Hi all, I'll start off by letting everyone know I'm new here. Please forgive me for any stupidity that ensues as a result. I was referred here by a fellow gamer, who suggested that this was a great place to get some feedback.
I first started played D&D 1st edition when I was only 11 years old. I skipped AD&D because I didn't even realise it was available; I just happened to find a players handbook and a module for D&D in my parent's basement one day. I realised early on the problems with basic D&D, and, not realising anything else was available, my friends and I basically homebrewed everything, retaining only the basic gameplay and themes of D&D. Later on, after I left high school in fact, I met another group of serious D&D 3.5 players who turned me on to all the latest sourcebooks. I played a few campaigns with them, and learned the rules pretty well. But I noticed the same flaws in the D&D system that everyone else has, and I'd been homebrewing for so long that I couldn't help but think I could design a better system. So, for the last year, I've been doing that. I don't claim that this system is any more 'fun' on an absolute scale, all I claim is that it's been more fun for me and my gaming group. I can see the appeal of D&D very well, and I'm certainly aware of its strengths as well as its weaknesses. What I have done is design a new system with different strengths, and I was hoping that some of you, particularly the insane power gamers, could provide some feedback on this system, and perhaps show me if and where it can be broken. I'm hoping that nobody prints it off and publishes it under their own name though!
I'll make a brief introduction to my system, and if there's a lot of interest, I'll risk getting ripped off and take the chance of posting it. Right now it's 135 pages though, and it's basically pure content because the wording hasn't been dumbed down or idiot-proofed yet. It's not ready to be published--in its present state it's really suitable only for experienced, mature gamers who can make judgement calls and use their common sense on some of the things that haven't been spelled out completely in black and white. There is also a great deal more left up to DM discretion than you'd see in a D&D book, because, essentially, that's how I feel it ought to be. If I'm the DM and I want such and such to be so and so, that's exactly what it's going to be, regardless of what it says in some book.
Weaknesses of D&D (as percieved by me and my gaming group)
1) At low levels the dice are king. Almost anything is possible with a lucky roll, and with an unlucky roll, almost anything is impossible. As has been pointed out in other threads, frogs can occasionally out-wrestle polar bears under d20 rules. On the other side of the coin, at high levels the D20 system breaks down. A mere 20 points of difference is pretty insignificant when stacked up against bonuses of 30, 50, 80 or more points. There's just no scaling.
2) Character creation, rolling of stat points, etc, is a really stressful affair. Low rolls leaves you with a ho-hum person for a character, certainly not a hero. Whoever happens to roll best in the gaming group is going to have the best character, leaving the other players a little emasculated. On the other hand, point buy is a rather dry affair.
3) I don't like the base stats: str, dex, con, int, wis, cha. They aren't balanced for one; cha sucks, you know it, I know it, everyone knows it, cha is almost always the lowest stat score. They aren't intuitive for another; why is Str used for melee 'to hit' rolls? To me, Dex makes a lot more sense as your chance to hit something. Why distinguish between wis and int? And why assign a player a wis and int score at all for that matter? Didn't Forrest Gump teach us that 'stupid is as stupid does'? What if you have a real life idiot playing a character with high int and wis? There are good answers to all these questions of course; balance and etc. But the answers are not as elegant as I'd like; basically they're still trying to squeeze the round peg into the square hole, because D&D first edition created those stats, and changing things too much is anathema. As a side point, I have similar problems with D&D's skill system.
4) Physical combat is exceedingly dry, especially at low levels. All it is, basically, is rolling to hit and then rolling damage. There is very little strategy, especially at low level when you have no options, and also especially in 1v1 combat. One monster vs one hero in physical combat is just taking turns trying to hit and damage each other. There are a couple of feats designed to give players some kind of options, Power Attack for example, but a lot more could be done.
