Giants and Graveyards: Grod's collected 3.5 revisions

[Grod_The_Giant]

So, what are your thoughts on mixing your rewrite with PF? I'm setting up a list of modifications I'm going to use for my games, and so far I have
PFSRD (yes, including all DSP and most other third party)
Giants and Graveyards. Overlap = merge, so Paladins get the benefits of both PF Paladin with archetypes and all, then the benefits of G&G on top of that (your paladin is one of my favorites)
Rules as Common Sense Dictates (at least, the ones I agree with)

Since PF has all the same problems as 3.5, most things I did here should still work.

• You'd probably want to fiddle with the feats and grant more automatic updates, since I understand that PF chopped up a lot of feats.
• Skills, again, would take some tweaking-- making sure the linked skills were still appropriate and all.
• Classes... the classes should work with no more than the usual updates to skill lists and bonus feats. I wouldn't merge them like you're proposing-- that seems like a good way to get characters with lots of redundant abilities, as well as being a power boost that frankly isn't needed. I'd also be really careful about what new classes you allow. G&G is a class-based fix at its core, after all. Replacing the wizard doesn't do much if you can pick up an Alchemist instead, you know? I wouldn't allow anything new that's outside the T3/T4-with-houserules-to-boost-it range.

[ace rooster]

It looks to me like archery got a little scary. A composite longbow in the hands of a decent str and dex character can be throwing out 4 attacks of d8 +10 damage a round at level 6 easy, with a good chance to hit at 600ft (distance bow). Against easy targets power attack can double that damage. I would limit the dex to damage to the first range increment, or possibly 30ft.

I think you are assuming that the dps of an archer should be able to match the dps of a melee, but in a party with some maturity this is not the case. Melee can be far more powerful and still be balanced (against archers), simply because of the extra risk involved in being in melee. The archer has to be prepared to accept that many encounters will be over too fast for them to be relevant (though readied actions to disrupt any spellcasters are always useful), and the melee has to accept that sometimes approaching the enemy is simply a bad idea (and they will just have to use a bow, which they will be ok with anyway), which is why some maturity is required.

[Grod_The_Giant]

I think you are assuming that the dps of an archer should be able to match the dps of a melee, but in a party with some maturity this is not the case. Melee can be far more powerful and still be balanced (against archers), simply because of the extra risk involved in being in melee. The archer has to be prepared to accept that many encounters will be over too fast for them to be relevant (though readied actions to disrupt any spellcasters are always useful), and the melee has to accept that sometimes approaching the enemy is simply a bad idea (and they will just have to use a bow, which they will be ok with anyway), which is why some maturity is required.

• I'm sure that was the designer's reasoning, too. In practice, it's problematic for, oh, several reasons:
• No player should be forced to sit out any significant proportion of encounters-- especially not ones that take as long as combat generally does. So "archers to be prepared to accept that many encounters will be over too fast for them to be relevant" is a poor design strategy. Partly because of this,
• Encounters almost never begin at high range increments. Whether it's because the party is indoors, being ambushed, the DM uses a battlemap, or just doesn't want melee (including his melee monsters!) to be bored, I've almost never seen a fight begin more than, oh, two hundred feet away. (And most of those were special circumstances, like a ship-to-ship battle with the party manning catapults). If the party does manage to find foes from a thousand feet away, they deserve a few rounds of archer-ing.
• Archery is still vulnerable to things like DR and weather manipulation.

I'll accept that you have a point with the potential for many attacks at Str+Dex. I'm not sure how much of an issue it will be, though-- I'll throw that question open to the floor. And as a potential answer, how about if composite bows increase range, rather than letting you add some of your Strength?

[ace rooster]

• I'm sure that was the designer's reasoning, too. In practice, it's problematic for, oh, several reasons:
• No player should be forced to sit out any significant proportion of encounters-- especially not ones that take as long as combat generally does. So "archers to be prepared to accept that many encounters will be over too fast for them to be relevant" is a poor design strategy. Partly because of this,
• Encounters almost never begin at high range increments. Whether it's because the party is indoors, being ambushed, the DM uses a battlemap, or just doesn't want melee (including his melee monsters!) to be bored, I've almost never seen a fight begin more than, oh, two hundred feet away. (And most of those were special circumstances, like a ship-to-ship battle with the party manning catapults). If the party does manage to find foes from a thousand feet away, they deserve a few rounds of archer-ing.
• Archery is still vulnerable to things like DR and weather manipulation.

