New Edition of Rules

[SphereOfFeetMan]

Also, the prospect of getting things to randomly generate abilities still has value. I find it generates more interesting characters than Point Buy right through the inherent unfairness.

Essentially what this means is that on 3d6, one in 54 ability scores generates the maximum bonus. That would be one out of 9 characters having max bonus on something. On 4d6, pick 3 it's one ability score in 17, on 3d6 reroll 1s it's one ability score in 31.

I take this to mean that the "specialness" of randomly getting an 18 ability score is more important than the equal distribution of ability score points among pc's. I don't understand this reasoning. I played in a game once wherein another player and I both rolled up wizards. His total ability score points were in the 60's while mine were in the 80's. I thought that was crap.

I much prefer point buy for the fairness of it. Yes, this creates "cookie-cutter" characters which lessens the specialness of rolling well on ability scores, but I think it is necessary.

You can have a well muscled mage and a smart fighter then.

I don't know about you, but I'm tired of stereotyped characters for the sake of "balance".

This is why people are sick of in point buy. Also, fighters with crap charisma piss dumbass dm's off. Of course dumbass dm's don't bat an eyelash when there are Sorcerers with great charisma's and crap strength scores.

I don't know how to fix this, but I do have some thoughts on the issue. I think it is important for all classes to have an equal amount of MAD. Especially in 3e, a monk has to have most of his ability scores be awesome to be effective, while an arcane caster can get away with crap stats except for one.

I think the ideal would be for all pc's to have an equal starting point of resources (ability scores or what-have-you), and an equal point of expenditure (no 3e monk vs 3e wizards). While at the same time not being bound to defining your fighter as stupid simply because of the limited ability scores.

I also have some unrelated nebulous thoughts about this which may or may not be worthwhile. Maybe you let players choose what their ability scores are to a limited extent, and choosing a high ability score has some benefits and drawbacks, while choosing a low ability score has some benefits and drawbacks. Like in Final Fantasy Tactics. For example, you have a Faith score, which is basically your magic score. The higher your faith score, the more powerful your magic is on other people. But it also determines how much you are affected by magic.

So, for example a Faith 90 (a 100 point scale) has powerful magic but is also affected by magic more than usual. And a Faith 20 person is little affected by magic while having little magical power of his own.

I don't know if this is feasible for a six stat system, or another type of system or what, but maybe someone can apply it to dnd in some manner. If it is possible to apply it to dnd's traditional 6 stat system, then people could just choose the ability scores of the pc they wanted to play. So if you wanted to play a super intelligent, charismatic fighter you could. And it would be no better, just different, from a stupid uncharismatic fighter.

Just some seeds of ideas. Hopefully they are useful.

[tzor]

1197483699[/unixtime]]I'd like to jump in to bitch about the random rolling thing. I actually wound up with my highest attribute being a 12 before. Let me tell you, it kills the damn game.

Bah! In my day sonny we rolled 3d6 and ...
Well we constantly thought the other guy was cheeting.

Bah we could never roll 3d6 to save our characters.
But boy do I have a plethora of stories where we kept rolling 99's on Arms Law/Claw Law tables.

But in all honestly, back in 1E unless you were really lucky no one really cared. 18.XX was where all the real numbers could be found. For the most parts stats were just a way to meet a base class prerequsites. (Like Paladin.)

[Catharz]

How about a point buy system followed by some randomness? If you min/max, you're at the cap anyway and an increase won't change your primary attributes.

But randomness on that level still conflicts with the desires of players who know their characters before rolling.

So perhaps a choice between three pregenerated arrays and unweighted point buy + random roll (say, 1d6 to see which stat, 1d6 to see the increase, if it goes above cap you're SOL)?


It's incredibly ugly, but when you're trying to kludge together something moderately balanced from an inherently imbalanced system that's what you get.

[Jacob_Orlove]

I always liked "everyone at the table rolls a set of stats, anyone can use any set rolled". Generally, you get at least one set with a high stat, and probably a different set that has a higher overall average, and you can always take a set that isn't the best one if you're going to play, say, a Druid.

