Approaching the Expertise Problem from another angle (or: I'm a monster, rawr!)

[NMcCoy]

I certainly won't claim that it's not heavy-handed, but here's a notion to consider: The "expertise problem" arises because PC attack bonuses and defenses advance at a different rate than the monsters'. So what happens if we make them the same?

* All "half your level" d20/defense modifiers become "your level". (Potential side effect: Skill check DCs out of whack, though meliorated somewhat by the next change)
* Ability scores do not increase. Ability score prerequisites for Paragon feats are decreased by 2, and for Epic feats are decreased by 4. (unaddressed side effect: this causes a -4 penalty to damage rolls by 30th level.)
* Magic items do not add enhancement bonuses to attack rolls or defenses. Masterwork armor does not exist.
*Weapon/Implement Expertise and the Epic Defense feats are removed.

Aside from substantially decreasing the value of magic items (to zero, for vanilla defensive items), this seems quite workable. This also addresses the "Low-hanging NAD" problem due to uneven ability score advancement. I'd like to hear people's thoughts on how this would affect the game.

[Crossposted to RPGnet]

 

[RangerWickett]

It would help the math for hitting, I think, but might muck with the math of damaging. But I think if you're already making this change, it's easy enough to also throw in "+2 damage to all attacks at paragon, +4 at epic."

One upside is that now you can hand out magic items and have them stick around, so a hero isn't swapping out his legendary weapon every few levels. On the downside, you've got magic items sticking around, which could create a glut over several levels since there's no longer motivation to toss aside old gear.

You could, however, just let it slide. I mean, sure, you've got plenty of power if your character has a flaming sword and a lightning sword and an icy sword, etc., but in this system you cannot feasibly sell these items to get a "better sword," just a "different sword." I mean, in modern games, once you already have a machine gun, getting three different machine guns doesn't really make you much stronger.

All in all, I like the change. I'll ask my fellow DMs to see what they think.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Like the last poster said, what it basically does is puts you back into essentially the situation that existed in 1e and 2e (and I guess 3e as well) where any enhancment bonus or feat bonus, etc is a static increase in hit rate against ALL opponents all the time. So a +2 sword is just as valuable to an Epic character as to a Heroic one, etc.

I think the other problem is that ALL the math for hitting on both sides would need to be reworked. If monster to-hit changes then character AC has to change. That means the existing bonuses for types of armors and class feature based AC stuff will probably have to change, etc. I suspect a lot of work would end up needing to be done, at which point you can't use premade modules or CB etc anymore without making manual changes to a bunch of numbers.

There are some fairly minor math issues with 4e at certain points, but none of them make it unplayable by any means. In a perfect world things might be all scaling perfectly and the 4e designers in hindsight might do a bit of it differently. The thing is it WORKS. Compared to all previous editions of D&D it is 4000x better. The remaining flaws are just too small to worry about and if they cause a specific problem, just patch it with an item or feat or something, it isn't worth going to more trouble than that IMHO.

Anyway, I think it would take a lot of work to get it all tweaked doing what you say. Good idea from a game design perspective. Probably not practical for most of us at this point.

 

[RangerWickett]

Like the last poster said, what it basically does is puts you back into essentially the situation that existed in 1e and 2e (and I guess 3e as well) where any enhancment bonus or feat bonus, etc is a static increase in hit rate against ALL opponents all the time. So a +2 sword is just as valuable to an Epic character as to a Heroic one, etc.

I think the other problem is that ALL the math for hitting on both sides would need to be reworked. If monster to-hit changes then character AC has to change. That means the existing bonuses for types of armors and class feature based AC stuff will probably have to change, etc. I suspect a lot of work would end up needing to be done, at which point you can't use premade modules or CB etc anymore without making manual changes to a bunch of numbers.

There are some fairly minor math issues with 4e at certain points, but none of them make it unplayable by any means. In a perfect world things might be all scaling perfectly and the 4e designers in hindsight might do a bit of it differently. The thing is it WORKS. Compared to all previous editions of D&D it is 4000x better. The remaining flaws are just too small to worry about and if they cause a specific problem, just patch it with an item or feat or something, it isn't worth going to more trouble than that IMHO.

Anyway, I think it would take a lot of work to get it all tweaked doing what you say. Good idea from a game design perspective. Probably not practical for most of us at this point.

I think you're misinterpreting what he's doing. Basically, instead of requiring the additional book-keeping of handing out magic items, giving stat boosts, and having feycraft armor and similar weird special armor types provide higher bonuses to AC, he's just saying, "Add your level instead of half your level to attack rolls, AC, and defenses."

He's basically putting PCs on the same scale as monsters, and making the math simpler.

Consider, right now a 20th level fighter probably has an attack bonus of +26. 10 of that is from level, 7 is from ability score (he started with a 20 and added a total of 5 points as he leveled up), 4 is from magic item, 3 is from the weapon's proficiency bonus, and 2 is from the new Expertise feat.

With this change, now a 20th level fighter has an attack bonus of +28. 20 of that is from level, 5 is ability score (he started with 20, and still has a 20), and 3 is from proficiency bonus. Magic weapons will no longer grant a +x bonus to attack or damage rolls, and I imagine he'd ditch the Expertise feat.

You end up dealing slightly less damage per hit, but you would have a slightly higher attack bonus. And trust me, the game is more fun when you hit.

 

[keterys]

I think this topic came up at one point not terribly long ago, but I think just for weapons not for neck and armor. Or, actually, one was for weapons, but another was the whole package and drop +s entirely.

Also, one of the ideas floated around was that you could make +weapons give double the + to damage, if you wanted to make them more special.

Hmm, it'd have to keep +s of some kind for me to really think of it as D&D, so it'd be nice to have a middle ground of sorts.

 

[MadLordOfMilk]

* Ability scores do not increase. Ability score prerequisites for Paragon feats are decreased by 2, and for Epic feats are decreased by 4. (unaddressed side effect: this causes a -4 penalty to damage rolls by 30th level.)

You forgot another side effect: a lot of powers and class features key off of ability score mods. That kind of kills this.

 

[NMcCoy]

You forgot another side effect: a lot of powers and class features key off of ability score mods. That kind of kills this.

Perhaps an additional tweak akin to Tactician's Armor - when a power or class feature calls upon an ability score to determine a value other than attack bonus, increase that value by 2 at Paragon tier and by 4 at Epic tier.