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Kurald_Galain wrote:

As I recall, in the 3.5 Living campaigns, a number of feats/spells/etc were banned because they were considered too cheesy or overpowered.

I was wondering if any such bans will be, or are expected to be, made for 4E living Forgotten Realms? E.g. banning certain items from the Adventurers Vault that penalize saving throws, to prevent an orb wizard from giving out a -12 saving throw penalty.

Doesn't look like it. The Battlerager-Warforged-Reparation Apparatus is here to stay.

Kurald_Galain wrote:

As I recall, in the 3.5 Living campaigns, a number of feats/spells/etc were banned because they were considered too cheesy or overpowered.

I was wondering if any such bans will be, or are expected to be, made for 4E living Forgotten Realms?

WOTC's philosophy appears to be that if a single rules item (i.e., power, feat, magic item, etc.) is unbalanced, or some rules system creates a subtle imbalance, those need to be corrected. However, if a combination of rules items cause a blatant imbalance, that's not really a problem, because DMs always have the power to make house rules and decide that, say, two powers don't synergize the way a player wants them to or a magic item isn't available to the player. The thinking appears to be that the more obvious the imbalance, the less the need to fix it, because no competent DM would allow such an obvious problem in their campaign.

This philosophy meshes poorly with a Living campaign, where the general assumption is that DMs will play by the RAW, even if they disagree with the end result.

Because of this, every successful Living campaign has made changes to the core rules, on the basis that the campaign staff were acting as DMs for the campaign and thus able to make house rules.

The LFR philosophy, which appears to have been forced by WOTC, is that campaign staff aren't the DMs of the campaign, but more facilitators for the actual DM, whoever happens to be running the module that day.

As a result, campaign staff is hamstrung, unable to do anything but mechanically tell you that the core rules are good, Dragon Magazine is good, everything that WOTC puts out is good and suitable for use in the campaign. At this point, the farthest that campaign staff appear able to go is to restrict things (like character backgrounds) for campaign flavor reasons. Inasmuch as a warforged who is a Battlelord of Kord is legal, however, that clearly doesn't extend very far.

Of course, the other implication of the newRPGA philosophy is that the DM at the table is actually a DM--as far as I can tell, if you as a DM decide that some combination of powers works better together than intended, you're free to declare by DM fiat that it just doesn't work that way at your table. For that matter, in discussions about Blade Cascade before errata came out, some campaign staff were implying that a DM could just house rule away the plain meaning of a single power if they thought the plain meaning was against the Rules as the DM thought were Intended.

So, the answer is: No, campaign staff are barred from ever implying that something that WOTC puts out is not suitable for use in the campaign. However, if you as DM personally and strongly don't like something, you can probably (either through inherent DM powers or DME) declare it anathema at your table.

-- Brian Gibbons.

Although so far I haven't seen anything that is blatantly overpowered. I have seen strong combos for sure, but they are usually good 1/day and/or are extremely situational

While not providing the snarky response I'd like to this statement, I will nevertheless respond.

Because Wizards has been (dare I say) months late with the updated errata, there are some blatant problems that seem to pop up every single module. One noticable one is people pulling out spare sets of Veteran's armor in order to cast a daily or more every combat. There are some items problematic in combination in Adventurer's Vault as well, but they don't really show up until late heroic, so we'll start hearing about them soon.

A couple of the paragon classes released recently have issues too, although nothing as bad as the items, really. If Wizards finishes up the errata soon, we may well see a situation were there is nothing blatently broken, but they seem to prefer to produce lots of subpar products rather than slightly fewer good products. A shame, really.

Brayden Glad