Is 3rd edition too "quantitative"

[Storm Raven]

So, if you have leather armor +2 along with the above shield, your AC is 17, right? Because like bonuses don't stack.

No, AC 19. Enchancement bonuses to shields and armor stack due to a special exception to the stacking rules, which is also discussed in the Combat section of the SRD.

 

[Turjan]

The bad thing is that they are the same color as my carpet and so are very hard to spot when they are crawling around on the floor

I find those that are clear like glass the most annoying. You sometimes just see them when the climb up the monitor.

 

[Storm Raven]

I think what he's driving at there, is that there doesn't seem to be a reason for them to have different kinds of bonuses, for two spells which are fundamentally the same. Why couldn't they have just said "these two spells stack".

Then you have to define indidivually what effect stacks with what other effects, for all different effects. Instead, WotC decided to go with a universal coding system that defined what types of bonuese each effect gave, and an overarching rule to determine what stacks with what, making the work much simpler on everyone.

Or better yet, make just one spell 'bless', and then have it scalable, so that the positive bonuses increase, and it gains negative modifers to enemies over time. So, that bless at 20th level works fundamentally different then bless cast by at 1st level. Do we really need two different spells, when one more customizable spell would have worked?

Then you would have a 1st level spell that replaces a 1st level spell and a 3rd level spell. Which means that bless couldn't appear on a class spell list without prayer also effectively appearing on it. Sometimes having greater granularity is useful in a system.

Do we really need 6 ability increasing spells when one would have worked? "this spell allows you to increase any one ability score by 4".

Doing this would have two effects: (1) it would make it that much easier for wizards, since they would have fewer spells to add to their spell books, and (2) you couldn't limit the types of bonuses that certain classes can give, look at the spell lists, most classes don't have access to all six animal buff spells.

 

[woodelf]

No, AC 19. Enchancement bonuses to shields and armor stack due to a special exception to the stacking rules, which is also discussed in the Combat section of the SRD.

And that's the part i've never understood: they go to all this trouble to streamline things, and make everything consistent, and implement the clever stacking rules--and there's an "except..." left in them. WTF? Why couldn't they figure out just one more named bonus type, and thus be able to say, without exception "like-named bonuses don't stack; differently-named or unnamed bonuses stack"?

 

[woodelf]

Changing rules in older editions was a nightmare by comparison - I think that the reason for which people forget this is that there weren't rules for lots of stuff.

Maybe from your POV. I found changing rules in AD&D1/2 to be a snap. That very same disjointedness and chaos which made the rules so funky also made them easy to change--since thief abilities, frex, used a completely different system from everything else, which nothing interacted with, you could change them completely and have no further repurcussions. In D20 System, you can't just change the scale of skills, frex, because they're carefully designed to be in the same range as BABs and spell DCs, and a whole host of other things.

 

[woodelf]

Doing this would have two effects: (1) it would make it that much easier for wizards, since they would have fewer spells to add to their spell books, and (2) you couldn't limit the types of bonuses that certain classes can give, look at the spell lists, most classes don't have access to all six animal buff spells.

You couldn't say "sorcerers may only use this spell for physical abilities"? It seems to work perfectly well in AU when the rules say that a flame mage gets access to sorcerous blast, but only as a fire spell.

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

Maybe from your POV. I found changing rules in AD&D1/2 to be a snap. That very same disjointedness and chaos which made the rules so funky also made them easy to change--since thief abilities, frex, used a completely different system from everything else, which nothing interacted with, you could change them completely and have no further repurcussions. In D20 System, you can't just change the scale of skills, frex, because they're carefully designed to be in the same range as BABs and spell DCs, and a whole host of other things.

No offense intended, but I find this general argument to be 100% wrong because it presumes that opportunities are liabilities, and restrictions are freedom.

(1) Consistency suggests a logical means to extend house rules, but does not logically require me to do so. I can choose to apply my house Tumble changes to Bluff if I want to. You make it sound like I am somehow required, which is just not true.

(2) Diversity of approaches on a similar back bone gives me opportunities and examples that are actually useful. If I dislike how something scales, I can look at, say, BAB, saves, Tumble, Bluff, Diplomacy, and Jump. While they all have similarities, they are very different in how they play out in detail. If I dislike a particular mechanic, I have usuable examples to choose from that are different, but not so different that I must rewrite everything from scratch.

(3a) The other side of the coin is that 1e/2e has far too much diversity. Mechanics were so bizarrely different that it was nearly impossible to see how to transfer one manner of mechanics into a different area.

(3b) And work done one place in 1e/2e has no value elsewhere. If you revise, say, the Thief skills, the work you just did has no possible application anywhere else in the entire game. You are prevented from extending your work.