Or you can just all use the elite array. I do like that system, because you actually rank all the stats, instead of being like 14 14 14 12 12 12.

[Koumei]

1197513258[/unixtime]]
But in all honestly, back in 1E unless you were really lucky no one really cared. 18.XX was where all the real numbers could be found. For the most parts stats were just a way to meet a base class prerequsites. (Like Paladin.)

Rifts is even worse. Your IQ, ME, MA, PP and PB only ever matter if they're 17+, and even then, it's not that big a deal. Heck, MA and PB are essentially useless, because no GM will ever pay attention to your "All NPCs have an 80% chance of instantly trusting me and being impressed by me."

Your Speed attribute is seriously useless, not affecting anything. PE is useful for determining the MDC of *some* monster characters, and for others, it's essentially useless at numbers below 17. Finally, PS is useless below 17, but it's ALSO useless if it isn't Supernatural. And the things with Supernatural PS don't roll 3d6 for theirs, they roll 5d6 +16 or something equally random.

[K]

I like the "roll 3d6 six times, then take the difference from 70, then add whats left to one stat, or two if it takes a number over 18 or under 3"

So a 15, 15, 12, 8, 10, 13 is 73 so 70-73 you take 3 from a a stat of your choice.

Its balanced, and yet makes everyone unique.

----------------

Personally, I don't think stats should make anyone "better" at the basic things your class does. I mean, thats straight up cheating as you are trying to say "hey, I have a character of the same level as you and we are supposed to be the same power, but for no good reason I'm just better."

I mean, when do you ever see a point buy wizard in DnD without max Int (when not being run by a moron)?

[Jacob_Orlove]

Oh man, seriously. For spellcasting especially, stats making you better at it are garbage.

[MagnaSecuris]

Races
We all know that people want to play Elves and Dwarves and Hobgoblins and half-dragons and half-elves and half-dragon elves. And any other combination of parentage they can think up. So why not make it simple?

Every player gets a choice of two Bloodlines at first level. So there would be Half-Human, Half-Elf, Half-Dwarf, Half-Orc, Half-Dragon. And also Full-Human, Full-Elf, and Full-Orc. Mix and match the halves as you choose, but you need the appropriate half to get the full. These would be best if they were made to scale with level, BAB, or skill ranks, as a feat. This is especially true of awesome magical bloodlines.

Example:
Half Dwarf Bloodline
+2 racial bonus on saving throws against poison.
Dwarf Blood: For all effects related to race, a half-dwarf is considered a dwarf.
Full Dwarf Bloodline
Dwarf base land speed is 20 feet. However, dwarves can move at this speed even when wearing medium or heavy armor or when carrying a medium or heavy load (unlike other creatures, whose speed is reduced in such situations).
+2 racial bonus on saving throws against spells and spell-like effects.
Darkvision: Dwarves can see in the dark up to 60 feet. Darkvision is black and white only, but it is otherwise like normal sight, and dwarves can function just fine with no light at all.


But, alas, I am lazy.

[Maxus]

I'm ambivalent on stat rolls. They do their job, and it's fun getting 16's, 17's, and 18's...

I just don't often get them.

My characters are notorious for having an Aura of Suck, too. My characters, and everyone fighting them, suddenly become extremely ineffective on attacks rolls.

It's like a feat, or Extraordinary ability, that ensures my guy shall roll in the neighborhood of 4 for most rolls, but shall be able to overcome, for his foeman shall be rolling in the neighborhood of 3 on all rolls. Yea, verily.

On the other hand, the HP dice love me. On a level 8, d8 HD character, I managed to get 84 HP once. And that's about 14 higher than the paladin had. Okay, he had 18 Con because of the class I'd picked. But, still. Out of a maximum of 96 HP, he had 84.

[Jacob_Orlove]

Rolling for hit points, in a way that lets the fighter roll two ones and suddenly never be level appropriate ever again, is also garbage.

[Catharz]

So ability scores apply only to skills, saves, and random things like carrying capacity and base languages?

[Maxus]

Rolling for hit points, in a way that lets the fighter roll two ones and suddenly never be level appropriate ever again, is also garbage.

