The Gaming Den

You know, 3E D&D was the first edition to fully take advantage of the information age. So we know what the problems are. We have several years worth of playtesting and writing. Pathfinder should not have fucked up things the way they did, but they did. So fuck it. Here goes something.

Let's not get into class or spell overhauls just yet. Overhauling the entire evocation and divination school is just too much beyond the scope of this post. So we'll just do specific fixes.

First order of business, the 3.0E/3.5E transparency thing. Frankly, the 3.5E's thing of going back and applying stealth errata sucks. So first order of business, there's a disclaimer at the front of the book saying that except for specific examples (which will be taken care of in the book) people are allowed to use 3.0E versions of anything that conflicts with 3.5E.

Swift/Immediate Action gets defined in this book. There are so many goddamn 3.5E books that define these terms over and over again, so let's just save them some time.

Wizards: Can find the spells they want with a Lore check or whatever. No more sucking the cocks of DM to see if a spell they want is available; the fact that they have to pay money to copy it down or buy a scroll is enough of a limit.

Evil spell tag: Does not have an alignment stipulation to it. All it does is tell you how it interacts with certain effects.

Hallow/Unhallow: Have a permanent duration. Not instantaneous.

Cleric: Clear up the 'spontaneous healing' thing once and for all. Clerics of either alignment can spontaneously cast both conjuration (healing) spells or the inflict line of spells. The 'choose negative or positive energy' crap is just for your turn-undead shenanigans.

Heal/Harm: These should just adjust hit points straight-up by 20 per caster level. That way you have OMG healing without having the high-level problem of 'BAM! Reset button, biyatch!'

Prayer Beads of Karma/Candles of Invocation: Are an abomination and should not be in the game.

Persistent Spell/Divine Metamagic: Divine Metamagic should be gone from the game. Persistent spell should go back to being a +4 level bonus. Because by the time you can make Divine Power persistent having full-BAB should be a stupid pet trick; sword-based classes already have a much better variety of stunts. By the time you can make Divine Favor persistent it's competing with stuff like Triadspell and Doomtide and Wall of Stone. Really, it's just not a problem.

Bull's Strength line of spells: Should go back to being either 10 minutes/level or an hour a level. I think they should go back to being an hour/level. Make them a flat bonus or something you roll. I don't care.

1 min/levels spells: Should not be 1 min/level. Every one of these goes back to being 10 min/level. The functionality remains the same without encouraging players to micromanage.

Teleport Ambushes: Teleport should be able to be blocked by a variety of inconvenient but doable things. I think it's okay to teleport right in front of the BBEG's lair or

Flight: Should require concentration checks depending on how much damage you take.

Invisibility: Should just have a will save if the person interacts with whatever if they're being invisible. None of this 'attack drops it' crap.

Hide: Goes back to how it was in 3.0.

Cover: Goes back to how it was in 3.0.

Grapple: Explain once and for all whether it's an attack or a check.

Diplomacy: Just needs a slight nerf. As in, a really good check won't completely change someone's motivations around--they'll just regard your opinions highly. This means that there is a limit to how much you can diplomatize anyone; higher DCs just let you diplomatize more powerful/insane critters. So the mayor will be just as impressed with your 45 Diplomacy check as he would with a 30, it's just that the 45 Diplomacy check will also convince the mind flayer to at least converse respectfully with you before eating your brain.

Hit points: You don't roll for hit points. You fucking take the average.

Rolled stats: Are also an abomination. Stats are too powerful in 3E at low level for this to fly. If you don't roll what you want after 4 tries, you get to go with 36-point buy. Not 32-point buy, that's actually slightly underpowered compared to 4d6.

Ability/Level Drain: There is no such thing as permanently missing levels/abilities. They can ALWAYS be recovered. Ability/Level Drain just prevents you from permanently raising either again until you get it fixed. Otherwise that leads to difference engine crap.

Multiclassing: No multiclassing experience penalty. I don't know what that was about. You don't lose prestige class abilities for not meeting the prerequisites unless the prestige class specifically says so. For racial/gendered/regional prestige classes that don't depend on a specific quality from said category, you don't frickin' actually need to be the race. If it's a 'self-taught' PrC like Dwarven Defender, the racial prerequisite is dropped. If it's an organizational PrC like Red Wizard of Thay, you just need to convince the circle wizards to take you in.

