We run up and everyone hits it and both the fighter and the ranger roll their threat range and do double damage, Ok, your problem is that you're not actually using the rules correctly. First, just because you've rolled within your weapon's threat range doesn't mean you have a critical hit -- you also need to roll again to confirm the critical. Check the rolls. Also, getting a critical hit does not do double damage; you roll extra damage dice. So instead of rolling 1d8 for that longsword, you'd roll 2d8, and add in your strength modifier twice. Finally, UNDEAD ARE IMMUNE TO CRITICAL HITS. I wouldn't be surprised if your dislike of the d20 system is mostly based on wild misunderstandings like that.
Also, the lich was damn stupid if he didn't have half a dozen defensive spells up to punish you for getting that close to him. He had it coming.
Holy swords are magic items that any good-aligned character can pick up and use. This isn't 2e, and they're not an integral part of the paladin class.
Paladin mounts are nice when you first get them, but their stats quickly lag so far behind the rest of the party that having them around is just a liability. Anybody who needs a horse for transport can buy one, and other classes quickly acquire more effective means of transportation, anyway.
Their auras and immunities are nice, and they're also all packed into the first three levels of the class, so anybody who wants them can take three levels of paladin and never look back. (spellcasting classes get spells that provide similar abilities, anyway)
Their saving throws are nothing special. Good fort, poor reflex and will. I'd argue that only the rogue's saves (good reflex, poor fort and will) are worse, really. If you're factoring divine grace into it, again that's a 2nd-level ability, so it's an easy dip.
Smite evil sucks. Only a few times per day even at high levels, and the damage is tiny compared to any other class' level-appropriate damaging abilities. You know what, let's do the math. At tenth level, for example, on three attacks per day they'll get maybe a +4 bonus to hit and +10 points to damage on each one -- so, +30 total, if they're lucky. A rogue who is invisible thanks to UMD + a wand of greater invis or the party's wizard will be getting an average of 17 points of extra damage on every attack he makes, with maybe 3 attacks per round if he's TWF'ing, 4 if he's hasted. All the time. Even without the invis, he'll still be sneaking around and catching opponents flat-footed after he's hidden from them, so he'll still be able to get a sneak attack in once every round or two. Sure, there are monsters that can't be sneak attacked. There are also plenty that aren't evil. I won't even go into spellcasting classes -- wizards got their first save-or-die (Phantasmal Killer) back at level 7...
So, just to recap. Do paladins get anything worthwhile after level 3?
Exactly what does a level 15 paladin "look like" compared to a 5 paladin / 10 cleric? Does he wear a nametag that says "Hi, I took more levels in paladin than this other guy"? Why can't the second guy be a holy knight who demands respect? Is it just because the number next to "paladin" on his character sheet isn't as high?
If you're using a weapon that you can't flurry with, how is a monk not worse than a fighter, paladin, barbarian, or ranger, as they have good BAB and thus will hit more reliably and get more attacks at an earlier level? Rogues have the same BAB as monks, but they can at least get sneak attack damage if they're smart. Anybody can take Improved Trip and Combat Reflexes, and the guys with full BAB don't even need to take proficiency with a glaive, so they'll be able to do it three levels earlier than the monk. (the fighter will do it earlier than that, even)
If not threatening the 5' next to you is an issue, you can either get armor spikes or just take EWP (Spiked Chain) and now you've spent the same number of feats as the monk and you've still got a better BAB.
Oh look, 5 people charging me. I trip you all 10 feet away. Why do you think that none of those people are going to also have reach weapons? Why do you think that the remaining four will charge after they see you trip the first one? What makes you think that you're actually going to be able to trip that many of them? That tactic isn't even usable against anybody who isn't low level and bothers to put a few skill points into Tumble.
You're making a lot of very generous assumptions -- that you're going to be charged by 5 medium-sized fighters who don't have reach weapons, whose str or dex is reasonably worse than your str (which probably isn't that high if your dex is high enough to get so many AoOs...), and that they're using stupid tactics. What will that tactic do against spellcasters who fly 100' overhead and rain down death from above, archers who stay 200' feet away from you and make you into a pincushion, any other melee character who has a reach weapon or can tumble, or any of the myriad "Large" or larger monsters who might even have four legs? And how many of your character's precious few feats were spent on this tactic...?
Using range weapons? I'll charge you instead. And then what will you do when your BAB makes it hard to hit anybody in the theoretical group of 5 people that you just charged into the middle of? They'll take a couple of five-foot steps forward to surround you and then use their full attacks to tear through your d8 hit points and your pitiful con -- at least I'm assuming that you have a poor con, considering that apparently your dex is high enough to get 5 AoOs and your str is high enough to consistently overpower 5 melee fighters...
When the party visits a king, the paladin is the one who is granted audience. When the party meets a god, the paladin is the one who gains favor. Paladins are supposed to have not only charisma but reputation, and reputation can get you out of a lot of trouble Except that none of those things are in the rules -- those are all you and your DM adding flavor on top of the class, and you can do that with any class. You can have "fighter" or "cleric" or "crusader" written at the top of your character sheet and still play the part of a holy warrior. You can even call yourself a paladin in-game if you want, and any NPC who disagrees with you is the DM metagaming. A player who has "cleric" written at the top of his sheet and is roleplaying as a paladin of Pelor will be able to kick much more ass in the name of justice than somebody who has "paladin" written there.
Role playing and flavor seems to have been tossed aside. They haven't been tossed aside, but flavor is completely separate from mechanics! Nobody should be forced to suck in combat just because they want to play an interesting character.
Bah, I'm old enough to remember when thieves were in the party to open locks and disarm traps, and in combat they stayed the hell out of the way.... But outside of combat they were fascinating to roleplay, and that's why people chose to play them. Yes, I'm old enough to remember that, too, and it sucked. Rogues are still fascinating to roleplay, they can still open locks and disarm traps, and they can do so much more, too -- negotiating, stealth, forgery, improvisation -- but now they're also useful in combat, which means that the player doesn't have to sit back and be bored every time the party encounters another group of goblins.
