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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5847748" data-attributes="member: 54877">On the skill point thing, context, context!   I mentioned it in passing as an example from 3E of the kind of problem.  It was disputed.  I then elaborated.  None of the rest of the things I have discussed have anything in particular to do with 3E.  So what have you read here that makes you think I'm stuck on 3E? As for the hit point example and how long it takes to put a foe down, it is true that changing the starting damage alone won't get you there.  The smaller range and generally lower hit points of early D&D is also a huge help--really the main help.  Changing the lower bound is more about truncating the extremes.  After all, you could have 20 hit points, do 1d20, and get a range from 1 to 20 rounds.  I think most people would find that too far the other way.   And of course how much randomness we want in that process is somewhat of a playstyle question.  The difference between 1d4+1 and 1d6 brings up the same issue.   Ideally, the ranges chosen would support some variation. Let's consider your examples for the d4 guy.  The one with straight d4 versus 20 hit points will take from 5 to 20 rounds, and average of 8 rounds.  (I realize that the extremes in the 5 to 20 are extremely unlikely here.)  Meanwhile, our d4+10 guy versus 70 hit points is an average of just under 6 rounds, for an extreme range of 5 to 7.   Pretty tight--probably too much. Of course, we are assuming in this example that the d4 guy is going to get that same +10.  (He probably will not.)  And we are assuming that the 5 round average was important enough to preserve, so that the hit points scaled from 20 to 70.  Maybe the 70 hit points should be somewhat less, the d8+10 guy is still thus seeing more variance, and his nice d8+10 attack is putting down opponents a bit faster than 5 rounds on average. No matter where you set it, however, if you make the die all important for long periods in the starting range, the fact is that d4s might as well not exist.  And maybe that would be a better answer for the kind of game you want.  I think that was mentioned earlier.  Maybe get rid of d4s and d6s as common attacks, and go with things like d8 as the starting point, with d10, 2d6, etc. occurring more often.  That puts the average damage well away from zero, and you get the same nice effects as bumping the base mod to +4.</blockquote>

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