Scurvy_Platypus
Explorer
as wizards get to do more damage with their spells and eve the chance to wield duel wands for double attacks, the rogue is doing extra sneak attack damage and the druid gets to have an army of animal companions and followers, why should the fighter get stuck with just : I hit with my sword: Whack!
I is hard enough that the fighter is the meat shield for the party, being up on the front line in the mids of spells zinging around him, and gods only know what else. why shouldn't his expertise show some pazaz and get multi attacks as he has learned how to skillfully weave with his weapon through the defenses of his opponant?
Errr... I get the impression you feel the need to defend the Fighter's right to be cool or something. I'm not questioning that; I refuse to play casters in d20 and usually play fighters. I'm all about fighters not sucking and being redundant/useless/whatever negative you care to call it.
I think Scurvy's point was "why not just do more damage with the one attack as the solution".
Sorta. So, the casters do damage in part pased on their level. Rogues do a sort of scaled bonus damage as well. Fighters... oh, they have to make an additional roll.
And of course, because of the way it's set up, it's not that _Fighters_ get to attack multiple folks at once... no, it's tied to BaB which means anyone that can pump up their BaB gets to tap into iterative attacks. Rogues and casters have their bonus damage "protected" from poaching by forcing people to invest levels in specific ways.
So I have to wonder if maybe it's not just better to scrap the whole iterative attack thing altogether. It slows down the game, everyone is doing it, and the way things are now, it's got to be fixed in some fashion that not everyone can agree to, although Wulf's fix seems reasonable enough to me.
In other words, it seems to me like Iterative Attacks are just there because they've always been there; it's a sacred cow. I'm trying to figure out why it _shouldn't_ be killed.
Now, if iterative attacks became a class feature of the Fighter... that's something I can see.
And before someone says, "It doesn't really slow things down that much"... with one person? Probably not. But every person at the table has to do iterative attacks, and that's where things really start slowing down. Especially since not everyone has all the bonuses for everything pre-figured (Bard Song, Haste, other stuff) so that means that instead of having to add up all those bonuses for a single attack, they do it for 2 and 3 attacks.
Yeah, you can complain that people should be more "prepared" or whatever, but let's face it, the world isn't perfect.
Off the top of my head: it restricts you to attacking just one opponent.
And I think _that_ is a pretty good point. But I still find myself thinking, "So?" It seems like there's a general tendency to use a small number of opponents in the first place. By default, 3.x doesn't have rules for mooks for example and most GMs seem to abhor the idea of having a lot of smaller minions that characters can chew through and look cool while doing it. In other words, they're using bigger monsters.
Just like I shouldn't have to make a Balance check to walk down the street, I'm not sure I should really have to roll the d20 3 different times just to whack one creature for a whole bunch of damage.
Pathfinder's Cleave feat seems to handle the attacking multiple targets too, so.... yeah. I guess everyone but me understands why Iterative Attacks for everyone is such a great idea.
It also restricts your effectiveness for the entire combat round to the whims of a single d20 roll. As anyone who's rolled a d20 knows, they are utterly unpredictable in any single instance.
This is 3.x. There's all kinds of stuff that affects/restricts your effectiveness. Last game, I was given the lovely opportunity to fail a Will save (that had to be over 21) for my Fighter or flee in panic after dropping my weapon (Thanks "Rise of the Runelords"). The basic premise of 3.x seems to be that at low levels, you're at the whim of the d20 roll. At higher levels, it's all about stacking bonuses.
By the time you're at the point where Iterative Attacks seem to matter (I'm currently 9th level), the d20 roll is instead functioning more like a random bonus, and it's more about having a massive starting bonus in the first place.
Or maybe I'm just a complete idiot. But that's how it seems to me.
Sorry Wulf, I'm not trying to hijack your thread here. I _think_ it's topical to your poll, but if this is pulling discussion away from what you want to focus on, I'm happy to start a new thread.