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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tequila Sunrise" data-source="post: 4022279" data-attributes="member: 40398">I'm in a game now where the Big Six effectively don't exist. The DM doesn't have any rule saying as much, but he just doesn't include such items in loot, doesn't have magic shoppes and encourages us to take other types of items. We're 6th/7th level at the moment and the campaign is...tough to put it mildly. While this is in part due to his penchant for throwing very creative and powerful foes at us, the game would be better IMO with the Big Six or something to replace them. Without those bonuses that characters of a given level are assumed to have, characters do become less powerful--especially in the defense department. Without AC boosters, AC mostly remains static from level 1 onwards which means that offense becomes much more effective and appealing to everyone. Without cloaks of resistance and stat boosters, save bonuses advance much slower than DCs so casters become even more powerful. If this campaign ever gets to the mid-high levels it will quickly become a 'first initiative, first kill' scenario.Maybe you like this play style, as it is very realistic, but I prefer to keep or replace the Big Six with something in games that I DM. I personally don't like action points because they infer that the PCs are somehow inherently better than NPCs and because they're yet another resource to keep track of and because I just don't like finite resources. I think using APs to replace the Big Six wouldn't work very well--either the PCs wouldn't have enough so they'd be able to perform spectacularly once in a while and suck the rest of the time, or they'd have too many and the game would be bogged down in constant d6s. I also don't like magic shoppes or fine tuning every monster I set my PCs against so they can handle them, so my solution to this problem is <a href="http://lucasbuchanan.com/Bonus%20Points" target="_blank">Bonus Points.</a> Bonus Points is a simple system that allows each character to improve their characters by two bonuses each level, without the option of pouring all their points into one bonus. Thus, I am left free to drop whatever oddball items into the PCs hands as I want without fear that they'll be crushed by the next monster that comes along. The only complication this causes is that it makes DR/magic obsolete, but frankly it was already 95% obsolete anyway. I have a simple fix to this, which I call "3.25 Damage Reduction."Hope that helps,TS</blockquote>

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