If you don't know why this is so awful and hilarious, that's OK.  Don't figure it out.

Sometimes people are just broken from their own personal history, or they're indoctrinated into a way of thinking and cannot see it.  It is very useful to recognize such issues and route around the damage.

The first time I realized that I could write off the opinion of a someone who had consistently voted in ways that had terrible, terrible results, it was incredibly liberating.  Why am I taking advice from someone so reliably wrong?  Why are they lecturing me?  I broadened it out to politics in general.  Why am I listening to the group that screwed things up?  Don't I have any discernment?  Can't I evaluate someone's position and decide it's foolish?  And if they advocate such foolish positions regularly, can't I write off the person as a fool?

That's all I have to say on that topic for now.

userscripts.org/users/34026/scripts

The nature of a man by ~isilien on deviantART

The problem with the Vancian system is that it engenders the "15 minute work day" -- that is to say that clerics, wizards, and the like seem to blow through their spells after just a few combats, causing the group to go rest after less than a hour in the game world.  Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition has a solution for this, which is pretty close to just abandoning the Vancian magic system.  I personally wanted to do something much simpler with the 3.5 rules.  I was thinking, could I address the issue by changing just one single table in the Player's Handbook?

Let me show you the revised table, and then I'll explain why it's awesome.

He was a geek, like me.  He loved video games and learning through fun.  He loved his family.  He has a thousand stories about the people he's met.  And he passed away today, July 25th, 2008.  You should watch the video.

"I mean, the metaphor I've used is... somebody's going to push my family off a cliff pretty soon, and I won't be there to catch them.  And that breaks my heart.  But I have some time to sew some nets to cushion the fall.  So, I can curl up in a ball and cry, or I can get to work on the nets."

Randy Pausch (Oct. 23, 1960 - July 25, 2008)

The problem?  To fix this, we cannot just drop the confirmation roll and say "all critical threats are automatically confirmed."  If we do that, then crits will happen much more often and low-level characters will die more often.  But if we reduce the damage of the weapons, then we can keep all those crits.  That should speed up gameplay without changing the numbers (much), because there is no more rolling to confirm crits.  They just happen.  It should be more enjoyable for the players, too -- their weapons might do a tiny bit less damage each hit, but they will do critical hits often.  So what we're about to do will keep damage roughly the same, but remove an extra dice roll.  Ready?

Critical hits

1. Drop every weapon's damage to the next smaller die.  1d12 becomes 1d10, 1d10 becomes 1d8, 1d8 becomes 1d6, 1d6 becomes 1d4, 1d4 becomes 1d3, and 1d3 becomes 1d2.  Now, there is a tricky part here, for weapons that do two dice worth of damage per hit: 2d6 becomes 1d10, and 2d4 becomes 1d6.
2. All critical threats are automatically confirmed.  Done.

I'm calling my revisions 3.t, as in 3.tony, because I'm the one to blame if the revisions suck or work well.  The criteria for "sucks" would be if a rule change requires large rewrites, or breaks lots of other rules.  The criteria for "works well" would be if a rule change speeds up gameplay but has little effect otherwise.  So if a typical combat takes 90 minutes to resolve normally, with my rules I hope that you can resolve combat in an hour or less.

Turning

First up for revision is the cleric system for turning undead.  We merely drop the turn check roll, and replace it with cleric level + charisma bonus + knowledge religion synergy (if the character has it).  The turn damage roll would remain.  So the steps are as follows:

1. Roll the turn damage as usual (2d6 + cleric level + charisma).
2. Cap the highest hit die undead that can be turned at: cleric level + charisma modifier + knowledge religion synergy (if any).

Let's consider the example of a 2nd level cleric with 14 charisma and no points in the knowledge religion skill.  If the cleric rolled a 4, he'd have an 8 for step 1 (4 + 2 for level, +2 for charisma).  Then for step 2 the cap would be set at 2 + 2 + 0 (no synergy bonus), or 4 total.  Therefore, the cleric could turn two 4 HD undead (8 total, capped at 4 HD).  But he/she could not turn one 8 HD undead, due to the per-monster cap.

This is almost exactly the same as turn undead following RAW, but removes one roll and replaces it with a reasonably fair, typically unchanging number.  Should be easier for players to follow and execute quickly.

I'll group all my articles about rules revision under the 3.t tag, should you wish to see what else I have for it.

I've owned a Wii since day one.  I've put probably a thousand dollars into the console, games, and controllers.  But I'm thinking hard about things, and so I want to share with you what I posted over at the RPG Codex.