Without quoting the article wholesale, let's address the points made:
Traditionally, yes, being able to fight with a weapon meant that your chance to hit with weapons got better faster than other classes, but you could also get more attacks per round, damage bonuses and more feats to spend on weapon-related activities. Now, flattened math is the claim that attack bonuses won't work as a measure of martial power and yet
we already see different attack bonuses progressing at different rates in the playtest classes.
I have no qualms with the new metric of increased level meaning increased HP and increased damage, with all the other numbers staying about level. We don't have all the numbers staying level, but let's ignore that for now. The bold claim is that expertise dice exist as a way to measure your martial combat skill, because your damage goes up. It might look like they exist just so that you can use maneuvers, but apparently that's not the reason they have opted for a clumsy dice progression over a simple smooth increased damage output. Did they honestly come up with the dice as a way to increase damage first, and then adapted them for use in maneuvers? Looking at the previous playtest iterations and the dice progression, I
sincerely doubt it.
Then we have the confession that since they're using it for every class that might make melee attacks reasonably often, the Fighter needs something for himself. Parry? Woah there, hold your horses, aren't we making the class a little bit
too exciting there? If that is there current idea to make the Fighter interesting, heck, if using expertise dice as a measure of martial prowess is something they're sticking with I am sorely disappointed.
Then there's the matter of complexity, and tracking between turns. I think the suggestion made is basically giving the Fighter expertise dice every time they make an attack (well, on your turn and on your reaction but I am making it even simpler). Why just the Fighter on this point? To me, the complexity comes with deciding how to spend multiple dice, not really the tracking, though that is a pain.
Finally we go back to the classic troll that feats can be used to buy combat abilities. What they have managed to do, for the Nth edition in a row, is set out to design something to make physical combat as dynamic and powerful as spellcasting, and have then thrown it into a system that every class uses. To-hit bonuses, thaco, feats and now expertise dice, all available to every class. Spellcasting, well, you can have a level zero spell, does that make you happy?
So to summarize:
- Expertise dice represent your growing skill through a bonus to damage, therefore all maneuvers will be strictly comparative with dealing damage, if not just dealing damage in different ways.
- Characters advance in weapon skill through a damage bonus, rather than an attack bonus, except that we're giving them increased attack bonuses too.
- Maneuvers are limited to certain classes, unless we put a module in for anyone to use them, or include feats to let anyone use them, or just make maneuvers that we want all classes to have.
- Some specific maneuvers are accessible by feats, so er, ignore the last point.
- We can use expertise dice as the currency for some optional rules modules, such as powers and tactical combat, so again, ignore that thing about uniqueness.
