I see your point on meta gaming. My view is a bit different, it's only meta gaming if you use the information in a way that is inconsistant with what the character can gain from observasion. In this case, backpost would only really of given you information that the imp looks like a winged cat and meows a lot. But, your point is taken. I missed that the cat didn't have feathered wings; with the character's theme, I would of expected bat wings, but it's a case of me assuming something rather than my knowing something that the character didn't. The character knew something that I didn't. ;)<br/><br/>AD&D 2nd had a significant imbalance against magic-users and toward non-human races and non-fighter classes. The magic-user couuldn't do much for the first 4 or 5 levels of real note and there were dozens, hundreds of house-ruled fixes. What 3.0 and 3.5 did was to slant things too much in favor of the magic-user by giving them more perks and better, more potent spells. Instead of just 1 spell at 1st level, the mage could have as many as 5 and some of those were pretty heavy hitters for the level. In the mean time, the melee types got sacked in the range of capibilities and the specialist (Ranger/rogue) became shadows of themselves. I was accused of saying that 3.0 was too combat oriented because all of the feats of value were combat or boosted combat and there wasn't anything else that most of the classes could do but be protection for the mages as they cast spells. 3.5 attempted to fix it in some way... I'm not sure how... but it's still heavily in favor of spell-slingers and I've been told 4.0 is even more of a mess.<br/><br/>I tend to think of fighters as simple thugs, they don't have enough to do anything RP wise but talk and flex muscles. .. relatively speaking in regards to skills, rogues get tons of skills, but are all but ineffective in a fight and the other classes have similar issues. The cleric and magic-user... lots of skill points, lots of spells, and lots of little perks to make them more awesome in their magic.<br/><br/>I will agree that unless you have a party of classes with dark vision, and everyone but humans do, and gets really smart about camps, are sitting ducks. My TOS for characters setting camp is to carry a lot of dark string, a couple of dozen little bells and sleep in a tree anyway. The string and bells MIGHT warn of approaching bad guys, and most rarely look up into trees for sleeping adventures.<br/><br/>Oh, and please, can we not talk about fireballs in stairways? My first character (and the whole party) got roasted by a party mage who decided that the best way to stop a bunch of goblins from chasing them up a tower was to fireball the stairs behind them... It wasn't pretty.<br/><br/>On a totally unrelated topic, I wonder if anyone had traditions when they played table top for welcomeing new players. My first group had a nice one.<br/><br/>I was 18 when I started playing and got a sbuscription to US Calvary, a catalog for military and police items... including practice hand-grnades. They were identical in size, weight and feel as a real grenande. I rigged a spring under the spoon and my little brother, who was well known for his temper, got to play with it.<br/><br/>What we would do, is when we got a new player in our group, at some point in the first night, he would play at getting all pissed off at something a character did, pull the grenande from his bag, pull the pin and the spoon goes flying off with a little "Ting!" He would get all wide eyed and "Oh shit!" and toss it into the lapof the new player while everyone scattered... we were kids, so we thought that it was funny... Not so much when we asked the pizza dude to hold it while we gathereed money for the pizza once.`