On Fri, 13 Apr 2007 00:01:22 +0000 (UTC),
mkkuhner@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
(Mary K. Kuhner) wrote:
>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 classes 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.
There's also the problem of changing ones item loadout between
encounters. If you're set up with defenses vs cold, and you get jumped
by a fire-based encounter...
>
>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.
And it succumbs to the pressure to create generalist "can act as any
special material or property" solutions. I found the "more magical
plusses" solution of 3.0 (and earlier) to be annoying, but the golf
bag is even more so.
I do like the idea that "more plusses are helpful" but not the idea of
"magic is trumps." I rejected the common house rule of changing
"DR/special material" to "DR/special materal or +N weapon" because it
made "+N" into a superset of various special materials. The house rule
I ended up with is that each magical plus above +1 reduces DR by 5. So
something with DR 10/holy would be DR 5 vs a non-holy +2 weapon. Which
isn't a perfect solution, but...
>
>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.
Hm. What are the necessary defenses in 3.x? Boosts to AC, boosts to
the three saves, resistance/immunity to the five "energy" types (fire,
cold, sonic, acid, electricity), resistance/immunity to poison. What
others?
>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!
IME this is true for *any* game system. I'm not sure if D&D is worse
than most others.
--
Erol K. Bayburt
ErolB1@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
|
