Exactly.
It's meant for cases where a targer has a particularly tough armor and you just have to nail a strike.
-1 here for +1 there - that's practically meaningless.
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D&D 3E/3.5 My 3.5 House Rules Codex – Final
- Thread starter nonsi256
- Start date
It's meant for cases where a targer has a particularly tough armor and you just have to nail a strike.
Michael Silverbane
Adventurer
Maybe you should reword that as "a full round action" or possibly even "a Full action". I think it is the attack part that makes it confusing, since "Full Attack" has a specific meaning.
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At least that's my experience, but who knows, YMMV.
it doesn't make any real difference
Those rare times where that single extra HP brought Mr. BBEG down are nullified by those rare times wher that single absent +1 to hit was so vital to bring Mr. BBEG (who was left with ~3HP) down.
At least that's my experience, but who knows, YMMV.
Nonsi I find it a little daunting to use all of your house rules and I am thinking of introducing them little by little. Which of them do you suggest on including at first? I am thinking of using your classes, magic system and feats/spells* fixes, but I am interested in hearing your opinion. *+ maybe shield another, defensive casting, dice rolling optimization, skill modifiers by size, skill synergies and fractional bab and saves. EDIT: I have a connection problem and for some inexplicable reason I can't use paragraphs
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If you find a certain rule cumbersome or don’t find any contribution by another (I’d like your feedback on which and why), don’t use them.
For the others: I say use them all with an open laptop – and if finding something takes more than 15 seconds, just view page source and hit Ctrl + F (heck, classes, magic system and feats/spells already constitute well over 50%).
It’s like getting into freezing waters on a steaming hot summer day. A step at a time can be really annoying, but if you jump right in it stings for a few seconds and then you really enjoy yourself.
Sooner rather than later you’ll be finding yourself actually looking for the rules you’ve left out.
And don't forget that practice makes perfect. Pretty soon your time spent going back to the document will grow shorter and shorter. The "main bulk" would probably be on level progression, but it's hardly something you'll be spared when using only official material (and using my rule, my guess is you'd be saving all that time spent on char-op attempts).
And don't forget that practice makes perfect. Pretty soon your time spent going back to the document will grow shorter and shorter. The "main bulk" would probably be on level progression, but it's hardly something you'll be spared when using only official material (and using my rule, my guess is you'd be saving all that time spent on char-op attempts).
You're probably saying to yourself "Sure, those are his rules. He worked hard to write them down and he'll defend each and every one of them".
Well, I certainly wouldn’t deny that I believe in the contribution of each and every one of them, but it’s not just that.
These rules were designed to work harmoniously together.
They’re meant to create equilibrium between the classes, to expand options and to make things make more sense. They were all born out of my 20 years of gaming experience and I went to great lengths to write them down in a manner that won’t make the gameflow more cumbersome (and it’s not like you can skip the PHB when grapple RAW).
If anything, I’d say that given people want to use the official stuff as much as possible, maybe they’d find it psychologically hard to make the transition to my extra ability scores (and it’s the only set of rules that requires a certain compromise without rewriting all the monsters – which I explained why in my view it’s not necessary), but then, creating a character that’s superbly perceptive all over the board would carry a heavy toll of MAD (I wanted once to play the group’s sentinel and spy and found it very difficult to accomplish). Try to make a clumsy overweight sharpshooter and you’ll find the task to be next to impossible.
Pass up the rules for Non-Classed Character Races or my HP rules and you hit your PCs starting HP hard (and it takes absolutely nothing off your game time, because it’s just part of character creation).
According to the RAW, in the beginning your life constantly dangles by a thread (this occasionally could and does take the wind of players in new campaigns that have to re-roll for new characters too often). OTOH, with level progression (8th level plus) Evocation spells suck mammoth because they can’t keep up the pace (which forces you to mix spells, feats, vestiges, essentia and other weird cocktails to ameliorate that problem – which would not be ameliorated if you’re not an expert optimizer).
The skills section: options. Lots and lots of more options that are simply not covered by RAW. This is basically just filling the black holes left by the designers. This section’s impact on the core skills ends in the tiny spoiler of Modified Skills.
The weapon groups are also not crucial, but they further assist in customizing your character, save precious feats waste and add more combat options to most weapons. With my proposed weapons rules the player is the one that chooses his character’s combat strengths and weaknesses. And again – this “burden” is of no consequences once character creation is complete.
