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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lord Zardoz" data-source="post: 4155252" data-attributes="member: 704">Responses to Storm-BringerCreatures with poison in 3rd edition essentially do not scale well with the given assumptions of how a characters durability changes as they increase in level.  Because they elected to use ability damage, spamming a bunch of creatures able to do some ability damage circumvents HD.  If I apply the Swarm template to something like common snakes, or create a situation where I can circumvent AC, the players will likely get wiped out.  While the system does a good job of keeping poison dangerous, it does not really add much entertainment to the game.On top of that, you get the fun of forcing your player to recalculate a bunch of stuff on the fly.  Saving throws, attack and damage modifiers, AC, HP, and Spell save DC's for casters is just the obvious stuff.  Encumberance and skill checks can also come into play (Dex poison vs mounted combat, etc)  A Str poison also affects your Grapple modifier.  All these things can be overlooked.Based on Bab, no.  But should grapple be able to function as a "Screw the Player" button for the DM? - It uses a melee touch attack, so you disregard most of a front line fighters AC. - Spell casters generally suck at grapple, so you shut down casters. - Front line fighters tend to specialize in a non light weapon.  If you grapple, that weapon cannot generally be used.  Against a 10th level opponent, that will have a huge affect on damage (especially if the player uses a 2 handed weapon) and attack roll (you lose the +X enhancement bonus, weapon focus, and weapon mastery). - Players cannot break the grapple unless they roll great AND you roll crappy if the size bonus is from a Huge or larger creature.  Against large creatures, front line fighter types can probably still break out reasonably often, but for all other classes, its still a longshot.The problem was never Str + X.  The problem was determining Str + X + Y, and then applying that to WpnDmg + A + B, and Bab + N.  Just way too many different modifiers that could reasonably come into play.My understanding is that for 4th edition, there will be fewer things in play which can affect your stats directly.  You may be right though.  We will find out in June I guess.No one is talking about statting out every goblin child in the game.  And I think I should have used a phrase other than book keeping to describe what my intent was.  But the current system does indeed have flaws when statting out high level NPC's.  A good example is applying the 4th level INT increase to acquired skills, and working out a reasonable spell selection for an arcane caster that avoids looking like the last 6 such casters you used.  If you multi-class, you also get to flip around the book to work out the saving throws and attack rolls.A better point worth making is that "Having the monsters use the same rules as the players has unintended consequences".  The players are meant to be a balanced part of a team.  That is not the case for monsters.  But it is pretty hard to create monsters that are a viable tactical threat to the players without them being screwy in some way.  Solo Monsters will often have much better Fort saves than intended because the only other way to kick up the HP is to add Hit dice, which will kick up all saves as well as Bab.A DM is perfectly entitled to just skew things, at least on paper.  If I want to have a Hill giant that can go solo against the party, I could just kick up the AC a few points and kick up the HP a great deal, as well as improve some of the saves.  But many people are leery of disregarding the rules as written, especially when they do not have a clear understanding of how the underlying system is meant to work.A good example here would be the spell like abilities of Outsiders, as well as some dragons.  How often does the Black Dragons ability to befoul water come into play?  How often do you give Juvenile dragons 1st level spells other than Shield and Mage Armour?  Do you even use the dragons Cantrips?Your counter examples are deeply flawed.  How about these skill challenges: - Narrow and slippery walkways calling for a Balance check - A chase scene that puts a river in the path of the party.  Crossing could greatly help, but it calls for a difficult Swim check.  Could also be a cliff and a Climb check.  Or a gap with a Jump check.Oh, and on that subject, a Swiss Army Knife wizard tends to render many good skill based encounters moot due to having spells that allow you to skip them entirely.The problem with Disarm and Trip are that the consequences of failure make them not worth trying unless they were guaranteed to succeed.  Grapple is a bit over complicated.  Sunder is actually pretty good aside from the sudden book keeping of Item HP, and having to look up item hardness.If you had a cleric in every fight against the party open with casting silence on the weapon of some cannon fodder type, and than having that fodder opponent stand within 15 feet of a spell caster, it would get old fast.  Why build a spell caster at all if he will suddenly be nerfed?  Do you always disarm the guy who put alot of feats into weapon spec / weapon focus / weapon mastery?  Probably not, but at least you have access to better defences against that tactic, such as better saving throws / opposed rolls.But mounted combat suffers because your mount is very damn easy to neutralize with Area of Effect spells and will probably have a very low AC.  It ought to be a good strategy, but it should not be trivial to counter a character concept that put at least 3 feats and a bunch of skill points into a character being skilled at it.  Tying the mounts defenses to the rider would not have been difficult and would not have harmed the game.END COMMUNICATION</blockquote>

Verification