Sorcerers: Are now called Psions and get all crystal/ectoplasm flavored. I normally hate changes that block off options the book author personally doesn't like, but psionics are a back alley abortion done by blind cannibals. And sorcerers psions work like the Frank Trollman sorcerer.

Half-elves and half-orcs need a boost.

Magical Item Crafting: 1st of all, these do not require feats anymore. They require caster levels and craft checks. Piss. Fuck. Oh my god.

Repairing magical items are free as long as you have all of the pieces; they just take a time investment.

Item crafting times are way reduced. It should take 1 day per 10,000 gold pieces of the price. Not 1000.

Personal spell blockage on potions removed.

No more discounts for making magical items 'can be used by fighters only'.

Amulet of Mighty Fists and Bracers of Armor get a huge reduction in price. Both of these items cost way too much.

Clear up once and for all the whole 'can you make an Oathbow an Oathsword' thing.

Spell-storing enchantment can't be placed on ammunition, just on bows.

A lot of the enchantments go to being a fixed cost rather than a modifier. This was one of the few things that 3.5E got right.

Magical weaponry costs way too fucking much. They should cost less than half of what they do right now.

Combine the 'on-hit' and 'critical hit' properties of the weapon enchantments. This should put them more in line with just getting a flat bonus.

Metamagic Feats:

Some of the metamagic feats are too punitive. For stuff like silent and persistent spell you should get a few freebies. One spell slot of every level can get the feat without a level adjustment.

Enlarge Spell: Should just flat-out increase the range AND width. You can already increase the range of cones and shit and unlike 4E there typically are few enough enemies so that you can get all of them in the first place. So what the hey?

Multi-Metamagic Stacking: Yes, you should be able to multi-empower spells without it being a pisser. The only reason why you couldn't beforehand was because people got whiny about Spelldancing.

Empower spell and Maximize Spell should stack normally. I couldn't even imagine what they were thinking. It's totally okay for an Empowered/Maximized Fireball (8th level spell) to do 90 damage, considering that a 20d6 spell will on average do 70 damage.

Metamagic raises the save DC automatically. That means Heighten Spell is fucken banned.

Metamagic rods should have their price standardized. I don't know why it's such a big deal to make specific rods, but does anyone really mind if players go around crafting Earthbound or Uttercold Rods? No, I don't.

Might as well just use Living Greyhawk values for hit points. And sorcerers don't need psionic flavor; they just need their casting progression bumped up one level.

Your level drain modification is even more of a bitch move then normal permanent level drain. A 3rd level character could be stuck at third level for multiple adventures while her friends go up in levels and get the resources to finally remove the level cap.

But seriously, Lago, what is the fucking point? We have the tomes; they're awesome. Who do you think is doing to use a fan-errataed version of 3e D&D when Pathfinder, Pathblazer, and 4.5e are all out?

"Good artists copy. Great artists steal" – Picasso

If another system has a good or even workable idea, take it (copyright permitting of course). There is absolutely no reason to reinvent the wheel when you don't have to.

I like changing Sorcerers to Psions, but for the love of dog either hire someone who has taken more than one semester of psychology or ditch the pop-psych trappings. The whole id/ego/super ego thing was developed by Freud, none of his work has survived (without massive revision) into the modern era of psychology. Pop psych makes my head hurt.

Can fighters have nice things this time around?

Lago PARANOIA wrote:The functionality remains the same without encouraging players to micromanage.

Of course it makes uber buffing easier.

Multiclassing: No multiclassing experience penalty. I don't know what that was about.

Well there is the huge save boost you get from it, that might have been part of their reasoning (without taking into account the gazillion of PrCs most people would be allowed to take).

Personally I think for each save you should simply have two boxes on the character sheet, one each for the number of levels with good/poor saves ... with a table in which you can find the appropriate fractional sum. No math required (which is the usual argument against fractional BAB/saves).

