RangerWickett
Legend
I posted an earlier thread, but this is a second go at the same idea, with a bit more clarification of my reasons, and how I see this being done.
What I want is to streamline the play experience of 3rd edition so that people have to keep track of fewer numbers. More importantly, I want to make sure that players and the GM do not have to recalculate stats in the middle of combat.
If you take a step back for a bit, you can see that all characters and monsters have internal numbers and external numbers. You use the internal numbers in various calculations to determine the external numbers, and players generally don’t like having to change the internal numbers, because then they require cascading changes to the external numbers.
For example, to determine AC, you’ve got Dexterity, armor, maybe shield, maybe feats, maybe size, maybe some other class abilities (monk Wisdom), and various magic items. But most of the time during the game, all you care about is what your final AC is.
Similarly, a monster’s attack bonus is modified by hit dice, creature type, possibly class levels, size, strength, feats, and occasionally gear, but all that the players usually care about is what the final attack bonus is.
In both instances, the components that make up your stats help you determine the specific flavor of a monster or character – is he nimble or encased in metal; is it a skilled warrior, or a brute with massive strength. This, I think, is actually a strength of 3e over 4e, which seems to white-wash a lot of that nuance.
Now in 3e combat, people have attack bonuses and they have ACs, and things are easy . . . until someone busts out with an entangle spell.
Entangle in 3e normally applies -2 to attacks and -4 to Dex. The -2 to attacks is easy to keep track of because it only applies to the external number of your attack bonus, but the -4 to Dex changes an internal number. Changing that one internal number results in a lot of secondary changes, and because entangle doesn’t explicitly state those changes, you have to do a bit of on-the-fly calculations. Your AC goes down (unless, say, you’ve got full plate and Dex 16), your Reflex save changes, your ranged attacks suffer (in addition to the other penalty to all attacks from being entangled), your skills change, and you might lose access to feats.
Of course, dealing with just this by itself isn’t such a big deal, but imagine a fight where you have a few PCs shaken, the bard entangled, the barbarian suffering from a ray of enfeeblement, the half-dragon cleric poisoned with Con-damage (did you remember to reduce your breath weapon DC?), and the wilder ego whipped (time to recalculate your power points, Jean Grey). Plus the bard drank a potion of cat’s grace and is singing, and the cleric cast mass shield of faith, but some of the PCs have rings of protection +2 while others have rings +1, and the wilder just got hit with a dispel magic that stripped off most of her buffs.
And that’s just the PCs. If the GM has to keep track of all these changes, plus juggle monster stats and try to handle enemy tactics, you’re in for a great slow-down.
So now that i’ve established the reasons I want to make these changes, what specifically do I suggest? I have three main points.
Bonus Types
I think we can seriously trim the rules and make gameplay simpler if we reduce the number of bonuses.
When you create your character, we can keep most of the same options. I personally would like to get rid of a lot of things (and I’ll detail how I’d do it later*), but I imagine the crowd that wants backward compatibility would raise a fuss. However, once you have built your character, those internal numbers should yield a set of external numbers that actual matter in gameplay. Then, in the course of an encounter, effects would only ever modify these external numbers, not the internal numbers. To make that doable, we need a straightforward system for taking all the myriad modifiers that existing spells and effects create, and converting them into a smaller set of modifiers.
My suggestion is that we limit ourselves to three bonuses that abilities can create during combat.
Circumstance bonuses result from favorable or unfavorable circumstances and tactics. If you know 4e’s combat advantage, I could see us doing something very similar to that.
Power bonuses are provided by magic, and they represent a direct increase (or decrease) to your prowess.
Morale bonuses represent you pulling out all the stops, or being frightened.
I’ll get into specifics in a bit, but let’s talk about what we don’t want to happen in combat: We do not want you to have to recalculate your internal numbers during combat. We don’t want to modify ability scores directly (like with ray of enfeeblement). We don’t want to strip away bonuses that you have factored into your character (like with dispel magic targeting a magic item). These effects should be revised so they affect the external numbers, or keep the same flavor without requiring rules head-ache.
Now, it’s okay if things that do this crop up as rare, special occurences – if someone puts a lot of effort into messing you up, it’s okay for you to have to modify one or two stats – but we need to reduce the number of things that require recalculation.
