Rules in 3.5 that need fixing and what you'd do to fix it.

[JVisgaitis]

For the sake of making the game easier what do you think needs to be fixed? Also, to make this unlike all the other threads out there, how would you fix it?

I'll start. Keeping track of class and cross-class skills is a nightmare. I would do away with cross-class skills altogether. To ensure that flavor is kept with the different classes, I would create additional abilities that played off of skills that were integral to that class. I'd also remove untrained skills and say that anyone can try and use any skill with some tweaks to the skills themselves to faciliate this.

 

[thedungeondelver]

I'd keep the skill mechanic but trim skills down. Way, way down. I'd probably go with skill bundles, like in LA.

Come to think on it if I wind up running a d20 D&D game again that's probably exactly what I'll do.

Edit: I'd call them thieves again in the RAW.

 

[Rothe]

I'd trim classes down to very, very few (maybe 5 or 6) and make character differentiation based on feats and skills. Group the skills and feats under classes, a skill or feat not in your class costs more to take but you can still take it. No prestige classes, but maybe prestige feats and skills.

 

[WayneLigon]

I would mix a few things from True20 and Arcana Unearthed, and produce a book about the size of the Mutants and Masterminds book. The core rules would be one book, selling (because I'm WoTC/Hasbro and can get away with this) for about $15.00.

I would have the six attributes, but only use modifiers. As in, you wouldn't have a strength of 12, you'd have a strength of +1.

I would have classes, but only three: Fighter, Wizard, Expert. The fighter does the best fighting. The Wizard casts spells. The Expert is the Skills Guy. Examples would be given about how to create the roles I want by mixing classes and feats. A Ranger, for example, might be Expert, Expert, Fighter, Wizard, Expert, Fighter, Wizard for the first seven levels. You have decent fighting and excellent skills for your first couple levels, get a lot better at fighting, and then at 4rth you get spells just like now. If you wanted some of your woodsy magic earlier than you currently get now, then just take a level of Wizard sooner. Don't like the idea of a Ranger casting spells? Never give him a wizard level!

This takes care of having to put in base classes and prestige classes. Gone.

You'd get a Feat every level, so you could both further customize and fill needed roles and also give you some bennie every level that might not be related to combat. There might be another class of Feats (Prestige feats?!) that would grant broader abilities and could only be taken rarely, like every five levels.

A lot of your supernatural characteristics would be Feats or Prestige Feats. It's not uncommon in fantasy novels for a character to have one really cool ability that does one or a small amount of things and that's that. These supernatural feats would be for doing things like that.

We could probably still have some limited number of spells and spell slot-like things if we make spell levels into feats. Wizards would be able to buy spell levels with certain prerequisites (Feat: Level Three Spells - Prerequsite: Level One spells, Int +3).

Or we do away with spells altogether and go with spell-like abilities bought as feats. Arcane Blast (do 1d6 per character level) takes care of probably 50% of the damage spells in D&D as it stands now. Being able to add templates to that with feats or by other means takes care of proabbly 40% of the rest.

Each spell or power is about a paragraph in length. If you can't describe an effect in that amount of space, you're probably over reaching or getting too wordy. Either way, it's brief and unambiguous.

In any case, no way is the spell section as big as it is now. That's part of the goal. The fact that half the PHB is for spells, something that only 1/3 of the character types use, is a shame. It's even more of a shame that we still have such huge amounts of redundancy and duplication. We have Burning Hands, Scorching Ray, Fireball, Fire Trap, Fire Shield, Wall of Fire, etc etc etc. That should be one spell: Manipulate Fire, that gets better as you level or put more feats into it, or whatever.

Monsters. The MM can be pared down to maybe 50 creatures we need for a basic book, with again the magic of templates and changing out feats to show the GM how to use these basic monsters to create newer ones.

Treasure. Maybe three to four pages devoted to this. Show examples of how to make magical treasures, then give a page or two of examples. The fact that half the DMG is magical stuff is a crying shame.

 

[FireLance]

I'll start. Keeping track of class and cross-class skills is a nightmare. I would do away with cross-class skills altogether. To ensure that flavor is kept with the different classes, I would create additional abilities that played off of skills that were integral to that class. I'd also remove untrained skills and say that anyone can try and use any skill with some tweaks to the skills themselves to faciliate this.

One idea that I've been toying around with is to give all classes 2 "class ranks" in all their class skills at 1st level. For every 5 levels in a class, the number of "class ranks" in each class skill increases by 1, to 3 at 5th level, 4 at 10th level, 5 at 15th level, and 6 at 20th level.

At the same time, characters only get the normal number of skill points at 1st character level, and not four times the amount. The old limits of double cost and half maximum ranks for cross-class skills no longer apply. Skill ranks from skill points are capped at character level (this may mean some tweaking of PrC and feat pre-requisites), but stack with "class ranks", and one rank in any skill only costs one skill point.

For multi-classed characters, levels of classes that have the same skill as a class skill stack to determine the number of "class ranks" for that skill.

Under this system, the difference between class skills and cross-class skills becomes a matter of the number of "class ranks", and the maximum difference (assuming an equal number of skill ranks) is 6 - still an advantage for opposed checks, but not an overwhelming one. This system also better portrays a multiclassed character's trade-off between breadth and depth - he gets "class ranks" in more skills, but fewer "class ranks" in most of them.

 

[Coplen]

I'd drop prestige classes, drop cross class skills, drop feats. I'd pretty much drop most of the meat of the game.

