Cascade effect of rule changes

[kennew142]

Dude, you are so out of it. We're blaming collectible miniatures this week. I'm going to have to take away your blaming rights for at least 10 days, I think.

Dagnabbit! I can never keep up with the newest fads in blaming. Darn kids and their newfangled hobbies!

 

[Lord Zardoz]

So how many 3E "problems" would have a cascade effect on the system?

IMHO.... all of them.

Not all problems were systemic in nature. The 3.0 Haste and Harm spells, are good examples. Replacing save or screwed spells with Save and Screwed until you make a successful Save are also not so bad. Turn Undead is another problem spot that is hardly systemic.

There are some problems that are truly systemic, however. I would say there are 2 systemic problems that lead to about 5 distinct difficulties with D&D.

Too Many Variables: Figuring out the attack bonus, damage, and saves of a 17th level Fighter with a full allotment of level appropriate items was not difficult, even when you figure in the iterative attacks. Where it did get difficult was in figuring out what it was on the 4th round when you had been hit with a Strength and Dex draining effect, a Con Boost, were slowed, had been disarmed and forced to use a non specialized weapon, and were subjected to a Bless spell. You now have to recompute your Attack, Damage, and saves mid fight, probably more than once.

Too Much Work: A consequence of Too Many Variables is that creating and running high level characters is difficult. The players only have to track one. The DM has to create and run a lot more than one. For DM's who do not mind dungeon crawls, the Monsterous Manual solves this nicely with lots of monsters for a wide range of levels. For DM's who like having classed NPC's for the players to interact with, the Monsterous Manual is not much help.

Not all things Improve Equally: The more insidious problem is that not everything improves at the same rate. Some stats improve much faster than others, creating a gap between a good rate and a bad rate which causes problems at higher levels. Even worse, one of the most important combat stats, Armour Class, does not improve at all as you level, being equipment dependant. This causes the following problems.


Fighter Bab vs Level Appropriate AC: At higher levels, you end up in a situation where one of the following happens.
- Only the fighters initial and maybe 2nd Iterative attack can hit. The Rogue, Monk, and Cleric always misses.
- The Fighter will hit with every attack except maybe his 3rd or 4th iterative attack.

Weak Save always Fails: At about the same time as the Fighter Bab problem crops up, the saving throw discrepancy becomes bad enough that Spell vs Weak Save will almost always fail. This is an issue for everyone except perhaps a High Cha Paladin and the Monk. And no one will take the Monk because by the time the good saves would kick ass, no one is using him because of the Flurry of Misses (see previous point).

Big 6 Christmas Tree: While HP and Weak Saves do not improve fast enough to keep pace with level appropriate challenges, magic items can help. The problem is that everyone will end up needing exactly the same magic items. And if your using classed opponents, this means your players will get quite a collection of these items. That covers only half the christmas tree though. The other half of the christmas tree is generally used to make other problems worse. Fighters will pump their attack and damage, and spell casters will pump their save DC's.

There is one non systemic problem that is nearly as bad as the systemic problems, however.

Completely Broken CR system:
The best proofs of this is the Monster Summoning III spell and Undead. Take a look at that list of beasts. Some sound pretty decent, like Hell hounds and various small elementals. Then you have the Fiendish Ape and the Celestial Bison. These are template creatures with low AC and a huge amount of HP. They have just enough hit dice for their template to give them Damage Reduction magic / 5. This makes them much more powerful than everything else on that list, but they are all the same CR.

Undead are another tricky one. They are unusually powerful, with immunity to Sneak Attack and Critical Hit, most Charm spells, and the d12 as hit dice. They often have nasty draining powers. Very difficult, unless you have a cleric. Then they just run the hell away or blow up.

Fixing the CR system is not the sort of thing that would require a whole lot of tinkering with the rest of the game, however.

END COMMUNICATION

 

[SSquirrel]

I think Races & Classes or one of the various blog posts made mention that stat buffing would be more of a per-encounter power than a bunch of different spells. Which is fine with me. Less wasting spell space on buffs and more on actually doing stuff

 

[Frostmarrow]

One great thing about the new design is that they look at the effect first. In earlier editions designers used to come up with a cool new rule and implement it into the game. Sometimes the rule created an effect that wasn't good for the game or 'realistic' within the mileu.

Now, the designers look at the effect first and make the rule second. Such as; "We want characters to have a few token magic items that define them. What rule can we devise that will give this effect?"

Instead of "Hey, wouldn't it be awesome if we there were decapitating swords!" Which brings the effect that everybody need one.

Example: Ranger

4E - We want a stealthy, mysterious survivor. Let's set it up that way.

3E - Two weapon fighting and giant slaying is cool. Let's give him that.

 

[Sitara]

Lots of nice points in this thread. However, I cannot help but wonder what new issues 4e and its splats will bring.

