Eddited down 3.5 D&D?

[bobthe6th]

Ok, so I had an idea. 3.5 is a sprawling mass of dozens of rulebooks, with thousands of spells, hundreds of classes, and probably one hundred thousand pages of rule text.

A lot of it is pointless (detect poison), or broken(DMM). But their is a bunch of good stuff in their... soooo....

Why not edit down the full rule system? As in just start cutting stuff until their is a comprehensible amount of stuff, then fix the finished pile.

This sound at all sane?:smallredface:

I suspect it would need people with more system mastery then I to do the editing for some stuff, and I would suggest a crowd sourced project. Like chose a rulebook and start cutting out the pointless stuff, or what needs to be combined. Then post a list of proposed cuts errata style in a separate thread.

Well, in any case, thanks for reading. :smallsmile:

[Eldan]

Welcome to the horde. I can think of at least three or four attempts that started this in the last few years.

[Grinner]

Microlite20 (http://www.forum.koboldenterprise.com/index.php?action=downloads;sa=view;down=22)?

[Zombimode]

This sound at all sane?:smallredface:

At a first glance, sure.
But if you look deeper, it might become a bit more problematic that you've imagined.

The big question is: what is your metric for keep/removing something?

You could say: "Well, everything thats bad or useless goes to the bin".
But determining exactly that is what is so problematic. Because D&D offers so many character building options it creates a very large amount of contexts and each feat/classfeature/spell/skill etc. has to be evaluated for each context. Add that players also have diverse character building goals, and NPC building is again very different from PC building, it becomes very difficult to make a general statement about a particular game element.

Examples:

Rapid Assault - you don't think is worth a feat slot? well, its useful for low-level mooks. Combine it with Martial Study (Steely Strike) or Reckless Charge and your 1st or 2nd level orc warrior looks quite dangerous (he probably wont be relevant for longer than one round anyway), so as a DM I'm glad the feat exists.

Intimidating Strike - "bah, Standard action, useless" you might say. But put it in an E6 environment and suddenly it becomes quite good (quite a lot of stuff becomes quite useful and relevant in E6 - one reason why I like it so much).

Or something more obvious: Enlarge Spell on a Beguiler or Spell Focus (Enchantments) on a Warmage. Both feats aren't very good in those context, but this changes if you switch them.


Of course there are some outliers. Skill Focus (Speak Language) doesn't do anything for example. But those are quite the minority.

[bobthe6th]

I guess I just missed the rest(unless you are talking G&G, which is a full rewrite I thought...)

that feat... feels like it should be a trait. Or possibly a part of a perk system to hand out mini feats at every level. The situation you mentioned is just about the only one were it is at all relevant. Outside of that, it is at best something to ignore, at worst a trap. As an amuture game designer, it makes me twitch. It is a symptom of the broken feat system, that has a lot of these.

The other needs to be expanded. As a power attack like base for some other feats? worthwhile. On its own... situational.

The issue is D&D has a lot of pages of situational stuff, with some cool things in between.

[nonsi]

Problem is that differnt people have different views about what's pointless and what's in the "essentials" bag.

There's just too much to debate about and you'll never reach a consensus.

Therefore, what I suggest is that you decide what's essential and what's pointless, and you cook it as you see fit.
You could share intermediate results and collect insights and feedbacks until you decide you have a more or less playable alternative to 3.5.

[Empedocles]

Honestly it sounds like a waste of effort. Just don't use what you don't want to use.

[Yora]

I just did a similar thing, though I completely switched out all classes, so it's not very close to an actual light version.

I think using Pathfinder as a base is a good idea, that one already has major smplifications with Combat Maneuver Bonus and Skill Ranks.

Personally, I think a good idea is also to limit the game to 10 levels. Most games I personally played and I heard of from other people rarely reach that level. And removing all spells of 6th to 9th level and all the feat that have prerequisites that can't be matched removes a significant portion of hassle as well.