I don't know what thread specifically you're referring to, but I definitely agree with that approach. Too often people want to play against type by being the scholarly berserker or the weightlifting wizard or what have you and D&D3 just doesn't support that.OgreBattle wrote:There's a thread on here where it's proposed that your two components of character class are...
1) Combat
2) Out of Combat
So you may be...
1) Melee/Ranged burst/steady
2) healer, info gatherer, and other stuff
To make this work, you would have to scrub attribute dependency from your system in one direction or the other - that is to say, your character's high INT score must either benefit their standing in spelling bees or the difficulty to resist their stinking cloud, not both. That has the potential to lead us down some weird paths, such as the Berserker who can shred a roomful of armored goblins with a pair of battleaxes but can't deadlift ten kilograms. Even so, de-coupling attribute scores from your battle utility is a direction that any heartbreaker has to go down if it wants to put real weight behind any claim to support characters of nonstandard types.
You could hack this into 3.X for SAD classes by replacing any reference to the SAD stat in the class description with a hidden, scaling "competence" stat that starts at 18 and increases with level. Any other references to the SAD stat in the game mechanics use the character's actual score, which they can spend ability increases on or acquire gear to improve as normal. Hence you can have a 10 INT Wizard who is still perfectly competent at doing Wizard spellcasting and has put his point-buy into 18 STR because he wants to bench press the Bard.
You could carry this forward with MAD classes as well; I feel a certain knee-jerk aversion to saying, in effect, "assume a starting Paladin has 18s in STR, WIS, and CHA for the purposes of swinging a sword or using class features," but that might just be the ghost of Gygax pressing on my brain. Carrying these things too far would basically trash the entire concept of attribute scores, certainly.