The half level bonus makes the tiers happen. A paragon level character is clearly out of the reach of a low level heroic. Removing it will remove certain styles of heroic fantasy play.
Not at all, do you think your first level PC can win a fight against a level 12 dragon that is at least nominally doing DPH 20 vs his DPH of what, 10? That the dragons 500 hit points will run out before he monches the whole party? I doubt it. In any case these values can be adjusted somewhat if they aren't dead on, we are free to make some changes. The INTERESTING part is, that with this setup the low level party CAN do some appreciable damage to the dragon, whereas in the current system they can't even hit it at all.
The 30 point spread has nothing to so with the half level bonus though.
It derives from ability score changes, item, class features and feats, and now themes.
Not sure if I would want to get rid if these things though.
Right, it is primarily driven by stat bumps, though as things have progressed other factors have come more to the front. Still, a PC with a skill in a non-bumping stat is going to fall so far behind they can barely even attempt hard tasks at high level. The new DC charts help, but it is still a royal PITA and makes group checks at high level sort of silly. Removing this issue allows for say a Perceptive Rogue without the player constantly needing to 'garden' his skill with feats/items/utilities (or take the unlikely step of boosting an otherwise useless stat). I mean if you made the choice to be good at something at level 1 you shouldn't have to constantly keep making that same choice again through levels, just let it stick.
I must say I am not too bothered about them and certainly not bothered enough at this point in time to slap dow $100 to solve them. Which is the key issue with regard to a new edition.
Agreed. My contention from the start was only that the issues with 4e are deep and if you are really going to fix them you have to start with the core of the game and thus you can't just 'fix 4e' unless you make 5e... I have no intention of buying into a 5e at this point either, or a real desire to see one except in a sort of theoretical sense.
I don't think I would have much bother with the kind of edition that you are advocating though it might not have enough wahoo for my taste.
If they do hire you to write it, remember to add some optional systems so that I can put the wahoo back in.
lol. I guess I can write. I make no claims and have nothing to brag about. I'm sure there are much better writers than I right here in this thread, if not in this post. OTOH I am tempted to do up a little testbed one of these days. Now if you had a dime for everyone that has said that, you'd be beyond wealthy...
I'd argue ther's a very important point, it's just psychological. If I'm swing at +5 at first level and I'm still swinging at +5 15 levels later, I don't feel I've progressed at all even if I'm still hitting by rolling a 10 because my attack bonus is no better and the monster defenses are no better. What's teh difference between a kobold and a Beholder then?
A Kobold has maybe 20 hit points and does probably on average 9 damage on a hit. A beholder probably has say 800 hit points, does say 8d10 damage and sets you on fire for ongoing 20 fire damage on a hit (and gets 9 attacks a turn, or whatever, its a beholder, it wouldn't be any less bad-assed than they are now). Remember, it isn't being hard to hit that makes the beholder nasty, to-hits will be the same either way.
That being said I don't see why there cannot be better defenses for the higher level monsters, just on a much smaller basis. Assuming PCs are likely to have ways to get attack bonuses to SOME degree at higher levels then defenses can increase somewhat, but lets imagine that being say in the range of 5 points total in 30 levels, which means a level 1 PC can still at least nick a high level opponent (though really if it were 10 points in 30 levels no big deal, the point being you don't as a player have to constantly scrounge for attack bonuses or as the DM constantly hand PCs new ones). Actually I'd say something like 3-5 points over 30 levels would be great. A character that doesn't concentrate on melee will still have a chance with a dagger in a tight spot, but the experts will easily keep up against appropriate monsters and hit say 5 points better against weaker ones, which makes it virtually an auto-hit, but not quite.
The level bonus is there to differentiate the level of competence between kobold and an archdemon. If everything was as easy to hit as everything else we might as well flip a coin to see if we hit.
You're flipping coins now, except you're restricted to a very narrow range of opponents you can put against a party due to increasing defense/to-hit. Actually there'd be no real need for minion->standard->elite->solo either under this rule. A 'solo' is just a much over leveled monster, which logically actually makes more sense and is just as playable. You can still design monsters to be used in specific types of encounters, so the CONCEPT of a 'solo' can certainly still exist, it just no longer needs special rules. Minions might still be special, but that's OK.
Just the more you look at it the more simplification this kind of change brings, and there is really just no huge argument against it except "but it was always like X".
I mean I understand the concern about depicting higher level PCs as 'epic' or whatever, but I think there's plenty of room to do that still. Hit points increase, damage increases, other powers, tricks, items, whatever will presumably accrue to the character over time. And as I said, defenses and attack CAN go up some, just not a lot.
So imagine your level 1 guy takes on a level 3 orc. This is a tough fight. He's likely to get clobbered. He can usually hit the orc, and he can do enough damage to it he'll kill it eventually, probably in 3-4 hits say. Meanwhile the orc does fairly good damage to him too and hits about the same, so it may kill him in 2-3 rounds (being slightly higher level than he is). Now, when said character is say 12th level the orc is hitting maybe 10% less often and doing only minor damage as the character has 3x the hit points he did at level 1, and in return he's hitting 10% more often and doing 2x more damage than before. The best the orc can hope for is to knock him down a surge or two and it will be lucky to survive 3 rounds. A level 30 character will just breath hard at the orc and it will die, though 100 orcs would still be scary, until said character turns on his 15 damage resist or flies or whatever bad-assery he does at that level that leaves the orcs in the dust.
Honestly it isn't THAT much different from how things worked in AD&D, especially 1e. Granted there WERE to-hit bonuses by levels, but the curve was shallower and I think it actually worked better. I think a flat to-hit would work fine.