Same for attack bonus, only this time you look up the combined bonus from medium and poor and add to your full BAB levels ... only integer addition required.

No more discounts for making magical items 'can be used by fighters only'.

Custom magic item guidelines need a LOT more restrictions than that to simply hand them over to PCs as rules.

Clear up once and for all the whole 'can you make an Oathbow an Oathsword' thing.

Also, every specific weapon/armor should come with a "this item counts as a +X item for further enhancement".

CatharzGodfoot wrote:But seriously, Lago, what is the fucking point? We have the tomes; they're awesome. Who do you think is doing to use a fan-errataed version of 3e D&D when Pathfinder, Pathblazer, and 4.5e are all out?

Tome is there, but it doesn't touch some of the aspect of the base game which should and can be fixed. Some of the concepts conceived for TNE can be retrofitted, ie. CAN. Limitations on buff spells should be in there, etc etc.

There are multiple lines in the OP that are truncated.

Don't get me wrong, I left a LOT of stuff out like fractional BAB/save bonuses. I also think that if you bump your character up to a new hit dice you should get a one-time retroactive bonus (though it's so small over the course of advancement that it doesn't even matter). Having bonus skills for your class at level 1 needs to go. Everyone should get a one-time bonus of 24 skill points to spend however they see fit in additional to what they get per level.

All the stuff I mentioned is just things off of the top of my head. There's still way more stuff that I'm missing.

Mfa wrote: Of course it makes uber buffing easier.

Ironically, it powers up the fighter-types.

Getting rid of multi-Empowered/Extended bull's strengths hurt the fighters more than it did the casters. Stuff like Triadspell and Mass Shield of Faith and persistent Recitation is a much bigger sword-based class buff than a caster buff; if the duration goes down then casters try to finagle things to make it so that they can get their combat music playing. While the overall power level of the game goes down (because you have one person at a +5 bonus to AC than three people at a +3 bonus) the imbalance increases.

MfA wrote:Custom magic item guidelines need a LOT more restrictions than that to simply hand them over to PCs as rules.

I know, butt they're unfortunately a big part of the rules. The best we can do is cut down on abuse.

If you really want to fix the custom magical item guidelines you need to completely change the bonuses so that costs don't go quadratic for a linear bonus AND balance the price of permanent vs. temporary effects better. Both of them require a complete mastery of the spell system above and beyond what's even expected of a hardcore expert who knows the level of every spell.

Juton wrote: Can fighters have nice things this time around?

Oh, hell yes. The biggest thing you can do to help fighters is to make party buffs last longer (or be cast quicker) and to make the magical item pricing system less insane.

Fixing fighter classes is actually really easy compared to all of the other tasks you have to do. Look at the huge wealth of tome material we have. It really just requires imagination and a cognizance of balance points. But even if you do THAT, there's still the problem that fighter-types get fucked over by the bonus system. A Tome Barbarian will still get his ass handed to him fighting Stone Giants.

Can we fucking drop alignment while we are at it? It doesn't really add anything, just causes problems.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:A Tome Barbarian will still get his ass handed to him fighting Stone Giants.

Well, I guess I can stop paying attention to you now that I know you are insane and don't understand anything.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Ironically, it powers up the fighter-types.

It is the retarded cousin of magic item christmas trees. Every downside to allowing tons of stacking/interacting magic items goes double for spells. The power and the way it affects balance isn't the issue, it's about playability.

Kaelik wrote:
Well, I guess I can stop paying attention to you now that I know you are insane and don't understand anything.

I can't tell you how happy I am to hear that Kaelik will pretend I don't exist anymore.

That's a huge load off of my mind.

A Tome barbarian looks something like this at level 8:
AC: base 10 (dex+armor+magic) 12 deflection 4 -2 rage = 24
DR: 6/-
HP: around 100

At optimal power attack, the giant deals 25 points of damage a round in melee, so will takes 4 rounds or so to kill the barbarian. I'm not going to consider rock throwing because the barbarian only gets hit every fourth round and can close pretty easily.

Barbarian attacks at
8 BAB 5 str 3 magic 2 morale = +18 vs an AC of 25 with 6d6+12 damage
The barbarian averages 40 damage a round. He kills the giant in about three.

