Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="eamon" data-source="post: 4801299" data-attributes="member: 51942">I like the simplicity of the "just add +1 to three scores" approach, but when I suggest a house-rule, I'd like to be sure that it's truly better that the WotC alternative.Making the barbarian's bonus a non-scaling +1 is a decent fix - for this problem.  But I can't oversee all the various combo's and interactions.  How much better will a starlock now be, now that he can have 2 secondary stats?  A tempest that can gain scimitar dance, pit fighter and marked scourge?  A bard that's even better at multiclassing?You don't need to be an abusive player to pick an obvious combo; and there are many, many combo's that become possible with the advent of a third +1.  Some of them may well overshadow the rest, and that would be bad for balance, but take a lot of work to detect up front.  You'd further need to evaluate all the new material in this new light.  Right now, even dragon magazine stuff works fine out of the box - with this change, you never know.Alternatively, you could just increase the lowest defense - being the defense where the ability mod plus the new defense bonus is lowest.That would make the new rule - +1 to to-hit, FRW, and an extra +1 to the lowest of FRW (before feats and other modifiers) at levels 5, 15, and 25.Thus, to-hit and FRW would all scale by +28, and AC by +27.  This would have little impact on class balance, meaning that eventually "fixes" to the shaman or whatnot would just work out of the box, and classes such as the barbarian don't require special treatment.  Once per tier, you'd need to compute the "basic" FRW scores to find the lowest one - not particularly onerous; and you could just let the player choose too (it's probably in their best interest to balance the defenses).  No changes to masterwork armor are necessary.The only problem is that I'm not sure how easy this would be to implement in the current character builder.Finally, a +1 to hit and to FRW at 5,15, and 25 even without extra attention for the weakest score is probably fine - that missing +3 isn't going to be terribly problematic.  In short, isn't a +1 to three scores at stat-boosting levels a disproportionate measure for a fairly small problem?  The big problem (overall bad scaling) is easy to fix, and the fact that one defense lags slightly is less problematic than opening up a whole swath of new & untested, potentially unbalancing build options.</blockquote>

Verification