One of the best resources I can point you to is the d20srd. All of the open content in the PHB, MM, DMG, and Unearthed Arcana, all nicely arranged in a hyperlinked format. I keep my laptop open with that up at all times when I'm DMing, and it's invaluable. One of the best tricks I've found for speeding up combat is to go ahead and open up tabs for all of the monsters that the group might run into today, and then I can just click on the tab rather than flip through the MM and try to hold it in such a way that the players can't see what I'm looking at...
Also, pick up a good DM's screen at your local gaming store. It should have a lot of tables and charts on the inside for commonly referenced values. Make sure you know what type of actions the players can take each round; see the list of actions in combat and special attacks in the d20srd. Remember that you can only attack once as a standard action, so if a character has use a move action in that round, he can't attack multiple times or with multiple weapons. If he only took a 5-foot step, though, that counts as a free action, so he can still make a full attack. Try to memorize what provokes attacks of opportunity and what doesn't. Grappling rules are, quite frankly, a mess, and even in an experience group, we have to just wing it sometimes when things get weird.
When you do have to houserule something, here's a few things to keep in mind: characters make skill or stat checks when they want to accomplish something, saving throws when they want to resist something. When you're trying to think of the difficulty of performing arbitrary tasks and you're not sure what the DC should be, a DC 10 check is doable by anybody with a little effort; a DC 15 check is still doable by anybody, but it's tough and they might mess up a few times; a DC 20 check is almost impossible for anybody who's not trained at what they're doing; DC 25 is impossible for anybody who's not well-trained at what they're doing; DC 30 is a fair challenge for somebody who is a master in that area. Feel free to adjust the DC by +/- 2 or so for unfavorable or favorable circumstances.
You might also consider buying the Rules Compendium, which has all of the basic rules condensed and indexed. It's organized better than the PHB and DMG and frequently explains the logic behind particular rules, so that you at least know what the developers had in mind when you have to house rule something.
Creating your own game world can be fun, but it's a lot of work. I honestly wouldn't recommend doing it until you have some more experience and you've got a month or two to work on it before your players will play in it; I guarantee that as soon as you drop them in, they're going to go off exploring in directions you hadn't thought of, wanting to meet with important NPCs in organizations that you hadn't detailed, and so forth. There's no shame in playing prebuilt modules; you do have the problem of eventually running out of modules and your players want to keep using their characters, but at that point you can just pick up the prebuilt NPCs and locations that you've been using and run with them. I like Eberron, myself, but Forgotten Realms is much more a "standard" fantasy setting.
Binder: lots of potential but requires as much, if not more, planning than a wizard to get the most out of the class. A wizard can leave 1/3 his slots open and still be fine. A binder with an open vestige is very sub par and without spending feats you are stuck with those vestiges for 24 hours. I like the binder but everyone else I know would rather play a warlock or a dragon shaman. It's true that the binder is a very complex class if you want to use it effectively -- maybe even more complex than the wizard at high levels -- but I don't think that makes it weak. Expel Vestige is only a single feat, and at higher levels you can buy a few vestige phylacteries to greatly increase your adapatibility. You might end up in a pinch if you bound vestiges that aren't too useful today, but you're no worse off than the barbarian or ranger whose abilities are set in stone. Granted, maybe my group just like their classes to be complex; most of them think the warlock is boringly simple (but sometimes a fun dip for multiclass builds), and they would all just laugh at the idea of playing a dragon shaman.
You're right on the shadowcaster and truenamer, but I suppose whether the ToM classes are "weaker" depends on exactly what you're comparing them to. Sure, they're weaker than the big four, but who isn't? The only base class I've seen that's in their league is Eberron's Artificer. I think the ToM classes were intended to be balanced against the upper-tier-yet-not-full-caster classes, and they generally succeed, aside from their mechanical failings. Some of the prestige classes are nice, too; the anima mage in particular is great. Almost broken-great if you abuse the right metamagic feats.
I'm very happy with ToB. It's not balanced against the core martial classes, so I've house ruled them to be epic classes to avoid upsetting my long running campaign but they are much better balanced to the casters that I'd have no trouble tossing out the PHB warrior types in favor of the Martial Adepts. I'd say that it's balanced against the upper tier of the melee classes. Rogues, rangers, and barbarians are all capable of doing some pretty crazy things, especially if you allow material from the PHB2 and the Complete books. In terms of pure damage per round potential, in fact, the crazy folks on WotC's character optimization boards have been unable to build a martial adept that could beat a barbarian/frenzied berserker, although the adepts still win in terms of versatility.
Whether you like it or not, modern D&D is as much a game of tactical combat as roleplaying. If you're not interested in strategy and you just want pure roleplaying, you should look into a different system. If you can pick between playing two different classes that can fill the exact same role in the story but one is mechanically better than the other and you intentionally pick the weaker one, that is, quite frankly, a stupid decision.
I'd agree that paladins are one of the weaker classes, but a well-built monk can do wonders. I'd recommend a monk who's taken Vow of Poverty.
I've gotta disagree. Aside from the fact that VoP's roleplaying requirements are so restrictive that it severely limits what type of character you can play, that speaks more about how broken Vow of Poverty is than how good monks are. Druids are even better with it.
Personally, I've never seen any decent "monk" builds that didn't have only a few monk levels sprinkled inbetween half a dozen other classes. As far as I'm concerned, a base class shouldn't be considered "good" unless you can make a 20-level build that has more than half of its levels come from that class, and a full 20 would being viable would be nice. The base class here itself is very weak; their average BAB hurts a lot for a class that's supposed to be a non-sneaky damage dealer, and the penalty from flurry of blows only makes it even worse at low levels. It's jokingly referred to as "flurry of misses" for a reason. On top of that, while attacking with your fists is thematically cool, the damage lags behind what standard melee weapons are capable of until high levels, and the fact that you can't get your fists permanently enhanced make their problems with hitting even worse; worn items that give you bonuses on natural attacks are prohibitively expensive compared to magical weapons, and getting somebody to cast greater magic fang and permanency on you is risky, since a stray Dispel Magic spell will flush all your money away.
