Bookmarks didnt work on your 3X books? How odd.......
And no, remember one rule or remember one rule. Equally easy except that I dont have to stop to do a math equation every time. Just roll a D6.
Here are the pages I use in 4E: Page 42 (for the DCs, I don't use the damage table any more), page 126 (for the treasure tables - a lot of things in my game are based on a roll on the appropriate table), and page 56 (for the XP awards). Every so often I look up the beliefs of the gods, and sometimes the specific details about an environmental feature like Grab Grass (if it comes up on the random terrain features table I use).
Three to five bookmarks are easy to keep track of.
In the last game of 3E I ran, I had to get the books to check out the Sickened condition, the Actions table, the DCs for Tumble checks, the Diplomacy table, the Arms & Equipment Guide for the price of a mantlet (used the AD&D DMG instead), the rules for Craft, and the Coup de Grace rules. (I should probably have used the "catching on fire" rules as well.)
I am not saying that everyone must necessarily find 4E easier to adjudicate, just that I do. I think it's based on how I approach 4E vs. how I approach 3E.
Every single fire spell, item or effect can cause it unless specifically stated otherwise in its description. If someone was running 3X where fire couldnt make umm more fire... then the flaw was in the operator, not the rules.
Your shouldnt need a rule for common sense.
From the SRD:
Catching on Fire
Characters exposed to burning oil, bonfires, and noninstantaneous magic fires might find their clothes, hair, or equipment on fire. Spells with an instantaneous duration don’t normally set a character on fire, since the heat and flame from these come and go in a flash.
Most fire spells are, I think, instantaneous, though I haven't checked.
This does make sense to me, though. I think it's a good rule. In the last 3E game the PCs wanted to light some logs on fire and roll them down a set of stairs. I told them that even dry wooden logs won't just burst into flames if you touch them with the flame from a torch - so they bored some holes in the log and filled them with pitch and wrapped the log with cloth. That should burn.
Again a problem with the operator not the rules. If you were specifically looking in the rules for what you CAN do then you were doing it backwards. The rules existed to tell you most of what you COULDNT do.
It was not a design goal of earlier editions to strictly make a rule for every single thing you might do in a fantasy universe. Thats the DM's job to adjudicate based on what existing rules say.
Yeah, you're probably right about it being a problem with the operator.
This is why I have trouble with 3E. I look at the above rule about instantaneous fire spells and I don't see much room for the DM to make a judgement call. (Though it's there, in "don't
normally".) A lot of the other rules give me the same impression. I see the rules, in isolation and all together, adding up to telling you what you can and can't do.
I think that, for me, if I were going to use my judgement or common sense, the rules would need to be presented differently. Instead of having a table of actions in combat, you'd have a rule that said "If you can do it, you can do it. Now here's how you resolve different actions, and when you should apply the resolution mechanics..."
That may be how other people read 3E but it's not how I have in the past. (I am thinking of changing up my approach to 3E, as I did with the "Stunning Breastplate".)
Hmm I would still use AC because if you dont get a solid hit your probably not going to ring anyone's bell. But I see what your going for.
In 3X I would use non-lethal damage for the same thing. Mainly because I find it unpalatable that an improvised attack should be able to bypass a common defense to knock someone out when something like say a club or a mace cant. If you allow that you've suddenly made everyone's armor into a better weapon then their actual weapon is.
I see what you're saying. Yeah, I would allow this kind of attack - "clobber" the target - with any kind of appropriate weapon (mace, club, fist, whatever). It's possible and a 13-year-old kid can do it, so why not you? For some reason I feel like, as DM, I can just say "Sure, STR vs. Fort" by referencing what the PC is trying to do, whereas I
don' (not can't) do that in 3E.
Non-lethal damage would probably be a good idea, too.
Because there is no fort save in 3x for that attack. So most of your 3x equation doesnt exist. It would do normal, non-lethal damage for reasons addressed previously.
So yes "make a normal attack -4, hit, roll normal damage." IS more simple then then the 4e version.
Even if we used something like stunning attack where there was a fort save I find the added complexity to be a positive thing. A simple attack IMO should not be able to add a status condition; especially one as powerful as knocked out without the target having some ability to resist it.
I see - yeah, "improvised weapon attack" is easier than STR vs. Fort, because you don't have to make the call about which defence to target.
What the player wanted to do - and what made sense to me, in terms of the game world - was to knock the ghoul in the head to make him see stars. I was going to say "No, you can't do that" but I had done enough of that in the past and I didn't want the player to stop immersing himself in the game world - and by that I mean picturing himself there, and taking actions as if he were the character.
So I let it work. Without the Fort save, I probably should have added that in; wait, can ghouls get clobbered like that? Undead have some kind of resistance to Fort saves. I'd say yes, they can be clobbered. Oh well.
I can accept thats a simple matter of taste though and not a mechanical superiority or inferiority of the rule system though.
Yeah. I wonder why my approach to 4E is so different from my approach to 3E. I think I'm going to take that approach to my next 3E game and see how it works. We'll see how the group feels about it.
Anyway, thanks for the reply. You've forced me to think about how I run 3E. Do you have any advice for running 3E in a more... "fiction first" manner?
