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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Man in the Funny Hat" data-source="post: 5895977" data-attributes="member: 32740">There is surprisingly little that I would consider "indispensible" about 3E/3.5. At first I couln't even think of anything, but after going through the thread the ONLY ones I can agree with are: 1) Cleric heal swapping. Simply because it begins to remove the onus upon clerics to be healbots. Doesn't cure it entirely but it was a step in the right direction. 2) Base Attack Bonus. Not because THACO or even using attack charts were so vile and evil, but because BAB is merely a better means to accomplish the same task. Of course, this goes in hand with ascending AC - hardly a new CONCEPT but had not been formally implemented before. 3) Standard creature types like construct, undead. I don't believe ANY monster MUST adhere strictly to some arbitrary set of abilities but it often helps to at least have a standardized place to start when designing certain critters. Too much of this sort of thing, however, simply begins to put arbitrary limitations upon monster design simply for the sake of standardization - and that is a recipe for uninspired design. 4) A list of standardized conditions. Something the game had been needing since 1E - the difference in effects of stunned, dazed, paralyzed, held, etc. EVERYTHING else I've seen listed I find to decidedly BE dispensible, to have been a design choice whose course ultimately proved to be a mistake, or was a concept that may have had some merit at the outset but was ulitmately allowed to be perverted to where it is actually undesireable. That's not even to say that I think an earlier edition did it any better. Just that SO MANY of 3E's supposedly terrific improvements turned out badly in the long run. For example, even so simple a thing as cyclic initiative. At first I thought it was brilliant, elegant and so much more sensible but I ultimately found it to merely contribute to combats being tedious and predictable. A simple thing like rolling initiative every round retained an element of randomness and unpredictability that the game NEEDED. Thus cyclic initiative is DISPENSIBLE; nothing wrong with it being an option but definitely not something the game can't do without.</blockquote>

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