This was assuming a human barbarian with only one feat (great fortitude). This was also assuming the giant made his save vs great blows every time (DC 19 or so vs +13 fort save, so 25% chance of failure in any given round). If we were to add on elusive target or large size the numbers go even more in the barbarian's favor. Or we could have him fight sword and board and it goes even more in his favor that way as well.

Point: Tome barbarians do not get squashed by stone giants.

Okay, so Stone Giants don't squash barbarians.

You know one thing I like about these boards, though? It's when someone tries to make an overall point and someone uses a bad example. The bad example gets refuted and that suddenly means that the overall point is bad.

The barbarian is nothing other than a big pile of bonuses, though, and unless you want to use tome material to rewrite 3.5E (which is not a bad idea, but it is what I was trying to avoid) you will need to provide similar bonuses to other characters.

Why did I reject the tome material upthread? It's pretty simple. The Tome solution requires A) a complete rewrite of all of the other classes/PrCs and B) DMs to realize that when they allow Complete Warrior or Scoundrel into the game that there are turkey options that rewriting the classes can't touch.

Don't get me wrong, the classes do need an overhaul even if the bonuses are normalized (because multiclassing, frontloading, and backloading are a bitch), but I think that it would still make the game more compatible and require less of a paradigm shift if the essential bonuses a character needs to compete is character-build agnostic. And unless you want to blam foreign sourcebooks that ain't gonna happen.

Lago, are you proposing a game more compatible with 3e than the Tomes, or less compatible? And are you proposing re-writing weak classes to a greater extent, or not at all?

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Okay, so Stone Giants don't squash barbarians.

You know one thing I like about these boards, though? It's when someone tries to make an overall point and someone uses a bad example. The bad example gets refuted and that suddenly means that the overall point is bad.

I wasn't under the impression that your statement of stone giants squashing barbarians was related to the rest of your point. I don't believe that I actually attacked your main point at all. All I did was point out that your statement was false.

The barbarian is nothing other than a big pile of bonuses, though, and unless you want to use tome material to rewrite 3.5E (which is not a bad idea, but it is what I was trying to avoid) you will need to provide similar bonuses to other characters.

Barbarian has the exact same flaws as rogue does except it has better defenses and requires less work. You'll be wanting to redesign rogue if pile of damage is not a valid contribution to encounters. Granted, with how little we see of people playing rogues in tome games, rogue obviously isn't an incredibly interesting class in the first place.

Edit: Rereading now, it seems I did actually refute your entire point. Book of Gears is the primary thing that makes a tome barbarian not get it's ass handed to it by stone giants. Having an AC that they don't want to power attack on makes all the difference. I guess this means you'll have to use something like book of gears to give people actual defenses. If you're using some sort of wealth by level, +X to AC is going to have to get much cheaper as well as +X weapons.

CG wrote: Lago, are you proposing a game more compatible with 3e than the Tomes, or less compatible? And are you proposing re-writing weak classes to a greater extent, or not at all?

The weak classes should be rewritten to take care of empty level issues. I mean, that is going to happen regardless since they need to be made viable for 20 levels which just ain't happening.

But the thing is, even if all twenty levels of fighters/barbarian/monk are competitive in any order, that's still not going to prevent people front PrCing into Dread Pirate or Consecrated Harrier or whatever the fuck. Instead of doing a heavy-handed 'only use tome material, sucka' thing, I would rather make bonuses through the feat and magical item system more prevalent.

So yeah, someone who takes twenty levels of fighter or whatever PrCs included in the book will probably be flat-out better than someone who gets material from WotC-produced sourcebooks, but I still think that it's possible to get someone who is a Ranger / Tempest / Holy Liberator able to take on level-appropriate challenges. I'm not so much concerned with making the classes/PrCs equal at this juncture since WotC produced so many fucking booby prizes as much as making them viable.

Since Book of Gears never came out in its entirety, it'll be up to the rewrite to make sure that by level 5 every fighter has a +2 sword, +2 armor, some resistance-bonus item, and some class-feature boosting geegaw.

