NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 5985611" data-attributes="member: 29398">Fireball isn't the best example, as my original point amounted to "use real-world physics except when dealing with magic", and a fireball is magic.What's needed is some sort of brief description of how magic might fit in with the rest of known physics.  I long ago dreamed up the idea that magic is in effect a fifth force (along with gravity and three others I forget now) which a few people have learned how to shape and manipulate into effects that wreak merry hell on the usual laws of the other four forces.  Many creatures - in fact, all non-mundane ones - rely on this fifth force in order to exist.This also nicely allows for wild magic.By the time the houserules reach a book-full the last thing I want to do is abandon all that work and start over learning and tweaking a whole new system.  Instead, I'll just keep on kitbashing the system I've already built as defined by said book-full of houserules.Rarely if ever will I make a significant change during a campaign unless it involves only things that have not yet come up in play.  For example, in my current campaign I can still mess around with high-level MU spells as 98% of them haven't been seen in play yet.  But I wouldn't want to tweak the low-level ones until my next campaign.Adding something minor that wasn't there before at all (e.g. new monster, new spell, new magic item) is almost irrelevant for these purposes.  Ditto for removing something, particularly if it's never been seen in play in that campaign.Adding something major (e.g. entirely new PC class or race) in mid-stream is something I'll only do in unusual circumstances, otherwise I'll just wait until the next campaign.  Removing something major always waits.Same for changes.Perhaps not, but I see what you're getting at.That said, nothing bugs me more in published modules than supposedly-intelligent foes who don't use resources available to them e.g. the Fighter carrying around a potion of haste who doesn't drink it once things start going badly for her...OK, so you do equalize it later.I've seen situations like this where no later equalization took place.  They got messy.How can the player know what's going on?  She has no idea of the rider's horsemanship skill, or whetherthe horse is trained or not, etc.And do these attacks go against the horse or the rider?  Tripping someone on a horse (your 3e example) makes no intuitive sense whatsoever; but tripping the horse itself certainly does.Lanefan</blockquote>

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