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ShortQuests -- individual adventure modules! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed to plug in to your game.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9881582" data-attributes="member: 4937">Sure.  For some reason I've become a bit obsessed with analyzing a game that I gave up on like 30 years ago, and which after trying to play several times since then decided never to play again.  I don't know why that is what I'm hyper fixated on, but here we are.Here is the thing; not nearly enough.  With Initiative and Surprise I had assumed my audience had already seen this analyzed to death and didn't need a refresher.  Yes, 90% of the time initiative is simple and you can use basic party initiative and carry over from round to round just for simplicity.  But that is part ignoring the rules and part not dealing with the complex situations that can arise with multiple attacks per round and scimitars of quickness and so forth.  I'm not asking about processes of play that aren't documented by the rules.  If you aren't using the rules, what the rules say is irrelevant, and indeed while the rules may not be harming you they certainly aren't helping you.  It's my goal to right rules that help and can be used.Also I think you are maybe using B/X initiative and not realizing it.  So let's look at the actual rules.  Please read this and get back to me about "cosmetic fixes".[MEDIA=scribd]124296392[/MEDIA]Now, there is some of that I really like, including the part you called out as disliking.  Absolutely in a charge situation, the person with the longer weapon should go first regardless of the initiative order.  That's a great rule, and one I would keep.  But the overall system is overly complex and involves way too much exception based design.  That document had to be compiled from all over.This is somewhat the opposite of where I would go.  Getting more out of high ability scores makes the problem worse and makes the need to only play a character who has the right high ability scores greater.  So for example in my fix to the Barbarian, one of the things I pointedly did was get rid of the double bonus to DEX on the barbarian, not only because it was unnecessary front loading, but because it reduced the Barbarians mutual (high) attribute dependency where you really only wanted to play one if you had high CON, DEX, and STR because Barbarian RAW was totally the "get more of everything if your stats are unreasonably high" class and I was deliberately getting away from that.  And indeed, I also lowered the entry requirements to the class because really I wanted a class that was interesting to get into if all you had going for you was high CON - something we otherwise didn't really have.  In which case you'd be better off just agreeing on the array you wanted to use ahead of time.  But I want to note, "everyone using a common array" is the height of not playing in a first edition style and is rather the opposite of claiming play what you get is a good thing.  Your fix is a reversal of basically everything about character generation as it existed before 1985 or so.</blockquote>

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