Aside from that, their class abilities are pretty unimpressive, too. Their AC bonus is roughly on par with what somebody who actually wore armor could have, except you can get awesome enchantments placed on armor, too. Their speed bonus is nice, but again, anybody else can cast spells or get items that increase their speed, and the fact that it's an enhancement bonus means that those methods won't help a monk, so again, they're on par. Slow fall is a joke compared to Feather Fall, which every arcane caster gets at level 1. Rings of feather fall are cheap, too. Their skill in grappling is decent at low levels, but their average BAB, difficulty of getting magical enhancements, and the fact that monsters are frequently larger than the PCs makes them very poor grapplers at mid and high levels. Abundant step is kinda nice, except wizards could do it multiple times per day five levels before monks could. Quivering Palm is a joke -- once per week for an ability that wizards could do multiple times per day two levels ago, and at a range (Finger of Death). Tongue of the Sun and Moon is the ultimate joke -- they get the effect of a constant level 2 spell (Tongues) at 17th level? Seriously, tell me that's not laughably sad. DR 10/magic at 20th level is nice, except that at 20th level, any monster whose primary means of attack involves physical damage should be doing 100+ points of magic, adamantine, evilly-aligned damage per round.
All of their other abilities have similar problems, those are just some of my favorites. Other classes could do them better several levels ago, and none of them synergize well with each other. It's like the person who designed the class watched a bunch of old wire-fu martial arts flicks and tossed together a bunch of abilities that he thought sounded cool. At least, that's why I don't like monks.
(Just for reference, the swordsage from the Tome of Battle has completely replaced the monk in my group; it still has some problems, but the unarmed melee combatants now actually feel like they're contributing something to the group)
With so many opportunities for role play who cares how many bodies he can stack up in a single round?
Because flavor is mutable. There is absolutely no reason why you can't play a cleric, fighter, crusader, or any other class who worships a lawful good god, serves the church, and punishes evil. You can take an oath, live by it, punish yourself if you break it, and serve justice without having the word "paladin" written at the top of your character sheet. What's the point of intentionally playing a class with suboptimal mechanics when you could play a more poweful class and still play exactly the same role?
I'll just chime in to reinforce the other poster's opinion. I had played 2e for years before 3e came out, and almost every complaint I'm seeing here is identical to the complaints I saw back then. 3e and 3.5e are simply better systems, mechanically. Some people still stick with 2e out of nostalgia, because they don't want to learn a new system, or because 3e has more of an emphasis on tactical combat -- which can be omitted entirely, as my group did for a few years after we switched to 3e -- but 3e really is just a cleaner, more flexible system.
My group is a little nervous about 4e just because we've bought so many books that we don't want to have to re-buy.. and I'm sure we'll keep playing 3.5e after 4e is out, maybe even for a few years, but eventually we'll pick up 4e books and give it a chance. If the system is easier to use and better balanced, we'll stick with it.
(For those who haven't seen them, the Tome of Magic classes tended to be weak while the Bo9S classes are quite potent, at least compared to their "core rules" 3.5 equivalents)
Hmm, I don't quite agree on the ToM. It's a very unbalanced book -- it's important to note that each of the three sections were written by different people. My group has used all three of the base classes in it a few times and some of the prestige classes, and in my experience, the binder is a very well balanced, versatile class, that is easily on par with the better non-full-caster PHB classes in terms of power, although it's not quite at the same level as the big four. They're a little constrained at lower levels, but after that, they have a huge number of abilities they can pick from, and combining the different vestiges intelligently lets them fill almost any party role (except for a dedicated healer). It's a complex class, and they have a few abilities that require a little errata to work right, but everybody in my group thinks they're great.
The shadowcaster is simply unbalanced -- against some foes they're impotent, and against others they can end fights in a single round. Likewise, at some levels they're way behind the rest of the party in terms of power, and at some they're a bit ahead. The guy who wrote the class mechanics has actually made some posts on WotC's message boards with some proposed fixes that makes the system much nicer. I think their biggest weakness might just be the lack of originality -- almost everybody in my group had a reaction that was something like, "Shadow magic? I'd move to the Forgotten Realms and worship Shar if I wanted that. Yawn."
Finally, the truenamer is the only class that is just plain unplayable. Due to typos and omissions, several of their abilities simply can't be used because the mechanics for using them aren't properly defined; even if you make up some house rules to stick things together, the truenaming DCs to use them become so insanely high as you level up that you have to rely on optimizing and using powerful magical items to aid you in order to be effective at all.
The Tome of Battle is just fantastic, though. All of the base classes are versatile and powerful, although not as powerful as the PHB's big four, and, perhaps most importantly, it's nearly impossible to build a character that sucks. Take whatever maneuvers you want, you'll still be good at something. As far as my group is concerned, the warblade, crusader, and swordsage have just replaced the fighter, paladin, and monk, and the game is much more balanced for it.
I often think that D&D should have a basic character generation book, a world book, and a monster manual. No real rules...no dice.
For better or worse, that's not what modern D&D is about. D&D 3.x is just as much a game of tactical combat as it is a game of roleplaying, and it's very important to have clear, concrete rules for governing that sort of thing. Granted, as things currently are, the rules aren't always clear or concrete, and sometimes the game swings heavily in the direction of either combat or roleplaying, but they're hoping to smooth out these problems in 4e. If you want a heavier emphasis on roleplaying than number crunching, you might check out White Wolf's games or GURPS. (at least, my impression of those systems is that they lean more heavily towards roleplaying, but I admit I'm not as intimately familiar with either of them as I am with D&D)
Paladins are probably the most powerful class in DnD!
Wait, are we both talking about 3.5 D&D? If so, I think you're the only person I've ever heard say it's the most powerful class. The common opinion among everybody I've talked to is that paladin is one of the worst-designed classes in the PHB, and possibly the weakest, although some people will argue that monks are weaker.
No, seriously -- if you think paladins are that great, I'd be interested in hearing why. From what I can see, the class basically just stops growing after 5th level. Remove disease a few times per weak is pitiful compared to the cleric who can do it several times per day; their signature ability, smite evil, is usable on only a few attacks per day, and the bonus to damage is miniscule compared to how much high-level spells can do; and their spellcasting can't hold a candle to any of the full spellcasters. The only other thing they get is minor improvements to their mount; the mount is almost as useful as the party's fighter when you first get one, but later on they're nothing but an extra target on the battlefield.
