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View Full Version : You know what's worse than the grappling rules?



AstralFire
2009-07-27, 11:52 PM
The maneuverability rules for flight. Who the hell thought that maximum turning arcs and radii and minimum stall speeds needed to be calculated? :smalleek:

Though at least it was much easier to handwave away in play than grappling. Just going over some of my older homebrew and wanting to smack myself for some of the convoluted mechanics I used. One of them being a highly convoluted system of determining your flight mobility when using a certain augmentable ability (that was itself mechanically balanced, but cumbersome). It had the unfortunate and ironic consequence of making it so that the faster and more daring a maneuver you wanted to do, the slower combat got.

grautry
2009-07-28, 12:03 AM
I don't think that those rules are precisely bad or meaningless. I think they're simply badly handled.

What I would like to see is something along the lines of a list of 'common flying manoeuvres'. If I remember correctly, Draconomicon had something along these lines but it was terribly incomplete.

If properly made, I think that something like that could actually make the game more interesting.

As it is... Yeah, the rules suck.

AstralFire
2009-07-28, 12:05 AM
That would be very nice. Star Wars Saga holds a number of them, too, which I need to look into more as I'm dreaming up a character who fights entirely from speeder bike. I think special abilities is a much better way to express maneuverability than "Let's make a sharp turn here guys!"

"STOP! PROTRACTOR TIME!"

Frosty
2009-07-28, 12:07 AM
Eh, I simplified everything by saying that if you didn't have Good or better maneuverability, you couldn't hover. This seems to work formost PC forms of flight. I as the DM then could just approximate all the creatures with lower than that maneuverability (like dragons).

AstralFire
2009-07-28, 12:12 AM
Eh, I simplified everything by saying that if you didn't have Good or better maneuverability, you couldn't hover. This seems to work formost PC forms of flight. I as the DM then could just approximate all the creatures with lower than that maneuverability (like dragons).

This is what I did as well. I just don't even bother with even that distinction anymore, though, when it comes to systems outside of 3.x, including The Anteheroes. I've really come to appreciate minimalism in design to allow for more complexity of movement.

Saph
2009-07-28, 12:14 AM
They're not all that complicated if you just glance at them and use them simply.

Average, you can fly like a bird and make normal turns.
Good, you can fly like a hummingbird and hover.
Perfect, you can fly like an air elemental and go up, down, backwards, and whatever you can think of.

There's no need to pay exact attention to the angle measurements unless you want to.

Mando Knight
2009-07-28, 12:17 AM
The maneuverability rules for flight. Who the hell thought that maximum turning arcs and radii and minimum stall speeds needed to be calculated? :smalleek:

*Raises hand because that's his area of study*

Oh, wait. We're talking about D&D. Right. *Promptly lowers hand*

AstralFire
2009-07-28, 12:22 AM
They're not all that complicated if you just glance at them and use them simply.

Average, you can fly like a bird and make normal turns.
Good, you can fly like a hummingbird and hover.
Perfect, you can fly like an air elemental and go up, down, backwards, and whatever you can think of.

There's no need to pay exact attention to the angle measurements unless you want to.

Well, it's not like the grappling rules themselves are particularly unwieldy - it's that they're an extra system rarely used tacked onto a system that normally doesn't require those considerations. And Clumsy and Poor maneuverabilities are the ones that are really bad for this.

Saph
2009-07-28, 12:27 AM
Well, it's not like the grappling rules themselves are particularly unwieldy - it's that they're an extra system rarely used tacked onto a system that normally doesn't require those considerations. And Clumsy and Poor maneuverabilities are the ones that are really bad for this.

Players generally have Average and better maneuverability, so only the DM needs to worry about Clumsy/Poor. As for the DM's job . . . eh, I just have them mostly fly in straight lines and wide turns. The main creatures with Clumsy/Poor are dragons, so you just have them make strafing runs like a ground attack aircraft.

So the full list would be something like:

Clumsy: Fixed-wing aircraft.
Poor: Big clumsy bird, like a condor.
Average: Normal bird.
Good: Hummingbird.
Perfect: Air elemental.

- Saph

bosssmiley
2009-07-28, 04:15 AM
Players generally have Average and better maneuverability, so only the DM needs to worry about Clumsy/Poor. As for the DM's job . . . eh, I just have them mostly fly in straight lines and wide turns. The main creatures with Clumsy/Poor are dragons, so you just have them make strafing runs like a ground attack aircraft.

So the full list would be something like:

Clumsy: Fixed-wing aircraft.
Poor: Big clumsy bird, like a condor.
Average: Normal bird.
Good: Hummingbird.
Perfect: Air elemental.

