Talen Lee

the piece you linked in here about haste reminded me of something.

the gamer cohort a few years ahead of me in college insisted on playing d&d 3.25, which just meant hacking together the parts of 3 they liked with the parts of 3.5 they liked. and one of the things from 3 they liked was its version of haste

i didn't play with them normally, but i was invited to a one shot-ish game one of them ran over a weekend. everyone was supposed to build 20th level characters, and we'd do a series of fights against all 10 great wrym dragons from the monster manual. the party was

• a relatively new player, who played a lvl 20 dwarf fighter
• a archer ranger who took a prestige class to super specialize in fighting one particular type of favored enemy (dragons, obviously)
• a cleric with some weird prestiege classes and abilities that made him hard to kill
• and me, playing the default OP wizard/incantatrix/archmage 3rd ed build

the fighter had a terrible time, and did basically nothing. the cleric did a bit of healing and buffs, and brought the fighter back to life once or twice. the ranger killed one dragon, because i let him.

i killed 8, usually with no meaningful help from the rest of the party, even though i had to devote spell slots to teleporting the party around. the whole time, the GM would tell me i couldn't do X broken thing anymore, so I'd just do Y instead. turns out, you can do a lot of broken shit as a 20th level caster who can consistently cast 3 spells per turn with Haste + Quicken Spell.

by the end, we were all very tired, so we just negotiated with the final boss gold dragon to end things. after that, they switched to 3.5.