If you want a holy warrior type character, paladin 4 / cleric 16 is objectively just a better build. You'll have a 16 BAB, which is still enough for four attacks, plus a much better will save and a better fort save due to the way multiclassing saves works, plus you'll be able to cast 8th level cleric spells. The only things you lose are a few hit points, a few uses of smite evil & remove disease, and a rather weak mount. Of course, spending a couple of your fourth level spell slots on Divine Power will bump your BAB up to 20 and give you effectively a d10 hit die, anyway, not to mention +6 to strength.
Heck, just ditch those paladin levels, and the only things you lose are a few class abilities that are easily emulated by other spells; in exchange you can turn undead better and get game-breaking 9th level spells.
Even compared to other melee classes, the paladin lacks the mobility & damage potential of a bow ranger, a TWF/UMD rogue, or a raging barbarian. Even the fighter is more versatile with all of his fights, but mind you, I'm not making the case that fighter is actually a good class, either.
It's ok, here the US we think it's pretty barbaric, too.
But, there's not much we can do. Depending on where you live, you get to pick between two or three carriers, all of whom have the same exorbitantly priced plans.
You see, there are two problems here. First, if illegally obtained evidence can be used in court, there are some people who will obtain evidence illegally intentionally if they don't believe they can do it legally. They would consider punishing the original criminal worth committing a crime themselves; the system would effectively be rewarding people for committing a crime. That is, of course, completely opposite to the intent of the system.
Second, if evidence is obtained illegally, there is no way to prove that the evidence is legitimate. If the evidence wasn't obtained through legal means, it's possible that it had been tampered with or planted. This would result in the conviction of an innocent -- and believe me, there are people out there who would be willing to commit a "minor" crime like illegally obtaining evidence in order to get somebody else wrongly convicted of murder. In order to prevent this, only legally obtained evidence is accepted.
handing it out for free to any group of N players just cheapens the game.
"Cheapens the game"? Come on, this isn't a work of high art, it's a game. It's supposed to be fun. How does making an item only obtainable once per week or one group of people actually make the game more fun? One group of people gets to stroke their egos about how they got lucky enough to get it, everybody else gets more frustrated that they wasted another week trying to get the drop, only to lose it again due to bad luck. They're not "handing it out for free" unless the dragon is so easy that one person can kill it with his eyes closed.
Except that a DHCP server isn't a conscious being capable of making rational decisions, so the analogy isn't really valid at all.
On many personal routers, you can't configure their DHCP server at all -- it's either on or it's off, and if it's off you have to go and manually configure all of the routing information on all of your computers. The fact that somebody turns their DHCP server on for their own personal ease of use doesn't mean that they're giving you permission to use their network.
Does anyone know how long Gmail keeps e-mail records? I've been having more and more reason to switch from Yahoo to Gmail, and this may be the last straw for me.
As far as I'm aware, Google doesn't have any age limit on what they retain. You can keep as much e-mail as your storage limit will allow.
Only a very small amount -- if you're using this computer simply for file storage, especially with 100 Mbit ethernet as your primary means of connection, you will never even notice the tiny slowdown caused by software RAID. An old Athlon XP with 256 MB of RAM are just fine, although if you want to do something like turn that file server into a web & e-mail server, you might want to bump it up to 512 MB. None of those things are computationally intensive at all, unless your server gets a ton of traffic; even then, you'll probably be limited more by your I/O speed than your CPU. A 64-bit processor won't help you at all if you're not doing any sort of scientific computing and you don't need to use more than 4 GB of RAM.
Heck, for years I ran a personal server on an old 450 MHz K6-III with 512 MB of RAM and three hard drives in a RAID 5. The only time I noticed any lag at all was when doing SSL negotation or when it was running a certain PHP-based webmail program on it. I upgraded it just this last year to an Athlon XP 2200+ with 1 GB of RAM, and I never even come close to making the CPU max out, and I'm also running a VPN server and spam filter on it.
Here's the part that makes OpenMoko flawed (again assuming it is accurate)
The "assuming it is accurate" part tells me that you actually haven't researched and thus don't know anything about what you're talking about, but I'll bite anyway.
"you are the root user"
So what? What does that have to do with anything? Just because you're running applications as a root user does not mean that every application is going to have a big red button that says "destroy everything." Most cell phone operating systems don't even have a concept of multi-user permissions -- you're effectively running as root all the time, limited only by what the accessible applications will let you do. OpenMoko will be no different. Most people are far more worried about losing their contacts or ringtones, anyway, and running as a restricted user won't stop you from wiping out your own files.
This has been the long term problem with Linux, and many other Geek toys
Now you're just going off on a tangent. This has nothing to do with being logged in as root by default; in fact, in most Linux distributions, you run applications as a standard user by default. Some distros (Ubuntu) even keep the root account disabled.
Seriously, you're not making any logical sense.
iPOD
It's spelled "iPod". It's not an acronym.
Normal people (bless their hearts)
And why do you repeat this over and over? You said it four times. We get the picture, you think that "normal" people are some sort of frail entity that you have to protect. You're not doing anything except make yourself look neurotic.
Plus, wishes are generally in short supply because they are high level, so why they are very useful "gadget" spells, they have to compete with more conventional spells for spell slots, so as healing spells they're only really useful if everything has gone to pot.
That's why wizards get "Scribe Scroll" for free at first level.;-) Scrolls are cheap as dirt to make, and any wizard who's good at planning will make a stack of scrolls with his utility spells, infrequently used spells, and combat spells that aren't heavily dependent on caster level or save DCs. Then you can load up all of your spell slots with spells that depend on your caster level or Int to be as effective as possible. Running out of spells per day is only an issue if you're poor at planning.
It's worth noting that, level-for-level, Cure spells aren't capable of keeping up with the amount of damage that spells of the same level are capable of dishing out (with the exception of Heal, to a degree). In most situations, defensive strategies in D&D are just not as good as offensive ones.
