK. He's not. You put an SRD Fighter against opponents of his level and rather than winning half the time he just gets stomped into the ground. Fighter 10 vs. Fire Giant? Fighter 8 vs. Mind Flayer? Fighter 7 vs. Remorhazz? It's ugly, ugly stuff.

But just because we know for certain that the Fighter is in need of an overhaul, doesn't mean that he is in need of this overhaul. This writeup has a number of problems:

• Still not that good. Let's face it, getting +1 to AC "most of the time" isn't that big of an improvement over getting nothing at all. When the Fighter picks up his armor training, Wizards are learning web. Heck, spellcasters could just be casting cat's grace or barkskin and provide a larger AC bonus.

• Punishes Organic Characters Having characters lose their bonuses when they upgrade equipment is bad design. As soon as the party finds some awesome bug carapace armor or a Nerra Shard Sword, the party Fighter may as well be a Warrior. Remember that a character who is naturally interested in Full Plate is going to lose their Armor Training Bonus at high levels because at medium levels Full Plate comes in Mithril (which is Medium Armor, not Heavy), and at high levels it also comes with the Celestial quality (which makes it Light, not Medium or Heavy).

• Has Nonsensical Weapon Groups I don't know if you've looked at a Pick lately, but it's an axe, not a spear.

• Completely Lacks Depth 2 skills off a short list and no real "class features?" The Fighter presented is still the absolute worst character class to bring to the party while adventuring between actual combats. And while that might theoretically be balanced overall if he completely dominated combats, I'm pretty sure that he doesn't do that.

Now I've put A lot of thought into Fighters, and I wouldn't presume to tell you that there is only one way to fix them. There really isn't consensus in D&D as to what "being a Fighter" should entail. But I can tell you that this version fails.

-Frank

So unlike the Actually Broken Stuff thread, this is an examination of things in 3.x D&D which are out of balance one to another, but not necessarily out of balance with regards to a universally agreed upon measuring stick. While we can all agree that "infinite power" or "instant death" are bad for the game, it is not immediately obvious whether a Monk or a Druid is "unbalanced" just because they fight side by side in naked glory and the Druid is much much better. One could make a point equally compelling that the Monk is underpowered or that the Druid is overpowered. One could easily in fact have in mind a power level of "balance" which lies between those characters (rendering both the Monk too weak and the Druid too strong) or on one side or the other of both characters (determining that both characters are too powerful or not powerful enough, just to greater or lesser degrees).

To facilitate discussion and to be p front about my personal bias, I will state my own personal rubric for determining the relative power of characters. I call it the Same Game Challenge and it works like this: A character of Level X is a valid NPC of CR X; and a party that is twice as large is expected to fight enemies of EL 2 higher, while a party of half the size is expected to fight enemies of EL 2 lower. An EL of Party Level + 4 is supposed to be 50% likely to kill the party. Which means that mathematically the ideal of 3rd edition is that a "party" of one character of Level X should have a roughly 50% chance of winning against a random monster of CR X in single mortal combat. Now obviously some characters are a better fit than others, Clerics are more "in their element" fighting the undead than giant oozes. But ideally, were we to take a list of encounters of a level then a character of that level should be able to win roughly half those encounters (and die in roughly half those encounters, so it's not recommended for a campaign).

The Cleric Archer - more recently this has been known as "CoDzilla" but the original formalization was with a Cleric outperforming an Arcane Archer in literally every way. It goes like this: if you play a Cleric, and then you take half of your daily spells and you set them aside as personal combat buffs; then you will noticeably outperform most of the "martial" classes in the realm of stabbing people in the face. And you'll still have spells left over to, you know, raise people from the dead. You can logically conclude from this fact that Clerics are too powerful, that Fighters are too weak, that Fighters lack enough depth, that Clerics have too much versatility, or some other combination. But the Cleric > Fighter paradigm is well established especially at levels 9+.

Monks vs. Everyone - if your game has ever included a Monk you have probably noticed one of two things: either the Monk character got some stupidly sweet magic items like artifact grade adamantine gloves or a pendant that allowed him to transform into a giant monster - or the monk was constantly sucking. Really really badly. This is completely understandable, as Monk defenses are numerically inferior to simply wearing armor. Monk attacks are smaller than using martial weapons. Monk fists can't hit incorporeal opponents, ad if they use magical weapons they lose what few "Monk Powers" they actually have. Monks underperform relative to any Martial class, including the straight Fighter, by a substantial margin. Or you could make the equally valid interpretation that Monks are the ideal and it is the other classes and the monsters that monks play with which are overpowered.

Magic Missile and Color Spray - Those of us who have been playing since AD&D or before remember when fireball and magic missile were the iconic spells of their level because they were crazy good and packing any other spells required some sort of mental competency waiver. The spells haven't changed, but folks at the CharOp board will tell you with a straight face that packing them is a "sucker's game" - so what happened? The key here is that the rest of the game changed massively even as the basic evocations stayed in one place. An AD&D Troll had only 30 hit points and if a fire attack brought them to zero they were dead. A 3rd edition Troll has 63 hit points and killing it with Fire requires not only that you inflict all 63 points with fire, but that you do the next 10 points of death margin with fire as well. Where a 9th level Wizard could literally expect to clear a room of trolls with fireball in the old days, in 3rd edition you're better off just clubbing them into unconsciousness with a warhammer and then drowning them. So it's not surprising really that Wizards in 3rd edition tend to skip over the old classics like magic missile and pick up the new classics like color spray.

