What to allow, and what not to

The whole psion thing from a while back has me thinking… dangerous, I know…

I never disallowed anything in AD&D.  Anything at all.  Back then, we just weren’t concerned with game balance.  The guys I’d been playing with had known each other for over a decade.  Some characters were awesome, some were fair, some were downright crappy.  It didn’t really matter.  Honestly, no one gave a crap about balance.  And I allowed everything.

 Now, fast forward.  3E, 3.5, etc.  Balance is the word of the day.  And yes, I can see where it was a necessary corrective.  To be sure, we’ve added a lot of new faces to our gaming table since AD&D.  Some of the people we now play with have played with us for less than half a dozen sessions, and we’ve only known for a few months.  Balance is, probably, a necessity for this group.  I get that.  I really do.  It’s why I was comfortable outlawing Psions in the name of balance.

To be sure, there’s another force at work here.  Whether or not they were fully playtested, all of the AD&D stuff was TSR.  With the Open Gaming License, anyone can put out D&D materials.  To be sure, some of it is as good, if not better, than the stuff that WotC puts out.  But, some of it is just crap.  (Then again, technically, some of the WotC stuff is crap too.)  To take the “allow it all” approach would be unwise and, plainly, irresponsible.

So, the “allow WotC products, except for Unearthed Arcana, plus no psions” was still gives players a pretty wide berth.  We even added an addendum:  “We’ll consider anything else you might have in mind, too.”  So, we’ve got some stuff that is, decidedly, not WotC:  some stuff from Monte Cook, a homemade racial class, alternate template rules.  And, as of yet, balance has only been thrown off by two standard W0tC concepts:  the Psion, which we’ve shut down, is the first.  The second, well, it remains to be seen how broken it is or isn’t.  But the fact of the matter is that the Eberron Shifter is really kicking more butt right now than anyone.

I’m intrigued by Randy’s idea.  He wants to take 4 “power gamers” (in other words, players that will either read the boards to figure out how to break a character, or either do the math themselves… I’m playing a Monk, I think) and run them through standard D&D adventures, to see how bad it really is.  My theory is that the game is well balanced enough that it will be difficult to notice the difference, if there is any, between those 4 players and the 4 average players.  In other words, I’m to the point where I believe that even “broken” characters are not so bad as to spoil the overall balance.

Maybe I should rethink the psion thing….