The real edge the wizard has is aoe damage, as opposed to a buffed cleric's single damage to one or minor damage to large groups. You can't counterspell the cleric's fist, however, and their AC is much higher, and they have higher HP.
No, as the grandparent pointed out, AoE damage isn't the wizard's real edge. Evocation is one of the weakest schools, but a lot of people take spells from it just because it's flashy and considered iconic of the archetypal blaster wizard. While their damage spells are very impressive, their real strength is in controlling the battlefield and making monsters die (or become helpless) in a single round. Even at low levels, spells like Color Spray, Grease, Sleep, and Web can effectively end large fights in a single round. Wizards don't care how high your AC is or how much HP you have because their best spells ignore that sort of thing.
The last time I checked....there were three core books and then a slew of additional books for each individual class subset, psionics, magic, magic items, etc... By boiling it down into just four books (PHB, DMG, MM, and Errata) it makes the game a bit more approachable by new players rather than a book of the week club.
None of those extra books are necessary; they're just expansion material for players who really want more. Your group can just pretend they don't exist if you don't want to deal with them. Heck, the only book players need to have is the PHB; only the DM needs to be familiar with the DMG and MM. I would say that players who don't intend to DM shouldn't read those, in fact, unless they want to spoil some of the surprises. If you want to use expansion books, not everybody at the table has to be familiar with all of them.
In fact, in my group, it's not uncommon for each player to have a few books of their own that they like and are very familiar with, and they use them all the time, even if the other players and DM haven't gone over them; it's not an issue as long as everybody trusts each other to play fairly and the DM is occasionally willing to ban things that end up being broken in actual play.
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Also, the lich was damn stupid if he didn't have half a dozen defensive spells up to punish you for getting that close to him. He had it coming.
Going down the list:
Holy swords are magic items that any good-aligned character can pick up and use. This isn't 2e, and they're not an integral part of the paladin class.
Paladin mounts are nice when you first get them, but their stats quickly lag so far behind the rest of the party that having them around is just a liability. Anybody who needs a horse for transport can buy one, and other classes quickly acquire more effective means of transportation, anyway.
Their auras and immunities are nice, and they're also all packed into the first three levels of the class, so anybody who wants them can take three levels of paladin and never look back. (spellcasting classes get spells that provide similar abilities, anyway)
Their saving throws are nothing special. Good fort, poor reflex and will. I'd argue that only the rogue's saves (good reflex, poor fort and will) are worse, really. If you're factoring divine grace into it, again that's a 2nd-level ability, so it's an easy dip.
Smite evil sucks. Only a few times per day even at high levels, and the damage is tiny compared to any other class' level-appropriate damaging abilities. You know what, let's do the math. At tenth level, for example, on three attacks per day they'll get maybe a +4 bonus to hit and +10 points to damage on each one -- so, +30 total, if they're lucky. A rogue who is invisible thanks to UMD + a wand of greater invis or the party's wizard will be getting an average of 17 points of extra damage on every attack he makes, with maybe 3 attacks per round if he's TWF'ing, 4 if he's hasted. All the time. Even without the invis, he'll still be sneaking around and catching opponents flat-footed after he's hidden from them, so he'll still be able to get a sneak attack in once every round or two. Sure, there are monsters that can't be sneak attacked. There are also plenty that aren't evil. I won't even go into spellcasting classes -- wizards got their first save-or-die (Phantasmal Killer) back at level 7...
So, just to recap. Do paladins get anything worthwhile after level 3?
Exactly what does a level 15 paladin "look like" compared to a 5 paladin / 10 cleric? Does he wear a nametag that says "Hi, I took more levels in paladin than this other guy"? Why can't the second guy be a holy knight who demands respect? Is it just because the number next to "paladin" on his character sheet isn't as high?
If not threatening the 5' next to you is an issue, you can either get armor spikes or just take EWP (Spiked Chain) and now you've spent the same number of feats as the monk and you've still got a better BAB. Oh look, 5 people charging me. I trip you all 10 feet away. Why do you think that none of those people are going to also have reach weapons? Why do you think that the remaining four will charge after they see you trip the first one? What makes you think that you're actually going to be able to trip that many of them? That tactic isn't even usable against anybody who isn't low level and bothers to put a few skill points into Tumble.
You're making a lot of very generous assumptions -- that you're going to be charged by 5 medium-sized fighters who don't have reach weapons, whose str or dex is reasonably worse than your str (which probably isn't that high if your dex is high enough to get so many AoOs...), and that they're using stupid tactics. What will that tactic do against spellcasters who fly 100' overhead and rain down death from above, archers who stay 200' feet away from you and make you into a pincushion, any other melee character who has a reach weapon or can tumble, or any of the myriad "Large" or larger monsters who might even have four legs? And how many of your character's precious few feats were spent on this tactic...? Using range weapons? I'll charge you instead. And then what will you do when your BAB makes it hard to hit anybody in the theoretical group of 5 people that you just charged into the middle of? They'll take a couple of five-foot steps forward to surround you and then use their full attacks to tear through your d8 hit points and your pitiful con -- at least I'm assuming that you have a poor con, considering that apparently your dex is high enough to get 5 AoOs and your str is high enough to consistently overpower 5 melee fighters...
One of the best resources I can point you to is the d20srd. All of the open content in the PHB, MM, DMG, and Unearthed Arcana, all nicely arranged in a hyperlinked format. I keep my laptop open with that up at all times when I'm DMing, and it's invaluable. One of the best tricks I've found for speeding up combat is to go ahead and open up tabs for all of the monsters that the group might run into today, and then I can just click on the tab rather than flip through the MM and try to hold it in such a way that the players can't see what I'm looking at...
Also, pick up a good DM's screen at your local gaming store. It should have a lot of tables and charts on the inside for commonly referenced values. Make sure you know what type of actions the players can take each round; see the list of actions in combat and special attacks in the d20srd. Remember that you can only attack once as a standard action, so if a character has use a move action in that round, he can't attack multiple times or with multiple weapons. If he only took a 5-foot step, though, that counts as a free action, so he can still make a full attack. Try to memorize what provokes attacks of opportunity and what doesn't. Grappling rules are, quite frankly, a mess, and even in an experience group, we have to just wing it sometimes when things get weird.
