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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6078419" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 306: April 2003part 2/9Dungeon has gone monthly! That'll please a lot of people. It may still be Dragon's little brother, but I guess it has caught up over the years, especially now it's got the D20 stuff in it as well. Up on a soapbox: Another interesting facet of old school play uncovered here. One reason for having large numbers of hirelings in your party is to get an edge in the action economy. Many monsters had multiple attacks per round, but very few PC's did (until you could cast Haste, which was enormously game-changing if you didn't enforce the aging penalty. ) Meanwhile AC did not consistently scale with HD. If you got enough of them in, you could take down even really powerful monsters (as long as they didn't require magic weapons to hit or something) before they got a chance to take many actions by unleashing a high intensity bombardment of missile weapons. This is definitely something that's consistent with my experience, where each player often had multiple characters, and they did not hesitate to buff up and get into tactical position before a fight so they could make it as short and brutal as possible for the other side. So really, this shows exactly why they tried to define the parameters of a fair challenge more tightly in later editions, and how keeping that finely tuned balance becomes increasingly difficult and tactics dependent as the party and number of enemies increases. At some point the players may well get unlucky and be killed by an enemy that on paper is way weaker than them. Perfect balance is an impossibility in an open ended game. All you can do is try your best. House rules: Here's one house rule that they did make standard come 3.5. Druids getting to swap out spells for Summon Nature's ally, just as Clerics can swap them out for healing (and sometimes their other domains if they take the right feat) As if they weren't enough of a swiss army knife with just their own shapeshifting powers. Now the only thing keeping them from having access to a full army (including infantry, cavalry, navy and air force) any time they want at higher level is the fact that they'll also nerf the duration to 1 round/level. And I don't find that very satisfying as it hurts the noncombat applications of summoning far more than it does the combat ones, so it doesn't even solve the problem it's intended too. So this is a house rule that seems reasonable in isolation, but when you consider that it's being applied to what is already the most powerful and flexible class overall, it just looks like favouritism. If people STILL aren't playing them after all this, it's purely their own loss. I disapprove quite strongly of this, just as I disapproved of clerics getting spontaneous healing in the first place. Betraying your evil nature: After the gross-out goofiness of issue 300, it's a real relief to see them try and tackle the question of temptation and redemption in a mature manner. In D&D, there are both creatures that tend towards evil because of their biology, and ones that are innately evil by cosmic design. The first can choose good, but will always find it a battle dealing with their instincts or appetites, while the second can only change their morality by fundamentally altering their being, which may require external intervention (not always voluntary or consensual) to pull off successfully. Is it right to transform a demon's fundamental selfhood so they have a chance to choose good, particularly if they got that way by choosing chaos and evil in their mortal life anyway? (I'll take better than most of the alternatives for 12 please Bob) So far, so good. Of course this being 3e, they then have to try and represent this mechanically, with a system for temptation and redemption based on giving moral weight to each individual act and accumulating points when you perform them. Which I don't inherently object too, but it's so hard to get systems like these to feel right and not be easily broken by rules lawyer players. Still, even if I can't call the system great, it does look more mechanically robust when applied strictly than nWoD morality (not that that's a hard bar to exceed, unfortunately) and the main way to break it is to buff your wisdom so high that you can justify anything to yourself by taking the larger-scale view. Oh well. At least they gave this a proper try, instead of farting on the page and calling it maturity. That means someone can take the ideas and refine them further. Maybe some day they'll come up with a morality system that satisfies most people.</blockquote>

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