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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lonely Tylenol" data-source="post: 1640400" data-attributes="member: 18549">Calculus, eh?You've said this a couple of times.  Where is this math that you speak of?  So far as I have seen, there was a deliberate effort by the designers of D20 to remove all math except simple addition and subtraction.  All modifiers, bonuses, and penalties boil down to simple addition and subtraction.  If you add a miss chance (which is either 20% or 50%) you may have to add a second operation when making an attack (one die roll), but that's as complex as it gets.  The allusions to higher math I keep seeing in this thread seem to be based on fiction.  I really don't get where all this complexity is supposed to be coming from.  If you spend five minutes before you play a new character to add up the bonuses and maybe put a little chart on the back of the sheet saying which items/spells/effects give which bonuses (and what type they are), there's not much to complicate things.  If a new bonus or penalty appears (because of a spell or whatever), check to see if a bonus of that type is already applied, and if it isn't, add a new box to your little chart.  Penalties are easy, since they just stack no matter what.Doing this at level 5 is not much different than doing it at level 10, 15, or 20.  It's not like every round you have to add up all your bonuses again, because they mostly stay the same from round to round.  Perhaps if your cleric casts five different buff spells before the combat, you might need to take 30 seconds or so to figure out how they change your numbers, but otherwise it's pretty damn simple to add up.  Then you just roll the D20, and add your modifiers, and compare to the target number.  The only complicating factor is determining whether you add a bonus or not due to the bonus type.  And that's stupidly easy to keep track of.  It just requires some minor organization of the character sheet.  If you're adding all your modifiers each round, along with the "I get +X from spell A, +Y from spell B, etc." litany, you're doing something wrong.With iterative attacks, things get slightly more complex.  But not really.  You just need to know two things:1. I have X attacks each round on a full-round action2. I subtract 5 from each subsequent attack until I hit X attacks.That's it.  It doesn't get much simpler than that.If you aren't willing to keep track of multiple bonus types and the Mensa-level challenge of iterative attacks makes your head swim, just house rule that there are only unnamed bonuses, and that you may have no more than three on you at once.  Then, eliminate iterative attacks and two-weapon fighting.  There you go.  One attack each round, no more than four numbers (including BAB) to keep track of.  If a new bonus appears, check to see if it's bigger than an existing bonus.  If it is, drop your lowest existing bonus and keep the new one.  You should be able to do that math on your fingers.</blockquote>

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