Third Edition was all about classes and multiclassing. It was heaven for munchkins, with enough splatbooks you could dip into a couple of prestige classes for synergetic abilities and have completely overpowered specialties. More importantly for me, any attempt to homebrew anything required designing classes, and I hated that.



You have not and I have not. 2nd Edition ability scores became stupidly more powerful for every point you put in beyond 18 (to speak nothing of that ridiculous Strength percentile die for Warriors), but in later Editions ability scores progressed far more linearly. And that's for 3rd Edition. In 4th Edition you gained a +1 bonus to two ability scores at 4th, 8th, 14th, 18th, 24th and 28th level, and +1 to all scores at 11th and 21st level.

Though I could say you are right in 4th Edition, as the game is pretty insistent that every ten levels, your adventure changes in scope.



Yeah, that's pretty terrible.



Fire Giants have Strength 31 in 3rd Edition, so no . An Ogre has a Strength of 21.

Actually, if he's not resisting, then you can coup de grâce him. In the case of our terrible fighter build from two posts ago, we can go for a -10 Power Attack then (more than that, actually, since a defenceless character will have penalties to defence and cannot use the Dodge feat we gave him), since you only get to do the one attack in the entire round, for 2(2d6+26) for an average of 66 damage, outright killing the 55hp fighter, and even if he survived, he'd still have to succeed at a DC 76 Fortitude Save or die outright. And, just so you have an idea of what a DC 76 save means, the Tarrasque has +38 to its Fortitude save, meaning it would have to roll a natural 38 on a d20 to survive (not exactly true, since natural 20s are always successes, but you get the point). [EDIT:] Oh, and then he'd have to roll a DC 15 Fortitude Save again to avoid dying from massive damage.



Yeah, I never had any interest in the 'epic levels' games. But as for characters reaching epic levels, there are any number of reasons to ascend. Take a fighter. Maybe he becomes someone like Lan, a warrior of legendary skill, until even the gods take notice and grant him a place as one one of their proxies. Or he could obtain (or forge his own) magical artefact of incredible power that allows him to travel through the planes. Or maybe he bathes in the blood of a slain Dragon and gains their power and immortality. It's just limited by your imagination.



Nah, I still have my 2nd Edition PHB, so I can assure you they subdivided their classes into those four groups. Mages was specifically the generalist type of Wizard. Why did they do that? Hell if I know, I stopped trying to make sense of 2nd Edition long ago.

As for 3rd Edition, yes, they made Barabarians a standard class. Also Monks.