Creating custom ruleset to try and address the issues with both Pathfinder and 3.X

[hakarb]

I need some feedback on what needs to be addressed.

From what I know, mundanes are pitiful beyond early levels because druid, clerics, and wizards quickly gain spells that allow them to completely bypass encounters as well as completely break the game. I'm not aware of other things that need to be fixed, such as imbalanced or nonfunctioning things, or needs that have yet to be met.

This is a longterm project so any information the community has would be very helpful.

[jiriku]

Ah, I have been down that road. It is a long, long road.

In summation:

Many classes are weak and defective, and need improvements to work as intended.
Many classes are grossly overpowered, and need to be toned down or they can literally wrestle control of the game away from the DM.
Most feats in general are terrible, and could use substantial improvement.
Many specific spells are very powerful for their level. Some DMs can manage this; others prefer to nerf or ban them.
A small number of magic items and combos allow for the creation of infinite loops. It's easiest just to tell your players "no infinities".
The CR system is borked, and doesn't correctly asses the effectiveness of monsters with class levels (among other things).
The level adjustment system is borked; in general you can cut the level adjustment for most races in half and round down.
The kinds of noncombat threats the players can handle aren't assigned levels, so nothing tells a DM whether a particular type of adventure concept is level-appropriate. You mostly have to learn this through trial and error.



That's most of it. As a warning, it is VERY VERY difficult to correctly rebalance rules for levels at which you don't have DMing experience. So, for example, if you have not DM'd campaigns at levels 13-20 before (where character power rises abruptly), it will be really difficult for you to tell what is weak, what is good, and what is too strong. It takes a lot of experience and skill to tweak the system into submission.

[Phelix-Mu]

A short-ish list:
-The designers overestimated the value of full BAB. Give it to any class that is expected to spend most of their time on the front lines or that is mostly going to be attacking. Definitely monks.

-The designers overestimated the value of having lots of skill points. Give 4+Int to every non-spellcasting class; leave clerics and wizards where they are.

- Fix the class skills lists. Spot and Listen should be class skills for all mundane classes; only casters can afford to casually ignore their surroundings.

- More well-defined uses for skills, especially for characters with high ranks in skills. Consider allowing these uses only for 5+ and 10+ skill ranks; the problem with the existing DCs system is that spells and magic items make it trivial for casters to get almost arbitrarily high bonuses, and thus they end up better at using skills than the classes that don't have many tools aside from skills.

- Consolidate combat feats. I usually bundle Dodge and Mobility into one, and Point-Blank Shot and Precise Shot into one, among others.

- Combat feats that grant numerical bonuses need to scale, likely by the character level of the character. So, like Weapon Focus grants +1 to attack with given weapon for every four levels. Fighters should get a bigger bonus, or be capable of stacking the feats, or their bonus scales faster.

- Consider allowing fighters to spend a feat for pounce, or to straight up full attack as a standard action 1/four levels per encounter.

- Adopt one of the monk fixes from this site. It's a huge amount of work to give the core monk the revision it needs while not creating something entirely new, or rendering a lot of the really cool ACFs and variants for monk less useful (not that that is a terrible thing, if the actual base class is improving noticeably). My two favorites are in my extended sig. Xaotiq1's is a very ambitious one, and should be handled with some care.



Did I say short-ish?
:smallbiggrin:

[hakarb]

Ah, I have been down that road. It is a long, long road.

In summation:

Many classes are weak and defective, and need improvements to work as intended.
Many classes are grossly overpowered, and need to be toned down or they can literally wrestle control of the game away from the DM.
Most feats in general are terrible, and could use substantial improvement.
Many specific spells are very powerful for their level. Some DMs can manage this; others prefer to nerf or ban them.
A small number of magic items and combos allow for the creation of infinite loops. It's easiest just to tell your players "no infinities".
The CR system is borked, and doesn't correctly asses the effectiveness of monsters with class levels (among other things).
The level adjustment system is borked; in general you can cut the level adjustment for most races in half and round down.
The kinds of noncombat threats the players can handle aren't assigned levels, so nothing tells a DM whether a particular type of adventure concept is level-appropriate. You mostly have to learn this through trial and error.



That's most of it. As a warning, it is VERY VERY difficult to correctly rebalance rules for levels at which you don't have DMing experience. So, for example, if you have not DM'd campaigns at levels 13-20 before (where character power rises abruptly), it will be really difficult for you to tell what is weak, what is good, and what is too strong. It takes a lot of experience and skill to tweak the system into submission.

