Revision Spotlight on Gnomes

[Staffan]

Well, having gnomes getting Bard as a favored class shouldn't surprise anyone. They are rock gnomes, after all.

 

[Li Shenron]

I think it's safe to say that Wizards of the Coast has said bollocks to backwards compatibility.

d8 hit die for rangers, gnome's favored class is bard, spells changing levels, monster CR's changing, monster skill points have to be redone, Weapon Finesse, etc.

They should just call it the fourth edition rules.

I think the one and only backward compatibility problem could be the Ranger HD. I think most existing characters are probably not going to be updated with the revised versions, unless the change is easy and they get something more and nothing less.

As far as I know, few spells are changing level, or at least that's what WotC say they have been trying to minimize (and that's why e.g. Haste was nerfed and not just raised a couple of levels, exactly to keep spell lists unchanged about existing spells).

Monster CRs and other stats are not a critical problem: whenever your DM wants, he'll just stop sending you 3e Orcs and start with 3.5e Orcs. I think anyway 3e statistics will still be fully usable if you want.

I admit that the most painful thing would be to rewrite all the NPCs and monsters unique statistics in published adventures, so if you have e.g. an NPC RangerX/BarbarianY it can be very painful to convert it. Usually published creatures always use AVERAGE Hp, not rolled, so it's probably easy to decrease by 1 hp for every Ranger level, but definitely worse for a PC. I have very much fun writing myself the NPCs from level 1 up, but I know it takes time, and having them ready in the written adventure is an important thing worth the price of the published adventure: to need to change them all by yourself is definitely not nice.