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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Staffan" data-source="post: 9163247" data-attributes="member: 907">I think the 3.5 DR rules were more faithful to the original idea behind DR in the first place.In AD&D, many monsters (particularly planar ones) were outright immune to weapons below a certain plus. If you were fighting a gargoyle without a +1 or better weapon, you were SOL. But one of the mantras behind 3e was not to provide hard limits on things (that's also why prestige classes had requirements along the lines of "can cast 3rd level spells" or "Base Attack Bonus +6" rather than "Level 5 wizard" or "Level 6 fighter), so they wanted to you could fight a monster with the wrong weapon, but you'd be at a pretty big disadvantage. But then they made the actual DR values so ridiculously high that the monsters might as well be immune (e.g. 50/+3). But since a magic weapon with enough of an enhancement bonus would suffice to hit anything, you were assumed to have the requisite weapon, making DR more of a flavor thing as well as a shield against hordes of less-powerful beings (In 5e, an army of archers is a serious threat to a dragon, but a 3.0 dragon with DR 10/+1 can basically shrug off their attacks while still being threatened by PCs).3.5 changed it so that piercing DR became more difficult – if something had DR 10/good, you'd probably drop 10 points off most attacks. It was assumed to be an actual defense, not just a "You must be this tall to fight this monster". But at the same time, values dropped drastically so they were almost always in the 5-15 range. This was a pretty cool idea, but lead to people trying to find ways around it – either by temporary solutions like silversheen or various spells, or by having multiple weapons. I personally liked the multi-weapon idea, but I've always been fairly partial to the "cunning warrior" archetype, where a person who lives by the sword would make sure to know what they're in for and prepare accordingly. I recognize that that's not something everyone's into.Giving the fighter more feats wouldn't help, except that they'd be able to "finish" their builds sooner. The fighter's problem is that they do not get high-level abilities.For example, take the "brute" archetype. Once you have Weapon Focus, Power Attack, Cleave, Improved Overrun, Improved Bull Rush, Great Cleave, and Weapon Specialization you're done. That's 6th level. You could add in Improved Sunder too if you're feeling spicy and you like to reduce the amount of treasure you're getting. So what do you do at 8th level? Start work on the ranged feat tree instead with Point-blank shot? That's like telling the 7th level wizard that they're not getting 4th level spells, they have to choose more 1st level spells instead.I suspect that's a big part of what makes E6 work – it hides the fact that martial characters (especially fighters) don't gain anything new and exciting after 6th level, by making sure no-one does.</blockquote>

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