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<blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6093884" data-attributes="member: 82106">I don't understand what was so &quot;whacky&quot; about scaling or how flat math fixes it. All that flat math does is allow weird situations like &quot;I'm a level 1 ranger, and I can track better than that 20th level ranger over there!&quot; That doesn't seem in any way a good thing. I'm neither a fan nor a critic of prereqs. They can be used in various ways depending on what the goals of the system are, and not having them or having only a few that set up feat chains are perfectly valid choices. OTOH you could virtually build all your classes, races, etc around using a prereq system, or do other things with it, and those would work too. Given that any 'lookups' are things that happen in chargen I don't think there's really any significant added complexity. Honestly, I think the scaling in DDN will be MORE complex than the scaling in 4e was. Instead of just knowing that a bonus is DEX + .5 level + skill, you now have a variable stat bonus, some sort of skill bonus based on needing to stack various feats etc to keep improving (since you WILL want some way to be better than EVERYONE else at high enough level). You're actually putting more of it on adding up various feats, and forcing the players to add in STAT bonus at play time instead of ahead of time, even though 99% of the time the same stat will apply to any given skill. I don't honestly see any benefit so far to the DDN skill system over the 4e one, which is simpler, quicker, and in the vast majority of cases does exactly what you want. The only time the 4e system COULD hypothetically seem odd is if your wizard for some weird reason at level 20 has to get through some low level lock, and finds it easy to do so. This is a vastly corner case situation as 99.9% of the time the rogue will simply be there to just glance at the lock and defeat it. No skill system is perfect, but 4e's at least was fast and simple to run. DDN's is a step backwards so far.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="AbdulAlhazred, post: 6093884, member: 82106"] I don't understand what was so "whacky" about scaling or how flat math fixes it. All that flat math does is allow weird situations like "I'm a level 1 ranger, and I can track better than that 20th level ranger over there!" That doesn't seem in any way a good thing. I'm neither a fan nor a critic of prereqs. They can be used in various ways depending on what the goals of the system are, and not having them or having only a few that set up feat chains are perfectly valid choices. OTOH you could virtually build all your classes, races, etc around using a prereq system, or do other things with it, and those would work too. Given that any 'lookups' are things that happen in chargen I don't think there's really any significant added complexity. Honestly, I think the scaling in DDN will be MORE complex than the scaling in 4e was. Instead of just knowing that a bonus is DEX + .5 level + skill, you now have a variable stat bonus, some sort of skill bonus based on needing to stack various feats etc to keep improving (since you WILL want some way to be better than EVERYONE else at high enough level). You're actually putting more of it on adding up various feats, and forcing the players to add in STAT bonus at play time instead of ahead of time, even though 99% of the time the same stat will apply to any given skill. I don't honestly see any benefit so far to the DDN skill system over the 4e one, which is simpler, quicker, and in the vast majority of cases does exactly what you want. The only time the 4e system COULD hypothetically seem odd is if your wizard for some weird reason at level 20 has to get through some low level lock, and finds it easy to do so. This is a vastly corner case situation as 99.9% of the time the rogue will simply be there to just glance at the lock and defeat it. No skill system is perfect, but 4e's at least was fast and simple to run. DDN's is a step backwards so far. [/QUOTE]

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