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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TwinBahamut" data-source="post: 3770310" data-attributes="member: 32536">The "accident of math" is the reason 3E is even playable.Before now, it seems that the game designers never sat down and calculated things like a characters chance to hit normal foes as they progress from level 1 to level 20. Things like full, 3/4, and half BAB progression were implemented because they seemed to work, and because they worked well when laid out on a table, not because of number-crunching that determined they were the best way to balance classes. Similarly, Acs were given out that seemed appropriate, but, were not calculated into an overal scheme of gameplay. The mathematical playability of the game was never thoroughly appraised by the designers until 4E.As such, the entire fact that there even is a sweet spot where the game mathematically makes sense is an "accident of math".The goal of 4E is to rebuild the math from the core, such that the "sweet spot" is not accidental, but is instead intentional, and covers the scope of the whole game.To shift to a metaphor, compare two imaginary houses.House 3E was not built by an architect, and the layout was instead planned solely by amateurs. The structural supports of the building were the same across the whole structure, but the weight load in some areas was much greater than in others, so parts of the building collapsed, but others did not. The fact that anything stood at all was an accident.To replace the collapsed House 3E, an architect will be hired to design House 4E, so that all the structural supports are sufficient to bear the weiht they need to bear, and the building won't collapse.Err, note that I am not insulting the designers of 3E. They had a lot of legacy issues from older version of the game, and it wasn't until serious mathematical disection of the game was done by house-ruling DMs, powergamers, and munchkins, and the extent of the collapse was proven in places like the WotC Theoretical Optimization Board, that the need for better math was demonstrated.</blockquote>

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