Quote from: Graewulf;1090228There are a lot of things I'd change, but if I can only choose one, I'd change the way armor works in the game to how armor actually works. Armor is all about mitigating damage when being physically hit, not the avoidance of being hit. There's a big difference there. The heavier the armor, the easier it is to physically hit you. Of course, the heavier the armor, the better the mitigation it will have and any damage you do take will be much less. There's a trade-off there that is ignored in D&D. It's over simplified and inaccurate because the game is designed around being a hit point sponge.

Changing armor to Damage Reduction wouldn't work in D&D without basically rebuilding the system from the ground up.

So basically the one thing that you'd change about D&D is make it an entirely different game? lol

Generally speaking I've never been able to make peace with armour making you harder to hit.  Hit point inflation I can live with as long as there's some damage inflation to go with it.  But I wouldn't strip it out of D&D because it's part of what makes D&D D&D.  I play other games that do armour better.  I mean, if I owned D&D, was mega rich, and had my way, I'd make the new edition a slightly cleaned up Rolemaster Standard System but that's mostly because I'm a very mean and bitter old man

Anyways in broader sense I'd like to bring D&D back to its wargame roots, make combat play faster so you can manage hundreds on a side, make sure realm management and naval combat and sieges are in the damn DMG.  That's really a broad change one thing and not a fix for fifth edition though.  Which is why I went with cutting back on special case rule bloat.

Quote from: Charon's Little Helper;1090229Changing armor to Damage Reduction wouldn't work in D&D without basically rebuilding the system from the ground up.

So basically the one thing that you'd change about D&D is make it an entirely different game? lol

Hackmaster 5e did it without making an entirely different game. It's still a d20 D&D knockoff. I'm sure it's not the only one out there either.

Quote from: Psikerlord;1090220If I am limited to only one thing. I'd make all spellcasting hazardous and unpredictable. Maybe some kind of variant on the wild sorcerer, but much easier to trigger. And a much bigger table of possibilities, obviously.

Yes.  Take the Easy button away from casters.  Insert more Risk / Reward into the equation.

Quote from: SavageSchemer;1090223Something like this or this works really well for that.

Personally, I'm in the "never seen this in real life" / "only exists on the internet" camp. I half suspect that people who do see this at the table are playing with classes essentially designed to break the game. You'd never see some of the classes mentioned a few posts back at my table, ever. But then, I don't play 3.x or later editions, either (own, yes - play, no). So there's that. This thread has made me mighty grateful of that fact.

Yes I really like that Lastgasp post on magic

Quote from: Razor 007;1090294Yes.  Take the Easy button away from casters.  Insert more Risk / Reward into the equation.

Yes it just makes magic more "magical" if it is not easily controlled

locked XP chart.  Individual XP charts per class, please.  Different people learn different things differently. The takeaway that a Magic-User has after a battle is wholly different than that of a fighter, or a thief, or a cleric (or a monk, bard, assassin, illusionist, druid, paladin or ranger).

Locked XP chart blandifies characters and leads to push-button games.  Bleh.

Quote from: Charon's Little Helper;1090163Starting in 3.x there was no good reason for ability scores to go from 3-18. Other than a few minor things (carry capacity & feat pre-reqs are the only things I can think of) only the modifier actually matters.

Just make the modifier be the score and it would significantly reduce complexity, especially for newbies. Unfortunately, it's a sacred cow and unlikely to be changed.


Many of the other changes people have put forward would make D&D no longer D&D. I don't want D&D to be a different game - I can just play one of them.

I've struggled with this myself.  In my heartbreaker, abilities and modifiers are the same.  There are some disadvantages.  In 3.x, if you have a STR of 18, you can take 4 STR damage and you have a STR of 14 (+2 modifier).  If your Strength were 4 and you took 4 strength damage, your Strength would be zero and you couldn't move.  

If you want to include negative modifiers, you actually have to deal with negative numbers.  If you don't deal with negative numbers, abilities are tightly constrained; ie 0-6 instead of 1-18.

Quote from: deadDMwalking;1090559I've struggled with this myself.  In my heartbreaker, abilities and modifiers are the same.  There are some disadvantages.  In 3.x, if you have a STR of 18, you can take 4 STR damage and you have a STR of 14 (+2 modifier).  If your Strength were 4 and you took 4 strength damage, your Strength would be zero and you couldn't move.  

Didn't you realize that strength damage should be adjusted to fit the scale? The -4 to +4 ability modifier range is a 9 point scale, which maps to the 18 point scale of the ability score range (2 to 19 not 3 to 18, to cover all possible scores associated with modifiers in the -4 to +4 range). If you have Str 18 and take 4 points of ability damage, the equivalent using just ability mods is Str +4 and 2 points of ability damage (i.e. halve the Str damage).

Edit: Not to mention that Str +0 (mods) is comparable to Str 10 in the full ability score range, not Str 0 (which is equivalent to -5). If you want to shift the scale so the modifiers are always positive, you'd have to shift the scale by 5 points. Though this screws up things like damage bonuses, so you're probably going to be stuck with negative scores. But if you say PCs are at least average at everything (scores of +0 or better, the equivalent of scores of 10 or better in the old system), then it will only come up in for monsters and NPCs, and special cases like severe ability damage.

Yes, I understand that you have to compress the amount of ability damage; that is my point.  Having a poison that does 1d4 STR damage pretty much has to become 1 STR.  You reduce variability which has some consequences.

5th edition? It is not my game, but if I could make one change to make me like it better, it would be about slowing down healing. As it goes, there is precious little long-term attrition in the game - you are either healed up or you are severely wounded, with little in between.

Quote from: deadDMwalking;1090591Yes, I understand that you have to compress the amount of ability damage; that is my point.  Having a poison that does 1d4 STR damage pretty much has to become 1 STR.  You reduce variability which has some consequences.

Fairly minor consequences, and there are ways of reintroducing variability like allowing a save or rolling 1d2 twice and taking the lowest (average is exactly the same as 1d4/2)

I would re-tune the entire core game to be 10-levels.

Every other "issue" would likely be resolved within that core assumption.

If we're talking 5e specifically, my change is replace the current XP chart with the ones from the 1e Player's Handbook. Making high level play routine instead of rare was a huge change and, I think, the source of a lot of problems that would otherwise (almost) never come up.

Quote from: tenbones;1090692I would re-tune the entire core game to be 10-levels.

Every other "issue" would likely be resolved within that core assumption.

There's a good reason why the default assumption in OD&D was that you retire from adventuring at 9th level and settle down to run a castle.