April 17, rule of 3

[Gundark]

Dungeons & Dragons Roleplaying Game Official Home Page - Article (Rule-of-Three: 04/17/2012)

Discuss

 

[Crazy Jerome]

Third question, baseline competence built in, best thing I've heard thus far. I hope they stick to that.

 

[Ranganathan]

"One area where we might make some tweaks is trying to level the playing field on a lot of common weapons, because for many players, a weapon is an aesthetic choice, and it's kind of a drag to pick a weapon for aesthetic reasons only to find out your character is somehow hampered because you didn't make another, less aesthetically pleasing choice."

ing squee.

 

[Sunseeker]

3rd question is exactly what I've been talking about in other threads. Give characters a little room to participate in the three pillars of the game, and allow them to specialize further if they choose to. I'm down with that.

 

[Libramarian]

"One area where we might make some tweaks is trying to level the playing field on a lot of common weapons, because for many players, a weapon is an aesthetic choice, and it's kind of a drag to pick a weapon for aesthetic reasons only to find out your character is somehow hampered because you didn't make another, less aesthetically pleasing choice."

:/ weak sauce

 

[Incenjucar]

So the answer to #3 is 4E's Linguist and Staff Expertise situation?

 

[Hussar]

Nice to see that I appear to be singing from the same hymnbook as these guys. Basic competence in all aspects of the game, with the option to specialize as you gain levels and the ability to choose that specialization. Fantastic.

As to #2, I can see what's being said here. I like the differing dice for different weapons, but, I also don't want to see any weapon be the "best" weapon that everyone who can should take. So, maybe a longsword does d8 slashing damage, and a mace does d8 bludgeoning damage and a spear does d8 piercing. All three do the same damage, but, you get the differentiation in the key words.

And, I imagine that the key words will interact with specific feats and possibly powers to allow specialization.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Maybe, or maybe not. In 3rd edition, a single +1 bonus was not worth as much as in 4e...

 

[Gundark]

"One area where we might make some tweaks is trying to level the playing field on a lot of common weapons, because for many players, a weapon is an aesthetic choice, and it's kind of a drag to pick a weapon for aesthetic reasons only to find out your character is somehow hampered because you didn't make another, less aesthetically pleasing choice."

:/ weak sauce

Hmmm. For I have pictured a character using a particular weapon and then was disappointed to find it was a suboptimal choice compared to other weapons. Fantasycraft did this well.

 

[Kzach]

I love the idea of 'baseline competence'. This works VERY nicely with another idea I'd love to see implemented in DDN, that being scaled success and failure. By that I mean that instead of having just one, binary, success or failure DC, you first decide on what the absolute minimum DC is needed to succeed (which would be significantly lower than 'regular' DC's) and then scale the level of success or failure based on the d20 roll (with modifiers). The higher the result, the better the outcome, the lower the result, the worse the outcome.

So instead of creating a road-block, pass/fail scenario, you instead make even failure interesting and reward players for specialising without punishing players who don't.