You could have the option of house-ruling in favor of generosity if you're so concerned about that.

"You have d10 HD. You're our meat shield. Therefore, you shall roll HP to see if you get greater than 5. If 5 is surpassed, that result is taken. If 5 is not achieved on the roll, than you shall receive HP as if you had achieved 5."

Or any number you think is appropriate.

[MagnaSecuris]

Or you could have everybody roll a d6 (or d4) and add bonuses to that based on class.
Fighter +4 hp
Ranger +3 hp
Rogue +1 hp

[Joy_Division]

I don't like rolling for hit points I think it's unnecessary but I fully support rolling for stats.

As for wound levels, I imagine that they would be a building penalty against certain actions. So that traps/early combats could have a lasting effect on a character and have HP change up and down a lot.

I'd be all for making named characters harder to damage the higher their wound level is so you have to bust out big finishing moves to actually finish off the bad guy. Also to make it less likely a dart trap or Mook kills your character because good/bad rolls.

[Jacob_Orlove]

1197519930[/unixtime]]

Rolling for hit points, in a way that lets the fighter roll two ones and suddenly never be level appropriate ever again, is also garbage.

You could have the option of house-ruling in favor of generosity if you're so concerned about that.

"You have d10 HD. You're our meat shield. Therefore, you shall roll HP to see if you get greater than 5. If 5 is surpassed, that result is taken. If 5 is not achieved on the roll, than you shall receive HP as if you had achieved 5."

Or any number you think is appropriate.

Oh, we totally do that. Every HP die gets the number rolled, or the average rounded down, whichever is higher. So Fighters can't roll lower than a 5, and Wizards can't roll 1s.

[Draco_Argentum]

What does rolling HP add to the game? I can see the argument for rolling stats but HP aren't like that. Noone ever complains that all members of one class having the same HP makes characters boring.

[Judging__Eagle]

My group has used Living Greyhawk rules for HP for a long time now.

1st lvl = Max Dice
2nd lvl + = 1/2 Hit Dice + 1

No one ever has inappropriate amounts of HP.

For stats...

We used to do all sorts of dumb shit. We also never had many magic items. So high stats + no items sort of played the same as medium stats + items.

Once we started using the Tome books, I insisted upon using the Elite array.

In a couple of levels everyone gets boner-inducing stats anyway, and having everyone start with the same baseline set of stats works great for everyone.

The wizzies get a bit pissy that they can't get 16+ int though, but they get there soon enough.

I personally like using elite array when playing Tome Games b/c it reduces the number of changed things in the game as a whole.

Then again, I'm the guy who will use the rules to cockblock the DM when he wants to do something 'dramatic'; like have some asshat try to grapple and drag/carry an NPC that doesn't want to do so. On the otherhand, I do the same to other players who try to do equally or worse stuff. Like somehow conbvince the DM that taking Druid levels will increase a clerics Cleric spellcasting... because they're both divine; which the DM was willing to buy, or two players trying to convince the DM that any cleric who 'could' select the Sun Domain counts as qualifying for the Radiant Servant of "X" PrC. Both times they nearly got the DM to buy it.



Back on-topic:

The 'value' and 'range' of stats is going back and forth a lot and it gave me some ideas.

Let's dump the idea of stats giving bonuses.

Let's just use the bonuses as the stats?

That way we can just get rid of stats that go from 3-18 and just have say.... 1-10 or 1-7 for stats.

As for generating stats, I thought of a novel way that people could generate stats.

They all get a baseline stat (say... 4 or 3) and then have the option of rolling X amount of dY dice to add to a stat. This can be done for each stat and the player can choose how many dice to roll and what type of dice they will be each time.

So, the player takes their base... 3 and decides to roll. The result is added to that stat, but here's the kicker; any stats that have a total value rolled over the pre-decided max have those excess points count as a penalty that must be applied somewhere among your stats.

So, you 'could' roll 3d4 to add to your base 3 and try for a 7 (or 10); but if in total you get over a 7 (or 10); you have to apply a penalty somewhere.

