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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 5726005" data-attributes="member: 2205">Sounds like special pleading.  Over time, writers started being more consistent in what they used, and players and GMs could detect patterns.  That doesn't mean that the method made sense, it just meant that players and writers were sufficiently skilled to band-aid up a nonsensical system and make it work for them.And I'll emphasise (again) my rebuttal to your re-emphasis.  There were not "metric buttloads" of modifiers, nor was there a "STUNNINGLY complication calculation" to figure out save DCs in 3rd edition.  There were a lot of examples given in the rules of factors that could be taken into account for GMs to figure out what appropriate save DCs were.  But they were just examples (am I the only person left who still remembers the tools, not rules motto?  Sometimes I feel like I am) and the GM was, of course, always free to handwave whatever DC he felt was appropriate--he had, after all, tons of examples to give him a flavor for what an appropriate DC should be.Plus, unless you play with some very unusual group that audits GM save DCs, and armor classes, and skill check DCs and all that jazz, how was a player supposed to know what "metric buttload" of modifiers apply anyway?  For that matter, it's not even a given that he knows what the DC is when he makes a saving throw or check--I only tell my players the target numbers that they need to hit when I'm feeling a bit short-cuttish and want to move quickly through a dice challenge of some sort or other without turning it into a major "thing."  Otherwise, I describe the percieved difficulty of what they're proposing in prose form, let them roll and give me their numerical result, and I tell them whether it's good enough or not.You're trying to create a false dichotomy around how the game was played when in reality that's just a playstyle issue that can be easily applied to either post 2e or pre 3e eras (to use your own labels.)</blockquote>

Verification