Very excellent stuff for the LA and CR systems, those always felt weird. I'll be looking for any and all infinites and removing them (I'm looking at you, thought bottle). Many spells will be flat out removed or changed as the vast majority of spells are far too powerful and tend to allow certain classes the ability to completely bypass encounters without needing to think.



Many classes are weak and defective, and need improvements to work as intended.
Many classes are grossly overpowered, and need to be toned down or they can literally wrestle control of the game away from the DM.
Most feats in general are terrible, and could use substantial improvement.


Is there a list of said classes that are weak and which ones are OP? That will give me a good place to start.

Also, which feats are specifically terrible and haven't already been improved with Pathfinder? Is there a list? :)

I'm aware that this is a LONG road, but I'm very passionate about this game and I've been wanting to do this for some time.

[hakarb]

A short-ish list:
-The designers overestimated the value of full BAB. Give it to any class that is expected to spend most of their time on the front lines or that is mostly going to be attacking. Definitely monks.

-The designers overestimated the value of having lots of skill points. Give 4+Int to every non-spellcasting class; leave clerics and wizards where they are.

- Fix the class skills lists. Spot and Listen should be class skills for all mundane classes; only casters can afford to casually ignore their surroundings.

- More well-defined uses for skills, especially for characters with high ranks in skills. Consider allowing these uses only for 5+ and 10+ skill ranks; the problem with the existing DCs system is that spells and magic items make it trivial for casters to get almost arbitrarily high bonuses, and thus they end up better at using skills than the classes that don't have many tools aside from skills.

- Consolidate combat feats. I usually bundle Dodge and Mobility into one, and Point-Blank Shot and Precise Shot into one, among others.

- Combat feats that grant numerical bonuses need to scale, likely by the character level of the character. So, like Weapon Focus grants +1 to attack with given weapon for every four levels. Fighters should get a bigger bonus, or be capable of stacking the feats, or their bonus scales faster.

- Consider allowing fighters to spend a feat for pounce, or to straight up full attack as a standard action 1/four levels per encounter.

- Adopt one of the monk fixes from this site. It's a huge amount of work to give the core monk the revision it needs while not creating something entirely new, or rendering a lot of the really cool ACFs and variants for monk less useful (not that that is a terrible thing, if the actual base class is improving noticeably). My two favorites are in my extended sig. Xaotiq1's is a very ambitious one, and should be handled with some care.



Did I say short-ish?
:smallbiggrin:

-The designers overestimated the value of full BAB. Give it to any class that is expected to spend most of their time on the front lines or that is mostly going to be attacking. Definitely monks.

So much this...Monks are already getting moved to a d10 and given full BAB. It never made sense why are worse at combat because they use their hands. I mean come on, in real life, unarmed martial artists can easily go toe to toe with armed trained fighters and win. The tricky part will of course be determining which classes are 'designed' to be front line fighters.

[Phelix-Mu]

Is there a list of said classes that are weak and which ones are OP? That will give me a good place to start.

Also, which feats are specifically terrible and haven't already been improved with Pathfinder? Is there a list? :)

I'm aware that this is a LONG road, but I'm very passionate about this game and I've been wanting to do this for some time.

Have you read JaronK's Tier System? And also the significant "Why Classes are in Their Tiers?" I think you can google for both those and come up with the relevant posts. Understanding the conceptual spread is a very big part of undertaking serious revision, as it allows one to generally understand what makes, let's say a monk, so much inferior to a wizard, given equal levels of optimization.:smallwink:

[Coidzor]

There've been a few starts at community-based endeavours along similar lines about 3.5 alone. I believe one such was the Rebalanced Compendium over on Brilliant Gameologists, before they moved to Minmax Boards, which attempted to bring Core 3.5 up to around Tier 3 minimum and tone down the worst excesses of Tiers 1 & 2 in core.

Also, I think Legend may have started out as something similar before they switched tracks to make their own game system. Fax Celestis' work is one of the more complete projects that's been mostly one person but even he has had assistance, I just can't remember how much. I also can't recall offhand how far along he got, though he laid a fairly good groundwork, I thought, so that may be of interest for an example of how/where to put the rebalance point.

I think the most daunting task, beyond figuring out the new balance point and how to determine if mechanics are in line with it, is rejiggering the spellcasting system without breaking it more or just killing it.

