The Gaming Den

All bonuses filter down into two types:

Natural
Magical

Each type stacks with the other, but not with itself.

This should eliminate the monstrous list of bonus types that D&D has accumulated as well as make the game more noob friendly.

The only downside I can see is making CharOp fans sad.

A nice thought, but too simplistic to handle standard 3e/3.5 D&D without a massive conversion. Damn near everything is a bonus. Let's look at Armor Class before doing anything weird, you can easily expect a first level character to have a Dexterity bonus, shield bonus, armor bonus, and maybe even a dodge bonus to AC. That's four bonuses before getting into magic.

What would be much more reasonable is to classify all bonuses granted by spells or magic items become magical bonuses. You'd still have marginal stacking (a magical bonus to an ability score increasing your ability score bonus, and a magic bonus to something that your ability score bonus also applies to) but you'd still probably run up against weird shit that no longer worked like you would think it should.

Also, this probably belongs in IMHO, and should go there if you want people to actually talk about this. Most people don't even look at IMOI much.

Limiting natural bonuses to one source would work better with armor-as-DR or similar, I understand the loss of Dodge/Shield/Armor but the change I had in mind was more for the magic bonus stacking.

One could probably do that for magic alone and see an improvement in the game.
Buff stacking would be mostly eliminated.

Even with only one bonus type, you're going to have stealth where it's magic to your Dex, your Skill, the circumstances, and as a penalty to their Wis, and their skill. And we probably want Darkness to stack with Silence for circumstances too, but not Invisibility or Blindness. Or cover I suppose. Oh, and don't forget size, and distance, and racial bonuses on both sides, and hey there's magic size and magic fog and magic race changing and ....

What you could say is that nothing stacks. So +4 Dex and +12 Skill and +4 Size and +8 Race is just +12. So if someone nukes your skill with a debuff then you still have +8 Race, and if they Poly you into a Troll as well you still have +4 Dex. Then no one needs to care if it's a morale bonus or a circumstance bonus. In Darkness everyone has +8 stealth unless they're better than that.