Of course...this could easily lead to people flipping coins to minimize the odds of seeing if they take a big hit to their stats.

On the other hand, it starts everyone at a baseline and the players decide how risky they want to play to get a stat to a level that they want.

Of course, that's if you want 'random' stats. You could very well tell people that they have a base 2 in all stats and 4 points to assign, no stat can start above 5.

[RandomCasualty]

1197419035[/unixtime]]The most important thing is that characters should be able and expected to take out large numbers of monsters of lower level. Specifically, the exchange rate of dude to army of mooks should expand faster than exponentials. It's fine to fight 2 enemies who are two levels lower, but enemies of 4 levels lower should seriously come in big groups.

This is potentially dangerous because it limits your possibilities as far as encounter design. If anything, I think the power scaling shouldn't be so extreme, so that groups are a bit more valuable at higher levels. Right now, AC and such scales to the point that large battles with hordes of weak monsters are a waste of time. They take forever to set up and are generally clean sweeped with minimal PC loss of resources. Also, each of those creatures gets an action, so mass battles take a long time.

It's cool to go on mass killing sprees in video games, where the math and calculations are hidden and stuff happens in real time regardless. In an RPG, fighting 100 orcs tends to be pretty boring, especially when they can't touch you without a chance of rolling a natural 20.

Honestly, I'd do something more similar to the Mob rules whereby a large pack of stuff effectively becomes a humanoid swarm, and uses rules similar to swarms, where they become one big monster. That in my opinion is more fun than the current model of either "Camp the doorway and fight em 1on1" or "101 arrows per round by archer monsters".

D&D works much better for tactical skirmishes of two groups under 20, otherwise the game just drags. I'd say stick to that principle. If a big pack of weak monsters isn't that strong, condense them into one uber monster to challenge a high level PC.

I think a good guideline is that if a group of monsters is dead faster than the time it took to set them up on the battlemap, then it's time to consider condensing them into a smaller group of mob monsters.

[Username17]

Quick thought outline before I go back to class:

• If attributes are purely reactive, then having high and low attributes is bad, and having characters maxing out one attribute should come at the cost of a much less dramatic reduction in other attributes.
  
  
• If attributes are wholly (are even mostly) active, then cutting secondary attributes to boost primary attributes is a no-brainer, and characters with diverse stats should have the higher over-all modifier.
  
  
• It is possible to use attributes purely for defensive and "skill" rolls (which makes them essentially reactive); use them for calculations of major character abilities (which makes them active), or to mix and match the two concepts in any degree you want.
  
  
• I think it does have value to have characters be tied in their defensive strengths to their offensive strengths. It allows players to anticipate the weaknesses of enemies by watching their actions and appearance. Nothing in all of D&D is much more insulting than the fact that the Tendridiculous takes no real damage from Fire or Axes.

-Username17

[Fwib]

About hp: My group are currently using this for hp:

First HD: Maximum
Other HD: d4-4+Maximum

It seems to give everyone reasonable hp, yet still allows those whose conception of the game is that you ought to roll dice for it to do so.

I shall suggest the 'everyone rolls up a stat array, then you all pick from the list' system, too.

[Catharz]

1197560239[/unixtime]]
I think it does have value to have characters be tied in their defensive strengths to their offensive strengths. It allows players to anticipate the weaknesses of enemies by watching their actions and appearance. Nothing in all of D&D is much more insulting than the fact that the Tendridiculous takes no real damage from Fire or Axes.

This is only true if there is some simple way of determining a character's stats from appearance. Just saying 'This guy looks smart' feels a little iffy. You could say 'this guy looks frail' and then assume that he must have high mental attributes, but that's at least as iffy.
Something like 'sense motive' to get a character's mental stats and 'spot' to get a character's physical stats could work. This would be opposed by the targeted character's 'bluff' and 'disguise' checks.

Ideally you shouldn't have to make a spot check every time you want to see if a person 10' away is wearing a fur cloak, so there should be some basic outlay of DCs and taking 10 automatically for free.

