Shields and DEX

Rolling up some pre-generated characters for next week's CampCon with the family and I noticed that I'm not happy with the way shields modify DEX.  It's too fiddly and it sucks.  The intent was to make shields a little bit less attractive but really that is stupid.  The real reason not to use a shield is so you can use two handed weapons (and get the +1 and full strength bonus to damage.).  Also magic users can't use them while casting and further limiting them is dumb so who cares if the rogue carries a shield?  Rogue is a lot more general now than it was in the beginning anyway and can just as easily be a tricky swashbuckler as a sneaky footpad.

Also DEX is not a purely physical attribute - it also doubles for reaction time and other things and it shouldn't be linked so heavily to having one arm occupied. Bad design.  I think I'll just take the DEX modifier right out because I don't like how it makes you have to keep two sets of stat calculations on hand since you can go from shield to no shield and vice-versa pretty quickly. Maybe I'll put in a Minimum Strength value to separate the large shields form the small.

Taking it out next update - you can pretty easily choose to ignore it in the current rules too.