Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="jmucchiello" data-source="post: 5740632" data-attributes="member: 813">If you consider these things important, you can just grant to hit, damage and hit point bonuses that make up for the stat changes. It is fairly obvious that you believe in the letter of rules whereas I prefer the rules as guides.It is also apparent that you believe 3e is actually in some manner balanced. I have no such belief. Balance only exists at the table based on what the DM sends against the party. There are games (Ars Magica) where party imbalance is inherent to the game. Absolute balance is an illusion.As for Vancian magic "requiring" bonus spells, 1e started wizards with 1 measly spell, once per day. That was considered balanced. 4e eliminated Vancian spellcasters because they were "Too" powerful. I fail to see how removing 2-5 total spells over the lifetime of a spellcaster (where his prime stat goes from 18 to 28) is inherently "unbalanced"."A little negotiation with my players": You see, you agree. The game is not "balanced". It requires a guiding hand (the DM) to ensure balance. Since the DM must intervene at character creation and at encounter design, (We have 4 rogues and a fighter in the party.... let's see how they handle Wraiths. Bwaahahahahahaa) tweaking the monsters slightly downward to deal with no attributes is no more difficult than normal character creation intervention or encounter design.As for point buy, the last 12 years of 3e/3.5e/4e on these boards, people have talked about running parties with players using suboptimal builds along side characters using uber-optimal builds and the DMs and players both lament the problem of creating challenges that both keep the uber builds from mopping the floor with the competition vs challenging the ubers at the expense of slaughtering the sub-opts. There must be thousands of threads about this topic on this board alone. And the only advice given to people in those situations is beef up the sub-opts or tone down the uber-opts. And all of these situations involve the use of point buy. I saw no problem powers whatsoever. As I said, the only hard issues are things like shadows that actually attack ability scores. You need to rewrite those powers from the ground up. Frankly, I don't use those kinds of monsters often because it is a pain to update a character sheet on the fly when ability scores are modified.As for being blithe, well that is easy when my attitude is "it's no big deal". Because It is no big deal. You see, I don't consider all your little "gotcha's" as things that "break my scheme". They are merely challenges to work around and the work arounds are generally fairly obvious.But as I said above, I suspect your worldview will not permit the loosy-goosy style that I'm advocating. I believe the FEEL of the game is merely implied by the rules. The true FEEL of the game is entirely in the hands of the DM. And a good DM will run a good game whether or not there are ability scores/modifiers.</blockquote>

Verification