Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5701448" data-attributes="member: 82106">Yeah, I'm just going to say that all of my long experience with playing, designing, and fiddling with games tells me that the existing d20 higher is better system used in 4e is fundamentally superior. It is simpler, more straightforward, etc. Furthermore there is a HIGH degree of utility in the uniformity of mechanics displayed by 4e. A bonus for instance always means roughly the same thing and you can easily extrapolate or reuse one mechanic from another without serious trouble. Your suggestion by contrast creates a whole peculiar different kind of mechanic that while it has some similarities to other mechanics also has differences which I'd consider fairly pointless and adding little or nothing of value. It would be harder to explain, probably result in some weird corner-case issues, and would generally make it more effort to figure things out. It certainly seems like a game designer jumping through flaming hoops just to make things conform to existing mechanics. In a sense the whole ability score 3-18 thing being translated into ability bonus is also somewhat of an example of that. At least they simply made a new mechanic that was sensible and then tied it back to the old mechanic in a rather harmless and reasonably straightforward way.Honestly, from a pure game design standpoint the 'get rid of ability score' camp has a perfectly fine point. There's just not much need for this legacy mechanic. OTOH I just figure its cost is low and removing it will be a magilla. I'd imagine that's pretty much why it was left in 4e. WotC just didn't figure it was worth removing. There are already enough things about recent editions of D&D that are non-traditional, why feed that fire?</blockquote>

Verification