[Phelix-Mu]

-The designers overestimated the value of full BAB. Give it to any class that is expected to spend most of their time on the front lines or that is mostly going to be attacking. Definitely monks.

So much this...Monks are already getting moved to a d10 and given full BAB. It never made sense why are worse at combat because they use their hands. I mean come on, in real life, unarmed martial artists can easily go toe to toe with armed trained fighters and win. The tricky part will of course be determining which classes are 'designed' to be front line fighters.

So, I will give you my quicky three-point fix for monks. Keep in mind that thousands of people have thousands of fixes. I even had a thread on ppl's top three suggestions on what needed to be fixed about monks. That was one of my first threads here. *tear*

1.) Full BAB and Wisdom to attack and damage. If this is too strong, consider Wisdom instead of Strength to attack and damage. Also, consider allowing a choice of Int, Dex, or Wis, as those are also archetypes that are often monk options (like via Kung-Fu Genius/Carmendine Monk feats), or builds for things like halfling monks.

2.) Wisdom modifier as an unnamed bonus to all Strength and Dexterity-based skills and ability checks. This includes combat maneuvers (bull rush, grapple, disarm, etc). Also, if you want to emphasize this, consider a scaling bonus on top of this, perhaps equal to 1/2 monk level.

3.) Allow monks to move 1/2 their speed as a swift action. This allows them a mini-pounce, and generally enhances their potent movement by allowing them to move more flexibly in combat without having to burn precious feats on the generally terrible Spring Attack feat tree. Also fixes the problem with Flurry's full-round action working counter to a monk's movement emphasis.

[Gwendol]

The hard part is how to deal with magic. I guess you could simply ban wizards, clerics, druids and sorcerers and only have beguilers, warmages, necros, spirit shamans and favored souls?

[hakarb]

So, I will give you my quicky three-point fix for monks. Keep in mind that thousands of people have thousands of fixes. I even had a thread on ppl's top three suggestions on what needed to be fixed about monks. That was one of my first threads here. *tear*

1.) Full BAB and Wisdom to attack and damage. If this is too strong, consider Wisdom instead of Strength to attack and damage. Also, consider allowing a choice of Int, Dex, or Wis, as those are also archetypes that are often monk options (like via Kung-Fu Genius/Carmendine Monk feats), or builds for things like halfling monks.

2.) Wisdom modifier as an unnamed bonus to all Strength and Dexterity-based skills and ability checks. This includes combat maneuvers (bull rush, grapple, disarm, etc). Also, if you want to emphasize this, consider a scaling bonus on top of this, perhaps equal to 1/2 monk level.

3.) Allow monks to move 1/2 their speed as a swift action. This allows them a mini-pounce, and generally enhances their potent movement by allowing them to move more flexibly in combat without having to burn precious feats on the generally terrible Spring Attack feat tree. Also fixes the problem with Flurry's full-round action working counter to a monk's movement emphasis.

Full BAB and Wisdom to attack is good.

Wisdom modifier to maneuvers also good, and makes sense for flavor.

[hakarb]

The hard part is how to deal with magic. I guess you could simply ban wizards, clerics, druids and sorcerers and only have beguilers, warmages, necros, spirit shamans and favored souls?

The problem with magic is that spells are too good and do too much with no real cost. Magic just offers solutions that don't require thought, the fix is to change spells and make it so they require actual preparation. Can you imagine if you have to actually have material components for all of your spells that you had to keep track of?

Of course the other part is dealing with the fact that magic accomplishes things far too easily. Spells just need to be changed and compared against available abilities to ensure that if they offer game-breaking awesomeness then they would also require situational foreknowledge and preparation.

I think everyone is fine letting wizards know all spells if he has to carry a backpack full of magical crap just to be able to cast powerful spells.

[Gwendol]

That doesn't sound like a fix to me but a penalty. I'm sorry but increasing the book-keeping for wizards isn't an appealing solution.

[hakarb]

That doesn't sound like a fix to me but a penalty. I'm sorry but increasing the book-keeping for wizards isn't an appealing solution.

Ultima made it work without it being too aggravating. They did this by having 8 components. If each school of magic had a specific component tied to casting a spell from it's school, it would definitely be a nerf to the wizard and any arcane spellcaster without being too annoying. Mundanes already have to manage an inventory of ammunition and various weapons. It's just adding ammunition to wizards.

The biggest changes will have to come in the form of changing the actual spells.