Lago PARANOIA wrote: You know one thing I like about these boards, though? It's when someone tries to make an overall point and someone uses a bad example. The bad example gets refuted and that suddenly means that the overall point is bad.

http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=516

Lago, boosting warrior classes through item guidelines seems like a valid and worthwhile path to pursue, but I don't see how you could make playing a decent class balanced with playing a dread pirate without specifically changing the rules of the dread pirate.

And 3e PrCs like Knight of the Middle Circle were actually pretty neat.

Fuck stacking minor modifiers. Fuck it in the ear.

Stack nothing. Give individual larger bonuses that stick around longer. Bulls Str should be hr/lvl, add caster level to STR, and be Chainable with the relevant metamagic feat.

Time Stop and Wish need to become Epic spells, as do their non arcane psionic/divine/whatthehellever analogues.

Bull's strength shouldn't exist at all. It and all the other retarded stat boosting spells can go burn in RNG hell.

Something important to consider is whether people like all the little stat-mod accounting. At first everyone should think that accounting is bullshit but some players actually like it after a fashion, it gives the impression of progress. XP, levels, loot, actually useful magic items, skillpoints etcetera are all little indicators that your character is more awesome than a commoner and a depressingly large portion of gamers love to wank about how awesome their characters are. My group has actually changed game systems multiple times because advancement was to slow.

Redoing 3e is a friggin lot of work.

Every time I try to redo 3e, it always winds up such that it would barely be recognizable as 3e anymore, as there are so many things I want to change. =-(

My first 3.Erik wound up being a lot like True20.
Nowadays it is an even further departure.

• HP as Living Greyhawk (HD average +1)
  
  Death at HP = -(10+Level+Str/Might)
  
  Get rid of Charisma and Constitution
  
  4 Stats: Might, Agility, Logic, Willpower
  
  Stats either chosen from preset tiers (i.e. pregen "rolls" by tier or pointbuy)
  
  Stats equal your bonus. A 3 Logic is a +3 bonus. +1 Stat bump comes on even levels.
  
  Race essentially grants access to one of a few scaling Feats and a couple nominal abilities.
  
  Many Skills are discarded/combined, no such thing as class skills. Classes either get 3, 5, or 7 skills. Logic/Int mod does not boost amount of skills.
  
  Feats become totally re-written as scaling abilities on part with getting relevant spells for those levels. Feats come on odd levels.
  
  Every class is essentially totally scrapped and redone.
  Armsman, Druid, Monk, Paladin, Ranger, Rogue, Wizard (with school specializations)
  
  If someone wants to be a raging Barbarian, take a feat for Ranger.
  If someone wants to sing their spells as a Bard, take a feat for an Enchanter Wizard.
  If someone wants to be a Cleric, they are a Paladin.
  If someone wants to be a Paladin, they are a Paladin.
  If someone wants to be a Sorcerer, they are a Wizard with a Feat.
  
  Classes are only 10 levels long.
  
  No alignments.
  
  Prestige Class necessity I am not sold on. If deemed necessary, then only 5 levels long and entered at level 6.
  
  Everyone gets abilities that are comparable to spells.
  
  No dead levels (easy when classes are only 10 levels long).
  
  No multiclassing. Between having relevant scaling Feats in a 10-level set up, it really isn't necessary. Especially if Prestige Classes are brought into the mix.
  
  Spell casters have spells from levels 1-10. New spell level at every level.
  
  Always have some lower level spells that you never run out of castings.
  
  Monsters are redone whole hog Monsters are simplified greatly by their challenge type [Brute, Mix, Puzzle]. No bullshit with monster type HD/BAB. Ugh.
  
  Magic items not purchased with normal wealth. Use level-dependent "magic item mojo currency" to get stuff.

So yeah. I certainly have more modifications, but it's late and this is off the top of my head from recollections of past attempted projects.

I personally wouldn't even call it D&D any more.

MfA wrote:I personally wouldn't even call it D&D any more.

Then I presume you are unfamiliar with how different other editions of DnD have been. It still bears a pretty close resemblance to 3rd edition as compared with most any other RPG. I'd say it is probably closer to 3rd edition than 1st or 2nd ed is to 3rd.

Presume away.