Xini said:
Okay so me and my friend have spent many hours going over this again and again with possible solutions and theories. So far we reckon that either we need to abandon D&D or completely rewrite it.
The flaws in brief (as far as I can remember them)
#1 Power disparity
This is kind of the primary flaw in the whole system. A 3rd level fighter can probably take down two 1st level fighters. A 10th level fighter could quite conceivably take down a company of 1st level characters. Generally unless the lower level combatants start to use advanced tactics to ensure flanking bonuses and stacking aid anothers then they are like so much cream cheese in front of the death dealing monster.
I think that's intentional. Like in LOTR where Gimli and Legolas boast about the number of orcs they are killing.
#2 Class System
Right well your a wizard, you adventure for six months in the wilderness and come back with more knowledge of architecture???
That's actually a flaw of all systems that allow players to advance their own characters, including GURPS, Hero, Vampire, etc.
Survival still remains cross class no matter what you do.
As opposed to GURPS, where anyone has the potential to be a jungle expert, regardless of their initial orientation and interests.
Oh and wizards are just refused armour completely.
Under the current rules, they can wear leather armor with no penalties, and still cast with a 90% success rate. I find armor restrictions a little odd sometimes, but I think you are overstating the case.
Basically the whole concept of classes is restrictive and seems more like a good excuse to release reams of books than out of any intrinsic value to the idea. Oh and this also leads to the temptation to make the classes in the next book slightly more powerful or attractive than the last to try to tempt more people to buy the book.
Classes provide structure. Every freeform or point based system that has succeeded has always eventually offered "templates," "packages," "pregens," and the like. I.e. classes.
#3 The whole d20 thing
Basically the d20 idea is not a good one from a statistics point of view and neither is it any good for representing what a person can reliably do as compared to what they could potentially do (ok that's like a reiteration of the statistics point). D&D has a flat probability curve. You are as likely to roll a 20 as a 1. That alone doesn't sound too bad but when you consider that 10 is basically a reliable result to reflect normal responses but rolling a 9 means failure then it's getting too twitchy and isn't a reliable result at all. There are ways around this but whilst still using the D20 system it tends to lead to more capability than you wanted and more cost than you can afford.
I prefer flat probability. It is easier to design around. Curves produce even stranger results, like the famous GURPS parry which starts off useless, rapidly gains ground, then plateaus.
All games that have numbers have break points.
#5 Magic
Okay so fantasy needs magic like Star Trek needs to be able to beam people or create food from nothing but the present philosophy regarding magic is terrible. Any time something happens which is not explained by what we regard as reality, it's labelled as magic. Strangely however it seems that magic is actually about a dozen different elements working in concert.
Kind of like "physics" or "theology."
No regard is paid to making any kind of sense with magic, it is just left completely open as some kind of weird thing which just does what it wants and yet conforms to the petty rules laid out in the books. Why oh why is there such restricted and tightly defined spells with almost no allowance for customisation and yet virtually anything can and will be explained away with a singular mention of the word magic.
Because magic can do anything, but magicians can not.
Personally I'd like to see some kind of overall general capabilities of magic which are guidelines for what magic can and cannot do whilst simultaneously relaxing the borders on spells so that a fireball (for instance) is not it's own spell but rather something you can do with a certain level of skill in a fire based spell. It'd be quite simple to break down most spells into various categories so that skills could be used and then each casters personal choice on where they place their skill points would be reflected in their capability with their spell selection.
That's a nice idea... for games that are not D&D. D&D has Vancian type spells. I've intentionally created magic systems of my own that work similarly, or even more arbitrarily. The model you are talking about makes magic more like a psychic power or superpower, which is appropriate for some types of fantasy, especially genre fantasy of the 80s and 90s, but not Conan, Dying Earth, Russian fairy tales, Arabian Nights, etc.
As you can see just from that we pretty much shot the system to pieces. Why not change systems? Well we have a group of dedicated D&D players (read can't be arsed to learn a new set of rules) and the system is simple and keeps moving. If only it did not grind so much when people stopped just walking up and trying to trade blows in a static fashion.
Perhaps if you changed it, it would not be as simple. What do you want out of your game?
I do hope that any version 4 that the mages of muhlah come up with is an improvement but I fear that they believe so strongly in the d20 religion and the infallibility of the original D&D concepts that we are liable to be left with a simple rehash of what exists now, including all the flaws.
They've already demonstrated a willingness to embrace multiclassing, and to write a Star Wars game so bad it had to be immediately replaced. Also, they've permanently tainted halflings with kenderness.
(just kidding)
