Etienne V's page

Power attack seems to my to have been designed for fighters to do good damage on rounds where hey can’t full attack. There are many was to deny a fighter his full attack sequence so when a rogue sneak attacks you and tumbles away you can charge in and full power attack. Unfortunately the reality is that players slide their power attacks up and down the scale until the get the perfect damage to hit chance ratio and suddenly the fighters are doing 40 damage per hit, which is too much.

Solution 1 power attack is a standard action.

Solution 2 power attack is all or nothing, - all your BA + BA dmg

Personally I like my NPCs to live long enough to have at least one action so I have implemented a serious nerf in my game:

Wild swing: -4 hit +1dmg with light +2dmg with one hand +3dmg with two handed and power attack doubles the damage bonus.

To understand DR you have to go back to 1st edition. In first edition if you didn’t have the right “plus” you would deal no damage… none! That means that some fights were meant to be fought where only the wizards magic missiles or the one guy with a +3 weapon would be doing the damage… everybody else had to think and be creative to help out, maybe throwing some holy water, imagine that, players thinking and being creative… ah the good old days.

Greater magic weapon and magic vestment are really way too strong. They should only give a +1 higher bonus.

But the best solution is to deal with DR on a case-by-case basis, monsters should have as many unique rules as possible, it creates more situations where the party has to discover the gaming world, which is something that is missing in the game right now.

I use Con plus regular starting HP in my game the reason is that it eliminates a lot of the variation between classes, so low HP classes aren’t stuck with one third the HP of the tank.

I also give this bonus to all my monsters as well, it allows low HP monsters (like fey) to act at least once in initiative before they die.

The other thing that it does is clean up the logic of HP a little bit, now a sword wound doesn’t halve in effectiveness when you go from 1st level to 2nd level.

Damage in 3.x is significantly higher than in pervious editions and -10 HP doesn’t cut it, so I use –Con score instead.

I definitely agree that diplomacy is totally not working as is, I am running a game where I have to deal with+55 to diplomacy on one check per day. I think the will save solution is the best idea but I think a diplomacy check should not change the creatures initial attitude instead it should allow you to do certain things based on your check result compared to their initial attitude (you can never convince someone who wants to kill you to suddenly go out of his way to help you, but you might get him to leave you alone.)

The real solution however is to use the first edition rules, players have to role play their way through social situations: eliminate social skills it slows the game down and it makes no sense.