Really good things in theory, but in practice...

[Shades of Green]

Another point about CR/EL: it assumes a "balanced" party (fighter/ranger/paladin, rogue, wizard/sorcerer and cleric/druid), it assumes a focus on combat (rather than stealth) and it assumes a relatively specific gameplay style. Would a thief-heavy campaign, in which the point is to avoid foes (using planning, stealth and and getting into combat is (relatively) bad news, work well with the published CRs/ELs?

 

[Glyfair]

If you're experienced, it is fine.

Are you saying that no guidelines are better for an inexperience player?

CR is a great starting point. I remember encounters from new DMs back in the old days. Very, very often encounters were cakewalks or incredibly deadly. This wasn't because the DM was designing these varied power levels intentionally, they had absolutely no cool. A monster was chosen because it was "cool."

If you aren't an experienced player, it's great to have guidelines and you'll learn how to adjust. If you are an experienced player, then it's great to have guidelines that your experience tells you how to modify.

Sure, there are pitfalls to the CR system for an inexperienced player. However, having no CR system has even larger pitfalls.

 

[DungeonmasterCal]

For me, it's the Attack of Opportunity mechanic. I used to fence in college, and believe me, in real life the AoO as written will get you killed.

 

[heirodule]

I think damage reduction is a really big D&D bugaboo and needs a serious overhaul. Past level 4 even something like DR Everything/Magic, is worthless as everyone packs +1 weapons.

agreed. I wouldn't want a return to the old system, but Monte Cook saliently points out that the magic weapon prices were balanced on the assumption that you needed +2 for DR/+2 and +3 for DR /+3 etc. Now you don't so one magic weapon is as good as another. The prices should be rebalanced, because now buying a +2 weapon is pretty inefficient.

Also the lantern archon isn't as cool.

Other things:

Making magic item save DCs always equal 10+ spell level makes alot of expensive magic items way too easy to save against. They fixed staves, but there's alot of other pointless expensive items out there.

 

[Hussar]

If you're experienced, it is fine. If you don't use random encounters, it's fine. But if you are either new to the game (or even new to the creature) or you make use of CR based random encounters, it can be problematic.

While I don't think I'm a newbie DM, I use CR for random encounters all the time. THere's a sweet site out there that crossreferences monsters by CR and terrain which makes making random encounter tables a snap. Never had a problem with it.

An all rogue campaign is pretty far outfield for core rules to be covering anyway. I'm unsure why people would want rules that covered such corner issues. CR is what it is - a shorthand baseline for picking creatures.

My RGTITBIP idea are the monk and paladin multiclassing restrictions. I can see why they were there to begin with, but, it's become rather painfully clear in hindsight that the restrictions just aren't needed.

 

[Reynard]

Are you saying that no guidelines are better for an inexperience player?

I didn't say that. But I think the CR system without experience will occassionally lead to easy kills and TPKs. Given the wide variety of powers and attacks available to creatures, I think some more attention paid to "If the montser has X ability, and the players lack Y resource, increase the effective CR by N" type advice would be useful is all.

 

[Joshua Randall]

Of course, I also think SR is completely absurd; it's making a saving throw to be able to make a saving throw. If the designers want a monster to be unusually resistant to magic, it should just have unusually good saves.

Hell yeah. Preach it, brother.

 

[Rodrigo Istalindir]

I didn't say that. But I think the CR system without experience will occassionally lead to easy kills and TPKs. Given the wide variety of powers and attacks available to creatures, I think some more attention paid to "If the montser has X ability, and the players lack Y resource, increase the effective CR by N" type advice would be useful is all.

Certainly would. It would also be nice to see a 'skull system' where you could add scale some of the abilities of a critter and get the adjusted CR (eg spell effect: save for none = CR 5, save for half=CR6, no save=CR8).

But I still don't see the CR system as a failure. Given the complexity of the game especially as the odds of having a canonical party decrease, I don't see how it could be much more accurate.

 

[Herzog]

The Classes and Feats

Let me explain.

About classes:

In OD&D, we had classes. Among those where the 'elf', 'dwarf' and 'halfling' class.
You has skills, which you either had or did not have, and with some optional rules you could have weapon mastery. Some classes could 'evolve' (NB: fighter to paladin at lvl 9 was an option)

In AD&D, races and classes where split. Multiclassing became available, as well as specialization for some classes.

In third edition, they introduced a wonderfull system: Feats!
Now you could really customize your character!

Except that you still had to start of with a preset package called 'class'. Additionaly, each class is accompanied by some background information, which is nice to read the first time, but especially when the described ideas do not fit your intended campaign, is bothersome (because you have to try to ignore it) to say the least.

The rules mention 'creating your own classes', but nowhere (that I have found) is a list of approximately how valuable some of the class-only abilities are (such as turn-undead, wild-shape, etc.)

I also wanted to write something about feats, (because I have the feeling they have taken some of the 'spontaneous actions' out of my roleplay) but I can't get a good example...

Herzog

 

[Particle_Man]

I always want to use a house rule where every "+" on a weapon only overcomes 5 pints of DR/magic.

Yoink!

Oh, and I will add: Grapple rules. I think it is a great idea in theory, and yes if one likes realism size should make a huge difference, but the end result is that a grappling monster is a fun-killer unless the party has a "get out of grapple free card" since against the big boys a PC *will* lose the grapple check, almost all of the time. And fun-killers are not good. Here I would eliminate realistic concerns (specifically, size modifiers) to make the grapple checks winnable by PCs and therefore more fun for them.