Thankfully, we can achieve the bulk of this by just altering the definitions of some key terms. If you look at the Pathfinder rules glossary, effects that did deal ability damage now translate directly into penalties to just the necessary external numbers. We can do the same with conditions like fatigued, exhausted, and entangled. I’d also like to see morale and fear effects moved to the same continuum, so that a bard’s inspiration is like the mirror image of what cause fear does.
Okay, so what do we want changing during combat?
It’s okay to modify:
Whenever an effect tries to modify one of these things during combat, it needs to fall into one of the three categories – circumstance, power, or morale. The spell greater magic weapon would give you a power bonus to your attack and damage rolls; the spell bull’s strength would also give you a power bonus to attack and damage rolls (plus a bonus to Strength checks, Strength skills, and lifting). You would only apply the greater of the two bonuses, though.
Likewise, you only benefit from the one best morale bonus, and the one best circumstance bonus. If you have multiple power penalties applied to you, you just use the greatest penalty. And if you have both a penalty and a bonus, you take the largest penalty and the largest bonus, and you let them balance each other. +2 bonus from greater magic weapon vs. -3 penalty from ray of enfeeblement results in a -1 penalty overall.
Because you can only benefit from 3 types of buffs at once, usually you won’t need to worry about people having more than a couple of spells on at once. You can still have both “bull’s strength” as a power bonus to attack and damage, and shield as a power bonus to AC, if you want.
Just as Pathfinder has revised a few of the core spells to make them easier to play with, they could also revise a few buff spells so that the core Pathfinder rules provide most of the necessary spells for your everyday adventurer.
I feel like I’m rambling a bit, and I recognize that implementing this would require a fair number of changes in the nooks and crannies of the rules, but I think something like this is absolutely necessary to streamline gameplay.
What I want is to streamline the play experience of 3rd edition so that people have to keep track of fewer numbers. More importantly, I want to make sure that players and the GM do not have to recalculate stats in the middle of combat.
If you take a step back for a bit, you can see that all characters and monsters have internal numbers and external numbers. You use the internal numbers in various calculations to determine the external numbers, and players generally don’t like having to change the internal numbers, because then they require cascading changes to the external numbers.
For example, to determine AC, you’ve got Dexterity, armor, maybe shield, maybe feats, maybe size, maybe some other class abilities (monk Wisdom), and various magic items. But most of the time during the game, all you care about is what your final AC is.
Similarly, a monster’s attack bonus is modified by hit dice, creature type, possibly class levels, size, strength, feats, and occasionally gear, but all that the players usually care about is what the final attack bonus is.
In both instances, the components that make up your stats help you determine the specific flavor of a monster or character – is he nimble or encased in metal; is it a skilled warrior, or a brute with massive strength. This, I think, is actually a strength of 3e over 4e, which seems to white-wash a lot of that nuance.
Now in 3e combat, people have attack bonuses and they have ACs, and things are easy . . . until someone busts out with an entangle spell.
Entangle in 3e normally applies -2 to attacks and -4 to Dex. The -2 to attacks is easy to keep track of because it only applies to the external number of your attack bonus, but the -4 to Dex changes an internal number. Changing that one internal number results in a lot of secondary changes, and because entangle doesn’t explicitly state those changes, you have to do a bit of on-the-fly calculations. Your AC goes down (unless, say, you’ve got full plate and Dex 16), your Reflex save changes, your ranged attacks suffer (in addition to the other penalty to all attacks from being entangled), your skills change, and you might lose access to feats.
Of course, dealing with just this by itself isn’t such a big deal, but imagine a fight where you have a few PCs shaken, the bard entangled, the barbarian suffering from a ray of enfeeblement, the half-dragon cleric poisoned with Con-damage (did you remember to reduce your breath weapon DC?), and the wilder ego whipped (time to recalculate your power points, Jean Grey). Plus the bard drank a potion of cat’s grace and is singing, and the cleric cast mass shield of faith, but some of the PCs have rings of protection +2 while others have rings +1, and the wilder just got hit with a dispel magic that stripped off most of her buffs.
And that’s just the PCs. If the GM has to keep track of all these changes, plus juggle monster stats and try to handle enemy tactics, you’re in for a great slow-down.
So now that i’ve established the reasons I want to make these changes, what specifically do I suggest? I have three main points.
