Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="HeapThaumaturgist" data-source="post: 2468395" data-attributes="member: 12332">Well, I'll generally go the route of civility here.  I've been packing all day and don't have enough energy to truly rise to Canis's overblown rudeness.  Sort of a let-down, really.For me, one of the larger problems with running higher-level D&D combats is the STATUS EFFECTS.  Player A casts Spell B, causing Status Effect X to Monsters Delta-Epsilon.  Eventually you're trying to track one guy who is enervated for 3 negative levels, blessed for +1 to attacks, Inspired for +1 damage, but Shaken for -2, and yet Bull's Strengthed and Raging ... but Ray of Enfeebled ... who has boots of Springing and Striding but stepped on a caltrop, who Death Knells a dying monster and then casts Prayer and gets hit with a Blashphemy ... stunned, blinded, shaken, impeeded, enfeebled, inspired, blessed, prayered ... even with software, eventually it gets hard to track.  What stacks, what doesn't, what your final strength bonus is, what your Attack Bonus is when you've got all that going on and you decide to do a Smite with 3 points of Power Attack in a spirited charge.A higher-level GT Strong hero, for instance, might have +5 damage with a Greatsword from Melee Smash 3 and Specialization, might topple columns of stone with feats of strength, and a few other things.  But they generally seem to be static and easily tracked.  There's no alternate ability that reduces bonuses from Melee Smash when the moon is at its zenith and the Almachus is in the rising house.  Heck, sometimes I'd like a little more ... maybe a token pool for some more interesting tactical considerations.  Just not 2-4 pools or 4 different ways to spend out of one pool at differing ammounts, half of which involve GM fiat and the other half countered by pools and tokens from other classes.I think there are alot of fundamentally interesting ideas and concepts in IH.  Skill groups and the like are something I've contemplated in the past.  I think abilities activated in-combat via opportunity-costs are VERY interesting.  It's just that when somebody says:  "They'll be able to take on the same challenges, it just might take a little longer to resolve combat." ... eh.  I'm all for players having options, I just don't need any MORE time taken up.I'll illustrate... might help.  (It's late and I'm rambling.)  In D&D it's pretty much expected that a party will have access to a Wand Of Cure X, and that this wand will allow them to get back into combat relatively quickly without spending days regenerating HP.  We can get rid of this wand by adding in a system where the PCs will get back more HP somehow "naturally" but where we still count off charges/pools/etc in a daily allotment (as opposed to a finite Charge allotment in a wand) or we can do it with a system like GT where we can have armor converting part of the damage taken to NL, which we can heal up more quickly.  Which, I think, accomplishes the goal with less in the way of resource-wrangling.  This is the same sort of situation with Armor As DR.  While rolling a die for DR might be cool, in the end, it's just adding another die roll to a combat already repleat with die rolls.  Why not just a fixed number?  That would be faster.  Bob removes 3 points from incoming damage each time ... he can remember that.  Or Bob converts 3 points or whatever.  But if Bob takes 3 full attacks from 3 ghouls in one round and has to roll 1d8 for each attack to see how much got absorbed, that's 9 additional dice throws we could have done without.--fje</blockquote>

Verification