 

[Celebrim]

I thought this was rules that actually needed fixing? The skill system is not broken, or at least not broken enough that any of the above fixes and tweaks could be called anything but personal preference.

Here's my top 10 + 1 bonus

1) Barbarian needs too lose its alignment restriction and its culture and setting specific flavor, to become the 'Fanatic'.
2) Paladin needs to lose its alignment restriction become a 'Champion' class similar to Book of the Righteous's 'Holy Warrior'.
3) The craft skill mechanic is not in the slightest logical as written, producing utterly random results. A more detailed system needs to be developed.
4) The rules for damaging objects are underwritten as they are (alot of hand waving) and produce highly illogical results in the hands of all but an experienced DM. Resistances of objects to particular forms of attack should be explicitly outlined, and hardnesses should scale up with thickness just as hitpoints do (this explains for example why a tank's armor can be impervious to any number of .308 bullets, why you can break a thin wooden board with one hit of your bare hands but a thicker one will beat your hands bloody long before it would break, and why six inch thick glass can take a heavy hit without even cracking).
5) The profession skill is vastly underdescribed and needs at least several pages of fleshing out explaining what it does plus a side bar on profession status that explains the optional mechanics which allow (for example) stewards, lawyers, engineers and physicians to generally make more than beggars, porters, chambermaids, and stevedoers.
6) The 3.5 weapon sized rules are semi-realistic for no good purpose, and need to go back to the more abstract 3.0 rules (which I figure most people use anyway).
7) All classes need access to the profession skill, as its potentially the broadest skill in the game but unlikely to be overpowering and its very difficult to explain how a fighter has acess to ride but not for example profession (boater). (I'm semi-inclined to give all the classes with 2 skill points per level, 3 per level, but I'm afraid of making Int even more of dump stat in cleric and fighter, and in any event thats a tweak and not a fix. The 2 skill points/level rules work fine and are logical as is.)
8) The rules as written prevent a running player from tackling another one unless the tackling player has 'improved overrun'. I'm pretty sure I don't have the 'improved overrun' feat, but I can tackle an opponent while running. This is a major oversite which has implications fairly often in chase sequences.
9) The rules for long duration movement are very rough and far from ideal. Persumably extended running and extended hustling should require saving throws just like a forced march. The incorporation of a refined version of the 'Hot Pursuit' rules into the core rules would also be a major and important addition, though technically that is an extension and not a fix.
10) For versimiltude, animal intelligences should be allowed to range higher to reflect the true range of animal ability (for example, lizard: 1, mouse: 2, cat: 3, dog: 4, ape: 5). All most animals are more skillful than presented, and compared to humans have certain advantages do to differences in body plan not represented in the rules. For example, all dogs should have Endurance and Run as bonus feats (the rules as written allow many humans to run faster than dogs, when in fact humans barely can keep up with even tiny dogs).

11) Realisticly, the constitution of most things in the game is too high, especially for small or smaller creatures. Reading the rules one gets the impression that Humans are one of the least healthy and enduring creatures in existence, rather than in fact one of the most (cats for example have pretty fragile constitutions). Still I don't count this among my 10 real fixes, because realism is not a particularly good justification on its own and achieving a target number of hit points for a particular CR is probably a better reason than realism.

In addition to those fixes, I'd say the most glaring deficiency in the rules is the absence of a general broad price list that makes any kind of economic sense whatsoever (beyond building a character at 1st level).

My number one tweak is that there are a number of divinations, detect evil, detect lie, know alignment and so forth which are too gross in thier application and need rules for resisting them through the mundane means and not just obscure magic. Simply put, you ought to be able to bluff your way out of them and fake your alignment in the same sort of fashion alignment is faked in Use Magic Device. So for example, rather than detecting a lie outright, discern lies might give you a +20 bonus to sense motive, and detect evil might require one or more opposed checks of some sort if the source is a sentient being.

 

[Arashi Ravenblade]

Heres the best thing about 3.5e you can do all those things and you dont even need a new edition to do it or some "fix". Dont like all the skills, plenty of other d20 games use simple skill lists. Dont like the Classes? Change them. It's that simple.
Personally i like the game the way it is.

If you want something done your way you might as well do it yourself.

 

[FireLance]

I thought this was rules that actually needed fixing?

No, this is changes to rules for the sake of making the game easier.

So, adding more rules, and increasing the level of complexity and detail of the rules probably wasn't what the OP had in mind.

 

[Celebrim]

No, this is changes to rules for the sake of making the game easier.

So, adding more rules, and increasing the level of complexity and detail of the rules probably wasn't what the OP had in mind.

But it would make the game easier for me!!!

The more hand waves that the rules do and the more they rely on DM judgement, the harder the DM has to work to get everything to flow and resolve in a satisfactory method. I can save my creative effort for the story and for fleshing out NPCs rather than mechanical difficulty. Too much complexity is bad, if you are forced to cross reference a bunch of tables and then make several dice throws and do some math to figure out what happened. But a good fast elegant resolution system speeds the game amazingly and makes things much easier on the DM.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that I'm the only poster that has actually suggested something that would make things simplier. The first poster for example suggested doing away with cross class skills in favor of a system of feats that would give classes special circumstantial abilities. So in other words, to avoid a problem that only occurs intermitantly when characters level up, he wants to create a reoccuring complexity during play and a whole new section of feats.

That makes my job as a DM harder, not easier.