The Shadow Lich said:
Ive always had a serious problem with armor making you harder to hit. There are rules I believe in unearthed Arcana where armor can be used as damage reduction. Now picture this two men are on the battle field. One is wearing full plate armor and the other is wearing ninja robes. Now if these two men were the exact same stat wise and base attack etc, do you really think the guy in plate mail would have a better chance at hitting guy in the ninja robes? The answer is no but the armor might absorb some or all of the damage. Really there are two problems I see with armor. It slowes you down which realalistically makes you easier to hit. Infact the guy in armor would probably get hit first. It might not get past his armor but he would still get hit.
This is already handled by the rules. Heavier armor makes you harder to DAMAGE, but much easier to TOUCH -- as represented by the effect that armor's bonus has on your AC (which determines how difficult it is to damage you) and the effect that armor's Dex penalty has on your touch AC (which determines how difficult it is to touch you).
Could it be more realistic? Yes. But only by adding a layer of complexity to the game which, frankly, doesn't render enough utility to justify the extra hassle in gameplay.
For example, adding a relatively simple mechanic in which the effectiveness of armor in preventing damage is rated as DR means that you now have to subtract a number from damage dealt every single time someone hits. Plus, you've increased the number of attacks that hit -- which means that you've got more attacks that need to have damage rolled for them. Let's be conservative and estimate that this means the average time it takes to resolve an attack increases by only 10 seconds.
That might seem like a small number, but it adds up. After just 6 attacks, you've extended the length of combat by a full minute. By 5th level I'm regularly running combats with 8 or more participants (including the PCs). That can easily translate into 6 attacks every round. Which means that you've added a full minute of gameplay to every single round of combat. At high levels that same combat can involve 12-18 attacks every round.
And you're proposing an even more complex system, in which the type of attack must be compared to the type of the armor. Is all this extra time you're spending resolving these marginally more realistic attacks really making the game more fun for you?
sirwmholder said:
Just as a personal preference... I'd like it if Level = HD = CR... if a Creature is powerful enough to warrant a CR 5 then it should have the racial HD of 5... likewise level adjustment should just go away. It should be balanced with any other 5 HD creature including PCs.
Racial HD are sloppy. Equating CR to HD limits the flexibility of creature design to a degree I think unwarranted.
What they should do is make each TYPE of monster into a class. These classes should be balanced against the PC classes. (In other words, 8 levels of Aberration should be equivalent to 8 levels of Fighter or Wizard or Rogue.)
This gives you a basic foundation on which to build your creature. Once you've got that basic foundation, however, you can add other special abilities. These special abilities don't create a LEVEL adjustment, however. They create a WEALTH adjustment.
So when you want to play a PC version of a monster you've got:
(1) A level associated with the creature's type-class (and these levels are balanced with equivalent PC levels).
(2) A wealth adjustment based on the value of the creature's special abilities (including size, HD, powerful ability scores, bonus feats, etc.).
Basically, you just think of the creature's extra special abilities (above and beyond their racial abilities as a member of a particular creature type) as intrinsic magic items. You price them the same way as magic items and you count them against the wealth-by-level guidelines when determining how much power the group has.
Delta said:
I think that AOOs need to go from the core rules (keep them as a variant, if you like). My players cried out for that when I last asked them what version of D&D they'd like to play next.
AoOS really split into two categories:
(1) Movement-based AoOs; and
(2) Action-based AoOS.
Movement-based AoOs are extremely easy to use, necessary for eliminating many of the oddities created by turn-based combat, and shouldn't be eliminated.
Action-based AoOs, however, are more difficult to use because they lead to long lists of allowed and disallowed actions which must be memorized. I think a strong case can be made that these should either be eliminated or the list of actions which provoke AoOs reduced to no more than a handful. For example, you could limit the list to just spellcasting and touch attacks.
(It's also notable that eliminating action-based AoOs entirely greatly simplifies the grappling rules right out of the starting gate.)
KarinsDad said:
The only thing a masterwork item does is let the PCs KNOW that a given item is magical or not.
That's a definite YMMV thing. I have lots of masterwork items in my campaigns that aren't magical.
Maybe an Appraise skill to notice that something is masterwork, but that goes in the opposite direction of simplification to more rolls.
That already IS the way the rules work.
Justin Alexander
http://www.thealexandrian.net
