Sean McGarry's page

Mr. Jacobs,

You're right, my post was a bit flamie and for that I apologize.

As far as the sorceror/bard argument, as I said we did this in 2nd edition when it wasn't nevesary to make a new class to get around a frustrating rule. I wasn't crazy about 3e, but outclassing the sorceror to me isn't a good enough argument to support picking spells. Many years of D&D taught me that picking spells doesn't lead to variety, it just leads to picking the "safe" reliable spells, or finding houserules to get around it. That tells me that the problem is the content, not user error.

And I don't like using tradition to support keeping a rule, things need to move forward or else we would all be still playing Chainmail, or magenta box basic rules (where I started, so many fond memories). Not that there's anything wrong with those games, just making a point.

Guys, seriously, rarely has there ever been in gaming a more useless and pointlessly frustrating rule.

We houseruled this away in 2nd edition and saw immediately that it had exactly ZERO disruptive effect on anything. At all. Except that players now had the tools they needed to deal with encounters and validate their class choice, instead of the "gotcha" approach to game design. If an encounter will fall apart because the wizard uses whatever spell he knows whenever he wants, you're doing it wrong.

The first thing I looked for when I bought the PDF was this, and I'm very dissapointed that it made the cut.