It is more common to grant a raise to three ability scores at the 4/8 levels (instead of the default two) in the house rules I've seen, including my own. I don't think yours will unbalance things necessarily, but it does reduce the specialness of hitting 11 and 21 a little, and reduces the characters' weaknesses, which may or may not matter in your game. Which stats to boost is also a tough choice for people when leveling up, and often determines the direction they want to take that character. I prefer to leave at at "boost 3 stats at the 4/8 levels".
Yeah, I thought about that too. However, boosting 3 stats won't solve the problem of builds that have two aligned primary/secondary stats - and these aren't uncommon: wand-wizards, Str-Con fighters, Cha-Wis paladins, prescient Bards, etc.
When it comes to weaknesses - raising all the stats doesn't remove a PC's weaknesses - it just avoids making them ever more acute. Beyond defenses, in particular skills and initiative diverge as levels rise, which is bad for balance (we get the 3e effect of having 1 or 2 characters auto-succeed at a check and the others hopelessly fail). Since the game still rewards high primary stats, there's no question that these weaknesses will be noticable - it's just that with this update, skill training might actually be able to mitigate that somewhat.
I'm pretty sure that diverging stat bonuses as levels rise are a bad idea - and if you're going to fix it a little (and expose yourself to the risk that there's an unbalancing combo somewhere) you might as well go whole hog.
No one in my current game does much with temporary HP, but I thought they were like any encounter power type effect - by default it wears off in 5 minutes. I could be mistaken, but it certainly makes sense to run it that way.
Yeah, Unfortunately, they last until the next short rest. Since I neither want people running around with masses of thp at the start of each combat nor wish to force short rests (if a char doesn't want to rest, that his business), I don't think these things should that long.
I didn't think you could stand up from prone in a square occupied by an ally, but I must admit I haven't read the rules recently, and I am too lazy to go find it right now. I'll look it up a bit later.
Currently, if you stand up from prone while an ally stand on you, you get a free shift - which doesn't particularly make sense to me.
I'm not sure reducing the monsters HP by 1/level is really enough to make a difference. I think the majority of people who reduce monster HP do so by some percentage. 3/4 hp is pretty common[...]
Monsters gain 6-10 hp per level, so this represents a 10-17% reduction (less at low levels) Relatively, brutes get the best deal, which is fine by me. I chose to not use a % reduction both because I actually kind of like slightly exagerating the differences between monsters, and because it's easy to calculate. Effectively, it's very similar to a percentage reduction but hopefully easier to calculate.
However, you may be right that a larger reduction is warranted, a 2 points per level reduction is probably just as good (and twice that for elites, and 4 times that for solo's). I'm leery of dropping 20-25% of the hit points simply because I like keeping my rules super-simple and their computations doable at a glance.
Currently at the high levels of the game, your weakest NAD is going to be *really* weak without adjustment. I don't think they start off as being all that weak, so I don't see the need for the initial starting +1. Boosting 3 stats lets you keep having bonuses to all three NADs if you place them that way. If you want to boost Wisdom and Charisma but not Strength or Con, well, you'll have a low Fort. That's your choice.
Monster attack bonuses vs. NAD's are about 1.5 points lower than those vs. AC. (in the MM) I accept that NAD attack might be a little nastier than AC attacks, but certainly player NAD's should be no more than 3 worse than AC
on average.
Right now a paladin's NAD's start more than 5 points lower than AC
on average. For a more generic character, assume a total of +8 to NADs from stats, +2 from class, and +1 from a light shield, divided over three NADs: that's an average NAD of 13.7. A typical AC would be hide+light shield+4, say, for 18 - or more than 4 lower. Frankly, I think a +1 bonus to nads at first level is on the low end of reasonable, but to avoid changing balance too much, I thought I'd stay conservative. The problem's a little worse than it seems too; although many characters will pick up a few extra AC boosters (a defensive weapon, a better shield, a staff of defense, etc.) those kind of small boosts are harder to get for NADs.
As for skill bonuses, they don't diverge at high levels all that much due to the half level bonus. Sure, the people boosting the relevant stat will pull away from those who aren't, but that makes some sense, doesn't it?
Not really - if people boost all stats, the divergence will be less. I don't have a problem with PC's being good in a skill, but right now, it's easy to reach the point where some PC's will always manage a certain skill check and others never. Skills diverge just as badly as NAD's do, and in practice, they tend to diverge more due to the huge effect of skill training. People often play to their strengths, so even at first level, it's not common to have a difference of +10 or more at a given skill within the party. Once you add a few racial bonuses, magic items, tools, armor penalties and whatnot, even without ability modifiers diverging, that's quite likely to get dangerously close to +20: that's not good in my book.
It will never approach the crazy divergences possible in 3E. I don't see the need to raise all the abilities at every level you get a stat boost. It feels like too much, and that it will flatten out the differences between characters - or rather not allow those who boost stats to stand out from their buddies who didn't.
I can see how raising all stats seems like a lot at first sight. It does, doesn't it? But really, the extra stats you're raising are the weakest, least interesting stats. Skills won't flatten out; they're already extremely different at level 1, and as people collect items + powers that play to their strengths, they'll still diverge - but now they'll diverge because of a real investment, not because of a non-choice (I mean, who's going to invest one of their two stat boosts in a non-primary stat?).
Another reason to raise all the stats is to prevent players from being, well, stupid. I've seen players several times choose to "round off" an uneven stat to a round stat or simply to pick some non-primary/secondary stat because they haven't thought it through. It takes quite a bit of effort to explain that if they're doing that, they're effectively playing at less than 22 point buy (it's cheaper to allocate non-primary/secondary stats at character creation), so that it's almost certainly unwise. These are the players that simply create a PC because it sounds fun, and I don't want to punish them because they didn't preplan their entire PC across 30 levels.
Because monsters are considered one level lower than usual, I expect PC's with these rules will actually be pretty much the same strength (relative to the monsters) as usual. Monsters gain a level but lose HP (effectively gaining +1 att/defenses and a bit cooler powers+damage), whereas pc's gain several feats over the course of their career (expertise +epic defense stuff) and roughly +1 to NADs.
