I can accept that, except as a group we have almost no house rules, we do everything by the book. (Except when we disallow certain broken rules from those books to come in play in our games.) If its broken, its because the book is broken, but then as I said, its primarily still a 3.5 game, and I can't disagree that 3.5 is largely broken. We don't use Spell Compendium, Tome of Battle, PH2 or certain other books as the group as a whole do see a great amount of broken attributes in those books. We never use 3pp books. We pretty much stick to PH, DMG, the Psionic handbooks, and a couple other WotC splats, oh and Epic Handbook, as we are currently epic as already stated - though we disallow many aspects of the Epic HB, as well. As I said, YMMV.
We did lots of multi-classing in 2e, and its hard to break the party from that experience.
Also when I DM, I'm using PF Core for some rulings and NPCs.
All of our encounters are against epic monsters and NPC's much higher in class level than the party with epic minions - so no swarms of lesser monsters just for easy experience. We do follow the 3.5 rule that states monsters of lower level grant no experience to higher level parties, so we never fighter weaker opponents, ever. Several of the PCs have been killed at least twice in the overall campaign - we just resurrect and lose some CON, then move on.
GP
PS: @ Cold Napalm, I do find it strange that though not sticking to AP levels isn't core to the majority, that your assumption that we are house-ruling, fudgeing or gimping encounters, ie: fighting swarms of weaker creatures and doing other sorts of brokeness is assumed in my previous post - I don't even see that implied in my post. Where did you get that idea from?
Because the assumed level of difficulty is at the level of APs. Saying a rule set is okay because your houseruling things or fudging things or gimping encounters means that the rule is NOT okay. In fact that is the definition of broken. Nothing against you gamer, but examples like these are nigh worthless. It´s like going well uber-chargers aren´t broken because I send nothing my swarms.
..but isn't this game aimed at groups of friends having fun? Do DM's not build play around the players?
Hmm.. the whole Adventure Path concept makes me shudder - the sheer enormity of creating a common framework to design the adventures around and (blatantly) have classes/races/thangs that fit within this carefully crafted framework, each and all that appeals to one and all..
House Rules and the like are, to me, the very core of DnD -- you're presented with a framework to build on (the 'core rules' ..and with a little creativity you can build your own (granted sometimes utterly warped) game.
What I'm flailing at is that... the ability to customise, to tweak and tailor play, is *the* greatest strength of DnD. You can play the game you want to play.
Essentially - what I'm asking is:
Can we define a Gish to satisfy everyone?
Do we always need a conesus to have fun?
Personally, from what I've seen on these boards alone, just nailing down a unified vision of a Gish has been, so far, impossible.
Using what we got and tweaking to suit our groups personal needs would seem to be the simplest solution, at least until the much desired consensus is reached regarding how best to define a Gish class.
Does that also mean that anyone playing a Pathfinder homebrew above the AP levels (16th?) is doing badwrongfun? The APs stop at 16, but the Core goes to 20 - is that a mistake, and actually playing a 20th level sorcerer is inherently broken?
I know the PF developers try to coax gaming groups to stick to a single class, especially through their capstone abilities. I don't see where PF denies GMs to allow multi-classing or saying doing so is broken as well.
For my personal games, what the majority of gaming groups restrict themselves in levels means very little to me. So we like high level and you don't, is that broken?
I've been playing homebrews since the early 80's, and in my personal games probably always will. I'm sure that even if I purchased Golarion APs, my group would still probably prefer a homebrew and vote against playing any published adventure (even my own, and I do have a 3pp PF adventure published.)
I hope you're not suggesting that not playing a published AP is wrong as well!!!
GP
PS: sorry for the threadjack, I just find Cold Napalm's "broken assumptions" in my game a bit insulting.
PS: sorry for the threadjack, I just find Cold Napalm's "broken assumptions" in my game a bit insulting.
That's because you're trying to exercise this weird thing called "judgment" and using it to enhance your "fun." Such concepts no longer have any place in gaming. Just like in MMO's the only thing that matters is who is more powerful.
Also, you seem to be under the mistaken impression that you and your players are somehow responsible for the success or failure of your game. This is simply no longer true. If the rules do not physically prevent you from running your game into the ground, then, clearly, the game is broken. Just like it is your automaker's fault if you drive headlong into a tree. After all, if that wasn't how you were supposed to drive, they'd have made it impossible.
I mean, c'mon, if a child breaks a toy, it is obviously the toy's fault for not anticipating that someone would throw it against the wall until it breaks.
Hope this helps.
