You mainly want to avoid redundancy. You don't need to have jumping rules in three (movement rules, the jump spell, and the ring of jumping) or more places. Having the reference pages, either in the text, in a margin like with the Cypher System books, or as a footnote, would be very helpful, though.
Fate does this & it's great, here's an example from fate core page 102
I think paizo does it by citing page number in the text itself. Here's a random example from starfinder pg21
5e is fond of "see chapter X" so you can flip to the ToC to see if that's useful, pick a spot in chapter x & start flipping in hopes that the thing you were hoping for jumps out
I think the jump silliness is a victim of 5e's "natural language boondoggle" & jump is a great example of using "natural language" to complicate a trivial bit of crunch to reductio ad absurdum levels of complexity. back in 3.5 jump had pretty straightforward rules for how it works when you use the jump skill
You might need to do some simple addition or subtraction to the roll or dc, but the process was fairly simple & straightforward amounting to "how far does this 6 strength pc need to jump?".... but then came 5e
Well that's great that the barbarian & strength fighter probably doesn't need to roll so they can jump over an obstacle... what about everyone else who needs to roll? maybe 190 has that
what the heck?... why is this even mentioned in the index under jump? What about athletics?
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This looks promising!
okay... how? good thing we got rid of "complicated" math like "The DC for the jump is equal to the distance jumped (in feet)." with a possible modifier if you were fast, slow, or did/didn't move the same/similar distance as required in 5e to auto succeed. People complain that 3.5 was bad about needing to cross reference stuff but here we are looking at 4 different pages & still not having a clue how to judge if the 6 strength kobold can make that jump with her athletics roll...
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well how should I decide if this is easy moderate hard or something else? Bob is saying that it should be very easy because the paladin barbarian & fighter didn't even need to roll, but it is a 6 strength kobold i plate armor trying to jump a pit before clearing the difficult terrain leading up to it Maybe if I keep reading there are some examples on the next page...
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wait what the.... that seems to be the default & so far only written rule for jumping, why is it now a variant rule? huh I'm up to six pages & still don't know how it works...
Not so much... I still don't know how jump works either. Alice you pass because I want to move on. edit: That is sadly the case with an awful lot of things obfuscated by 5e's natural language to pointlessly split pc & dm facing sides of a topic while often failing to even do much for clarity or anything.
You mainly want to avoid redundancy. You don't need to have jumping rules in three (movement rules, the jump spell, and the ring of jumping) or more places. Having the reference pages, either in the text, in a margin like with the Cypher System books, or as a footnote, would be very helpful, though.
Fate does this & it's great, here's an example from fate core page 102
I think paizo does it by citing page number in the text itself. Here's a random example from starfinder pg21
5e is fond of "see chapter X" so you can flip to the ToC to see if that's useful, pick a spot in chapter x & start flipping in hopes that the thing you were hoping for jumps out
Yup; both good examples. It's not that the rules in 5e are bad, it's that they're badly organized and don't give enough examples. Having the list of DCs, from super-easy 5 to nigh-impossible 30, is useful, but would be more useful if there was a list of what each DC meant. They should have done that with each each skill. They started doing it with toolkits in Xanie's, but they haven't gone far enough.
Yup; both good examples. It's not that the rules in 5e are bad, it's that they're badly organized and don't give enough examples. Having the list of DCs, from super-easy 5 to nigh-impossible 30, is useful, but would be more useful if there was a list of what each DC meant. They should have done that with each each skill. They started doing it with toolkits in Xanie's, but they haven't gone far enough.
I definitely agree here on DCs. I always felt they were too arbitrary because its difficult to interpret those examples into a real game at times. Besides the Monster Manual which that is and should be its own book, the core rule books could be revised into a single book, or broken up over multiple books. I think a good book would be one which reads as a group of players and DM playing an adventure, including dialogue, maps, examples and maps with rule side bars. basically a complete game walk through.
Maybe it's off topic, but I'm really super excited at what I'm seeing and reading so far about Advanced 5e: I don't want any 6 edition, I REALLY WANT ADVANCED 5E, you guys are really doing a terrific work for me, and you're nailing it right! I'm particularly impressed with the Origins section, just great! The only thing that worries me it's the backward compatibility, since I've already bought several O5e books, and I wouldn't want them to be just... useless now... In any case, keep up with the great and fantastic work you're doing!
3.5phb was published july 2, 2000, 3.5 dmg was published july 1, 2003
You're comparing the 3.0 PH to the 3.5 DMG there. In 3.0 I can't actually find release dates for the other two core books but they were definitely all out by the end of 2000. In 3.5 all three core books were released on the same day - the 3.5 PH was also released July 1, 2003.