When you do have to houserule something, here's a few things to keep in mind: characters make skill or stat checks when they want to accomplish something, saving throws when they want to resist something. When you're trying to think of the difficulty of performing arbitrary tasks and you're not sure what the DC should be, a DC 10 check is doable by anybody with a little effort; a DC 15 check is still doable by anybody, but it's tough and they might mess up a few times; a DC 20 check is almost impossible for anybody who's not trained at what they're doing; DC 25 is impossible for anybody who's not well-trained at what they're doing; DC 30 is a fair challenge for somebody who is a master in that area. Feel free to adjust the DC by +/- 2 or so for unfavorable or favorable circumstances.
You might also consider buying the Rules Compendium, which has all of the basic rules condensed and indexed. It's organized better than the PHB and DMG and frequently explains the logic behind particular rules, so that you at least know what the developers had in mind when you have to house rule something.
Creating your own game world can be fun, but it's a lot of work. I honestly wouldn't recommend doing it until you have some more experience and you've got a month or two to work on it before your players will play in it; I guarantee that as soon as you drop them in, they're going to go off exploring in directions you hadn't thought of, wanting to meet with important NPCs in organizations that you hadn't detailed, and so forth. There's no shame in playing prebuilt modules; you do have the problem of eventually running out of modules and your players want to keep using their characters, but at that point you can just pick up the prebuilt NPCs and locations that you've been using and run with them. I like Eberron, myself, but Forgotten Realms is much more a "standard" fantasy setting.
You're right on the shadowcaster and truenamer, but I suppose whether the ToM classes are "weaker" depends on exactly what you're comparing them to. Sure, they're weaker than the big four, but who isn't? The only base class I've seen that's in their league is Eberron's Artificer. I think the ToM classes were intended to be balanced against the upper-tier-yet-not-full-caster classes, and they generally succeed, aside from their mechanical failings. Some of the prestige classes are nice, too; the anima mage in particular is great. Almost broken-great if you abuse the right metamagic feats. I'm very happy with ToB. It's not balanced against the core martial classes, so I've house ruled them to be epic classes to avoid upsetting my long running campaign but they are much better balanced to the casters that I'd have no trouble tossing out the PHB warrior types in favor of the Martial Adepts. I'd say that it's balanced against the upper tier of the melee classes. Rogues, rangers, and barbarians are all capable of doing some pretty crazy things, especially if you allow material from the PHB2 and the Complete books. In terms of pure damage per round potential, in fact, the crazy folks on WotC's character optimization boards have been unable to build a martial adept that could beat a barbarian/frenzied berserker, although the adepts still win in terms of versatility.
Whether you like it or not, modern D&D is as much a game of tactical combat as roleplaying. If you're not interested in strategy and you just want pure roleplaying, you should look into a different system. If you can pick between playing two different classes that can fill the exact same role in the story but one is mechanically better than the other and you intentionally pick the weaker one, that is, quite frankly, a stupid decision.
I'd agree that paladins are one of the weaker classes, but a well-built monk can do wonders. I'd recommend a monk who's taken Vow of Poverty.
I've gotta disagree. Aside from the fact that VoP's roleplaying requirements are so restrictive that it severely limits what type of character you can play, that speaks more about how broken Vow of Poverty is than how good monks are. Druids are even better with it.
Personally, I've never seen any decent "monk" builds that didn't have only a few monk levels sprinkled inbetween half a dozen other classes. As far as I'm concerned, a base class shouldn't be considered "good" unless you can make a 20-level build that has more than half of its levels come from that class, and a full 20 would being viable would be nice. The base class here itself is very weak; their average BAB hurts a lot for a class that's supposed to be a non-sneaky damage dealer, and the penalty from flurry of blows only makes it even worse at low levels. It's jokingly referred to as "flurry of misses" for a reason. On top of that, while attacking with your fists is thematically cool, the damage lags behind what standard melee weapons are capable of until high levels, and the fact that you can't get your fists permanently enhanced make their problems with hitting even worse; worn items that give you bonuses on natural attacks are prohibitively expensive compared to magical weapons, and getting somebody to cast greater magic fang and permanency on you is risky, since a stray Dispel Magic spell will flush all your money away.
Aside from that, their class abilities are pretty unimpressive, too. Their AC bonus is roughly on par with what somebody who actually wore armor could have, except you can get awesome enchantments placed on armor, too. Their speed bonus is nice, but again, anybody else can cast spells or get items that increase their speed, and the fact that it's an enhancement bonus means that those methods won't help a monk, so again, they're on par. Slow fall is a joke compared to Feather Fall, which every arcane caster gets at level 1. Rings of feather fall are cheap, too. Their skill in grappling is decent at low levels, but their average BAB, difficulty of getting magical enhancements, and the fact that monsters are frequently larger than the PCs makes them very poor grapplers at mid and high levels. Abundant step is kinda nice, except wizards could do it multiple times per day five levels before monks could. Quivering Palm is a joke -- once per week for an ability that wizards could do multiple times per day two levels ago, and at a range (Finger of Death). Tongue of the Sun and Moon is the ultimate joke -- they get the effect of a constant level 2 spell (Tongues) at 17th level? Seriously, tell me that's not laughably sad. DR 10/magic at 20th level is nice, except that at 20th level, any monster whose primary means of attack involves physical damage should be doing 100+ points of magic, adamantine, evilly-aligned damage per round.
All of their other abilities have similar problems, those are just some of my favorites. Other classes could do them better several levels ago, and none of them synergize well with each other. It's like the person who designed the class watched a bunch of old wire-fu martial arts flicks and tossed together a bunch of abilities that he thought sounded cool. At least, that's why I don't like monks.
(Just for reference, the swordsage from the Tome of Battle has completely replaced the monk in my group; it still has some problems, but the unarmed melee combatants now actually feel like they're contributing something to the group)
With so many opportunities for role play who cares how many bodies he can stack up in a single round?
