Revised DR

[Ridley's Cohort]

I, for one, like, no, love the ideas for the new DR.

The 3.0 DR was a good idea, but as implemented, it was lame. There is no monster with DR that cannot be trivially bypassed by GMW from a spellcaster of level appropriate to combatting the beastie. The typical ??/+3 monster is CR ~15 or better. There are a few ??/+2 critters that might catch a low to mid level party off guard, but that is about it.

 

[Illuminae]

OH MY GOD ! Hong has replied to my post!
Does it mean now that I can be your friend and pimp slap you around?!?!?!?!?



Illuminae "hong´s jokes have fans" Ooi

 

[bret]

Agreed. And, I know they aren't perfect. They are trying though. And I would feel safer if they had done some more public from the start. However, according to them the play testing staff never truly disbanded and has been continuing ever since inception. Perhaps we'll here more in the months to come. I'm willing to give benefit of a doubt for the moment.

This would be the same 'original playtesting staff' that never noticed problems with Harm or Heal?

There are many styles of games. If the styles of the various play testers are too close to each other, they are going to miss the same areas. This is especially true if there isn't much time to try out the rules changes. It takes time to develope an effective strategy with some of the character classes, and in my opinion a numerical analysis just isn't going to do it.

I don't care for the DR/material change. I don't think it is needed and is too risky a change. I also don't think qualifies as backward compatible since I believe it would have a significant effect on how players chose equipment and can turn battles into a binary system. Either you've got weapons made from the right material, in which case it is a cake walk, or you don't and it results in a TPK.


Talking to a few of my friends, I convinced them that it wouldn't add to their game either. It was really quite simple.

Assume you use special materials.

Now, you are a fighter. How do you deal with this?

Answer: The golf bag of weaponry. An extradimensional space to store weapons of the various flavors.

As a GM, is that what you want your characters to do?

The answer was no, that wasn't an improvement in the game style.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

I like the flavor of this new rule, but I hate the new bookeeping it will cause - and probably even destroy some parts of the backward compatibilty - assume you are playing a Bard that used Greater Magic Weapon on his arrows to penetrate Damage Reduction. He can no longer do this - but he could just cast the 1st level spell "transmute arrow" - unfortunately, he doesn`t learn any more 1st level spells, so what can I do now?

But consider this:
We know that creating magic items needs some kind of base materials, which are quite expensive (a holy water flask has how many silver powder in it?) - why just assume that a enhanced magical sword consists of special materials each of them effecting a certain array of damage reduction types ...

So, there is the flavour in the old system, hidden far behind the rules...

On the other hand:
If the Damage Reduction values go down, this might compensate for something - still, a smaller creautre or a two weapon guy is severaly penalized against this type of monster...

Mustrum Ridcully

 

[hong]

My point was, and you provided the numbers, that a first level fighter can with only a little luck damage a pit fiend with a normal weapon. I never claimed that he would live past the first round. If the rule change is to make things make more sense (Your definition of sense may vary) this does not from my perspective. A pit fiend should be shrugging off any damage that a level 1 fighter can do.

As said before, if the pit fiend has DR 15/holywhatnot, that 1st level fighter will be lucky to do two points of damage to it, even with Power Attack. I don't know about you, but taking two points when you have 250+ pretty much fits the definition of "shrugging it off" to me.

 

[FireLance]

Personally, I like what I've seen of the new DR rules.

[rant]

Yes, the change in rules will make some classes or playing styles less effective. However, before you starting moaning about how two-weapon fighters/arcane archers/monks/yada/yada/yada are going to get sc ed by the new rules, consider the following:

How often do you fight DR creatures? One in twenty encounters? One in ten? One in five? Just because you have to expend a bit more effort to overcome a small subset of the creatures you meet, it's the end of the world?

Your character is now less effective in certain encounters. Somebody else, possibly the hard-hitting barbarian or the flame-casting wizard, gets to shine instead. Does your character really need to hog the limelight all the time?

Your DM wants to throw your party an interesting challenge, to change the pace of the adventure from the usual meet-the-monster-hack-slice-dice-puree to one of researching or obtaining something that can damage it significantly. It would be sad if his plans can be totally derailed by a 3rd level spell cast at 15th caster level.

Ultimately, it's how you want to play the game. If you don't like the new DR rules, rule 0 it or make Anymaterial weapons or transmute material spells suddenly a lot more common in your campaign.

If some of your gaming group likes the change and some don't, it looks like you have playing style conflict. And that's something that can be only partly blamed on the rule changes.

[/rant]

Shutting up now.

 

[hong]

OH MY GOD ! Hong has replied to my post!
Does it mean now that I can be your friend and pimp slap you around?!?!?!?!?

Well, everyone else beats me with sticks, what's one more?

/me hands Illuminae a stick

 

[Darklone]

Prefer chains, hong ?

 

[Petrosian]

Well, while the new DR is different than the old DR, its not IMo any better.

its different in that now magic weapons are less beneficial than they were, but its just going to encourage carrying around a lot of different weapons ala the porcupine of weapons fighter we used to laugh about in 1e. With Heward's haversacks common enough, this is not a big deal. With GMW providing the magic bonuses, this is no big deal.

My biggest gripe with it is simple... it leaves spells untouched. A +3 sword may not do well against skeletons but a magic missile or ray of frost does just fine.

All in all, i think DR would be better served as some form of rapid healing or regeneration with specific "does not work againsts" defined for it.

If they wanted to add flavor, they seem to have failed and instead added bookkeeping and paperwork

**************

In conjunction with the new rule, i would expect to see the following...

a random materials roll for magic items/weapons to reflect the frequency of silver weapons being made and cold iron weapons being made. Should also be in the mundane weapons lists.

A suite of spells akin to GMW that alter the materials of the weapons.

 

[Ferox4]

I've remaind open to the proposed changes to Haste and Harm, but I just don't see the need to address DR.

I hear people saying that GMW overcomes the DR thing too easily - well, isn't that what the spell is good for? Perhaps the problem is GMW and not DR. What if instead of 1 enhancement per 3/levels it was bumped to 1 every 4 levels? Seems a bit simpler to me. Then the 12th level Cleric is making +3 instead of +4 weapons, and the 15th level Cleric is still making +3 weapons instead of +5 weapons. That's a big difference.