- Saph

GJ saph. Anything more fiddly and specific than that is likely to just be rules-wanking. Reminds me of the old AD&D manoeuvrability classes (A-E). They were fun, if completely non-intuitive and wholly opaque without the DMG.

Totally Guy
2009-07-28, 04:18 AM
You know what's worse than the grappling rules?

Finding half a worm in your apple?

Zemro
2009-07-28, 04:33 AM
Finding half a worm in your apple?

Finding a Purple Worm?

As for the flying rules, they may seem a bit much at first glance, but I found them easy enough to deal with for a campaign I DM'd a while back.

I had a lot more free time back then, so aside from strafing runs (Which is pretty much what I had flying creatures used for.) I grid'd up some templates for turning manoeuvres for the more restrictive fly speeds. It worked out kinda like a combination of the knight/queen chess pieces. You could move straight, but you could only turn if you could complete it, the turns like moving around as a knight.

FMArthur
2009-07-28, 01:12 PM
I didn't even want it but I felt like I absolutely had to take Improved Flight for my Dragonborn character just to reduce headaches. I don't even know how distance is calculated in 3 dimensions in D&D, what happens immediately after a diving charge (and when it happens), and what kind of action taking off/landing is.

Yuki Akuma
2009-07-28, 01:19 PM
Movement in three dimensions is handled using five-foot cubes. Taking off and landing is just moving out of or into a cube that happens to have ground in it.

Random832
2009-07-28, 01:28 PM
How do you actually work with flying with miniatures, anyway?

AstralFire
2009-07-28, 01:29 PM
How do you actually work with flying with miniatures, anyway?

Same way I work it on Virtual Tabletop - place it on the ground and say "pretend he's yay high up."

The template thing is a good idea, but I only virtual tabletop, and that's a bit awkward to do.

Kaiyanwang
2009-07-28, 01:34 PM
Finding a Purple Worm?


Wow! An Epic Apple. Farmed by a 30 level commoner.

only1doug
2009-07-28, 01:38 PM
How do you actually work with flying with miniatures, anyway?

usually with an upturned glass or dice pot, or just by placing a dice pot lid under the miniature. (a disc of coloured paper would work I expect).

Curmudgeon
2009-07-28, 01:41 PM
There are all sorts of continuity problems across the artificial distinction of "rounds". Say a character is climbing during the round. When someone else has a turn, is that person still considered climbing, and thus bereft of their DEX bonus to AC? Isn't the answer dependent on what they do the next turn? I.e., if they don't do any more climbing; that would mean that they had finished and were balancing on whatever foothold they had climbed up to instead. But if they Climb the next turn as well, they were "still" climbing in the interim. Then the number of Balance ranks makes a big difference.
You are considered flat-footed while balancing, since you can’t move to avoid a blow, and thus you lose your Dexterity bonus to AC (if any). If you have 5 or more ranks in Balance, you aren’t considered flat-footed while balancing.
Action: None. A Balance check doesn’t require an action; it is made as part of another action or as a reaction to a situation. If my character had 5+ ranks in Balance, I'd specify that at the end of every round I used the Climb skill that I was pausing to Balance, and keep my DEX bonus to AC.

You can apply this sort of twisted logic to other D&D actions, too. So I'm running (a full-round action), which provokes AoOs. But I'm going to specify that I come to a complete stop at the end of the round because there's no start/stop overhead for running. And thus I avoid arguments about whether some enemy who moves up to my position on their turn can get an AoO because I'm "still" running.

Epinephrine
2009-07-28, 01:50 PM
How do you actually work with flying with miniatures, anyway?

We have a bunch of little pieces of wood, numbered. They're made of of a 1X1, and cut into different lengths. The small cube is a 5, the one larger than that is a 10, the next is a 20, etc...

Pile'm up, set figure on top, hope nobody sneezes. We tend to hover at 20' most of the time anyway. They're only to scale for numbers up to 40' (and hence up to 75'), then we just use a big one and write on the board. It's obvious that they're up high.

Beats the way we were denoting conditions (shaken, blind, etc. - we used beer caps, and set the minis in them - Heineken is shaken, Stella is blind, Budweiser is nauseatingsickened, etc...)

FMArthur
2009-07-28, 04:25 PM
If you are using Lego like any self-respecting cheapskate should, you can use the small square bricks to build a base of variable height that you can sit your Lego character atop.

Zuki
2009-07-28, 04:44 PM
How do you actually work with flying with miniatures, anyway?

We stack a couple of spare d6's underneath it, one per five feet up or so.

Then again, we also tend to use dice to represent the monsters and PCs as well, so you might have a swirly red d12 sitting on top of a stack of two d6.