PS: sorry for the threadjack, I just find Cold Napalm's "broken assumptions" in my game a bit insulting.That's because you're trying to exercise this weird thing called "judgment" and using it to enhance your "fun." Such concepts no longer have any place in gaming. Just like in MMO's the only thing that matters is who is more powerful.
Also, you seem to be under the mistaken impression that you and your players are somehow responsible for the success or failure of your game. This is simply no longer true. If the rules do not physically prevent you from running your game into the ground, then, clearly, the game is broken. Just like it is your automaker's fault if you drive headlong into a tree. After all, if that wasn't how you were supposed to drive, they'd have made it impossible.
I mean, c'mon, if a child breaks a toy, it is obviously the toy's fault for not anticipating that someone would throw it against the wall until it breaks.
Hope this helps.
[sarcasm]
Absolutely, because every DM out there has 20+ years of experience to draw upon when making those judgement calls and there are no players out there whose entire purpose for playing it to try and break the game in their favor.[/sarcasm]
Good judgement comes from experience.
Experience comes for poor judgement.
The rules will never be perfect, but god forbid they actually help you avoid making some mistakes while you are learning to be a good DM.
/end threadjack
[sarcasm]
Absolutely, because every DM out there has 20+ years of experience to draw upon when making those judgement calls and there are no players out there whose entire purpose for playing it to try and break the game in their favor.
[/sarcasm]Good judgement comes from experience.
Experience comes for poor judgement.The rules will never be perfect, but god forbid they actually help you avoid making some mistakes while you are learning to be a good DM.
/end threadjack
Part of what you wrote bears repeating. In bold.
"players out there whose entire purpose for playing it to try and break the game in their favor."
Now repeat after me: "There is no way to stop idiots from being idiots."
No rule, no guideline, no game, not even tic-tac-toe, can be idiot proofed. It simply can't be done. DnD and PF are not exceptions. Judging the worth of a rules set by how it is used by those who are determined to break it, is like judging guns based on how eight year olds behave when you give them a loaded revolver.
And BTW, judgment...experience...judgment, only works when you accept responsibility for YOUR bad judgment, not when you blame someone, or, in this case, something else.
Hope this helps.
Part of what you wrote bears repeating. In bold.
"players out there whose entire purpose for playing it to try and break the game in their favor."
Now repeat after me: "There is no way to stop idiots from being idiots."
No rule, no guideline, no game, not even tic-tac-toe, can be idiot proofed. It simply can't be done. DnD and PF are not exceptions. Judging the worth of a rules set by how it is used by those who are determined to break it, is like judging guns based on how eight year olds behave when you give them a loaded revolver.
And BTW, judgment...experience...judgment, only works when you accept responsibility for YOUR bad judgment, not when you blame someone, or, in this case, something else.
Hope this helps.
So you point is because it is impossible to make something idiot proof we shouldn't bother trying to make thing more idiot resistant?
By that logic, since we can't stop people from crashing their cars, we lets just take all the safety features(seat belts, air bags, etc) out.
Can we make things idiot proof? no
Can we make them more idiot resistant? yes
Safety features mitigate damage. They offer little or no protection against willful recklessness. No amount of safety features, and no amount of rules, can or will prevent the deliberate destruction of a car, or a game. The perfect can not be allowed to become the enemy of the good.
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Did I say anyone is playing the damn game wrong? What I said is that positing a rule as not broken because your making it work in your own game due to whatever reason does not make the rule not broken. When testing, we need a standard. I have been in games where if you didn´t take the most broken PrC out there with the best possible feat choices you would die...and I have been in games where it was considered broken for a level 12 character to nova and do a whopping 46 damage to one target. Since every game is different, the standards are the APs...and some of them do go to 20. At least rise of the runelord did when I ran it. Anyways, if the rules can´t be used to run a character through one and have it be meaningful, then the rules don´t work by default. For s@~$s and giggles, we tried to run the rise of the runelord with a rule that everyone MUST multi-class and no prestige classes were allowed. If you play the game as written, you WILL TPK...at least we did. And this was some serious optimizers so we tried our best with just multi-classing. The fighter and rogue was okay but because our casters were MC, we died. We died at the mansion, at the keep, at the stone giants...oh and the boss kick our sorry butts like nobody´s business...which was funny since with our normal characters for that AP, it was a breeze and we killed the runelord in 2 rounds. So yeah standard difficulty, all the splat books maybe breaking the game in the other direction, but just multi-classing is not a viable system either (without adjustments). Asking for a viable system is not a bad thing.