Armor & Coins - please, No.

[Aage]

I would much rather see wisdom modify reflex, and intelligence could be kept for will saves... Wisdom represents perception, intuition, instict; intelligence on the other hand is rational thinking, which to me has nothing to do with reflex...

 

[jaer]

I would much rather see wisdom modify reflex, and intelligence could be kept for will saves... Wisdom represents perception, intuition, instict; intelligence on the other hand is rational thinking, which to me has nothing to do with reflex...

Perhaps. Instict and perception do play a part in it, true, but I always felt Wisdom was more gut feeling, while the speed of reaction would be in the speed at which synaps fire in the brain.

Intelligence, as used as an attribute in D&D, covers a whole lot of ground. To me it is both book smarts (how much you actually know) and quickness of thought (how quickly your brain works to process information).

While wisdom does cover gut instinct, and one could make an arguement for it (or a feat that did use wisdom instead of int or a class ability like that of the 3e monk) so that your character reacts to gut instinct rather than reacting to a recognized pattern, I have never thought of wisdom covering the mental aspects of quick-witt and mental processing time. But that is just me.

 

[Mercule]

Medium armor - gone. Simpler isn't always better. This one's a minor issue, though.

Makes sense, to me. Hide is still in. They've just made the categories "stuff that lets you dodge" and "stuff that doesn't".

All armor takes 5 minutes to put on. - So leather armor isn't any easier to put on that a chainmail suit, or plate mail? Simpler isn't always better. This one seems like simplicity for simplicity's sake. (And don't start with the "you can house rule it" stuff.)

At least 5 minutes. In other words, "all armor take a non-trivial amount of time to don." Again, makes sense to me. It's a martial ritual.

Masterwork only as magic armor - unnecessary change.

This one does bug me. I like the idea of some armor that is just plain made better. Maybe there's something on another page that fits that bill or gives us better information. If not, I agree with your concern.

Starleather, spiritmail, godplate - I'm not really digging these. For all the weak accusations of 4e being video-gamey, these names definitely make me think of a video game.

I actually kinda like having various "common magic" armors. It's a fantasy world, and there's a bunch of flavor in having low grade, higher-availability magic armor. It makes a fine distinction between the +1/+2 armors that every town guard captain seems to have and the more rare and custom armors.

I hope they do something similar for weapons. It'd be great to have the availability of +1/+2 weapons, but grant some room for Excalibur, too.

But the prizewiiner = ASTRAL DIAMONDS! - WTF? Are you kidding me? I can see it now, perfectly cut diamonds scattered throughout the Astral Plane. How do you mine the Astral Plane, exactly?

Although I'm unlikely to ever need or use them, they make total sense for both a fantasy setting and for inclusion in a PHB that handles characters up to the potency of deicide and who have powers that activate "once per day, when you die."

I don't think astral diamonds are going to be considered common -- the blurb pretty much states as much. I think they're going to be extremely rare. They probably aren't supposed to be diamonds in any real sense, either, just shiny crystals from the astral. I really like the idea of currency that has absolutely no real-world basis.

To each their own, I guess, but I'm underwhelmed by these changes.

I consider myself to be a pretty big fan of low-magic and gritty games, but I view most of these as being positives.

Heck, some of your issues don't even seem to have a flavor-related root. There wasn't even armor categorization before 3e. I don't see how re-doing some simple meta-game labels can really be a travesty or a testament to bad design.

 

[GnomeWorks]

Nevermind, I just forgot how to use the internet for a moment.

 

[Azgulor]

I don't see it as having anything to do with judging attacks and thinking through defense. It has everything to do with reaction time and mental chronometry.

In order to reaction to anything, there is a mental aspect to it. Recognizing a threat, identifying stimuli. This is subconcious, and in D&D terms, I can understand how such a purely mental act would be given unto Intelligence. It shows speed of thought. Think of this as the immediate "fight or fligh" response in the mind...or in the case of combat, "dodge or block." Your brain controls the impulse.