Because flavor is mutable. There is absolutely no reason why you can't play a cleric, fighter, crusader, or any other class who worships a lawful good god, serves the church, and punishes evil. You can take an oath, live by it, punish yourself if you break it, and serve justice without having the word "paladin" written at the top of your character sheet. What's the point of intentionally playing a class with suboptimal mechanics when you could play a more poweful class and still play exactly the same role?
I'll just chime in to reinforce the other poster's opinion. I had played 2e for years before 3e came out, and almost every complaint I'm seeing here is identical to the complaints I saw back then. 3e and 3.5e are simply better systems, mechanically. Some people still stick with 2e out of nostalgia, because they don't want to learn a new system, or because 3e has more of an emphasis on tactical combat -- which can be omitted entirely, as my group did for a few years after we switched to 3e -- but 3e really is just a cleaner, more flexible system.
My group is a little nervous about 4e just because we've bought so many books that we don't want to have to re-buy.. and I'm sure we'll keep playing 3.5e after 4e is out, maybe even for a few years, but eventually we'll pick up 4e books and give it a chance. If the system is easier to use and better balanced, we'll stick with it.
(For those who haven't seen them, the Tome of Magic classes tended to be weak while the Bo9S classes are quite potent, at least compared to their "core rules" 3.5 equivalents)
Hmm, I don't quite agree on the ToM. It's a very unbalanced book -- it's important to note that each of the three sections were written by different people. My group has used all three of the base classes in it a few times and some of the prestige classes, and in my experience, the binder is a very well balanced, versatile class, that is easily on par with the better non-full-caster PHB classes in terms of power, although it's not quite at the same level as the big four. They're a little constrained at lower levels, but after that, they have a huge number of abilities they can pick from, and combining the different vestiges intelligently lets them fill almost any party role (except for a dedicated healer). It's a complex class, and they have a few abilities that require a little errata to work right, but everybody in my group thinks they're great.
The shadowcaster is simply unbalanced -- against some foes they're impotent, and against others they can end fights in a single round. Likewise, at some levels they're way behind the rest of the party in terms of power, and at some they're a bit ahead. The guy who wrote the class mechanics has actually made some posts on WotC's message boards with some proposed fixes that makes the system much nicer. I think their biggest weakness might just be the lack of originality -- almost everybody in my group had a reaction that was something like, "Shadow magic? I'd move to the Forgotten Realms and worship Shar if I wanted that. Yawn."
Finally, the truenamer is the only class that is just plain unplayable. Due to typos and omissions, several of their abilities simply can't be used because the mechanics for using them aren't properly defined; even if you make up some house rules to stick things together, the truenaming DCs to use them become so insanely high as you level up that you have to rely on optimizing and using powerful magical items to aid you in order to be effective at all.
The Tome of Battle is just fantastic, though. All of the base classes are versatile and powerful, although not as powerful as the PHB's big four, and, perhaps most importantly, it's nearly impossible to build a character that sucks. Take whatever maneuvers you want, you'll still be good at something. As far as my group is concerned, the warblade, crusader, and swordsage have just replaced the fighter, paladin, and monk, and the game is much more balanced for it.
I often think that D&D should have a basic character generation book, a world book, and a monster manual. No real rules...no dice.
For better or worse, that's not what modern D&D is about. D&D 3.x is just as much a game of tactical combat as it is a game of roleplaying, and it's very important to have clear, concrete rules for governing that sort of thing. Granted, as things currently are, the rules aren't always clear or concrete, and sometimes the game swings heavily in the direction of either combat or roleplaying, but they're hoping to smooth out these problems in 4e. If you want a heavier emphasis on roleplaying than number crunching, you might check out White Wolf's games or GURPS. (at least, my impression of those systems is that they lean more heavily towards roleplaying, but I admit I'm not as intimately familiar with either of them as I am with D&D)
Even the fighter is more versatile with all of his fights
Oops. Feats, not fights.
Paladins are probably the most powerful class in DnD!
Wait, are we both talking about 3.5 D&D? If so, I think you're the only person I've ever heard say it's the most powerful class. The common opinion among everybody I've talked to is that paladin is one of the worst-designed classes in the PHB, and possibly the weakest, although some people will argue that monks are weaker.
No, seriously -- if you think paladins are that great, I'd be interested in hearing why. From what I can see, the class basically just stops growing after 5th level. Remove disease a few times per weak is pitiful compared to the cleric who can do it several times per day; their signature ability, smite evil, is usable on only a few attacks per day, and the bonus to damage is miniscule compared to how much high-level spells can do; and their spellcasting can't hold a candle to any of the full spellcasters. The only other thing they get is minor improvements to their mount; the mount is almost as useful as the party's fighter when you first get one, but later on they're nothing but an extra target on the battlefield.
If you want a holy warrior type character, paladin 4 / cleric 16 is objectively just a better build. You'll have a 16 BAB, which is still enough for four attacks, plus a much better will save and a better fort save due to the way multiclassing saves works, plus you'll be able to cast 8th level cleric spells. The only things you lose are a few hit points, a few uses of smite evil & remove disease, and a rather weak mount. Of course, spending a couple of your fourth level spell slots on Divine Power will bump your BAB up to 20 and give you effectively a d10 hit die, anyway, not to mention +6 to strength.
Heck, just ditch those paladin levels, and the only things you lose are a few class abilities that are easily emulated by other spells; in exchange you can turn undead better and get game-breaking 9th level spells.
Even compared to other melee classes, the paladin lacks the mobility & damage potential of a bow ranger, a TWF/UMD rogue, or a raging barbarian. Even the fighter is more versatile with all of his fights, but mind you, I'm not making the case that fighter is actually a good class, either.
It's ok, here the US we think it's pretty barbaric, too.
But, there's not much we can do. Depending on where you live, you get to pick between two or three carriers, all of whom have the same exorbitantly priced plans.
You see, there are two problems here. First, if illegally obtained evidence can be used in court, there are some people who will obtain evidence illegally intentionally if they don't believe they can do it legally. They would consider punishing the original criminal worth committing a crime themselves; the system would effectively be rewarding people for committing a crime. That is, of course, completely opposite to the intent of the system.