5) Magic is just insane. There are so many different spells and they have such a huge variety of effects and consequences as to make designing a campaign at high level almost impossible without being intimately familiar with the party. High level combat is replete with disintegrating rays, power word kill, and other insta-kill spells without number. Why crawl through a dungeon when you can scry, dimension-door, teleport, fly, etc, whatever? Why even play when you can simply 'Wish' or 'Miracle'? Of course the DM is supposed to think of ways around these powers, or limit them, but then players feel cheated; they figured their 20th level mage could exert ultimate influence over the cosmos (which they can, basically) but then you tell them, what, there's an anti-magic field around the enemy or something? No, magic is broken in D&D. It's impossible to manage and balance, it leaves the fighters looking like tools, standing around watching while the mages and clerics decide the fate of the universe, and even if it were to be balanced somehow, the spell descriptions alone strain the suspension of disbelief. Ok, so suppose your fighter lives through the 20th level fireball the size of a small mountain. The question is begged; how? Moreover, spells are probably over 50% of the material that has to be 'learned'. The spell section of any sourcebook is enormous. Every magic using class has dozens of spells available at a given level. It's unwieldly, unbalanced, and mostly inelegant.
6) Other smaller problems: A 12th level fighter could easily wade into an army of thousands of first level fighters and slay them all. At what point does 'cool' become 'ridiculous'. Ranged weapons, bows, etc, are not a viable primary choice. Sure it's nice to have a bow or something, and it could come in handy in certain situations, but a character designed around ranged combat is pretty underpowered compared to most anything else. Some of the rules there are ridiculous; like if you have your bow out and see a monster at the end of a 60 foot hallway, so long as the monster wins the initiative, he can sprint and hit you before you get a shot off (!?!?!!? WHAT?).
Solutions:
1) A scaled system is used for ability checks, attack rolls, etc. Low level characters begin with 3d6, and add a d6 as they gain levels. What this results in is scaled randomness. Because of the bell curve, unbelievable results, like toads beating polar bears, is basically impossible (especially in light of other rules). However, the scaled dice means that luck still retains some significance even at high levels.
2) Character's based stats are rolled 2d6 + 6. The bonus derived from stats is 1/3rd the score. So a score of 12-14 is +4, 15-17 is +5, 18-20 +6, and so on. Players also get 4-6 (d3+3) bonus points to add on where they like. But, I give players only one chance to roll stats (unless they somehow roll something really ridiculously absymal). The effects here are many fold. First off, even if one player rolls well compared to the others, his actual bonuses are unlikely to be significantly higher. Consider these two sets of scores: 12, 15, 15, 18, 12 and 14, 17, 17, 20, 14. Both scores have the same net bonus: +4, +5, +5, +6, +4, even though the second set adds up to 10 points higher. Also, you'll notice the bonuses are all higher at the lower scores. A 12 isn't +1, it's +4. And an 18 isn't +4, it's +6. There's 2 things happening here: 1, the difference between a 12 and an 18 is small, only 33%. In D&D the difference is 400%. 2, in general, bonuses are higher relative to the roll. In D&D if you're a normal low level character doing a str check, you're rolling d20 + ~(0-4). In this system, an average str check at low levels is 3d6 + ~(4-7). A great deal of the effect of randomness is removed. Yet at high levels, by adding additional dice, the effect of luck is preserved rather than becoming insignificant.
3) My base stats are Strength, Agility, Perception, Vitality, and Will. There's no charisma, wisdom, or intelligence, because to me those are role-playing stats. Your character's intelligence, wisdom, or charisma are up to how you play him, simple as that. Those 5 stats are all extremely well balanced (if I do say so myself! Watch as I toot my own horn =[ ), and in my game of experienced players all trying to power game, each one of them chose a different priority. These skills also account for all saves (a reflex save is agility, a will save is will, a fort save is vit, etc) and for some skills. For example, I much prefer a base 'Perception' check to 'spot', 'listen', and 'search' checks. How does someone get better at seeing something anyways?
