The death of bonus stacking?

[shilsen]

An alternative method to restricting stacking is to cap the maximum bonus.

If the rules said (for instance) that you can have no more than a total +6 bonus to anything (AC, saves, abilities, whatever), and they then let you stack away to your hearts content but capped the maximum bonus you could get no matter how many different sources it came from... that might work too.

Cheers

Sounds like the M&M system to me, and I mean that as a good thing. In M&M, at any given power level, you have an assigned cap for skills, attack bonuses, damage, saves, etc. You can have small tradeoffs for particular characters if the DM allows (e.g. if Attack and Damage are capped at +10 each, you could trade off 2 pts of Attack to get Attack +8, Damage +12).

 

[Baby Samurai]

My group has gone with banning AC boosting items such as rings of deflection and amulets of natural armour etc and replaced it with the mechanic of all characters get a bonus to AC equal to half their character level, so the most bonuses you could get to your AC would be half CL, Dex, armour, and shield.

So at 20th level a character has a +10 half CL bonus to AC, instead of having to have a +5 ring of deflection and a +5 amulet of natural armour.

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

My group has gone with banning AC boosting items such as rings of deflection and amulets of natural armour etc and replaced it with the mechanic of all characters get a bonus to AC equal to half their character level, so the most bonuses you could get to your AC would be half CL, Dex, armour, and shield.

So at 20th level a character has a +10 half CL bonus to AC, instead of having to have a +5 ring of deflection and a +5 amulet of natural armour.

To what net result? You end up with the same total AC bonuses, and the math is still broken.

Do they pour the money they saved on those items into better weapons, wands, scrolls-- or are they rolling around naked on their huge collection of Murlynd's Spoons?

 

[Baby Samurai]

1.) To what net result?


2.) You end up with the same total AC bonuses, and the math is still broken.

1.) Less gear dependant.


2.) How so?

 

[Wiseblood]

dodge the stacking bullet

Have just a handfuls of spells that can adjust the odds either + or - a number.

Replace the lame stacking and redundant bonus spells with ones that have a non numerical impact. Fly, spider climb, Rock to mud and so on.

Bonuses are bland and cumbersome. All too often the flavor text in a spell is ignored because players are looking for the bottom line "How big is the bonus?".

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

1.) Less gear dependant.


2.) How so?

1) Are you giving out less treasure overall? You haven't said anything about any other changes you may have made to your game. Giving them a class AC bonus means they don't have to buy that gear. So: What are they buying instead? Do they have extra gold resources they can apply to other gear, or do you cut back their gold resources as well?

2) I assume "How so?" means, "How is the math broken?" and not "How is 5+5=10?"

Getting you up to speed on how the math is (indisputably) broken is beyond my capacity at the moment (no patience, no coffee, etc.).

I'm honestly not trying to be snarky, I just don't have it in me at the moment. Somebody else will step up, I am sure, given the nature of this thread.

 

[Baby Samurai]

1) Are you giving out less treasure overall?

Yep – never been into the bling dripping pimp look.

 

[Baby Samurai]

the math is (indisputably) broken

If you mean how AC scales compared to BAB, I agree.