I never encountered this problem, actually, on the contrary, I was overwhelmed by the amount of stuff added by the tons of rulebooks of 3.5 (can't really speak for 4ed because I never played it and only read some stuff from the PHB). For me, the real problem is that with so much stuff, is nearly impossible to keep everything balanced and players can easily break the game abusing the rules... one of my "friends" actually tried to do that (and later on even downright cheated -.-" )

Depends on the setting. For Example, In the Forgotten Realms setting, it would be Ao, The Overlord of the Gods. In Dragonlance, its Mina, Goddess of Tears.

Outside of those, its the gods, celestial beings and dragons.

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Lan

I wonder what will happen if a Tarrasque finds itself for some reason into Sigil. My money's will always be on the Lady of Pain though. Seems like LOP doesn't even have stats to begin with hahaha.

Elminster is a colossal coward who uses others to do his work for him. He's the AD&D equivalent of Eldrad Ulthran.

Fizban. "Arrest that tree for obstructing sunlight!"

He's pretty cool, but Elminster could solo Dragonlance, gods and all.

What I recall in regard to variety is that they have over 5000 prestige classes.

Each supplement they make, they add some prestige classes.

Each is heavily described in terms of play mechanics.

In the end, they kinda feel like they are all the same (maybe 5% of the described prestige classes are cool, the rest kinda suck I have to say).

In the second edition, they made a lot of kits for the various classes, but because each was approached from a role-playing perspective first, they felt more flavorful (for each kit, the role-playing section was big and the mechanics section was smaller so you could kinda tell that they first came out with a lot of role-playing rationalization for the kit before throwing in play mechanics).

Speaking from a game-making perspective, I believe that's the place where you want to be. You want to rationalize the various pieces of the game in terms of flavor BEFORE you translate them into play mechanics.

The best analogy I can come up with in terms of DMing is a friend of mine who felt compelled to create his entire world before we even started the first game.

He could tell you all sorts of things about that city or that royal family he created, but when we started playing, it all felt quite bland and without much flavor.

Made me wish he had started focusing on a certain area and put a lot of twists and turns into it (which has always been my approach... create the world one bloc at a time and it will be all the richer for it, because you put a lot of thought into each bloc).

I think it's somewhere in the middle. Big problems come is you go all roleplaying or all mechanics. Sometimes in AD&D, especially with spells, the wording is so vague that you literally don't know how to handle the spell (this happens also in 3.5, but far less in comparison). Don't get me wrong, I think 3.5 could use a bit more "soul" and sometimes, I am really tempted to drop it. Then, I see a neat PrC or I come up with an interesting idea for a character, and I'm in love again. It also helps that spellcasters are friggin' awesome, and I always play spellcasters

Insanity beats everything. Especially Kender insanity.

Rules for a pen and paper RPGs will never be complete enough to cover the gamut of scenarios a DM and his players can come up with.

This is a desirable outcome, because that is a great part of the attraction of pen and paper RPGs compared to their video game counterparts (the infinite possibilities and great flexibility).

At some point, you will have to either modify the rules or expand upon them anyways so having a truly complete set of rules is not a priority (as long as the basis for the rules is extensible).

They simplified the rules quite a bit (not bad in edition 3/3.5, but too much in the 4th edition, flexibility suffered) in the later editions, in part to make the game more accessible and in part because they wanted to make it easier to make video games based on D&D which on its own is ok as long as flexibility remains.

However, the unforgivable offense is that when designing all the material for the game, they often took a bottom-up approach (try to explain things by their rules) rather than a top-to-bottom approach (explain the role-playing flavor they are trying to achieve and then talk about the rules employed to achieve it).