Reaper Steve said:
Did I help my argument at all? Probably not... like I said, I was trying to avoid a lengthy post--I don't debate well via threads.
Ok. I'll put down my two by four and try to be gentle.
First, I do not conclude that starting BAB is going to become +3. It might. Maybe fighter BAB is now 2 + level/2 (rounded up). However, that's purely speculative and doesn't deal with the issue at hand, which is, what is the effect of normalizing the system so that it doesn't use negative numbers.
Well, first, it doesn't really change you odds of hitting anything.
Suppose its 1st level 16 STR fighter vs. 16 DEX house cat. In 3.X, the cat has an AC of 15, and the fighter (without considering any other factors) has an attack bonus of +4. He needs an 11 or better to hit.
Renormalizing he modifiers, the cat has an AC of 18 and the fighter has an attack bonus of +7. He needs an 11 or better to hit.
But we have changed something. We've diminished the value of anything that we didn't re-normalize. In this case, that includes things like hit points and the damage dice.
Lets say your house cat used to do on average 1 damage per attack (1d2-2). Our fighter used to do 1d8+3 (average 7.5) and now does 1d8+6 (average 10.5). But the new house cat now does 1d2+1 (average 2.5). The fighter's average damage only went up by about 50%, but the cat's damage more than doubled. The cat is a relatively better deal with his hitpoint bonus from CON as well (because the cat's base HD is lower than the fighter's his CON bonus is a bigger percentage of his hit points). If the fighter's hit points didn't also more than double when we made this change, he's become relatively weaker against the cat. If previously said fighter was a match for 6 house cats, he's now probably only a match for 3 or 4. Granted, we could increase the cat's hit points by 50% and the fighters by 250% and then we'd get back to where we started. But then, we'd do all of this
just to get back to where we started.
The same sort of thing can be seen when we examine a dagger fighter versus a longsword fighter. The damage bonus increased which made the damage dice relatively less importance. Daggers have become relatively more powerful compared to longswords.
And a different problem crops up when we scale anything based on the renormalized values. Anything that scales gets relatively more valuable. We've actually made two-handed weapons relatively more powerful compared to one-handed weapons as well, because 50% or 100% of 'more' is a bigger number. The difference between +3 and 150% of +3 (+5 or an incremental difference of 2) is smaller than +6 and 150% of +6 (+9, or a incremental diference of 3). In this case, it comes out as a wash due to the diminished value of larger damage die, but you can see that it makes going to two-hands more appealing faster.
(okay i'll stop being saracastic and sod off to bed)
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