Instant Gratification

One feature I've always liked about Chaosium's system for Call of Cthulhu (based off of their Basic Role Playing) is the opportunity for character improvement after each adventure. Unlike level based games like D&D, or even point buy games like White Wolf's World of Darkness, your character has a chance to advance each of their skills after each adventure; the only caveat being that you have to use the skill successfully at least once during the adventure. Talk about instant gratification! You could easily do this with D&D, just do away with purchasing skill ranks at each level and allow the player to do a skill check after each adventure with every skill that was used successfully within each adventure. If they succeed, allow them to roll 1d4 and add that many ranks to that skill.

What's Wrong With 3.5

What's wrong with D&D 3.5? There is a short answer and a long answer. The short answer is that it is far too complicated. From top to bottom, there are too many rules and too many special cases. The rules for feats and skills and combats are the ones that bother me the most, but each is deserving of it's own post.

The special cases are what drives me insane. It seems that every section in the combat chapter states a rule, how it works, exactly what it entails, provides an example and then lists a feat(s) that modify how that rule works. This reminds me of the old game system/setting Earthdawn, where characters would acquire powers, very similar to feats, as they increased in experience. It makes life for a Game Master difficult on two levels. First, it increases adventure design time exponentially, especially at higher levels when you must assign massive numbers of skill points and select a dozen feats for each NPC. If you earn your living writing modules for pay, no problem. However, this is far too much paperwork for a hobby! I'm lucky to have any time left over for character motivations or plot hooks and twists.

Second, all of the special cases make combat slow down to a crawl, between players trying to plot out their character's movement without incurring an attack of opportunity, or choosing from their laundry list of skills, or scanning through their player's handbook trying to figure out how x feat will react when combined with skill y against class ability z! It's a pure nightmare! Especially when everyone pauses from the action to look up a particular rule or feat! It's a focus killer, par excellence!

Mission Statement

The mission of this blog is to serve as a forum for gamers who would like to see a fourth edition of the Dungeons & Dragons game. To discuss what we would like to see from a fourth edition, what we think is broken in the current edition, etc. No edition of Dungeons & Dragons will be perfect for everyone, but what advances would make the game better for the majority of gamers? This will be a place for people to compare and contrast editons and discuss intelligently what they like and dislike!