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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rodrigo Istalindir" data-source="post: 1846909" data-attributes="member: 2810">All races have the same tendencies.  The stats are up to the player, who is perfectly free to make an elf with a 10 dex and 16 con if he so chooses.  Tendencies are not requirements and archetypes are not straitjackets.So create a 'trickery' domain where the domain ability gives them bluff and intimidate as class skills.  Or let the character take one of the feats that adds class skills.  Or make the cleric rely on his god-given magic to excel at deception.And I hardly think the sorcerer with his whopping 2 skill points per level is going to compete with my bard in diplomacy except at very low levels. Because only the last few hit points represent lethal damage, the rest.... oh, never mind.  If your going to gripe about the hit point mechanic, there's threads going back 20 years on that.Asking for a simple set of rules that can accomodate every 'I wish I had' from every munchkin player is unrealistic.  Rechargeable items (which are really a combination of charged items and uses per day) are notoriously hard to play-balance.  In campaigns with few encounters per day, they become essentially infinitely-charged items.  For some effects, that's fine, but a wand of fireballs (50 charges, recharges 5 per day) is an invitation to a whole lot o' d6 rolling.  Given the near-limitless combinations of item type and spell, the RAW do a pretty darn good job.  It's up to the DM and the player to come to a reasonable conclusion using the rules as guidelines.But at a certain point, who cares?  I've played a lot of d100 games (including the love/hate affair with Rolemaster).  More granular modifiers just means more rules, more complexity, and more things to forget.  Want crappy leather armor?  Fine -- same AC, one additional point of armor penalty.  No one is going to take it unless they have too, but I doubt anyone one would in a d100 game if it was +3% armor / -3% armor penalty vs +5/-5.And in D&D, that's what they are doing.  But in Midnight, they're not.    Twenty years ago, my 13th level DU&D character wasn't hanging out in the village, he was crawling through the Underdark to get to Lolth.  The only game I've ever played where top of the line characters didn't appear as gods to the common folk was DragonQuest.  (Maybe Paranoia or Recon, but truth be told I never saw characters survive long enough to tell).And a CR20 dragon could be a cakewalk if the DM plays it wrong.  That's not a failure of the CR guidelines.  For all their faults, the CR ratings are a major blessing.  In the old days, all you had to go by was hit dice.  Lot's more TPKs in the hands of inexperienced DMs back then.  CRs are approximations that player skill and DM experience can skew widely in either direction. You don't have to use PCGen or ETools.  It was a couple of years before either of those programs evolved to the point of utility, and people played 3rd Ed. just fine.  (And I remember a lot of Shadowrun, Gurps, etc., chargen programs and spreadsheets well before d20).  I'm sure Psion and Hypersmurf and some of the other rules gurus around here can churn out a point-perfect NPC quite handily on their own.  I suspect most of us could do approximately well enough long hand.   But for those that want to push the limits (fiendish half-dragon/half-weasels with 12 levels of barbarian, anyone?), those that have limited prep time, or those that are struggling with the rules for any reason, those tools are wonderful (but not essential).Choice breeds complexity.  You can't complain about all elves being dextrous on one hand, and decry the difficulty in making NPCs on the other.  Is d20 perfect?  No, of course not.  (Strawmen are 1/4 CR -- notice how easily I dispatched that one?)  But the beauty is in how it can be adapted to a variety of gaming styles without forcing players and DMs to memorize entirely different rule-sets.  It's a darn site easier to play D&D one week and post-apocalyptic d20 Modern the next than it ever was to play Rolemaster and then Aftermath.  Or even to play Gurps both weekends, in my opinion, and I played a heck of a lot of Gurps.</blockquote>

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