Rule of Three: 20/3/12

[Boarstorm]

I'm honestly surprised at the amount of sky-is-falling in the early pages of this thread. The game Rodney describes sounds to me like exactly what I've always wanted to play.

 

[Gadget]

Love it or hate it, ROT continues to be the best and most informative effort on Wotc's part to connect with the masses.

I'm actually quite interested in the whole "bounded accuracy" thing. I sounds like a good system at first blush. Things like average damage and a note or two could help with the minion thing. Alignments - blach. I can't say I'm surprised, but I'm not thrilled by the return of what I consider to be D&D's earliest and most egregious example of the 'filling in the symmetry matrix' syndrome. It does sound like they are limiting it more though. I'll wait and see with the fighter manoeuvre thing. I don't really want a return to 3e's multi-attack though.

 

[Frostmarrow]

Good or Evil is what you are. Lawful or Chaotic is what you think the world is; Good or Evil.

Unaligned is for plants and bugs.

Your ethics is what you think the moral of the world is. Lawful people think the world is basically good. Chaotic people thinks the world is evil at heart. Lawful Evil thinks the world is good and easy taking advantage of. Chaotic Good thinks the world is evil and must he kept at armslength. Lawful Good thinks the world is good and must be protected. Chaotic Evil thinks the world is evil and must be dominated or destroyed.

 

[El Mahdi]

Originally Posted by from the article
Since AC and attack bonuses aren't automatically scaling up (. . .)

Sounds like they've set this one in stone.

I'm very intrigued to see how this works in the system and in play. I'm seriously itching to look at it now. I'm not sure if this is good or bad until I see how it plays out...how character progression works.

As an aside, this is a definite point towards the validity of that Something Awful Leak. The leak is obviously based on a real, though likely very early, version of the rules (as the leak says also), though heavily coloured with personal bias, but it seems real nonetheless.

 

[Frostmarrow]

I'm very intrigued to see how this works in the system and in play. I'm seriously itching to look at it now. I'm not sure if this is good or bad until I see how it plays out...how character progression works.

As an aside, this is a definite point towards the validity of that Something Awful Leak. The leak is obviously based on a real, though likely very early, version of the rules (as the leak says also), though heavily coloured with personal bias, but it seems real nonetheless.

I think it's safe to say a longsword will do 1d8 damage. We can assume Str adds to this. Anything above 10 adds 1. It seems level is also added. Now, if there is going to be any difference between first and sixth level (3 hits to 1) something else must be added. I'm thinking you get another weapon die per five levels. So a sixth level character will do 2d8+6 plus bonus. To this we add 1dX depending on class when you crit, according to the leak.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I'm not advocating True Neutrality as the absence of a morality. I'm advocating True Neutrality as the philosophy that all of the other philosophies are important, and that it is therefore important to maintain balance between them.

Unaligned would then be your absence of a defining moral code.

Sure, I'm just pointing out that this distinction is very philosophically fuzzy.

Someone who would neither run into a burning building to save orphaned children (good), nor ensure his inheritance by ushering his mother to an early grave (evil). Someone who neither considers individual laws very important (lawful), nor considers them shackles upon the true right that is freedom (chaos). Also someone who does not find the esoteric task of maintaining the balance between these philosophies to be appealing.

All those sentences could be describing Neutral just as well as they could be describing Unaligned.

If I have a character who will not risk his life to save others, but also not do horrible things to other people, who does not believe the world is entirely logical, nor that it is entirely unpredictable, and doesn't care about balance...I could be either Neutral or Unaligned, and have the same belief system.

 

[KesselZero]

Admittedly, running a TN PC would be very difficult. It's more an NPC alignment. But there are NPCs suited to that alignment. I can't think of an example at the moment, but literature is rife with figures who only act to maintain balance between factions (usually good and evil).

The example that springs to mind is the Checkered Knight from Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion stuff, a guy who occasionally pops in to maintain the balance between Law and Chaos (and symbolically wears black-and-white checkered armor). Moorcock's protagonists tend to fight for one or the other, and the Checkered Knight is always a mysterious NPC.

