D&D 3.5

[Ondo]

Reading your posts here chaps it seems to me that you are rather falling for D&D's traditional marketing approach - buy this product and your character gets better

Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with that so long as you're both doing it with your eyes open

Their characters don't get better because that's part of WotC marketing scheme. Their character get better because they're rangers. Not only was the ranger generally regarded as a weak class in 3.0, no powergamer would ever take more than 1 level in ranger. It was clearly a bad idea, as they got essentially all their abilities at 1st level. That has been fixed, and more flexibility has been added to the class. It's hardly simply a power up - the hit die has been dropped to d8 from d10.

Incindentially, "splatbooks" is what White Wolf's supplements for Vampire: The Masquerade that covered each individual clan in it's own book were called. They had similar books for their other RPGs. The explanation I've heard is that an asterik was used as a wildcard to replace the individual clan's name it the title, and people pronounced the asterik "splat", hence splatbooks.