Talk:Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia (3.5e Flaw)

Problems

Okay, there are problems with this. Severe ones. Let's take a look at that first sentence under "Effect".
"For reasons unknown, you are extremely uncomfortable with long, complex words, preferring to speak in simpler terms."
Why are the reasons unknown? Don't tell a player they can't know the reason their character feels this way. Remove that.
How long are these words? Eight letters or more? Ten letters or more? How about contractions? How about German? Word length varies from language to language. Elves probably have lots of really complex words, because elves. There's no way of judging this precisely or having a DM count and track word length. This mechanic simply just doesn't work like how you want it to and is unreasonable to enforce. This is your main mechanic gimmick and I'm honestly not sure how to make it work.
Why does the character prefer to speak in simpler terms? Maybe they want to be loquacious but are crippled with fear and can't. Remove that too. Don't provide motivations for people in rules text.
Also, just realized being deaf and this is a problem but whatever.
The scaling penalties are also really annoying to track. It's like hey, there's this conversation going on and someone uses the word "marmalade" or whatever and suddenly the DM has to stop talking in the middle of that to ask a player to roll a save, then calculate how much they may have failed it by in several degrees to see how much it ruins the flow of the game by.
If the speaker has a Charisma penalty are they shaken for a negative number of rounds?
If it's based on Charisma, why... wait. Why does who says the word garner more weight than the... nevermind, I don't even care anymore.
Also, that last sentence, pointing out that someone's real life crippling phobia might be funny is in terrible taste. Remove that.
Get some revision going on this when you can, please. --Ganteka Future (talk) 21:19, 30 March 2017 (MDT)

Oh, and I forgot the part where the "when" it triggers in a conversation. If it triggers off the first time it happens in a conversation, the DC is flat unless you have a choir all chant "superstitious extremophile" all at the same time while the bard casts ghost sound and the barbarian just starts yelling "Yayayayaayayayayayaayayyaayayayaaaaa!" Also, is word length syllables or letters? I was going off letters there for a bit, but it doesn't say. This doesn't build character, this just screws things up. Sorry man. Try again. --Ganteka Future (talk) 21:33, 30 March 2017 (MDT)

A bit of poor wording on my part there. I'll fix that. Now that you mention it, the penalty scaling does seem annoying. It sounded better in my head when I first thought of it. I had to base the penalty off of something. Any suggestions? I'll definitely remove that last one. I don't think the phobia is funny, although whoever named it certainly seems to have a sadistic sense of humor. I'll look the phobia back up and see if if specifies what qualifies for word length. I'll work on this some more and see if I can get it to work. Hopefully I can get this fixed rather than having to scrap it. --Halloweenman33 (User talk:talk) 22:38, 30 March 2017

I've made a few changes. Hopefully that's an improvement, but it could probably use some more work. For now, I think I'll call it a night and work on it some more tomorrow when my brain has been refreshed. --Halloweenman33 (talk) 23:00, 30 March 2017

I meant to work on this earlier, but I've been a bit busy. Anyway, I think I've fixed it for the most part. If you have any other suggestions for improvements, please let me know. --Halloweenman33 (User talk:talk) 21:25, 7 April 2017