For instance, 3E Core was not such a bad game at all. Its the splats that really ended up ruining it. (though some splats were very good and beneficial, such as PHBII)
Why would anyone select dodge when they could select 'eyes in the back of your head?'

 

[Haffrung Helleyes]

Lord Zardoz,

That's an excellent summary of 3E weaknesses. I do have a few quibbles (I don't, for example, think that Undead are as powerful as you suggest) , but I essentially agree with you.

I am not sure though that 4E will solve these problems.

The main issues you identify, namely that the attack capabilty and defenses of the different PCs diverge as they level, is a consequence of D&D's focus on specialization.

IE, in D&D, the party is supposed to succeed when PCs stick to their roles. Therefore, players choose PCs that specialize in such a way as to perform their roles optimally. The Wizard pumps his DCs rather than improving his attack ability or his AC, The fighter gets a flaming sword rather than improving his will save, and so on. Everyone maxes a few skills that define their character, and ignores all the others.

The class abilities that accumulate reinforce this trend.

4E fixes a few of these problems in simplistic ways (giving everyone a level-dependent static bonus to all their skills, so eventually all the PCs can make a DC15 climb check, for example) , but it remains a game where PCs are encouraged to stick to their roles, from what I can tell. They've even introduced formal language (Striker, Controller, Defender, etc) to define these roles. So I worry that , over time, the damage output of the Striker will diverge greatly, and the saves and AC of the Defender will do likewise. If skill resolution remains an important part of the game, DCs of tasks will scale in such a way that those class-dependent bonuses to skills are necessary for success.

Ken

 

[Stogoe]

3E Core was not such a bad game at all. Its the splats that really ended up ruining it.

Oh, sure, blame the splats.

Why would anyone select dodge when they could select 'eyes in the back of your head?'

Because Dodge was a choice that only suckers would make*, even without any splats. It was designed that way.


*Spring Attack was pretty cool. But it was weighted down with two feats that no one would otherwise take.

 

[hong]

Because Dodge was a choice that only suckers would make*, even without any splats. It was designed that way.

And thank god that preposterous "system mastery" canard is going out the window. Let's attract players to a non-competitive, teamwork-based game by giving them ways to shoot themselves in the foot right from the get-go. Great design work there, guys.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Lots of nice points in this thread. However, I cannot help but wonder what new issues 4e and its splats will bring.

For instance, 3E Core was not such a bad game at all. Its the splats that really ended up ruining it. (though some splats were very good and beneficial, such as PHBII)
Why would anyone select dodge when they could select 'eyes in the back of your head?'

Splat Books are inevitable. WotC wants to earn money, and gamers hunger for more options - some of them they sure could build themselves, but it's alot of work, and why not concentrate on playing and give WotC the money to do the work for you?

The problem with splat books is that the persons writing these books do not know or understand the system well enough to see all unwanted implications. Certain effects weren't even known to the original designers, they were emergent properties of the game system.

If you never used a single splat book, but would try to generate your own monsters/NPCs following the MM and DMG guidelines, you were not guaranteed satisfying results. Even applying some standard MM templates applied to some standard MM monsters lead to unbalanced monsters!

Most of this knowledge today is hindsight. Few would have been able to predict this on first seeing the system. (But there are still bad things that might have been easier to spot: Your Dodge example is interesting here: Why take Dodge at all? The feat sucks. The only reason someone takes it is to qualify for other feats or PrCs, but it's next to useless on its own. The feat exists to reward "rules mastery" - someone that mastered the rules it is bad and would never take unless it's required for some feat prerequisites. A non-rulesmastery player might give this feat to his Bard or his Rogue and only very late notice how bad it is...)

My hope is that the underlying assumptions of 4E are better formulated - and better reasoned then in 3E. Directly looking at how things affect the "math" of the game goes a long way to do this.

 

[DJCupboard]

Lots of nice points in this thread. However, I cannot help but wonder what new issues 4e and its splats will bring.

For instance, 3E Core was not such a bad game at all. Its the splats that really ended up ruining it. (though some splats were very good and beneficial, such as PHBII)
Why would anyone select dodge when they could select 'eyes in the back of your head?'

I think the biggest thing to look out for is going to be role creep; you have a party of four or five and That One Guy(tm) figures out how to get the benefits from a different role. For instance, he may be a controller, but figure some way to emulate (or outright have) certain striker powers or abilities better than the party striker. Rules familiarity and manipulation are going to be an issue regardless of edition. 4E sounds like it is being set up to minimize this as much as possible, but you can never escape the fact that all rules are (somehow and somewhat) exploitable and that some people understand the rules better than others.

I don't know how, but I also see something coming up from this Silo idea. This I am sure will be a splat problem and not something inherent in the rules.