Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5491126" data-attributes="member: 4937">A lot of the time the problem is see is after a while, people forget why they were making the change in the first place.   If the problem with ability score drain is it is too fiddly, then a fix has to not be fiddly or you've had no net improvement.  If you replace ability score drain with a mechanic that is even less unified, even less elegant, more variable, and less conceptually clear, then the question becomes, "Why did you replace it in the first place?"A lot of the time as a designer you can see some inelegancy in the approach and spend a lot of time fiddling with different mechanics only to discover that the problem never was with the mechanic in the first place, but the thing you were using the mechanic for is inherently complex.  And so, any mechanic whatsoever you use to simulate the thing acquires the properties you disliked.Combat is a good example.  People complain about how complicated combat is, and how long it takes to resolve it.  But people also want tactical diversity and depth, and they also want the combat to be cinematic and evocative, and they also want the combat to be fair and meaningful, and they also want a certain amount of versimilitude.  So, no matter what mechanic you use, you end up with some set of essential difficulties that are what in fact carries all those other things people want.  It's quite possible to resolve combat with a coin flip or roshambo, and as fortune mechanics go its hard to beat that for ease of resolution.But that's not what people really want.  The biggest problem I usually saw in the house rules forum (back when we had one) was people didn't really know what they wanted. I think what people really want isn't to get rid of the fiddly bits but a character sheet written in excel and/or some well labelled and preferably laminated note cards.  One of the things I've learned over the years is how fiddly a mechanic seems is about half dependent on your level of organization and about half dependent on how fiddly you are.  Really fiddly players should be matched with very organized ways of tracking their fiddly bits very early on.</blockquote>

Verification