Lessons from The Eberron Code #2: The Spell Compendium

I'm not sure if anyone is still reading this blog, or if there's even a hint of residual interest, but...

Some months ago, I posted the first of me "Lessons from The Eberron Code" posts. This was supposed to be the first of three such posts, but I never did get around to the second or third posts. Well, here goes.

One of the things I like about 3e is that it was intentionally constructed to be easily expanded - adding extra feats, spells, magic items, monsters, classes, and so on was just a matter of dropping them in. But the down-side of that was that the game quickly became unmanageable, as characters would be built with a class from here, a feat from there, and three magic items from those other three books. That was a pain, especially for the poor DM who had to lug all those books around with him. And, unlike with 4e, the technology wasn't really available at the outset to allow this to be nicely gathered and indexed in an online resource. (Of course, that's no longer true, but the only people who have the legal right to do so are WotC, and they've moved on and have no interest in doing so.)

So, when it was released, I was absolutely delighted to see the "Spell Compendium" (and then the companion volume, the "Magic Item Compendium"). I promptly declared that PCs could use any spells from the PHB or the SC, but no other spells from any source. And so it went on, with the book seeing almost no use in-game, up to the point where the player of the Druid in the Eberron Code took a serious look in the book, and then started using some of the spells.

Unfortunately, that was also the point where I was handed a sharp lesson about the contents of that book. Specifically, that the "Spell Compendium" represented a source of massive power creep and, worse, that it was a power boost for exactly those classes that least required it: the Cleric, the Druid, and the Wizard.

See, it has long been known that 3e has balance issues across the classes. Actually, these have been inherent in the game since the outset, but they really kicked into high gear with 3.0e, and got worse with 3.5e. There were two issues: firstly, the Fighter-types have a more-or-less linear progression in abilities (actually, as far as I can tell, it's an n.log(n) progression), while the spellcasters have a cubic progression.

(That is, the Fighters gain power in terms of advanced BAB and hit points (linear), plus they also gain more powerful feats and some extra attacks (log n). Meanwhile, the Wizards gain more spells per day, plus the gain higher level spells, plus all their existing spells become more powerful as they go.)

The other problem, though, is that the Fighter-types have a small and fixed set of tricks available: they get maybe a dozen feats. Meanwhile, the Cleric gets access to all his spells. And, when a new sourcebook is added, the Cleric immediately gains access to all those spells as well. Adding more feats gives more ways to build a Fighter, but generally doesn't vastly increase the power of an individual Fighter; adding more spells can dramatically increase the power level of the Cleric (or Druid, and to a lesser extent the Wizard).

In addition, the "Spell Compendium" really highlights something that I'd been aware of for a long time, but hadn't really bothered with: the designers of the game actively broke 3e as it went along. See, 3e has a limitation on PC power inherent in the 'stacking' rules - if you have two bonuses of the same type (armour +2 and armour +3, for example), you don't get to add both bonuses, only the larger. And, since the DMG included only a limited number of bonus types, this put a hard ceiling on potential power.

The problem with this was that the PHB spells do a pretty good job of "filling in the gaps" - for pretty much any possible bonus type, there are spells in the PHB to give a bonus of that type. What this means is that, when the designers came to add new spells, they found themselves rather stuck - if there's already a spell to grant a +X armour bonus, how do you make an interesting spell that gives an armour bonus? Can't just go for a bigger number, because that would change the spell level, but if you don't then your new spell is redundant.

So they cheated. They designed loads of new spells by introducing a huge range of new bonus types. The consequence of this was obvious: the game grew more complex, and characters grew much more powerful as they stacked the new spells on top of the old. Huzzah!

(Which means, by the way, that when the team introducing 4e commented that 3e was 'broken' and 'over-complex', they weren't wrong. But the reason 3e was in that state was that those same designers had made it that way! But that's another rant.)

The bottom line of all of this is that, while I really like the concept of the "Spell Compendium", the effect on the game overall is a shockingly bad one. Much as I would prefer not to, I think I'm going to have to remove it from use from any future games that I run. Assuming, that is, that I ever run 3.5e D&D again...