D&D 4E 4E - What Rules Need Fixing?

Now that we all know that 4E is going to happen in the near future, what changes do you hope they make to the 4E rules (compared to the 3.x rules)? What rules need fixing the most?

Personally I think that the grappling, turning and the counterspelling rules are 3 areas that are in prime need of a revision. I'm sure I'll think of more as I go.

Olaf the Stout

Note to mods: I have started a similar thread to this in General. I figured that the 2 threads would have different tones, based on my experiences in reading and posting on the 2 boards. If you feel that it should still only be 1 thread feel free to delete/merge them.

Items marked with a * are already solved by a simple, backwards-compatible Star Wars Saga Edition port, although they could be further improved.

Prep time in general.
Chase rules.
Counterspelling.
Grappling.
Character flexibility both in multiclassing and within a class.*
The time it takes to resolve multi-target attacks.*
Skills, especially on the GM side.*
Save and defense/AC consolidation.*
Damage scaling with level.
The over-importance of magic items.
The fragility and incompetence of beginning characters.*
The spellcasting system and per day mechanics in general.
Balance between casters and non-casters.*
Simplified combat rules.*
A more unified, less exceptions-based system.

Ive always had a serious problem with armor making you harder to hit. There are rules I believe in unearthed Arcana where armor can be used as damage reduction. Now picture this two men are on the battle field. One is wearing full plate armor and the other is wearing ninja robes. Now if these two men were the exact same stat wise and base attack etc, do you really think the guy in plate mail would have a better chance at hitting guy in the ninja robes? The answer is no but the armor might absorb some or all of the damage. Really there are two problems I see with armor. It slowes you down which realalistically makes you easier to hit. Infact the guy in armor would probably get hit first. It might not get past his armor but he would still get hit. So lets say both of these characters are extremely strong. With magic items they have a +8 str bonus. Said ninja man is useing a heavy flail. Not a ninja weapon but not the point either. He misses by two because of the armor. To me that means he hit the armor and should do heavy flail damage plus str mod plus any extra damage from feats. Hitting the armor hard enough might be enough to still cause some damage. Armor and natural armor would work much better to me as damage reduction. Also there should be different types of damage reduction for different armor types. Chain mail is good against slashing not real good against piering but does not help at all against bludgeoning. So damage reduction 6 against slashing/ 3 against piering and bludgeoning bypasses it. Those numbers might not be good, it was just a example.

Also I think that spot and listen should be class skills for all classes.

The Shadow Lich said:

Ive always had a serious problem with armor making you harder to hit. *snip*

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D&D is not a simulation game.

Ive been sniped. I know it is not a simulation game but I would still like to see some things make sense. Up is up and down is down right? Well at least on the prime material plane.

Nothing *needs* changing, but I imagine you'll see a big push to SIMPLIFY SIMPLIFY SIMPLIFY.

That would of course open the door for supplements to EXPAND EXPAND EXPAND.

I'll stick to 3.5, thanks.

The Shadow Lich said:

Ive always had a serious problem with armor making you harder to hit.

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Armor makes you harder to hit hurt.

Does that make you feel any better?

Level Adjustment and monster PC issues .

Two different issues, but are inter-related. It's the one thing in D&D that just hasn't worked well at all.

Thanks felix for simplifying that. I would like 3.5 to stick around longer even with all the things I dislike about it. I mean I just dont want to think of my hundereds and hundereds of dollars in books obsolete.

I think the biggest points that should be cleaned up is the sort of things we see in this forum all the time:

Mirror Image (spacing, reach, threatened area et cetera).

Unarmed Attacks vs. Manufactured Weapons vs. Natural Attack Sequences vs. Monk Attacks (Improved Natural Attack, kung-foo bear et et cetera).

Stealth in general (it's a huge mess with blindsight, tremmorsense, blindsense, scent and the like making investments in the area questionable as you need to consider what the DM will let you get away with).

Shapechanging. Duh.

I really want death and dying to be more of a large DMG sidebar with dozens of options on how to handle it and how raise dead and similar affect the campaign world. It's the default assumption that by far has the most fallout...

Conditions really need to be simplified. http://www.d20srd.org/indexes/conditions.htm has 40 listed! I like something more robust than the Saga condition track, but 40?!?

The Shadow Lich said:

Up is up and down is down right?

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Up and down are entirely relative terms. Depending on my orientation in space relative to yours, my 'Up' can very well be your 'Down' and vice versa