Also the skill/class system seemed kind of inelegant to me. So suppose you're a fighter but you also want to have a lot of 'skills'. So you can multi-class into a rogue. The problem in practice is that this is highly complex and there are ways you can figure out to tweak it so that you maximise your character's power. Power gamers have complex 'builds' to create super characters that far outstrip a normal character at the same level. In my game, the skill system has been highly simplified while at the same time allowing for far greater customisation of characters and retaining all of the flavor and fluff of D&D. In short, you can do anything with this system that you can do in D&D, but you can do it more easily and it's harder to 'break'.
4) As someone who has trained and competed seriously in mixed martial arts, I have a much better idea than 99% of the world how real fights actually go down. This knowledge is directly reflected in my combat rules, which feature a great deal more depth and strategy than standard D&D taking turns hitting each other rules. I have over 100 feats devoted solely to physical combat. This system also has consequences for more detailed weapon and armour design, and the whole physical combat system is in general a great deal more fun. So much fun in fact that whole campaigns can be designed around single 1v1 physical combat (a gladiator tourney for example) and the fights are still extremely fun and varied. Different weapon choices and feat tree selections lead to a great deal of variety. Naturally this is kind of hard to balance, so I fear that balance is currently probably the greatest weakness of my game (power gamers can help me here a great deal!)
5) I conduct my campaign basically as a low to no magic campaign. Some magic is essential of course, after all, it's still fantasy; and nobody really wants to rest for 6 months while they recover from their broken leg. But magic is greatly greatly reduced. All my classes are first and foremost combat classes (Paladin, Ranger, Berserkir, Gladiator, Swordmaster, and Assassin). However, they all have some 'magic-like' abilities, either directly related to phsyical combat (but no auto-death abilities!) or healing. Other stuff, particularly scrying or transportation type magic is just too hard to balance and control. As the DM, I am the sole arbiter of what and when my players find things out, and where they can go and at what time and how quickly. All magic-like stuff is basically handled as a feat. There are no gigantic spell lists to memorise, and it's not like in D&D, where if a fighter gains a level maybe he can choose a single feat from a small selection of feats, but when the magic user gains a level he can choose a ton of new spells from a gigantic list. The great Sid Meier once said that a great game consists of a series of interesting choices. Based on that criteria, it's pretty easy to see that not only are magic using classes more powerful, they are also more inherently 'fun' than fighter classes.
6) Because of the way I redesigned the rule system from the ground up, silly things like these basically disappear. Although a 12th level fighter can annihilate a first level fighter, or even a few of them, if he pisses off a group of peasants (like 10 or more) he's probably going down (There are two ways the peasants can win in my system; A, a character gets accumulating penalties to defense every time he's attacked in the same round. He can block the first couple attacks every time with ease, but by the time he's getting hit 5+ times in a round, his defence is penalised by 20 points and soon doesn't matter any more; just as it would be in real life. Even worse for the fighter, if the peasants decide to just jump on him, they can combine all their strength scores for a grapple check. Then 4 or 5 of them can hold him down while the others finish him off. Basically, if the figther can't eliminate enough enemies on his first attack that there aren't more than 3 or 4 left, he's pretty screwed). And this is totally realistic. Do you think Hulk Hogan in his prime could take on 6 ordinary yet determined men with baseball bats at the same time? Even if he had a baseball bat of his own? Of course not. This eliminates the problem of having a party of high level characters being able to overthrow a kingdom by challenging it's entire army on the open field and winning with ease.
Another example is the ranged combat example. In my system, initiatives are sometimes not even rolled because whose turn it is first rarely matters. The first attack always goes to the guy with the longer reach. If you're a character with a bow and you spot an orc at the end of the hallway, you always get to fire an arrow before he gets to you. If you have a great sword and the other guy has a battle axe, you have first swing whether it's his 'turn' or yours.
Well that's a basic introduction to the rules. As I say, it's NOT D&D, so if nobody is interested in something that's NOT D&D, I won't bother posting it, but if you're looking for something that's a lot more intuitive and balanced than D&D, but that has just as much if not more overall depth to the combat system, I might have just what you're looking for. If nothing else, there's sure to be some interesting ideas you can use.
