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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kenjib" data-source="post: 32989" data-attributes="member: 530">That's a good list of changes.  Getting rid of skills and most feats does make things easier to handle in such a simplification, but it also means that now you have to re-write the fighter and rogue class and you are incompatible with most published modules and many other materials.  You've also lost surprise round mechanics.  This is a nice start though.  Let's see.  Perhaps you could just give the rogue a list of pre-determined skills that are always at 3+level?  A few other classes can get skills like this too - wilderness lore for rangers (tracking), spellcraft for wizards.  Maybe do the same for fighter with some pre-determined bonus feats, just the really simple ones like power attack, weapon focus, etc.  Otherwise you would run out of feats for the fighter with such a small list - especially taking pre-reqs into account.That's interesting.  What you would have left becomes very similar to 1e but with the streamlined benefits you mention.  You're stripping 3e back to the identifying elements that make it D&D, so I see your point about essential vs. inessential.  Hmmm...  That's pretty nice.  It's kind of like 2.6e.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Customizing the system in 1e wasn't any hard work though.  It was really pretty inconsequential and many people used some or all of the exact same changes because they were so easy to do.  Thanks to your suggestions I'm starting to think that it could be done in 3e now though but there is still a lot more to it than there was in 1e.Again, I'm not talking about balance here.  I'm talking about how one seemingly small change requires a great number of rules modifications.  Every monster that has reach is changed, as another example, when you get rid of AoO.  When you get rid of skills and feats other parts of the rules, other monsters are losing special abilities that otherwise would have been aspects of Special Qualities or Special Attacks (Monster X is very hard to surprise, for example).  When you get rid of certain skills some obstacles and challenges in published modules don't work anymore.  There are tiny little issues like this all over the place.  Maybe it's no problem just to ignore them all, or work around them all, but still it's just another thing to think about.  Almost every aspect of the game has something more to think about or some required modifications when you make such sweeping changes.Making 3e simple requires that you ignore or modify 80 things instead of just 12 for 1e (no, these numbers are not concrete nor calculated to be accurate).  In addition, you need to modify all new material that you bring into the game.  This makes it more complicated to manage, even over the long term.  I don't think that it's lethargy.  I think that it's a more complicated thing to do and it has more consequences, both foreseen and unforeseen.</blockquote>

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