Zaranthan wrote:maglag wrote:Meanwhile, Franktrollman wrote a full series of homebrew where everybody has infinite scrolls of every spell from the start (as they're worth less than 15 K GP each, aka free as dust as per Frank's "efreetis exist only to be mass enslaved as your wish factories" hypothesis) and after years I still haven't figured out how that's supposed to even start to work in an actual game. But people still claim to have played tome campaigns.
I doubt anyone has actually played a game like that. The most common houserule I've heard of is to make scrolls above 4th level into wish economy items somehow.
Considering that the wish economy doesn't work anything remotely like what maglag is describing, I'm assuming that it was half-assed hyperbole to attempt to play a shellgame with the fact that his hypothesis is indefensible. His basic claim is that there are some broken rules in 3.5, therefore 3.5 characters are more powerful than Pathfinder characters. That doesn't even. This sentence no verb.
As others have already pointed out, Pathfinder
also has broken stuff in it, so if you play "all dicks on the table" then Pathfinder and 3.5 Wizards are
exactly the same power. They are both powerful enough to run the game into the ground at about level 9 if not before. So it's basically a meaningless point of comparison. And even if the comparison point was meaningful, it still wouldn't give you an
answer, because breaking the game is the same end point in both cases. Candles of Invocation exist in both games, and Pathfinder characters have more wealth by level. I think the theoretical optimization takeoff point for pure RAW wankery is like one level earlier in Pathfinder.
And, as others have pointed out, in the virtually 100% chance that you
aren't doing that kind of bullshit and are actually trying to play a game without netdecking the game breaking holes in the rules and shitting through them, Pathfinder Wizards are just objectively
better than WotC Wizards. They just
are. They have the same spectrum of available spell power and a pile of bonus abilities that range from "better than nothing" to "really pretty decent." It's just not even a comparison that makes sense.
maglag is making the apparently incredibly common mistake that since I posit that there is no number of potions that you can be expected to be able to trade for a major magic item that everyone has infinity potions at level 1. I really honestly have no idea how this is supposed to work. There's no amount of sand you can trade for the Mona Lisa, nevertheless no one has infinity sand. It's not even a paradox and I don't know why people have such problems with understanding it. But no matter how good or bad your understanding of the wish economy, it obviously has nothing at all to do with the relative power of 3.5 Wizards and Pathfinder Wizards. It was introduced as nothing but a "Poisoning the Well" maneuver to attempt to distract from maglag's incredibly weak argument.
-Username17