Celebrim said:
Grappling is fine how it is. Any simplification of it has unnecessary side effects.
It is to laugh. Let's see it.
Do away with the AoO, and there really is no penalty for attempting to grapple. An unarmed guy can just reach around a sword with no problems.
Quite honestly, the AOO is the least of the issues.
Do away with the touch attack, and big clumsy ogres can grab nimble little pixies out of the air with ease.
Um, dude, they already can do that. Melee touch attacks are keyed off of strength -- whether they should be or not! -- and include base attack bonus, which adds up to an ogre having a +8 on his touch attack against a pixie's 15 touch AC. The clumsy ogre only needs a 7 to succeed at grabbing a nimble pixie.
Note that once you are grappling, these two complexities go away. They are things that happen before the grapple that are very helpful for balancing the game.
They don't really balance anything, but go ahead.
All the real complexity of grappling is in the condition 'grappled' itself. That is, for each action you could normally attempt, 'grappled' has some impact on the action. IMO, alot of the confusion here comes from minor differences between 3.0 and 3.5. Some changes were for the better (and some weren't) but I'm not sure that any were worth the confusion that they caused.
It's not really the 3.x changes that cause the problem -- it's that you have to look up whatever you want to do on the list and see if you can do it at all, and if so, find out how -- because it's not the usual way.
Grappling is a horribly unbalanced attack form. It is IRL too. My suggestion would be consider as a DM whether PC's foe needs to be 200' feet tall and weigh 160 tons, and consider as a PC whether getting up close and personal with something like that is actually a good idea.
But as previously mentioned, very large creatures are usually strong, and therefore very good at melee touches -- AND very good at starting and maintaining grapples. AND, ironically, very good at resisting "Shadow of the Colossus" style monster-climbing.
The grappling rules are far simplier than the combat rules as a whole. Perhaps we should simply get rid of the combat rules.
The point is that grapples are *different* from the usual rules, so learning one system in no way informs the other.
If the grapple rules used the same set of rules as the rest of the game, it would work fine -- but it doesn't do that.
For example, the Star Wars SE vehicle combat system has dogfighting, which is the vehicular equivalent of a grapple.
As a standard action or an attack of opportunity, you make an opposed Pilot check, with a -5 on the initiator. If you succeed, you've pulled the other guy into a dogfight.
Consequences? Every round, you have to use an action to Dogfight and you can't leave the square unless you successfully disengage.
What can you do in a dogfight? Well, as previously mentioned, you have to use an action every turn to Dogfight, and you can either attack or try to disengage with that action.
If you attack, it costs a standard action. You make an opposed Pilot check (no penalty) and if you succeed, you can fire one weapon at the enemy ship (a normal attack roll) as a swift action. If you fail, you can't fire.
If you try to disengage, it costs a move action. You make an opposed pilot check, and if you win you escape and move away.
Outsiders firing into a dogfight take a -5 on their attack roll.
Obviously physical combat doesn't have a Pilot-check-equivalent to represent your facility at moving quickly and accurately*, but this is a good example of a simple grapple rule that doesn't go too far outside of what is already expected in combat. You're doing all that with only skill checks, attack rolls, penalties, and action types.
*Actually, maybe there is. Use an Athletics check (or whatever skill includes the tumble ability) instead of a Pilot check, and these would probably work fine.