I'll accept that you have a point with the potential for many attacks at Str+Dex. I'm not sure how much of an issue it will be, though-- I'll throw that question open to the floor. And as a potential answer, how about if composite bows increase range, rather than letting you add some of your Strength?

If a DM is going to only use close range encounters against single enemies that are ok with you engaging them in melee then the only consideration is dps, and so if archery is lower in those terms then it is strictly worse. If there is some variety in the type and setting of combats though archery can start to shine, and does not have to match melee in terms of dps to do it. The famous example is tuckers kobolds, who really do not need to be made more lethal. The important consideration is that ranged combat only requires some way of avoiding melee, and not massive distances. Difficult terrain is a big one, but simply being faster than your enemy is enough in open terrain.

I agree that encounters that a player cannot interact with at all are bad, but if a player builds a character that cannot combat opponents fighting with a decent amount of sense at all, then I regard that as their own fault. Goblins on wolves with crossbows that withdraw when engaged in melee should not be an unexpected problem, nor should a meat grinder monster that can only move 10ft per round (Any PC who walks up to it deserves what they get). Likewise inclement weather or the sun setting should not cripple a build.

For the DM to do this requires players who won't throw their toys out of the pram when their one trick won't work, which I admit is not always realistic, but this is not a system problem. 3.5 is a rich system, and has many tactical options that are a bad idea most of the time, but this is why I like it. I find the game to be most enjoyable when I end up using some of those options because circumstances call for it, rather than something I built the character to be good at it. I have played melee machines where the best decision I ever made was realising that our opponent had no answer to us simply keeping our distance, and I have played an archer who at one point rugby tackled a caster (Dm did not expect that one, got to love the lack of AoOs from unarmed opponents). Ranged combat has to be suboptimal in terms of damage output, because it is simply more versatile.

I think my biggest worry is that this benefits large numbers of mooks with ranged weapons far more than PCs (elite array goblins with crossbows deal almost double damage), which degrades mundane character's relative power further compared to casters. Increased power options for mid to high level archers I could get behind, but a blanket improvement to the power of ranged combat strikes me as misplaced. I hope that clarrifies.

[Grod_The_Giant]

For the DM to do this requires players who won't throw their toys out of the pram when their one trick won't work

It's not an issue of immature players, it's more a sense of "these people have taken the time out of their busy lives to participate in my game. We're only here for a few hours. Even if s/he doesn't mind, it feels rude for me, as the DM, to spend an hour on an encounter they can't help with.

I think my biggest worry is that this benefits large numbers of mooks with ranged weapons far more than PCs (elite array goblins with crossbows deal almost double damage), which degrades mundane character's relative power further compared to casters. Increased power options for mid to high level archers I could get behind, but a blanket improvement to the power of ranged combat strikes me as misplaced. I hope that clarrifies.

One big thing I was trying to do with the general feat/combat rules was to make all combat options viable, even without a real investment. The barbarian won't be as good an archer as the ranger, but he's not going to be useless if he needs to pull out a bow for some reason. Massed mooks may well benefit from the rules changes, but... with the power boost from the classes, I think the players still come out well ahead.

[MeimuHakurei]

Small wording issue: You replace the Greatclub with a Greathammer with "identical stats to the Greataxe". You should probably specify it deals bludgeoning damage because with this way of putting it, it would deal slashing damage (which I think is not your intent).

[VladtheLad]

Are your melee homebrew warriors like fighter, barbarian and paladin balanced against the warblade and the crusader?

From a cursory reading the totally homebrewed classes seem stronger than the ToB classes (including your buffs to the ToB), then again maybe it is that I haven't used ToB for like a decade and have forgotten how strong it is.
Also do you use any fixes for the ToB maneuvers?