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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8945473" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Not trying to weasel-word here, but...that depends on what you mean by "completely overhauling."There are basically three ways to fix up the system. One is, as you say, to just reformat the system, begin anew.The second is to painstakingly test each and every creature ever published, under a huge variety of contexts and circumstances, evaluate the performance in each, and then assign a score of some kind. Once you have collected enough things, that score can then be translated into a CR or XP budget or whatever metric you prefer. This is, as I think my description has implied, pretty much untenable for any actual product. Small-time outfits simply don't have the reach or manpower to do this kind of testing, and the big names like WotC and Paizo don't have the time to review the entire body of their work in this way when it would honestly most likely be less work to just rebuild the system from scratch. (Worth noting, though, this does actually seem to be what WotC did with 5e's initial books. As I said, I have been told by folks who were in the loop for 5e's private playtesting stuff, and apparently the vast majority of CRs in the book have been manually adjusted because the value they originally had--as assigned by the tools WotC tells DMs to use--was simply inaccurate.)The third is to more or less try for something like 4e's "MM3 On A Business Card." That is, you can fit the math for creating 4e monsters (not for giving them fun actions or interesting tactics, just their basic math) onto just one side of a business card. It's called "MM3" because 4e switched from a more cautious, "higher HP+defenses and lower damage" math framework to a more aggressive "lower HP+defenses and higher damage" math framework with MM3, which was generally welcomed by most 4e players. Now, to be clear, this path is more difficult than I've made it sound; actually finding an effective formula which actually does work across a broad range of character levels is difficult, especially if you can't make major changes to the rules while you work on it. You may find your efforts wasted if the underlying system is sufficiently self-contradictory.That last thing actually did happen with 3e/PF, for example; this is why Paizo eventually had to admit to its fans, "Yeah uh...we can't actually keep working on PF1e. It's fundamentally broken and we can't fix that without rebuilding the system." So...yeah, some of the time, the only solution is to start over. But the "find a formula" approach, if you can make it work, is your best bet for a method to fix up the problems, especially if you're allowed to make "small" changes (that is, altering individual mechanics or removing/rewriting individual bits and pieces like certain problematic spells or class features or the like.)</blockquote>

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