[Username17]

My thought is if the abilities that you use in combat are dependent upon various attributes and those abilities have signature equipment, then just looking at someone in adventuring gear will give a pretty good idea about what kind of bad assery they are depending on and thus give you at least one good idea of a kind of attack to not throw at him.

The classic example is the giant two handed sword, which powers a lot of strength based maneuvers. If someone is running around with one they probably have a decent Strength and throwing a Tenacity-targetting attack against them is likely a waste of time. But I think that there should be a number of offshoots of that that might be somewhat opaque until the guy starts attacking (if he's throwing Smites and Battle Roars then he probably has a good Willpower defense as well). And I think there should likely be similar tell-alls for other attributes.

A gnome running around with gears and robot spiders and shit probably has a decent Intelligence (and if he also intends to fall back on his psychic amplifier he might have a high Wisdom as well, hard to tell until he starts using his gadgets). So straight away you can figure than an attack that targets his Insight is suboptimal.

And yeah, characters can certainly play all tricky and shit with that. I've played an illusionist who ran around with a Dwarven Waraxe he wasn't proficient with, and there's nothing stopping players from playing a dagger fighter who walks around with a lance that he drops as soon as combat begins in earnest in order to fight with the daggers in his sleaves.

-Username17

[Catharz]

That makes sense. I can see signature equipment being tied to attributes, and for something like a huge sword it's fine to say 'it's a really heavy sword so you probably want a high strength just to carry it'. And yeah, you might have to have been around the block a few times before you recognize a psychic amplifier.



On a pseudo-related note, should all attributes resist their own attacks, or is it enough that an attribute is used to resist attacks of another attribute?

I could see a system like Con/Con, Dex/Dex, Str/Str, Cha/Int, Int/Wis, Wis/Cha. You can probably come up with something that makes more sense than that, but I do like the idea of having an attribute round.

I'm also not sure what attributes are used for what tests. If tinkering is Int-based, say you make a clockwork spider which you order around to attack people. It doesn't make sense as an Int-based attack, because it's a metal spider physically trying to stab. You could make the spider's attributes based on your Int, but that creates what is effectively an Int-based attack targeting Dex and Con (or whatever).

[K]

My question is: why have Str-based Two handed Sword maneuvers at all?

I mean, what is so special about a Two-handed sword that it does something that a Battleax or a Guisarme can't do, or even a dagger or a punch?

All it does it make you think the DM is personally trying to screw you when he disarms your Two-handed sword and suddenly you don't have any maneuvers in combat until you get your sword back. Do you really want to be powerless when you break out of prison until you find the one guy who has a spiked chain among the guards?

Basically, stats need to be less important in DnD. Those of us who are only decent at math still don't want to run the numbers to figure out just the right stat array to get a decent combo of defense and offense.

I like stats being boosts to saves, and defaults to skills you don't have (not bonuses). Then, you can have "adventurer mages" or "warmages" with good physical stats who are used to getting into the thick of combat with short range spells and jumping over crevasses and swinging on ropes and "ghost killer" or "leader of men" warriors with good mental stats to resist the kinds of combat they are good at.

Making stats count for offense and defenses means that you have a system where the high Str fighter attacks the low Con Wizard and the wizard explodes in one hit, and on the flipside if the high Int Wizzy hits the low Wis fighter with one Charm he can't make the SoD.

Thats dumb. Why even have a level system where your lowest weakness is so low that the the other guy's best strength means no save death for you?

Why even have a system with added complication of worrying about both offenses and defenses? Complexity for complexity's sake just means thats its harder to teach your non-gamer girlfriend how to play and nothing of value has been added.

[Username17]

I think the plan here is that Psycic attacks will sometimes target your willpower (Charisma) and sometimes target your fortitude (Constitution), and sometimes target your perception (Wisdom) and sometimes target your tenacity (Strength).

Since you're generally speaking only looking at +4 or so to target a character's weak Armor Classes vs. their strong ones, it's merely a mini-game rather than a be-all-end-all insta-gib-fest.

---

The goal is to have players feel that they have a logical and comprehensible reason why they would want to use "Whispers of Madness" on an opponent rather than "Wave of Force". Player engagement is the number one priority of the combat system after all.

-Username17