To react physically to something, you need physical movement, obviously. Raising the shield, jumping out of the way, what have you. This movement cannot happen before a mental process has occured and the brain has stimulated the muscles into action, or rather, into reaction to the interrepted stimuli. This movement is represented by Dexterity.

Therefore, total reaction time = mental reaction + physical reaction.

Initative, Reflex saves, and Armor Class make sense being dictated by either Intelligence or Dex, and in fact, would make greater sense to have them be adjusted by both. Someone who is exceedingly nimble and graceful might not react quickly to stimuli because of slow mental reaction, even though once the brain processes, he can physically move very quickly.

So a high int wizard can be as good at dodging a fireball or sword strike as a high dex rogue, but not because he quickly calculated the trajetory and knew how to get out of the way. His sharper mind reacted to the threat of the attack even before the rogue did, so he was moving to dodge the attack before the rogue does. The rogue, once he starts to react, physically moves faster. But the time the fireball explodes, they have "caught up" to each other and safely ducked out of the way, the wizard because he moved a second or so before the rogue, and the rogue because he moved with greater speed.

I don't buy it.

I mean, if this were true, why isn't Wil E. Coyote on par with the Roadrunner?

He is a supra-genius after all.

Seriously, though flight-or-flight is instinct not reasoning/IQ. Speed-of-thought doesn't translate to "started moving first".

You want to talk about INT providing some type of tactics bonus, I have less of an issue. Combat Expertise didn't both me. As a feat, it reflected special training and I liked it. But a flat, you're smart so you're harder to hit...strikes me as a bonus for balance sake. As I said earlier up, either to make the math work or to eliminate the "unfunness" of missing out on a bonus. (Making the math "smoother" and eliminating "unfun" aspects of the game have both been cited as design goals for 4e.)

 

[Lizard]

You want to talk about INT providing some type of tactics bonus, I have less of an issue. Combat Expertise didn't both me. As a feat, it reflected special training and I liked it. But a flat, you're smart so you're harder to hit...strikes me as a bonus for balance sake.

One of the 4e design goals was to 'eliminate unnecessary parallelism', but here it is, none the less...

 

[delericho]

Yeah, Einstein was great at dodging. Nobody could lay an hand on him into a fight

What's more, his reflexes actually sharpened as he grew older!

 

[delericho]

Therefore, total reaction time = mental reaction + physical reaction.

The problem is, the rules don't reflect that. If they did, you should either add the lower of the two modifiers, or just add both of them.

Instead, it would appear that a character needs to think about what he needs to do, or he needs to move, but he doesn't need to do both.

This is an... odd rule. I might even say bizarre.

 

[Campbell]

Yeah, Einstein was great at dodging. Nobody could lay an hand on him into a fight

Not at all. Einstein has never learned how to apply his mental agility to avoiding sharp sticks or moving out of the way of a fireball. This example only makes sense if we constrain ourselves to applying tools that are meant to model adventurers (trained combatants) to folks who have never received any sort of combat training.

Einstein Level 0 Dude
Medium natural humanoid XP 175
Initiative -1 Senses Perception +2
HP 8; Bloodied 4
AC 8, Fortitude 6, Reflex 8, Will 12
Speed 6
m Nerd Slap (standard; at-will)
-4 vs. AC; 1d4 -3 damage
Alignment Unaligned Languages English, German
Skills Science +19
Str 6 (-2) Dex 8 (-1) Wis 14 (+2)
Con 6 (-2) Int 28 (+9) Cha 6 (-2)
Equipment: Pocket Protector

 

[fafhrd]

If you've ever seen a World's Strongest Man competition, it's apparent that while all the competitors are what we would call 'strong', they each have areas in which they are exceptional. Likewise those people who are strong willed aren't necessarily intuitive. For practical reasons, games consolidate a lot of the features into a few stats. While Einstein was what we'd call genius, I don't know that he was intelligent in all the ways human intellect is expressed.