-Frank

When you begin a character at 6th level, it is fundamentally unimportant whether the character advanced Rogue, Rogue, Rogue, Bard, Bard, Bard; or Bard, Bard, Bard, Rogue, Rogue, Rogue; or Bard, Rogue, Bard, Rogue, Bard, Rogue; or whatever. You're making a Bard 3/ Rogue 3 from scratch. And so it is trivially easy to see that having different level orders make the difference between a character be "better" or "worse" is bad design.

So the first level skill thing? That's bad design. It makes people who take a level of Rogue before their other levels get 2-6 bonus skills over characters who take a level of something else and then move on to Rogue.

If you must have Rogues retain their status as the class with "more skills" it should be ingrained as class features into the class - a character who takes their levels of Rogue should get the same number of bonus skills no matter what order those levels were actually taken in.

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While we're at it, any starting hit point scheme which rewards starting in a class with a bigger hit die is an inherently unbalanced and poor choice. If a Barbarian/Fighter is strictly superior to a Fighter/Barbarian, you have a very obvious balance problem. A problem which has no actual excuse for existing.

-Frank

From the folks who brought you The Wish and The Word, here is a sampler list of actually broken material from 3.5, which we would hope would be fixed in Pathfinder:

1> More Wishes For reasons defying ready analysis, the 3.5 Wish spell allows you to wish for magic items of unlimited power, with the only caveat being that the XP cost is arbitrarily high. The game also allows people to cast spells with XP costs no matter how high without spending anything at all if they cast them as Spell-like abilities or out of magic items. So if you cast planar binding to call in an Efreet, it is a legal basic wish to request a Staff of Wishes. The XP cost of the wish is over five hundred thousand, but that doesn't matter because neither you nor anyone else actually pays that cost. Breaks game at level 11.

2> Free Vacation on the Negative Energy Plane (no save) The gate spell allows you to call in a specific named individual who is a resident of a plane other than the one you are standing in, and they have to do anything you tell them to (no matter how stupid or dangerous) for 1 round/level. Aside from the basic hilarity of calling in Solars to hand over their sweet loot, you can actually go to other planes of existence and then call in named individuals from your home plane and then kill them. You're a 17th level character and killing a level appropriate challenge is worth more to you than the gate costs; so when you pull in the villain of the adventure and force him to hand roll taquitos for 17 rounds while your entire team beats him mercilessly in the back of the head - you actually make XP (and win the adventure). Breaks game at level 17.

3> Reawakening The Awaken spell turns an Animal into a Magical Beast and gives them sweet untyped instantaneous increases to hit dice and mental stats. You can give yourself the Animal type over and over again with Wildshaping, and that means that you can Awaken yourself again. And again. And so on. Breaks game at level 9.

4> The Difference Engine Level loss is funny stuff. It sets your XP total to the mid point of your new, lower level. When combined with Lycanthropy (which gives you bonus levels without XP), this can turn into an infinite level engine. Here is how it works: First get bit by a lycanthrope, and fail (voluntarily) your save vs. turning into a badger (or whatever). Your "level" is now 2-8 levels above what it was a few moments ago. Now get punched in the mouth by a Wight, and fail your save against the level loss. Your "level" is one lower than it was a few moments ago, which still puts it at 1-7 levels higher than it was when you started the process, and it gives you XP to match. Now cast break enchantment on yourself and trade those crappy lycanthrope levels in for Cleric levels subject to your current XP total - which means that you are a much higher level Cleric than when you started. Also you aren't a lycanthrope, so you can get bitten and restart the process. It takes a few weeks of downtime to pick up enough levels to fight gods. Note: "The Difference Engine" is also the general term for any loop based on selling and repurchasing stuff for profit, including using the retraining rules to max out all skills by trading out skills at the cross class rate and repurchasing them in-class. Breaks game at level 10.

5> The Shadow over the Sun Did you notice that Shadows create a new Shadow every time they kill "a creature"? That includes peasants, mackerel, squirrels, and even butterflies. Also, they are incorporeal and have a totally arbitrary way of killing people that is almost completely level independent. So if you create and command one Shadow, you can create an arbitrarily large army of the things under chain control that will conquer the entire world. It's not even hard. Breaks game at level 11.

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I'm really not interested in people who want to say "But the DM can override the rules, no DM is going to let you Wish for infinite wishes!" because that's kind of the entire point of this article. This is about addressing actual rules loop holes.

Also, I will note that all of these can be done at much lower levels. For example, you could use lesser planar binding to get a limited wish off a Dao and then cash that in for a planar binding to get an Efreet to grant you a wish to make you win Dungeons and Dragons.

-Frank