D&D is a big game, and no fix will truely balance everything in all situations. All I'm looking for is to bring them on a similar level, so the differences aren't so glaring. Given JaronK's tier system, I'd eventually like them all to be around tier 3 to 4.
You are not the arbiter of what should be dropped. If you don't accept the stated premise then you are derailing the thread, into what you want it to be. It's a frame of reference that the op saw fit to include and the only person who has a problem with it...
...is you.
You're not even supposed to be here doing this shouldn't you be reporting to the duel of wits or something? Fuck...
Right then Moving on... away from the elephant, I have a proposed diplomacy fix.
Diplomacy.
Funtions off the same opposed roll as Intimidate you cannot advance someones role more than two steps with a single check but multiple checks can be allowed in the course of conversation.
Even a friendly, person will not do something that vastly differs from thier original intent or alignment.
There's no rule against me posting on this thread. There's a rule against me flaming and baiting other posters, something I am very happy NOT to do as long as the same is not directed at me.
I deleted the invitation to a Duel as soon as I got them. I do NOT spend my time on the Internet just to get sucked into "How good at you at flame wars?" I much prefer the tone of your prior posts, with gentleman's disagreements.
The intent of
this thread is to Fix Problems. If the OP wants to refer to Jaron's thread, good for him. It's not a requirement to refer to it to post balance issues. Balance issues occured long before 'Tiering'.
I suggest moving off the topic, because, as you say, I'm not going to budge on my perspective, and I've no desire to keep reiterating it and have people frothing to tell me once again that my opinion is 'wrong'. That is the kind of thinking that got the original Tiering thread locked.
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Diplomacy. Ugh. You had to pick the worst of them, didn't you?
Diplomacy suffers from two problems.
1) Skills work on fixed DC's. Diplomacy DC's are, well, laughable.
2) There's way, way, waaaaaaaaaaay too many ways to gain bonuses to skill checks in the game.
#2 isn't hard to work on...reduce the frequency and power of bonuses.
#1 could be fixed by simply making the DC's float. Looking ahead, 4E does this by fixing DC's by level of the PC's. This can be done because the only 'bonuses' are a couple of feats, and aiding another, in addition to stats. Not so simple in 3.5!
I like the idea of RANKS in a skill determining what you can and cannot accomplish. Your idea of limiting effects to 'two degrees' would be something that might require 5 ranks of Diplomacy, changing 'one rank' might require none, but moving from unfriendly might equal two ranks of change, etc. The rule that sometimes you just can't use Diplomacy should be set down in stone, as well!
Definitely, the possibility of 'hasty diplomacy' should allow no more then one rank of change. Yeah, my Cleric of Pelor with the +80 Diplomacy modifier speaks with the raging CE barbarians charging him, and ten seconds later they are fanatic followers?
A sure and total fix? It'd have to involve a lot of work on the numbers to shoot for, and how easy those numbers are to get. IF NPC's have problems hitting the numbers, you have PC's always, always 'winning' the checks...boring. If everyone can hit them, the current situation, the effect is laughable.
I would suggest that the first thing would be to set what having x amounts of RANKS in Diplomacy allows you to accomplish...and then looking at DC's, penalties and extreme effects after that.
Note that any changes to the Diplomacy situation will ripple across the entire Skill subset of rules.
Das Bier!
