MilesMk1's page

The biggest issue I have with 4E minions? The fact that, like a lot of new stuff in 4E, they're an arbitrary and artificial concept that does not reflect the "physics" of the game, such as they may be.

When you have a 20th level character that can drop a 20th level minion in one blow, but be unable to kill a normal 1st level monster with one hit (because those have something like 30hp, and characters don't seem to do that much damage these days, except with special abilities), something is terribly wrong.

The advice in the recent minion excerpt says that you can always just re-classify normal low level opponents and make them into higher level minions (so the ogre brute that was a challenge at level 5 is just an ogre minion at level 15) but I find that terribly jarring - suddenly, this beast of a monster that would still take me several rounds to kill because it had a heap of HP goes down in one hit... but at the same time, its AC, defenses and the ability to hit more accurately go way UP?

Which actually underlines one of the biggest issues with 4E, the way they "fixed" the math - which is an accurate description if you use it in the same sense as the people who fix things in place with cement or dead things in formaldehyde.

If the makers of Pathfinder want to have rules for this sort of thing, modifying the DMG II mob rules is a much better idea. Emphasis on modifying, though, because the current rules are awful - when a mob of human commoners can out-grapple a decently sized dragon and is more dangerous to the PCs than 40 or 50 armed and armored low-level soldiers, a revision is necessary.

I'm all in favor of sonic effects, but I do very much hope that they're never again lumped in with the fire/ice/acid/electricity "classics", and can't be used with energy substitution.

I didn't see this covered anywhere, and I figured it fits in this forum best.

Does anyone think ability checks need revision badly?

The current system, which makes them work much like skills, just does not work, and often tends to produce comical results - like a supposedly very strong character needing 3 or 4 tries to bust open an average door, and so on.

The question is what to do about it? Revise the DCs? Meh. The 4E way (adding 1/2 level to ability checks) does not appeal to me at all, because I see no reason for a Str 10 20th level wizard to be effectively much stronger than a Str 20 1st level fighter, for example. Unfortunately, a good alternative escapes me... Thoughts? Suggestions?

Leave iterative attacks in.

For me, the most important issue is flavor/feel - having just one attack per round doesn't, for me, adequately convey the feeling of growing power and combat ability as you go up in level.

The second one is versatility - there's just no substitute for actually being able to target multiple enemies, or use different attacks (trip/disarm/sunder, etc. followed by normal attacks) all in the same round.

Finally, I'm really not impressed with either the SWSE or the 4E way - the former royally screwed things up by removing iterative attacks and the sneaking them back in as two-weapon fighting, the other one has too many fiddly exceptions to the one-attack-only rule that allow you to hit more than one enemy per round after all.

I'd rather have one relatively simple system for making multiple attacks than one which pretends you only get one attack but then has dozens of exceptions.

Especially because if you make "one attack per round" the supposed standard, but then don't stick to it and begin to allow exceptions, you are playing with the surest way ever to completely unbalance a game. The way to reliably get that extra attack as often as possible becomes the optimal thing to do, and people that don't go with it get left in the dust. (Any video game players here? Anyone remember what removing iterative attacks but allowing two-weapon fighting and flurry in KOTOR did to combat balance of that game?)

I'd go with Intelligence... Some of the reasons have already been stated - if it's an innate ability the helps define the character, they should be better at it than at run of the mill spells, not worse.

Another big one is that if they go with Cha, it'll not apply evenly across all the specialist schools, because not all the schools have the same number of abilities which target an enemy and for which a save DC is actually meaningful, and the levels of the abilities which require a save vary a lot from school to school.

Abjurers and Diviners, for example, hardly have any spells for which the DC matters, and the other schools basically cover a spectrum from "ok" to "really hosed".