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ShortQuests -- individual adventure modules! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed to plug in to your game.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Spatzimaus" data-source="post: 3104203" data-attributes="member: 3051">It's a fair point, although I'd say that there's a substantial melee-vs-caster balance issue involved.  One of the big advantages of a weapon-user is the over-time consistency of his damage, and if a caster can just shoot fireballs ad nauseum, it diminishes the noncasters a bit.  The current system gives 3 or 4 good encounters before you run out of heavy spells; substantially increasing this means that the caster effectively never runs out of firepower.Now, maybe you're okay with that, or maybe you can add something else to those other classes.  But I just don't think it can be ignored.There's a difference between "striving for simplicity" and "limiting because of simplicity".  For instance, one of the complaints against the UA-style fractional BAB/Save system is that a Ftr 6/Rog 5 can't just look up the two separate class levels and add their numbers together.  And yet, the result IMO is a much more balanced and robust system, with fewer rules abuses and less metagaming.  Yes, it's more complex, but this is one case where the simplicity of the original system leads to weaknesses.In general, I feel that complexity works fine as long as it's done out-of-game.  That is, complex decisions/mathematics can (and should) be made during the level-up process, but shouldn't be forced on a player during the game.  In-game, if it can't be easily looked up on a single table or done in the player's head, it's too much.If I wanted "realism", I wouldn't be playing a game involving Elves and fireballs.It's about balance, more than anything else; as a card-carrying Friar in the Church of Munchkin, I can say that an overly-simplistic system leaves a lot of loopholes for spectacular rules abuses.  Yes, if you've got a good group of players they won't go around looking for these specifically, but you can run across them occasionally no matter how good your intentions are.Take the 1-level multiclassing issue.  I had a player who hadn't played much at all, and so didn't know the issue, but his character concept was a mix of Ranger, Rogue, and Fighter (I think the term was "nature-oriented Bard, but a little more combat-oriented").  You can pretty much guess what happened.  But, I HATE the idea of forcing a character to change his concept simply because the game system won't let him implement it fairly.  (In this case, we just tweaked the Horizon Walker into a more roguelike "Stalker" PrC to fit his concept.)  You especially see this in the fighter/mage types; they've had to make a bunch of questionably-balanced PrCs just to make it viable, because the RAW fail in that regard.You know, in the last three campaigns I've played, I don't think we've ever actually gone through a "dungeon", and I don't mean that in the pure dictionary sense; I mean that our adventures rarely involved fighting our way through a single extended location, and when they did it was more of a "one big fight" setup.  City-based campaigns tend to do that to you.  As a result, we rarely had any time where we could claim to have "finished" an adventure.  And within each adventure there were rarely times where the players could hole up and be absolutely sure nothing would happen to them for 8 hours, to where they could feel safe blowing off their heavy artillery in the final fight of the day.  They ended up building a stronghold simply so that they could have a place for safe downtime (and then, of course, I had an adventure involving that stronghold...)And more importantly, there's a conceptual question: SHOULD the DM dynamically adjust the number or intensity of encounters such that the players will always have enough resources?  Or should the players adapt to the DM's setup, accepting the consequences when their mistakes cause them to lose?Yes, it is.  And yet, what happens when the player fails at this?  As I said before, if the Wizard blows all his huge nukes on the first fight of the day, what does the DM do?Does he continue with the encounters as planned, knowing that the single player's mistake could likely lead to a TPK?Does he reduce the later encounters, making the adventure easier for the group, which only leads to the same thing happening the next week?Either way, the stupid mistake of one player has had a large impact on the experience of the group as a whole.  You can't just write it off as a learning experience.</blockquote>

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