Do you take offense to this because of procedural problems with using the system itself, or because you have a problem with characters whose schticks are getting level-appropriate abilities just slightly less quickly than everyone else in return for more overall proficiencies?FrankTrollman wrote:the 2nd edition system where they tried to get you to accept a Fighter 3 / Thief 3 as a 4th level character is bullshit.
I don't find so much of an issue with the first of those because I take it as a base assumption that if you're going to include a play mechanic at all, it should be something that I as a player can interact with, not the DM's arbitrary bullshit-meter where he communicates via innuendo and ant pheromones that by his divine decree, everyone can have level 5 next session.
EXP, if it exists in a decimalized form at all, is a resource you're handing to the players, something you mentioned in your codex of clockwork. And while we can probably come up with many grievances about the bullshit in the 3E Wizard's own little personal microcosm of economic allegory, the part where he make scrolls and sacrifices his EXP to subtract from some measure of his future power to come up with something a little bit more immediate is interesting, and the fact that he has a choice about it is basically the only reason EXP exists at all.
So maybe it's the other thing you don't like. I'd love to hear you expound on it, but the way I see it is that you can either build a system in which the player can take his power-by-level capital and go shopping and maybe decide to widen his focus, in which case you use the more virtuous aspects of the 2E multiclass/EXP system or 3E wealth-by-level system and put the costs for everything on an exponential function so that nobody can move outside the boundaries that are assumed for their peers, or you build a system in which people cannot do this, in which case EXP is always "You are now one-eighth closer to your next level" and never, ever "that ogre was 487.15 exp so if we divide that by five then that's 97.43 exp for each of you."
(As an aside, I know that a lot of people seem to really, really hate playing some sort of logistics mini-game in which they deal with 10,000 of anything. I happen to have a soft spot for that, though, so I philosophically treat this as though it's viable, in at least a niche sense. I'm saying that if the player doesn't have options worth 500, 2,500, 3,333, and 5,000 of whatever it is that you gave them, it's worth precisely jack shit.)
Well if you're not going to approach it from the standpoint of arbitrary thematic distinction then you clearly want to approach it from the standpoint of arbitrary mechanical distinction. So what is it that you even want saves to do? 3E, in general, thinks that there are two levels of defense in which you first try to be totally unaffected by something (with AC or spell resistance, or a skill check if you're dealing with the bullshit side-systems that pertain to covert combat) and then you try to resist its various effects (with FORT/WILL/REF). 4E thinks that there's just one level of defense and that you just roll against one of it's five subcategories (AC/FORT/WILL/REF/Perception).sigma999 wrote:We should really have one save type and add the various stats to that when needed and I'm not even going to care, internet dickpunch, etc.
I imagine that when faced with this revelation most people would think it's more succinct to just have one tier of defense, and, I mean, if you think four is a good number of distinct defenses then thematically they won't be arranged too differently from 4E's.
If you want one for each main stat, you're saying you want a one-tier system with six DEFs. But maybe you don't.
