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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Crimson Binome" data-source="post: 6815720" data-attributes="member: 6775031">One of the things about 3.X was that everything had inherent meaning. A racial bonus meant that there was something about the creature's physiology which made the creature better at the relevant task. Natural ability was covered by ability scores. Skills only represented practiced skills. You could have a creature with +20 to Spot because it had four ranks and Wisdom 13 and a +15 racial bonus, and it would be distinctly different from another creature that just had 20 skill ranks, or 15 ranks and +5 from Wisdom. There were a lot of rules, but most of them were far-reaching and applied equally to everyone. Most of what a creature could do was just the sum of its parts, and could be inferred just by looking at it, once you were fluent in the system language - you could look at a troll, and guess by its size that it would have Strength and AC within a certain range, and even if you didn't know immediately that it could regenerate (in the same way that it's not obvious that a dragon can breathe fire), you would know that any regeneration in this world followed certain rules about how fast it happened and what sorts of conditions were required to stop it (just like you'd know that armor doesn't help you against a breath weapon or spell, because that's always a saving throw rather than an attack roll).Also, for the record, there was a strict hierarchy of types. If you tried to turn a plant into an undead (or apply a half-demon template to a dragon, or whatever), then there were strict rules for how types interacted and which abilities the final creature would have. This was important so you could know if the final creature needed to breathe, was immune to paralysis, or was proficient in martial weapons. You could just make stuff up without worrying about that, but then you risk the players feeling helpless since the world doesn't work how they believe it should work.</blockquote>

Verification