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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 4975367" data-attributes="member: 82106">I'm going to have to cast my vote with KD as far as ability score boosts. I think it was basically a poor idea. The one thing it does is give the PCs a bit more of a feel of becoming far more powerful than a normal person, but I don't think it does a lot of that either. Basically when everyone has scores in the high 20's by end game they just don't feel all that special. Maybe a boost to 2 stats at 11th and 21st and a feat that let you boost one stat 1 point 1 time. That would still give the PCs a feeling of getting stronger, let you tweak your stat allocation a bit as you progress and yet not really impact the math of the game much since the best a character could do is toss on 3 extra points over 30 levels to one stat and assuming he started with an odd score that's worth a +2 to his ability mod in one stat and at most +1 to two others if they were odd scores as well.I don't think the issue with NAD progression is really a "flaw" in the design of the game though. I think the idea was to insure that every character had a single weak point they would have to work on and take into account. If the player really wants to focus on evening up their NADs they CAN do so either with clever score allocation, feats, or items. They'll lose out a bit somewhere else, but there should be SOME room in the system for trade offs. If the math was some sort of perfect inalterable progression then every character would be a total stat clone of every other character by definition. Same with monsters. Exactly what the bonus progressions would be in some idealized version of the system is hard to say. They could have taken a number of different approaches. Monsters could have progressed at +1/2 levels like PCs for example. I kind of think this might have been nicer as it means each monster is more useful over a wider range of levels and more defined by its damage output and other characteristics vs mainly by its defenses and to-hit progression. Personally I really seriously doubt there will ever be a 4.5. At least not for many years to come. The 4e rules system is pretty tightly integrated and tweaking math or cleaning up the wording and terminology of the PHB (aweful that way, can't they hire some actual game designers) would basically mean editing and reissuing EVERY single other book in the 4e lineup. The changes would be more than just superficial too. Items, powers, classes, etc would need some rebalancing and significant playtest, etc. Frankly 90% of the people playing 4e could probably care less anyway. The system works and a better tuned version would basically not give them anything really new. The comparison to 3e -> 3.5e isn't really apt. 3e didn't have minor issues with a few numbers. It was an unworkable system that could only really be played at most levels with massive house ruling and extensive patches. It HAD to be fixed because it was pretty much impossible to write commercial adventures for it since you either couldn't play it as written or if you did the power levels of PCs was so all over the map that encounter CR was a meaningless number. 4e is a totally different case. Its 10x better structured than 3e was and the things people are complaining about are like a mouse compared to the elephant of 3.x problems.</blockquote>

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