Second, if evidence is obtained illegally, there is no way to prove that the evidence is legitimate. If the evidence wasn't obtained through legal means, it's possible that it had been tampered with or planted. This would result in the conviction of an innocent -- and believe me, there are people out there who would be willing to commit a "minor" crime like illegally obtaining evidence in order to get somebody else wrongly convicted of murder. In order to prevent this, only legally obtained evidence is accepted.
Does that make more sense now?
two words: play Fallout
Also, Planescape: Torment.
handing it out for free to any group of N players just cheapens the game.
"Cheapens the game"? Come on, this isn't a work of high art, it's a game. It's supposed to be fun. How does making an item only obtainable once per week or one group of people actually make the game more fun? One group of people gets to stroke their egos about how they got lucky enough to get it, everybody else gets more frustrated that they wasted another week trying to get the drop, only to lose it again due to bad luck. They're not "handing it out for free" unless the dragon is so easy that one person can kill it with his eyes closed.
Except that a DHCP server isn't a conscious being capable of making rational decisions, so the analogy isn't really valid at all.
On many personal routers, you can't configure their DHCP server at all -- it's either on or it's off, and if it's off you have to go and manually configure all of the routing information on all of your computers. The fact that somebody turns their DHCP server on for their own personal ease of use doesn't mean that they're giving you permission to use their network.
Does anyone know how long Gmail keeps e-mail records? I've been having more and more reason to switch from Yahoo to Gmail, and this may be the last straw for me.
As far as I'm aware, Google doesn't have any age limit on what they retain. You can keep as much e-mail as your storage limit will allow.
Software RAID costs cycles.
Only a very small amount -- if you're using this computer simply for file storage, especially with 100 Mbit ethernet as your primary means of connection, you will never even notice the tiny slowdown caused by software RAID. An old Athlon XP with 256 MB of RAM are just fine, although if you want to do something like turn that file server into a web & e-mail server, you might want to bump it up to 512 MB. None of those things are computationally intensive at all, unless your server gets a ton of traffic; even then, you'll probably be limited more by your I/O speed than your CPU. A 64-bit processor won't help you at all if you're not doing any sort of scientific computing and you don't need to use more than 4 GB of RAM.
Heck, for years I ran a personal server on an old 450 MHz K6-III with 512 MB of RAM and three hard drives in a RAID 5. The only time I noticed any lag at all was when doing SSL negotation or when it was running a certain PHP-based webmail program on it. I upgraded it just this last year to an Athlon XP 2200+ with 1 GB of RAM, and I never even come close to making the CPU max out, and I'm also running a VPN server and spam filter on it.
Here's the part that makes OpenMoko flawed (again assuming it is accurate)
The "assuming it is accurate" part tells me that you actually haven't researched and thus don't know anything about what you're talking about, but I'll bite anyway.
"you are the root user"
So what? What does that have to do with anything? Just because you're running applications as a root user does not mean that every application is going to have a big red button that says "destroy everything." Most cell phone operating systems don't even have a concept of multi-user permissions -- you're effectively running as root all the time, limited only by what the accessible applications will let you do. OpenMoko will be no different. Most people are far more worried about losing their contacts or ringtones, anyway, and running as a restricted user won't stop you from wiping out your own files.
This has been the long term problem with Linux, and many other Geek toys
Now you're just going off on a tangent. This has nothing to do with being logged in as root by default; in fact, in most Linux distributions, you run applications as a standard user by default. Some distros (Ubuntu) even keep the root account disabled.
Seriously, you're not making any logical sense.
iPOD
It's spelled "iPod". It's not an acronym.
Normal people (bless their hearts)
And why do you repeat this over and over? You said it four times. We get the picture, you think that "normal" people are some sort of frail entity that you have to protect. You're not doing anything except make yourself look neurotic.
Plus, wishes are generally in short supply because they are high level, so why they are very useful "gadget" spells, they have to compete with more conventional spells for spell slots, so as healing spells they're only really useful if everything has gone to pot.
;-) Scrolls are cheap as dirt to make, and any wizard who's good at planning will make a stack of scrolls with his utility spells, infrequently used spells, and combat spells that aren't heavily dependent on caster level or save DCs. Then you can load up all of your spell slots with spells that depend on your caster level or Int to be as effective as possible. Running out of spells per day is only an issue if you're poor at planning.
That's why wizards get "Scribe Scroll" for free at first level.
It's worth noting that, level-for-level, Cure spells aren't capable of keeping up with the amount of damage that spells of the same level are capable of dishing out (with the exception of Heal, to a degree). In most situations, defensive strategies in D&D are just not as good as offensive ones.
The real edge the wizard has is aoe damage, as opposed to a buffed cleric's single damage to one or minor damage to large groups. You can't counterspell the cleric's fist, however, and their AC is much higher, and they have higher HP.
No, as the grandparent pointed out, AoE damage isn't the wizard's real edge. Evocation is one of the weakest schools, but a lot of people take spells from it just because it's flashy and considered iconic of the archetypal blaster wizard. While their damage spells are very impressive, their real strength is in controlling the battlefield and making monsters die (or become helpless) in a single round. Even at low levels, spells like Color Spray, Grease, Sleep, and Web can effectively end large fights in a single round. Wizards don't care how high your AC is or how much HP you have because their best spells ignore that sort of thing.
The last time I checked....there were three core books and then a slew of additional books for each individual class subset, psionics, magic, magic items, etc... By boiling it down into just four books (PHB, DMG, MM, and Errata) it makes the game a bit more approachable by new players rather than a book of the week club.
None of those extra books are necessary; they're just expansion material for players who really want more. Your group can just pretend they don't exist if you don't want to deal with them. Heck, the only book players need to have is the PHB; only the DM needs to be familiar with the DMG and MM. I would say that players who don't intend to DM shouldn't read those, in fact, unless they want to spoil some of the surprises. If you want to use expansion books, not everybody at the table has to be familiar with all of them.
In fact, in my group, it's not uncommon for each player to have a few books of their own that they like and are very familiar with, and they use them all the time, even if the other players and DM haven't gone over them; it's not an issue as long as everybody trusts each other to play fairly and the DM is occasionally willing to ban things that end up being broken in actual play.