Wulf Ratbane
Adventurer
I actually had a longer reply typed for you yesterday, but the BSOD ate it.
They don't need to be kept-- except in the sense that rejiggering all the monster ACs and hit points for a rule system with 10 years of supplements would certainly be the "hard way" as opposed to what I finally settled on.
But they should be kept because they improve the play experience. The game feels "sweetest" when combat is a series of infrequent failures, combined with successes of varying degrees, all contributing to the slow but inevitable ablation of resources.
As opposed to a boolean system where each roll is either hit and kill, or miss and suck; where each roll is either save and nothing happens, or you fail and die.
Victory should come like the dawn, not like a light switch.
You want a system that can be swingy without breaking: A system that will support a run-of-the-mill hit for 10 points of damage and a power attack critical for 50+ points of damage.
There are other reasons-- economy of actions, meaningful tactical choices, etc. Iterative attacks are part of a design package I'd call, "More fun."
When iterative attacks were slowing down the game, more fun was being suppressed. It was less fun because nobody wants to sit and wait on the player to roll multiple times and recalculate each hit or miss on the fly. Designate ONE target number you're looking for on the dice, and throw the batch.
My change was made to speed up play, not to remove some specified number of attacks and reduce it to a smaller "correct" number of attacks. Why did I choose two attacks? Because I found that to be the right number of attacks at the attack penalty that produces results the most similar to the damage output I wanted to see.
Funny, in the light of a new morning they look the same to me, too. I think I was rattled by the BSOD when I came back to post a reply. Substitute some other way of getting an additional attack.