I first started played D&D 1st edition when I was only 11 years old. I skipped AD&D because I didn't even realise it was available; I just happened to find a players handbook and a module for D&D in my parent's basement one day. I realised early on the problems with basic D&D, and, not realising anything else was available, my friends and I basically homebrewed everything, retaining only the basic gameplay and themes of D&D. Later on, after I left high school in fact, I met another group of serious D&D 3.5 players who turned me on to all the latest sourcebooks. I played a few campaigns with them, and learned the rules pretty well. But I noticed the same flaws in the D&D system that everyone else has, and I'd been homebrewing for so long that I couldn't help but think I could design a better system. So, for the last year, I've been doing that. I don't claim that this system is any more 'fun' on an absolute scale, all I claim is that it's been more fun for me and my gaming group. I can see the appeal of D&D very well, and I'm certainly aware of its strengths as well as its weaknesses. What I have done is design a new system with different strengths, and I was hoping that some of you, particularly the insane power gamers, could provide some feedback on this system, and perhaps show me if and where it can be broken. I'm hoping that nobody prints it off and publishes it under their own name though!
I'll make a brief introduction to my system, and if there's a lot of interest, I'll risk getting ripped off and take the chance of posting it. Right now it's 135 pages though, and it's basically pure content because the wording hasn't been dumbed down or idiot-proofed yet. It's not ready to be published--in its present state it's really suitable only for experienced, mature gamers who can make judgement calls and use their common sense on some of the things that haven't been spelled out completely in black and white. There is also a great deal more left up to DM discretion than you'd see in a D&D book, because, essentially, that's how I feel it ought to be. If I'm the DM and I want such and such to be so and so, that's exactly what it's going to be, regardless of what it says in some book.
Weaknesses of D&D (as percieved by me and my gaming group)
1) At low levels the dice are king. Almost anything is possible with a lucky roll, and with an unlucky roll, almost anything is impossible. As has been pointed out in other threads, frogs can occasionally out-wrestle polar bears under d20 rules. On the other side of the coin, at high levels the D20 system breaks down. A mere 20 points of difference is pretty insignificant when stacked up against bonuses of 30, 50, 80 or more points. There's just no scaling.
2) Character creation, rolling of stat points, etc, is a really stressful affair. Low rolls leaves you with a ho-hum person for a character, certainly not a hero. Whoever happens to roll best in the gaming group is going to have the best character, leaving the other players a little emasculated. On the other hand, point buy is a rather dry affair.
3) I don't like the base stats: str, dex, con, int, wis, cha. They aren't balanced for one; cha sucks, you know it, I know it, everyone knows it, cha is almost always the lowest stat score. They aren't intuitive for another; why is Str used for melee 'to hit' rolls? To me, Dex makes a lot more sense as your chance to hit something. Why distinguish between wis and int? And why assign a player a wis and int score at all for that matter? Didn't Forrest Gump teach us that 'stupid is as stupid does'? What if you have a real life idiot playing a character with high int and wis? There are good answers to all these questions of course; balance and etc. But the answers are not as elegant as I'd like; basically they're still trying to squeeze the round peg into the square hole, because D&D first edition created those stats, and changing things too much is anathema. As a side point, I have similar problems with D&D's skill system.
4) Physical combat is exceedingly dry, especially at low levels. All it is, basically, is rolling to hit and then rolling damage. There is very little strategy, especially at low level when you have no options, and also especially in 1v1 combat. One monster vs one hero in physical combat is just taking turns trying to hit and damage each other. There are a couple of feats designed to give players some kind of options, Power Attack for example, but a lot more could be done.
