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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Doctor Proctor" data-source="post: 5736117" data-attributes="member: 78547"><a href="http://www.wizards.com/dnd/Article.aspx?x=dnd/4ll/20111122" target="_blank">Dungeons & Dragons Roleplaying Game Official Home Page - Article (A Different Way to Slice the Pie)</a>  This seems like a bad idea... Sure, it sounds simple in practice "Oh, just put the rule where it's needed, and it leads to less rules in the rules section!", but the problem is that things like OA's interact with multiple things. In the PHB, for example, you would need to explain it in several different places according to his thinking. <ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">The Fighter entry for Combat Superiority would need an explanation of OA's, since it gives a buff to them</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">The movement rules would need an explanation when it comes to moving out of a square adjacent to an enemy</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Ranged attack rules would need a reference since those provoke OA's when adjacent</li> </ol>Or with Damage Resistance, you would need to explain that rule on every entry for every Dragon, since they all have resistances to various element types.  This idea is a little bit better, but still has some issues. You could do something like, say, introduce OA's at level 3. But what about when the players are level 2 (pre-OA) and have to fight level 3 monsters (theoretically post-OA here)? This would be trivially easy to fit into the XP budget, even to keep at an N+0 level encounter. So do the monsters not get OA's because the PC's are at level 2? If so, what happens when they reach level 3? Do the same monsters suddenly learn the ability to use OA's, even though their level hasn't changed at all? Another problem arises with the scenario where the new player and experienced player are sitting down together and starting from level 1. I played 2e, but skipped over 3e before eventually coming back to D&D almost 10 years later for 4e. Most of the group I was playing with all played 3e (in one form or another). This led to a lot of confusion at the table though, as they were constantly trying to do things according to 3e rules at first, even though some of those things had completely changed in 4e. It had been so long since I had played that it was easier for me to forget the old 2e knowledge and learn the new system, but for them it was much harder because some of them were even in 3e campaigns concurrent with our 4e campaign! You will run into the same problem with level based complexity. When the level 5 player rolls up a level 1 to start playing a new game, he might starting talking about "shifts" and "OA's", even though they haven't been introduced yet (since a shift is really designed to avoid OA's, there's not much reason to introduce them earlier). Not only would he need to "forget" his advanced knowledge, but it then might confuse new players or DM's because he's talking about things that aren't listed in the low level handbooks at all! What are other people's thoughts on this column? Am I wrong, and Monte is up to something great, or is this just another pie in the sky column that doesn't really go anywhere?</blockquote>

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