3e gives freedom to scale changes in the system as you please. A houserule can be purely local -- one small change for one mechanic. Or it can be global. Or anywhere in between. Scaling the extent of change up or down is trivial.

1e/2e gives you the freedom from repurcussions, but it is the freedom from opportunity -- the freedom of a prisoner in a small cell.

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

And that's the part i've never understood: they go to all this trouble to streamline things, and make everything consistent, and implement the clever stacking rules--and there's an "except..." left in them. WTF? Why couldn't they figure out just one more named bonus type, and thus be able to say, without exception "like-named bonuses don't stack; differently-named or unnamed bonuses stack"?

I agree with that. In 3.0, the Shield spell use a hack of applying a Cover bonus, and the shield provided an Armor bonus due to an oddly worded exception to the Armor stacking rules. 3.5 did the screamingly obvious and created the Shield bonus category so that the Shield spell can give a Shield bonus, shields can give a Shield bonus, and exceptions can be erased from the armor rules. Unfortunately the rewrite of the relevant rules is only ~90% complete. The design essentials are there; they are just unnecessarily confusing.

 

[woodelf]

Interesting how perspectives vary.

I find WotC's rules, because they are just rules, to be more open-ended and thus more inspiring. I found AU to push in a general direction and thus be counter to inspiration. Not anything near absolute, but I'd certainly put AU as less open to inspiration because it has more built in concepts to work around.

I think that's at least partly a matter of where you come from. I didn't find AU to have any more built-in concepts than D&D3E, just different ones. One assumes alignment and turnable undead and backstabbing rogues and elves and spell-granting gods. The other assumes collective memory and nature spirits and truenames and transformed races andstaff-wielding wizards.

They seem about equally well-defined, IMHO. So then it just becomes a matter of which elements better fit your preconceived notions of high fantasy.

 

[woodelf]

No offense intended, but I find this general argument to be 100% wrong because it presumes that opportunities are liabilities, and restrictions are freedom.

Please identify the "opportunities" that i am mislabeling as liabilities, and the "restrictions" that i have misidentified as freedoms. Because, honestly, i don't even see how you're applying this analogy/analysis to my argument. Seriously.

(1) Consistency suggests a logical means to extend house rules, but does not logically require me to do so. I can choose to apply my house Tumble changes to Bluff if I want to. You make it sound like I am somehow required, which is just not true.

That's not at all what i said. I said that, if you choose not to apply consistency it will (1) be very noticable and (2) might have some significant unintended repurcussions. And, contrariwise, a lack of interaction between distinct subsystems means that, even if you totally screw up a subsystem, it won't affect the others, because they simply don't inter-relate.

(2) Diversity of approaches on a similar back bone gives me opportunities and examples that are actually useful. If I dislike how something scales, I can look at, say, BAB, saves, Tumble, Bluff, Diplomacy, and Jump. While they all have similarities, they are very different in how they play out in detail. If I dislike a particular mechanic, I have usuable examples to choose from that are different, but not so different that I must rewrite everything from scratch.

In other words, lots of variations on the same core. How is that more freedom than lots of variations on half-a-dozen radically different cores? It might not be less (orders of infinity and all that), but how is it more?

(3a) The other side of the coin is that 1e/2e has far too much diversity. Mechanics were so bizarrely different that it was nearly impossible to see how to transfer one manner of mechanics into a different area.

(3b) And work done one place in 1e/2e has no value elsewhere. If you revise, say, the Thief skills, the work you just did has no possible application anywhere else in the entire game. You are prevented from extending your work.

This is, as a generalization, absolutely true.

3e gives freedom to scale changes in the system as you please. A houserule can be purely local -- one small change for one mechanic. Or it can be global. Or anywhere in between. Scaling the extent of change up or down is trivial.

Yes. But not without repurcussions. Let's take a simple example: double all skill point allocations, and raise the max skill ranks to level +20. Suddenly, Tumble becomes a super-powerful skill, because the DC to avoid an AoO is based on the attacker's roll, and you've just given the tumbler a potential 10-15pt advantage. Likewise for any other task where a skill interacts with some other mechanic.

1e/2e gives you the freedom from repurcussions, but it is the freedom from opportunity -- the freedom of a prisoner in a small cell.

Huh? Didn't you just apply a sensible analogy exactly backwards? How does a codified system give you more freedom than a lack of system? I can accept a claim that it gives no less--but how does it give more? More specifically, i fail to see how you can analogize, of the two systems (AD&D2, D&D3E), AD&D to either "freedom from opportunity" or a prison cell. I'm not sure i'd use that analogy for either system, but surely, if anything, the system with greater codification is the one more deserving of that analogy.