5) Magic is just insane. There are so many different spells and they have such a huge variety of effects and consequences as to make designing a campaign at high level almost impossible without being intimately familiar with the party. High level combat is replete with disintegrating rays, power word kill, and other insta-kill spells without number. Why crawl through a dungeon when you can scry, dimension-door, teleport, fly, etc, whatever? Why even play when you can simply 'Wish' or 'Miracle'? Of course the DM is supposed to think of ways around these powers, or limit them, but then players feel cheated; they figured their 20th level mage could exert ultimate influence over the cosmos (which they can, basically) but then you tell them, what, there's an anti-magic field around the enemy or something? No, magic is broken in D&D. It's impossible to manage and balance, it leaves the fighters looking like tools, standing around watching while the mages and clerics decide the fate of the universe, and even if it were to be balanced somehow, the spell descriptions alone strain the suspension of disbelief. Ok, so suppose your fighter lives through the 20th level fireball the size of a small mountain. The question is begged; how? Moreover, spells are probably over 50% of the material that has to be 'learned'. The spell section of any sourcebook is enormous. Every magic using class has dozens of spells available at a given level. It's unwieldly, unbalanced, and mostly inelegant.
6) Other smaller problems: A 12th level fighter could easily wade into an army of thousands of first level fighters and slay them all. At what point does 'cool' become 'ridiculous'. Ranged weapons, bows, etc, are not a viable primary choice. Sure it's nice to have a bow or something, and it could come in handy in certain situations, but a character designed around ranged combat is pretty underpowered compared to most anything else. Some of the rules there are ridiculous; like if you have your bow out and see a monster at the end of a 60 foot hallway, so long as the monster wins the initiative, he can sprint and hit you before you get a shot off (!?!?!!? WHAT?).
Solutions:
1) A scaled system is used for ability checks, attack rolls, etc. Low level characters begin with 3d6, and add a d6 as they gain levels. What this results in is scaled randomness. Because of the bell curve, unbelievable results, like toads beating polar bears, is basically impossible (especially in light of other rules). However, the scaled dice means that luck still retains some significance even at high levels.
2) Character's based stats are rolled 2d6 + 6. The bonus derived from stats is 1/3rd the score. So a score of 12-14 is +4, 15-17 is +5, 18-20 +6, and so on. Players also get 4-6 (d3+3) bonus points to add on where they like. But, I give players only one chance to roll stats (unless they somehow roll something really ridiculously absymal). The effects here are many fold. First off, even if one player rolls well compared to the others, his actual bonuses are unlikely to be significantly higher. Consider these two sets of scores: 12, 15, 15, 18, 12 and 14, 17, 17, 20, 14. Both scores have the same net bonus: +4, +5, +5, +6, +4, even though the second set adds up to 10 points higher. Also, you'll notice the bonuses are all higher at the lower scores. A 12 isn't +1, it's +4. And an 18 isn't +4, it's +6. There's 2 things happening here: 1, the difference between a 12 and an 18 is small, only 33%. In D&D the difference is 400%. 2, in general, bonuses are higher relative to the roll. In D&D if you're a normal low level character doing a str check, you're rolling d20 + ~(0-4). In this system, an average str check at low levels is 3d6 + ~(4-7). A great deal of the effect of randomness is removed. Yet at high levels, by adding additional dice, the effect of luck is preserved rather than becoming insignificant.
3) My base stats are Strength, Agility, Perception, Vitality, and Will. There's no charisma, wisdom, or intelligence, because to me those are role-playing stats. Your character's intelligence, wisdom, or charisma are up to how you play him, simple as that. Those 5 stats are all extremely well balanced (if I do say so myself! Watch as I toot my own horn =[ ), and in my game of experienced players all trying to power game, each one of them chose a different priority. These skills also account for all saves (a reflex save is agility, a will save is will, a fort save is vit, etc) and for some skills. For example, I much prefer a base 'Perception' check to 'spot', 'listen', and 'search' checks. How does someone get better at seeing something anyways?
