Before I get started, I think it's really important that I note that what follows is not a criticism of the player of the Artificer character in my campaign. Had he chosen to do so, that player could have destroyed the campaign quite thoroughly; to his great credit, he instead chose to focus his efforts on creating 'interesting' items, rather than going for raw power. So, he highlighted the problems below, without himself being a destructive influence. Which is a good thing.
The Artificer is a character class introduced in the Eberron sourcebook. Where other characters gain their power by feats of arms, or by casting spells, the Artificer gains his power by crafting and using magic items. Basically, he's Iron Man. And this was even more the case in "The Eberron Code", where the Artificer was a Warforged - a new Eberron race that is essentially a "metal man".
(As an aside about the Warforged, at least in 3e - they're also overpowered. In the PHB, the dwarf is quite clearly the most powerful of the races; the Warforged has them beat quite handily. Those immunities are extremely powerful. But I digress.)
I really like the concept of the Artificer. The "Iron Man" concept is a good one. And, in theory, 3e was the first edition to really support widespread crafting of magic items. It seemed a great fit.
"Seemed" is the operative word there.
See, what I hadn't grasped, but what really became apparent very quickly when Mondo started crafting lots of items, is that the 3e magic item crafting system just doesn't work. It looks like it's a solid system, filled with lots of mathematical rigour, and with formulae just under the surface for the enterprising DM to dig out.
It's really not. The guidelines in the DMG actually allude to this, noting that the fomulae given should just be considered guidelines. But it's not clear until it gets heavily used that it's more or less just something that they put together, didn't really playtest, and left well alone.
In fact, I'm now reasonably sure that the 3e designers envisaged the game being played in a very "2nd Edition" style - PCs would mostly be single class, you'd have the 'classic' four person party in most cases, campaigns would stop about 10th level, and almost all magic items would be found following random rolls on the treasure tables - almost no items would be bought or crafted. And, played in that style, you get a very different game.
(I think I've mentioned this before. I'm now convinced that the whole of multiclassing, the whole of magic item creation, and the whole of high-level play was only barely playtested, and pretty much doesn't work right. Which is a pretty damning indictment - that's about two-thirds of the game right there!)
So, the consequence of this discovery was that Mondo Jiwa was a very powerful character. Indeed, with a bit of tweaking that character could have filled pretty much any role in the party, and could probably have done it better in most cases than the dedicated specialist. (Fortunately, he didn't seem able to fill all the roles at once.) As noted above, had the player not deliberately chosen not to break the game, he could readily have done so, simply by applying the rules as written.
As far as I can tell, WotC were only too well aware of this weakness in the rules. In the "Magic Item Compendium", they re-price a whole lot of items to make them a bit more sane. They start to introduce the notion of "item levels", indicating that a certain item is suitable for characters of a suitable level (a concept that would be fully adopted in 4e).
Unfortunately, the MIC is one of the most incompetent books they ever produced. Worse, it starts the process of re-pricing items, but it fails to touch any of the items in the DMG (some of which were the worst offenders), and it says nothing about item creation. In effect, it creates a hybrid between two systems, one improperly tested and one half-done, and then walks away from the rubble of your game. The book is still, barely, useable, but only as a source of items for the DM to insert as treasure in his game; for item creation or purchase, it is worse than useless.
Tragically, the upshot of that is that I think the Artificer needs to be removed from any future campaigns I run. Further, the whole notion of item creation needs to be removed entirely - it's too complex to properly fix, and some of the most basic items to create (specifically scrolls) and also the ones most likely to cause problems. It's a real mess - and a huge and fundamental flaw at the heart of 3.5e.
There's also one further lesson to be learned from this. One of the things that I didn't expect was that Mondo's player really enjoyed tinkering with the item creation system, broken as it is. He actively enjoyed working on his spreadhseets, sorting out just what his character would make next, and so forth. The very complexity of that bit of the game was actively a bonus as far as he was concerned.
That was something of a surprise to me, to say the least. To a large extent, I'd written off item creation as just being too complex. And one of my key design goals for "Nutshell Fantasy" was that the game should be vastly simpler - that it should allow item creation, and should do so in a nice, easy manner.
But if the very complexity of the system can be a draw, where does that leave NF? Especially since there's simply no way I could possibly replicate the many thousands of items in 3e and its sourcebooks?
Anyway, that was the third, and final, big lesson that I learned from "The Eberron Code". It was also, probably, the most surprising of the three.
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