Given that Moorcock was an Appendix N influence, and IIRC the Checkered Knight appears in the Hawkmoon books that are specifically called out by Gygax, this may be a clue to the original intent of "neutral" in D&D, especially since Moorcock was the guy who popularized the law-chaos axis, using it exclusively in place of good and evil. Law and Chaos could both be "good" or "evil" depending on the situation and conflict at hand, which may also have influenced the nine-point grid of D&D-- the classic example of Lawful Evil being a fascist society in which individuality is brutally repressed but the trains run on time. In Moorcock this would just be an expression of Law, which hopefully some brave protagonist dedicated to Chaos would overthrow!

 

[Plane Sailing]

As for the Rogue and Fighter combat manevuers, that actually sounded freaking awesome. Customize multiple attacks with different manevours to build unique combos.

I am nervous about most of things being said about fighters. Disarming, sundering, bull rushing, tripping and grappling are mundane everyday things any character can do with enough strength. I like to see some flashy and stunning tricks and combinations: basically many of the Fourth Edition powers were tricks that allowed the Fighter to do more than one thing with a single action. The Rule of Three here seems to be suggesting that the Fighter can do the three actions of hit, trip and push in one efficient action, but if it just means use your move and standard and minor action, that is three actions spent.

What I would love to see is something like the 'Master of Arms' supplement from Second World Simulations, which came out early in 3e.

It essentially used combinations of base and secondary (or even tertiary) attacks to pull off some excellent manoeuvres - and it provided the maths to back them up and help you develop your own if you wanted to.

e.g. Axe Beheading (battleax, greataxe, waraxe). Sacrifice the first attack to increase your base critical rate to 18-20 with the axe (i.e. you take only your secondary attack).

e.g. Blinding Slash (slashing weapon). Two step combination, you first make a targeting attack against the victims normal AC which doesn't do any damage. if the targeting succeeds you then follow with another normal attack which blinds the target for 1d6 rounds if Fort save failed.

e.g. Double Spin (bladed polearm: glaive, guisarme, halberd). You spin the polearm high on the first blow and follow up low at the legs. You take a -2 to your first attack in the sequence but +3 to hit on the second attack in the sequence.

The whole book has got lots more examples - I think it would be a great way of providing a huge, flexible range of martial manoeuvres (it also includes cloak fighting, three section staff fighting, immovable rod fighting and others!)

As you can tell... I'm a fan.

Cheers

 

[GM Dave]

Minions
...

Also, someone mentioned that with flat math, 100 level 1 orcs could kill a level 20 character. I fail to see this as a bad thing: if I want to play a supers game, Evil Hat just came out with an awesome system, thanks. If one man is going up against 100 orcs... yes, he'll eventually die. Because that makes a hell of a lot more sense than him not dying. The amazing and badass nature of that scenario comes from the fact that the guy's still alive after the first bloody round. You'll note that even in high fantasy, most "One man holds off an entire army" scenarios don't usually end well for the one man...

What do you mean one man holds off an entire scenarios don't end well.

Jet Li in Hero begs to differ... oh right ... that didn't end well.

Step along, nothing to see here.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

AC and attack beeing no strict function of level is going back to ADnD

You may say: the fighter is gaining a better thac0. Yes, right... but you still find monsters with AC above 0 at high levels. His damage on the other hand does not go up so much. Instead he gets more attacks that hit more often. HP for monsters don´t go up that much. A troll just has 30-40 hp. A few solid hits will bring them down reasonably fast.
I didn´t do the math... but my guess is, that monster defenses on average may go up by 1/3 per level. Even with a bard, you notice an increase in accuracy with your measly thac0 -1/2 level.

So as I said: "attacks and defenses not automatically go up per level" could as well mean: some classes have increasing attack bonuses, but it may only go up at some occasions and it is not assumed in math, so it is a real increase.