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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alex319" data-source="post: 5061135" data-attributes="member: 45678">Two more things that I see as problems:1. The encounter building advice in the DMG is entirely based on answering the question "I want to make an encounter that's (easy/medium/hard/impossible) for my party of level X. What monsters/traps/skill DCs are about right?" Where what I think a lot of people want more advice on is "My party of level X is in situation Y. How hard is it for them to get out of it?" For example, I remember reading one thread somewhere where the OP asked "How do you stat out the town guard?" and the advice was along the lines of "Well, if you want them to be minor nuisances, make them minions, if you want them to be a tough fight, make them a full combat encounter, etc...). But part of the problem is that in that situation, that assumes that the DM has some predefined role that they want the town guard to play, when in reality what some DMs want is something that will allow them to figure out how hard it should be based on game world considerations.2. A major design flaw I see is the way they tried to balance out the attack/defense progression with "+1 per level" on the monsters' side of the equation with a whole series of bonuses on the players' side - the +1/2 level, plus magic item bonuses, plus feats, plus stat bumps, etc. This leads to a whole host of kludgy hacks to make the math work (and even then it doesn't work all the time) such as:(a) Masterwork armor. It's needed to allow heavy armor users to keep pace with light armor users following stat bumps, but it's caused probably more confusion than any other element of the game.(b) Non-weapon/implement attacks like Dragon Breath need that tier-scaled bonus (+2/+4/+6) to remain competitive at higher levels.(c) Things like grabs, bull rushes, and improvised maneuvers become very hard to hit with at higher levels, because they don't get a lot of the boosts (like item bonuses) that regular attacks get.(d) Since PCs depend so much on their weapon bonuses to hit at high levels, effects which deprive PCs of their weapons are extremely powerful, and thus by necessity very rare. Considering all the threads about reintroducing disarm rules, that seems to be something that is missed by a lot of people.(e) At higher levels, the spread between high and low NADs becomes much higher because people upgrade the same two stats on each "+1 to two" stat bump, so the NADs attached to those stats increase faster. Thus you have the "The enemy hits my Reflex on a 3 or higher" problem.(f) All of the so called "feat tax" feats - Expertise, etc. (Those have been discussed to death elsewhere so I won't say anything else about them.)(g) Classes and builds that use both weapon and implement powers need to be able to use their weapons as implements to keep up (otherwise they would have to pay twice as much to get both a magic weapon and a magic implement, and then keep swapping them.) Thus you have more complexity and confusion about when you can use weapons as implements and which weapon powers function when the weapon is used as an implement, etc.(h) The "magic threshold" rules for when a monster is wielding a magic item. Again, necessary for balance (since the monster's listed attacks/defenses already include enough to counteract players' magic items, so adding extra would just make them even more powerful) but again causes confusion and makes the game world make a little less sense.(i) Even classes whose shtick is "unarmed fighting" like the Monk still need weapons/implements in order to get their attack bonuses. This makes a true "class that fights without needing items" hard to make in the system.---The "inherent bonus" rules in DMG2 do fix some of this, but not all of it. For example, it doesn't fix the "masterwork armor" thing.</blockquote>

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