Also the skill/class system seemed kind of inelegant to me. So suppose you're a fighter but you also want to have a lot of 'skills'. So you can multi-class into a rogue. The problem in practice is that this is highly complex and there are ways you can figure out to tweak it so that you maximise your character's power. Power gamers have complex 'builds' to create super characters that far outstrip a normal character at the same level. In my game, the skill system has been highly simplified while at the same time allowing for far greater customisation of characters and retaining all of the flavor and fluff of D&D. In short, you can do anything with this system that you can do in D&D, but you can do it more easily and it's harder to 'break'.
4) As someone who has trained and competed seriously in mixed martial arts, I have a much better idea than 99% of the world how real fights actually go down. This knowledge is directly reflected in my combat rules, which feature a great deal more depth and strategy than standard D&D taking turns hitting each other rules. I have over 100 feats devoted solely to physical combat. This system also has consequences for more detailed weapon and armour design, and the whole physical combat system is in general a great deal more fun. So much fun in fact that whole campaigns can be designed around single 1v1 physical combat (a gladiator tourney for example) and the fights are still extremely fun and varied. Different weapon choices and feat tree selections lead to a great deal of variety. Naturally this is kind of hard to balance, so I fear that balance is currently probably the greatest weakness of my game (power gamers can help me here a great deal!)
5) I conduct my campaign basically as a low to no magic campaign. Some magic is essential of course, after all, it's still fantasy; and nobody really wants to rest for 6 months while they recover from their broken leg. But magic is greatly greatly reduced. All my classes are first and foremost combat classes (Paladin, Ranger, Berserkir, Gladiator, Swordmaster, and Assassin). However, they all have some 'magic-like' abilities, either directly related to phsyical combat (but no auto-death abilities!) or healing. Other stuff, particularly scrying or transportation type magic is just too hard to balance and control. As the DM, I am the sole arbiter of what and when my players find things out, and where they can go and at what time and how quickly. All magic-like stuff is basically handled as a feat. There are no gigantic spell lists to memorise, and it's not like in D&D, where if a fighter gains a level maybe he can choose a single feat from a small selection of feats, but when the magic user gains a level he can choose a ton of new spells from a gigantic list. The great Sid Meier once said that a great game consists of a series of interesting choices. Based on that criteria, it's pretty easy to see that not only are magic using classes more powerful, they are also more inherently 'fun' than fighter classes.
6) Because of the way I redesigned the rule system from the ground up, silly things like these basically disappear. Although a 12th level fighter can annihilate a first level fighter, or even a few of them, if he pisses off a group of peasants (like 10 or more) he's probably going down (There are two ways the peasants can win in my system; A, a character gets accumulating penalties to defense every time he's attacked in the same round. He can block the first couple attacks every time with ease, but by the time he's getting hit 5+ times in a round, his defence is penalised by 20 points and soon doesn't matter any more; just as it would be in real life. Even worse for the fighter, if the peasants decide to just jump on him, they can combine all their strength scores for a grapple check. Then 4 or 5 of them can hold him down while the others finish him off. Basically, if the figther can't eliminate enough enemies on his first attack that there aren't more than 3 or 4 left, he's pretty screwed). And this is totally realistic. Do you think Hulk Hogan in his prime could take on 6 ordinary yet determined men with baseball bats at the same time? Even if he had a baseball bat of his own? Of course not. This eliminates the problem of having a party of high level characters being able to overthrow a kingdom by challenging it's entire army on the open field and winning with ease.
Another example is the ranged combat example. In my system, initiatives are sometimes not even rolled because whose turn it is first rarely matters. The first attack always goes to the guy with the longer reach. If you're a character with a bow and you spot an orc at the end of the hallway, you always get to fire an arrow before he gets to you. If you have a great sword and the other guy has a battle axe, you have first swing whether it's his 'turn' or yours.
Well that's a basic introduction to the rules. As I say, it's NOT D&D, so if nobody is interested in something that's NOT D&D, I won't bother posting it, but if you're looking for something that's a lot more intuitive and balanced than D&D, but that has just as much if not more overall depth to the combat system, I might have just what you're looking for. If nothing else, there's sure to be some interesting ideas you can use.
