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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elric" data-source="post: 1666333" data-attributes="member: 1139">High level D&D is a grueling, grueling game.  Let me just give an example from a recent adventure:The party (only 3 of us, plus the Paladin’s horse) is fighting a group of Rakhasha fighters and a Rakhasha mage.  We are 16th level.  With haste, the fighter types have 5-6 (my monk) attacks/round.  Even worse, my monk has a ton of martial arts feats (Hold the Line, Defensive Throw, Great Throw and more) that result in even more attack and opposed rolls.  The Rakhashas have DR 15/good and piercing.  Most of our weapons are not good and piercing.  When the Paladin hits with his holy evil-outsider bane sword, he has to roll the actual sword damage separately to see if it exceeds 15, then subtract DR and roll the 4d6’s of extra damage.  Then the horse has its attacks which have Poison and more Holy Damage to make things even longer.  Factoring the DR into damage was a huge pain and made the fight much longer in real-time.  When each round takes so much time, enemies who have DR to keep them alive are just exhausting.My character is typed and has all of his bonuses to everything listed- this helps keep bonus types in check (did I include high ground in my attack bonus?  What’s my plus on trip attempts etc.).  I have stopped rolling damage for my monk because  2d8 + 2d6 holy gets to be far too much rolling and adding for the benefit (since I only crit on a 20, almost all of my attacks do similar amounts of damage).  I understand that things like Sneak Attack and Holy Swords aren’t doubled on crits, but life would be a lot easier if these bonuses were just numbers and less dice were rolled per attack (increasing the number of dice decreases the chance to deviate from the mean anyway).Choices are overrated.  Consider the book of exalted deeds.  Spellcasters who can spontaneously cast sanctified spells take forever to play in combat because you can always look up spells until you find an exceedingly powerful spell that is good under the circumstances.  After you do this for a while it gets quicker because you kind of know which spell to use, but you have so many choices that you still have to look things up.  Keeping track of spells cast, choosing spells, and buying magic items is not a quick process.  Finding the lowest marginal cost route for your magic items, for example, requires you to do a calculation for the relative effectiveness of your magic items that provide similar benefits and to search out all of the different bonuses that you can find.Let me make it clear that I don’t find any of this to be incredibly difficult.  I am good at math so adding up separate bonuses, summing damage, and calculating price:benefit on magic items is not hard.  At the moment, I don’t enjoy it all that much and want more of a beer and pretzels kind of game.  Concerns for balance and having an effective character necessitate a lot of this, but I find that D&D has become too much of an arms race where the real loser is brevity.  I want fights to be quick in real time.  In D&D, the vast majority of fights are relatively major and important because the game would bog down too much if you had a fight for an hour against mooks who can’t really threaten you at all.  The fights, by sheer real-time duration, overshadow the rest of the game.  When your main purpose for gaming is to have a good time with friends, this much wargaming becomes disruptive.  My solution is Mutants and Masterminds.  One of the other players introduced the rest of the group to it and I really love its simplicity, ease of play and general awesomeness.  It doesn’t pretend that its system can be completely balanced but is well balanced for a pure point based system.  Combat under the standard rules is very non-lethal, so the fights are at low stakes.  The game (at least in my group) lends itself to light comedy and no one takes it too seriously (there’s little incentive to build the uber-PC).  In M&M weapons are all the same- you can customize them from there.  You are free of the Greatsword, Unarmed, or ‘weapon you have a prestige class for’ set of options.  Pick a weapon, add its powers, describe it however you want.  Hero points in M&M lends itself to a lot of creativity.  You’re a superhero- you have a few set powers and can try a lot more on rare occasions.  Combat is quick, has high variance (that can be controlled using hero/villain points for big fights), and you only get 1 attack a round.  I’d highly recommend it and I don’t read comics/watch Justice League or anything.  To back up mmadsen, Mutants and Masterminds is a great way to do epic play.</blockquote>

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