The Knock On effect and Complexity Complaints

[Raven Crowking]

A couple of instances:

Surprise. In AD&D, you roll 1d6 to see if you a surprised. On a 1 or 2, you are surprised, and for that many segments. A 4th level monk has a reduced chance of surprise, being surprised only 28% of the time. How does that work? How many segments is the monk surprised for?

Initiative A fighter charges 30' to attack a magic-user casting web. Who wins initiative? Repeat, but with 60' being the distance charged. Add someone firing a bow.

Cheers!

Sorry, but I find these no more problematic than the ripple effects others have quoted upthread. Therefore, these examples do not meet the standard of evidence to claim an iota of evidence for knock-on effects causing prolems. As we wish to maintain a reasonable standard of evidence for all claims, I have to ask you to provide something more concrete.

RC

 

[Numion]

I have challenged many posters to cough up explicit arguments and evidence to support this opinion over the years following the release of 3.0 and all I have ever gotten is gibberish in response.

Church, brother!

I've asked for the same evidence way back, and never got any

 

[BSF]

Sorry, but I find these no more problematic than the ripple effects others have quoted upthread. Therefore, these examples do not meet the standard of evidence to claim an iota of evidence for knock-on effects causing prolems. As we wish to maintain a reasonable standard of evidence for all claims, I have to ask you to provide something more concrete.

RC

Primarily because this has become off topic. It diverged at the following:

a number of 1e rules already fail to successfully interact with each other out of the box.

So far no one has offered an iota of evidence to support this assertion.

At that point the discussion diverged into examples of how 1E rules failed to interact together. Surprise is one of the stranger interactions when you have races and classes that have static numerical values of how surprise is supposed to happen. Even if you want to argue that it is simply a matter of computing fractions, how do you figure in segments of surprise?

To drag it vaguely back toward topic, trying to implement a spot/listen (notice) check for surprise in 1E would have to contend with all of the divergent race/class benefits. If a drow gains a flat percentage chance to surprise, then that might be reflected in penalties to your notice check. So does the monk get a bonus to the notice check? What about elves? Rangers? Svrifneblin. We are just talking a difference in surprise, which is related to initiative. So what will the knock on effect be in the initiative cycle? There is a pretty big ripple effect if you try to create a unified system to handle initiative.

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

Sorry, but I've never had a problem when a monk met a drow. Care to elaborate?

How do you determine who surprises whom? And for how many segments.

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

Sorry, but I find these no more problematic than the ripple effects others have quoted upthread. Therefore, these examples do not meet the standard of evidence to claim an iota of evidence for knock-on effects causing prolems. As we wish to maintain a reasonable standard of evidence for all claims, I have to ask you to provide something more concrete.

There is a difference between taking a working system and creating ripples from house rules, and having to create house rules in order use the rules as is because ripples are getting in the way already. At least I see that way.

To use the 1e surprise rules seem to require rewriting the 1e surprise rules. That is my real life experience and not a made up example.

 

[Aust Diamondew]

Of the several RPGs I have played only D&D has AoOs as such, and they do not seem to suffer for the lack.

The proposition that it is in the least bit difficult to remove AoOs from 3e is the position desperately in need of supporting evidence, any supporting evidence. Not my hypothesis to the contrary.

To comment on your first statement.

AoO like features do exist in other systems.
Both Shadowrun 3rd and 4th edition have intercepts (I didn't play earlier editions). I
n SR4 the rule works as follows (from memory, it worked similar if not the same in SR3 if I recall): an intercept is a free action melee attack that a character can make in melee combat when an opponent moves adjacent to him and does not attack him or when an oppoent moves away from him out of melee combat.

Sound familiar?

Don't know how this is really relavent. Just saying that the idea of something similar to AoO being important to a gaming system has indeed been around before 3e.

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

Good catch. I believe that one is in the earlier SR editions.

Different in some signficant ways because of how dice pools work. And you do not have a laundry list of ways to provoke this kind of effect, nor the various tactics for avoiding the interception/AoO.

 

[Hussar]

In 2e this would make the iconic spell less valuable, because the THAC0 of wizards was crappy, and, IIRC, there was no distinction between touch attacks and regular. Low overall impact--just stick to spells with saves unless you're a fighter/mage.

In 3e this changes the effect of magic missile quite a bit more. Since it has an attack roll, it can be critted with, and can do sneak attack damage. For thief/mages it makes the spell *more* powerful. Because force damage is treated differently than other types of damage (IIRC, again, this was not the case in 2e) it... well, I don't know what, but that's the point--does that make a difference? Do I have to comb through every supplement to be sure?

