In article <1176396479.131164.199500@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
psychohist <psychohist@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>It's to be noted, however, that making specific resistances the better
>choice is an approach that is much more open to exploitation. For
>example, you could seek out encounters that your party has good
>resistances against. You could also have multiple sets of items and
>put on the ones that you're expecting to need. In fact, with specific
>resistances being the better choice, I think most parties would end up
>needing a full set of specific resistance gear against all the most
>common cl***** of foes.
This is quite true, if having resistance to the foe is essential in
defeating it. I don't think it would be a good idea to implement
my scheme in v3.5, because it's definitely the case by high level
that you *must* have defenses or you'll die, and making the defenses
very diverse just increases the item load required.
Your point is well illustrated by a change made between v3.0 and v3.5.
In v3.0 creatures which required special weaponry to hit almost always
required magical weapons; more fearsome creatures required stronger
magic weapons. This is a problem with an obvious generalist solution
(get the most powerful magic weapon you can) and that is what everyone
did.
In v3.5 creatures may require any combination of magic, holy, unholy,
lawful, chaotic, silver, cold iron, or adamantine: a fair number
require two ("can be hurt normally only by a holy silver weapon" for
vampires, for example). To compensate, the severity of not having
the right weapon has been decreased quite a bit.
You could approach this with a specialist strategy of having the
appropriate weapon for a foe. Unless the PCs can control their
encounters, though, you need to carry a lot of specialist weapons.
Vampire hunters are in pretty good shape, but in many scenarios
you don't know in advance whether you need cold iron or silver.
(Is the mysterious thing afflicting the town a demon, or a devil?)
The "golf bag of weapons" lacks something, esthetically.
Some characters--my fighter Bryce is one--can go with a generalist
strategy "Do so much damage that it doesn't matter." Unfortunately
this seems to narrow the range of possible fighter strategies
painfully at levels where DR starts to become common. The party's
other two fighters, not optimized for high damage, stopped being able
to compete with Bryce.
But if DR levels were still lower, so that having the right weapon
was helpful rather than (for anyone but an optimized strength-heavy
fighter like Bryce) absolutely essential, then the holy-silver
vampire sword might be a neat thing to give its owner flavor, rather
than part of a golf bag of essential specialist weapons.
I think if I were rewriting the system--it's getting more and
more tempting to do so--I'd want to make magic-item defenses a lot
less significant and character abilities a lot more so. When DR
started to become a real killer for us, we invented a class ability
for one PC that would let her overcome it. This felt better to me
than either (a) saying only high-strength two-hand-weapon fighters
are viable at high level, or (b) carrying the golf bag.
If the defenses from items were not so large as to become essential,
specialist defenses might have more of a niche, and getting rid of
item-based generalist defenses might not be so troublesome.
I don't know. As I found out last time I did it, in the 80's, revising
one rule in D&D is like eating one peanut!
Mary Kuhner mkkuhner@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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