Bull-Rush, Charging, Coup-de-Grace, Feint, Grapple, Multiple Attacks & Movement, Overrun, Play Dead, Pulling Punches, Shield Another – these issues all contain options that just don’t exist in the RAW. When you players reach a situation where they’d want to do these things, your options would be to either improvise or take a peek in the rules I figured after a lot of thought.
Actions, Delay-in-Turn, Force-Effects, Gaze Attacks, Immunities, Magical Plusses & DR, Multiple Attacks & Movement, Out-of-turn Dodge – these save a lot of time being wasted twiddling your thumbs during combat (same goes for several skill-related topics).
AC, Damage Multipliers, Pounce – preventing dice rolling from taking over your game and numeric values from shooting towards the Pegasus galaxy.
Fractional BAB & Saves, LA Buyoffs – mitigating frustration factors.
INT Increment – saving time.
Retraining – neutralizing the “you touch you buy” syndrome.
Turn Undead – same issue as with HP, only reversed (starts too drastic and ends with a whimper).
I could go on for a long time, but I guess this will do.
And again, if you a certain rule to be cumbersome or don’t find any contribution in another, I’d like your feedback on which and why (maybe I did miss something or maybe I might be able to show you that you missed something).
Edit: regarding paragraphs.
If you edit your message in MSWord, after you copy-paste, you get an extra "white" character in the empty lines (would appear to be a normal Space character, but it's not) that messes up the display.
Remove that extra character (del/backspace) and you're golden.
Edit: regarding paragraphs.
If you edit your message in MSWord, after you copy-paste, you get an extra "white" character in the empty lines (would appear to be a normal Space character, but it's not) that messes up the display.
Remove that extra character (del/backspace) and you're golden.
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I don't have a real problem using your houserules its just they are hard to sell to my players. So I thought a houserules lite version would be easier to sell.
I think the main rules that cause me to pause are the attributes (by the way charisma mentions it should add to a save but It doesn't), the no con mod to hp and the max monster hp rules. Some others just don't seem that necessary to me (like criticals).
But basically there just too much to swallow all at once, so I am going to feed them to my players piece by piece. I fear that even I who have read them much more than my players have, will have a hard time remebering them all during my first game.
On another note as I said before the spells need much more thorough balancing than a "cast as a full round action" fix.
I think the main rules that cause me to pause are the attributes (by the way charisma mentions it should add to a save but It doesn't), the no con mod to hp and the max monster hp rules. Some others just don't seem that necessary to me (like criticals).
But basically there just too much to swallow all at once, so I am going to feed them to my players piece by piece. I fear that even I who have read them much more than my players have, will have a hard time remebering them all during my first game.
On another note as I said before the spells need much more thorough balancing than a "cast as a full round action" fix.
I always said this section was the hardest to swallow.
HR rule #1 says that HR are meant to make the game more fun. Any rule that stands in the way of having fun should be discarded.
If adding the suggested attributes becomes a time waster - just skip it.
Yes, this is somewhat an oddball.
Every once in a while I see a monster with special abilities that require saves with unorthodox ability modifiers. Its reasonable for CHA, which represents one's strength of personality and gracefulness to be used for Ref or Will saves in certain situations.
A 1st level Half-Orc Warrior could start with 10 (racial) + 6 (class) + 20 (CON-score) = 36 HP (Half-Giant can gain +2 more and even beyond that with paragon levels).
Add Toughness (1 HP per HD + level) and you don't lag behind - at least not in the first half of you pre-epic level progression.
Crits are a classic case of both Makes-sense and of reduction in dice rolls.
1. By RAW, a 1st level Fighter with Imp. Crit has double the chance of scoring a threat over a 20th level Fighter with Weapon Supremacy.
2. You skip the confirmation roll. This also makes crits more intimidating (but OTOH, you're now much harder to kill when you reach ZERO HP or less) and makes high-level warriors' physical attacks a lot more meaningful without aiming for base damage scores by the hundreds.
Neither do I - All I need is to know where to look, and if I forget... that's what Ctrl+F (on the page source) is for.
But again, going back to HR rule #1, you should take things at your convenient pace.
Again, you're welcome to present any suggestion you find contributive.
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