While true that the problems of Power Attack, Sneak Attack, 2h fighting, high Strength, and many others have been beaten to death, I do find it interesting that someone brought up Combat Expertise. And, there is likely more to be said on house rules and GM responses to broken mechanics.
I don't know how much of a problem Combat Expertise is. It's not going to make much of a difference to a single threat, as threat will have some absurd attack bonus and hit anyway, while on the flip side the single threat's DV may be high enough that taking an attack penalty has some meaningful disadvantage. It is huge when being swarmed.
I have a hard time looking at 4e for inspiration. Sure, it obsesses over balance, but playing it in my experience is like playing a boardgame rather than a role-playing game. And, combat in 4e (i.e. everything in 4e) is routinely deadly dull.
The problem with going in and changing anything is that it won't necessarily fix the problem and often has unintended consequences. I'm not sure Conan d20 combat is fixable in the way I want it fixed. I like having things risk being taken out in one shot. I feel like combat is reasonably quick and not overly dice-rolling heavy. As a player, playing pretty close to RAW doesn't bother me a lot except that a well-built combat character and any other character are playing two different games when combat breaks out.
OTOH, as a GM, I found it to be really painful coming up with appropriate challenges. Coming up with things to fight that are pretty much dead as soon as a combat PC gets an attack off is not interesting and not fun. It's funny how it's just like the HeroQuest boardgame (something I've played a lot) in my mind from a Zargon perspective. You throw things out you know are going to die fast, but every once in a while they do something and the attrition effect builds and builds until the party may just not be able to continue. Well, that may be how to get a boardgame to balance, but it doesn't enthrall me as a GM. I want drama. I want parties to feel pressure. But, I don't want them to be devastated by anything less than a climactic battle.
In one session of guest GMing, I threw stuff at the party that was insanely hard to one-shot or grind down through straight up fighting and that could force MDSs. The party ran away and the adventure was pretty much over at that point as the party wasn't interested enough in trying to come up with either a better battle plan or a solution that involved dealing with the enemy without fighting it. As you all can imagine, that was hardly entertaining.
So, the first step in changing rules is figuring out how as a playgroup we want combat to work. When I look at Conan, I see it failing in terms of variance of "effective damage output" depending upon whether you built a good combat character or didn't, failing in terms of party recovery, failing in terms of tending to be either repetitive (superstrategies, like nuking the world with 2h PA+, or one shot anything with SA) or clunky (grappling).
There are tons of ideas for fixing the EDO problem. I still have an interest in a mechanic where you do damage based on level as I see that helping to maintain some level of parity between characters as they advance and between the characters and their foes. But, in the absence of other changes, that just means combat becomes outrageously lethal. So, where do you scaleback elsewhere? Getting rid of MD does scaleback, but now combat becomes awfully D&Desque with round after round of attrition - it becomes a grind. Grind to me != drama.
Improving recovery is easy, in one thread, there's talk of giving back half HP after every battle. While this may prove to be necessary to have things really work the way playgroups envision them, it has its own consequences and may not end up balancing depending upon what other changes are made.
As a player, I've gotten to the point where pretty much I don't care anymore. I see too many corrections needed to where the whole game ends up being rewritten, which isn't necessary as combat isn't so dominant in our gaming that it has to be perfected. Combat isn't completely broken, it's just kind of broken, and that's okay. When I design characters in the future, I'll know better what works and either build more capable combat characters or just resign the character to trying to survive combat as a spearchucker.
As a GM, I would struggle with not trying to fix the most egregious crap that makes interesting challenges challenging. My 3.5 D&D group changed Power Attack and additional damage for wielding a weapon 2h before it ever began because the group knew that there was something wonky in the rules (also changed things like how Knowledge skills worked as D&D 3.5 is FUed up with how few skill ranks you get). But, if the players don't care enough - ours don't, then why go to all that trouble. Takes time away from crafting adventures and NPCs and making good stories.