There's a few quibbles I have with this.

Magic missiles were considered "different damage" in earlier editions as well. Thus we have the Brooch of Shielding which specifically was the only item which could block Magic Missiles. No energy resistence types would.

Granted, adding an attack roll to Magic Missile would have ripple effects in 3e. That's true. A rogue/mage could have a field day with this. However, the fact that you can, in about ten seconds, name all of the effects that this change would have, is proof to me that it is easier to guage the effects of new rules.

As has been outlined above, changing the surprise rules in 1e would be problematic - not impossible, but difficult, because there were just so many corner cases spread through the DMG, PHB and MM, never mind any supplements. Different classes react differently to surprise, different races as well. And, the mechanic is NOT transparent.

With 3e mechanics, we have very transparent rules that generally follow the same language. Skills are all formatted in exactly the same way. How do you listen at a door in 1e? Depending on your race/class you could be rolling d6's or d100's. How do you listen at a door in 3e? Roll a listen check. Doesn't matter if you are a human commoner or a xorn.

 

[Raven Crowking]

Ridley's Cohort,

Obviously, I could claim that "When I run the game, what I say happens is what happens" is the rules right out of the box, and requires no additional house rules at all. This would be pretty similar IMHO to claiming that "not one iota of proof" (presumably, we mean evidence here) has been offered that ripple effects occur, that ripple effects occur because of rules inter-relationships, that rules inter-relationships occur more in 3e than in earlier editions, and that these ripple effects have caused some people problems.

Ample evidence of all of these things exist.

While I agree that the "ripple effect" is more hype than substance, this is not the same thing as claiming that it has no substance whatsoever.

Of the several RPGs I have played only D&D has AoOs as such, and they do not seem to suffer for the lack.

The proposition that it is in the least bit difficult to remove AoOs from 3e is the position desperately in need of supporting evidence, any supporting evidence. Not my hypothesis to the contrary.

Any claim requires evidence, regardless of what that claim is. So, yes, your hypothesis to the contrary does require supporting evidence. The problem, btw, is not simply removing AoOs, but rather removing AoOs without otherwise significantly changing the game, and that does require at a minimum some amount of work.

Nor does the mechanism for AoOs in, or not in, other rpgs relate at all to how AoOs work and inter-related in 3.X, unless there is a direct game design parallel. This is simply non-evidence.

So, as soon as we can determine exactly what level of proof - or evidence - we require, we can discuss 1e and 3e. Because there is, IMHO, the same level of evidence for both the ripple effect claim in 3e and the disfunctional rule claim in 1e. There is also, IMHO and IME, the exact same level of difficulty dealing with each.

RC

 

[Chiaroscuro23]

There's a few quibbles I have with this.

Magic missiles were considered "different damage" in earlier editions as well. Thus we have the Brooch of Shielding which specifically was the only item which could block Magic Missiles. No energy resistence types would.

The Shield spell could, too. Actually, I was thinking of the way force damage interacts with incorporeality in 3e. I can't remember an equivalent rule in earlier editions.

As has been outlined above, changing the surprise rules in 1e would be problematic - not impossible, but difficult, because there were just so many corner cases spread through the DMG, PHB and MM, never mind any supplements. Different classes react differently to surprise, different races as well. And, the mechanic is NOT transparent.

With 3e mechanics, we have very transparent rules that generally follow the same language. Skills are all formatted in exactly the same way. How do you listen at a door in 1e? Depending on your race/class you could be rolling d6's or d100's. How do you listen at a door in 3e? Roll a listen check. Doesn't matter if you are a human commoner or a xorn.

What's been outlined above is that the 1e surprise rule was itself problematic. Not that changing it was, but that the rule as it existed didn't work very well. It needs houseruling to function at all, apparently. Since it's opaque and poorly balanced to start with, changing it is pretty much just hacking randomly at a rulesset that was hacked at randomly by the designers. Your argument is just for how 3e is better because the listen check is a unified way to handle hearing someone approaching. It does not follow from that conclusion that changing how listen works would affect more other parts of the system than changing how old-style surprise worked.

I think you might actually be right about surprise, though, because apparently it was tied to segments in initiative (I don't think I ever knew anyone who used segments, myself, and don't really know the rules), whereas removing or changing listen checks now just weakens the classes that have Listen as a skill, and doesn't mandate change of the surprise round structure.