Recent content by AllOlive

I've spent a lot of time thinking about how to fix the Monk class, including playtesting a "Martial Artist" from 3rd-8th level. I found even one special technique per level from the base class to be a lot; add in subclass features, racial features, feats, and there's a lot of opportunities to...

Why not (INT-10)*3? It rewards odd scores more fairly.

Under my proposal, the level-10 character (+5 stat, +4 prof bonus, +max[d8 expertise or d10 Bardic Inspiration]) would get an average bonus of +6.6. They'd have an 83% chance of beating DC20, 58% chance of beating DC25 under my way; with your way (adding bonuses), it's 92% and 74%, respectively...

In Steampunkette's scenario, LU would give up to +1d8+1d12, for an average bonus (after proficiency and ability) of 11. That's as much again as the bonus of a maxed-out level-20 character versus an unproficient character with a 10 in the ability. It's not as much as advantage+2d4+1d12, so that's...

So Bless, Guidance, Bardic Inspiration, and the like are all rolled into this same expertise dice system?

One problem with complex rulesets that offer various ways to get bonuses is that there's often a strong incentive to stack multiple bonuses up to potentially gamebreaking levels. Then, in order to keep things challenging, a Narrator would have to stack penalties to match — an arms race that...

Having thought about it more, I think that if you have multiple modifier dice (expertise, bardic inspiration, guidance/resistance, bless, etc.), the simplest thing to do that doesn't over-reward stacking them up is to take the largest roll. So if you had 1d4 guidance, 1d6 super-expertise, and...

(double post, deleted)

A few more (partial/incipient) vow ideas: Ritual Calendar/ Diviner: roll a random vow each day. For the calendar one, also roll a duration, and you can roll in advance so you know what's coming. Confessional: you cannot share information freely revealed to you unless explicitly told it's OK...

Just to be clear: I didn't reduce advantage/disadvantage to a step on this ladder, I just suggested that in addition to its normal effects, it should change the boundaries of the ladder. But yes, this is probably overcomplicated. On the other hand, the "guidance should be an actual bonus, not...

Critical successes and critical failures are fun if they happen occastionally, but can break the game if they happen too often. If one or the other happens a combined 10% of the time (20 or 1), that's actually quite a lot — and it completely ignores the relevant skill modifier. One reasonably...

What the above page sets up is a limited spectrum: +0, +d4, +d6, +d8. The fact that it's limited is good; if it weren't, it would break the whole idea of bounded accuracy. But let me try to suggest something a little bit less limited. This is just exploring what it would look like, more than it...

(whoops, I wrote this before I saw the page posted above. Deleted — looks good.)

Oh, well... sorry. Unless my idea "fixes" it enough to bring it back.

It's nice to have a more-granular form of advantage/disadvantage. But as a statistician, I think the "reroll if your first roll is too high/low" dynamic seems bad; the distribution has funny kinks in it, and it feels as if it "punishes/rewards" you for rolling too well/poorly the first time...