- Revise temporary bonuses and penalties so they only apply to external stats, not internal stats
Pathfinder has already started to do this. If you look in the Alpha 3 rules glossary, you’ll see they’ve changed how to handle ability score penalties and damage. I very much approve of this change. - Reduce and mechanically rearrange the number of bonus types
There should just be three types of bonuses that affect your external stats during combat. This is the main bulk of the rest of the post. - Teach a clear revision philosophy
These rules are not 100% compatible with 3.5. I wholly acknowledge that, and I am glad of it, because I’m making them incompatible with the janky, difficult parts of 3e. There is a slight problem, however, that some old materials will care about these parts. It is important that gamers who want to continue to use their old material understand how easily they can ignore the whys and hows of the internal numbers as long as the external numbers stay the same.
Bonus Types
I think we can seriously trim the rules and make gameplay simpler if we reduce the number of bonuses.
When you create your character, we can keep most of the same options. I personally would like to get rid of a lot of things (and I’ll detail how I’d do it later*), but I imagine the crowd that wants backward compatibility would raise a fuss. However, once you have built your character, those internal numbers should yield a set of external numbers that actual matter in gameplay. Then, in the course of an encounter, effects would only ever modify these external numbers, not the internal numbers. To make that doable, we need a straightforward system for taking all the myriad modifiers that existing spells and effects create, and converting them into a smaller set of modifiers.
My suggestion is that we limit ourselves to three bonuses that abilities can create during combat.
Circumstance bonuses result from favorable or unfavorable circumstances and tactics. If you know 4e’s combat advantage, I could see us doing something very similar to that.
Power bonuses are provided by magic, and they represent a direct increase (or decrease) to your prowess.
Morale bonuses represent you pulling out all the stops, or being frightened.
I’ll get into specifics in a bit, but let’s talk about what we don’t want to happen in combat: We do not want you to have to recalculate your internal numbers during combat. We don’t want to modify ability scores directly (like with ray of enfeeblement). We don’t want to strip away bonuses that you have factored into your character (like with dispel magic targeting a magic item). These effects should be revised so they affect the external numbers, or keep the same flavor without requiring rules head-ache.
Now, it’s okay if things that do this crop up as rare, special occurences – if someone puts a lot of effort into messing you up, it’s okay for you to have to modify one or two stats – but we need to reduce the number of things that require recalculation.
Thankfully, we can achieve the bulk of this by just altering the definitions of some key terms. If you look at the Pathfinder rules glossary, effects that did deal ability damage now translate directly into penalties to just the necessary external numbers. We can do the same with conditions like fatigued, exhausted, and entangled. I’d also like to see morale and fear effects moved to the same continuum, so that a bard’s inspiration is like the mirror image of what cause fear does.
Okay, so what do we want changing during combat?
It’s okay to modify:
- Attack rolls.
- Damage rolls.
- AC.
- Saving throws.
- Speed.
- Skill checks.
Whenever an effect tries to modify one of these things during combat, it needs to fall into one of the three categories – circumstance, power, or morale. The spell greater magic weapon would give you a power bonus to your attack and damage rolls; the spell bull’s strength would also give you a power bonus to attack and damage rolls (plus a bonus to Strength checks, Strength skills, and lifting). You would only apply the greater of the two bonuses, though.
Likewise, you only benefit from the one best morale bonus, and the one best circumstance bonus. If you have multiple power penalties applied to you, you just use the greatest penalty. And if you have both a penalty and a bonus, you take the largest penalty and the largest bonus, and you let them balance each other. +2 bonus from greater magic weapon vs. -3 penalty from ray of enfeeblement results in a -1 penalty overall.
Because you can only benefit from 3 types of buffs at once, usually you won’t need to worry about people having more than a couple of spells on at once. You can still have both “bull’s strength” as a power bonus to attack and damage, and shield as a power bonus to AC, if you want.
Just as Pathfinder has revised a few of the core spells to make them easier to play with, they could also revise a few buff spells so that the core Pathfinder rules provide most of the necessary spells for your everyday adventurer.
I feel like I’m rambling a bit, and I recognize that implementing this would require a fair number of changes in the nooks and crannies of the rules, but I think something like this is absolutely necessary to streamline gameplay.
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