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View Full Version : Why do the D&D novels ignore the rules?



Tainted_Scholar
2017-01-30, 04:49 PM
It seems like a lot of the novels for Dungeons and Dragons tend to ignore the rules which they are based on. I can understand taking some liberties with the rules for the sake of story telling, but it just confuses me when they show complete disregard for well established traits of D&D.

One rather egregious example that I have heard of was when Magic Missile missed it target in one of the novels (I believe it was a Drizzt Novel), despite the fact that Magic Missile auto hitting is one of the spells defining features.

shuyung
2017-01-30, 04:53 PM
Because stories have different needs than games. And, frankly, simply because you're an author writing a story for a game novel doesn't actually imply that you have any facility with the game mechanics.

JoshuaZ
2017-01-30, 04:53 PM
It seems like a lot of the novels for Dungeons and Dragons tend to ignore the rules which they are based on. I can understand taking some liberties with the rules for the sake of story telling, but it just confuses me when they show complete disregard for well established traits of D&D.

One rather egregious example that I have heard of was when Magic Missile missed it target in one of the novels (I believe it was a Drizzt Novel), despite the fact that Magic Missile auto hitting is one of the spells defining features.

The writers don't always know all the rules, nor do the editors. In general, they have errors in both directions, both in not adhering to the rules, and in doing things that are too close to the rules when the rules could be reasonably treated as approximations. One example of the second is in the Avatar series which moved Forgotten Realms from 2nd to 3.0, assassins stopped being a base class. So rather than just say that the assassins had levels in rogue mainly, they literally killed off all the assassins in the setting. Overly strict adherence to the rule leads to junk like that. And many people reading the novels won't even have played D&D or be that familiar with the rules. And if really strict rule adherence occurred, then for many editions (3.0,3.5 especially) you'd end up with god-wizards pretty much winning always with no interesting non-casting classes.

In general, what makes a good story and what makes a good game mechanic don't always agree.

hymer
2017-01-30, 04:56 PM
Not all those books are written by people who play the game, or don't play it much. They may simply not be aware of their mistakes. I seem to recall a comment from someone in the know, who pointed out that sometimes the books would lead to additions or changes to the rules, to allow stuff to happen in the game as they do in the books - which is pretty much the sort of thing the crunch sections of campaign books deal with.

Even so, I think the novels are generally based not necessarily on the rules system, but on the campaign worlds.

Freed
2017-01-30, 04:56 PM
Well, because if you read a book where the characters stopped and argued with an invisible force in the sky about the effects of a spell in mid-combat, you'd feel silly wouldn't you?

Cazero
2017-01-30, 04:57 PM
The RAW of D&D are filled to the brim with holes, inconsistencies, absurdities and dysfunctions that absolutely requires arbitration from someone. Good thing they're not supposed to be a set of physical laws. The rules are an abstraction for physical laws and following them when not playing the game is just as absurd as forcing real life entrepreneurs to buy four local houses before investing in an hotel.

To answer your example, it has been argued to death that HP are not just meat and can cover stuff like Magic Missile missing even though the RAW seem to contradict it.

Tainted_Scholar
2017-01-30, 05:11 PM
The RAW of D&D are filled to the brim with holes, inconsistencies, absurdities and dysfunctions that absolutely requires arbitration from someone. Good thing they're not supposed to be a set of physical laws. The rules are an abstraction for physical laws and following them when not playing the game is just as absurd as forcing real life entrepreneurs to buy four local houses before investing in an hotel.

Abstractions would indubitably have to be made, however the novels should at the very least follow some of the the more definitive rules of the setting even though they often don't.


To answer your example, it has been argued to death that HP are not just meat and can cover stuff like Magic Missile missing even though the RAW seem to contradict it.

Even if we go with the interpretation that HP involves turning aside attacks or blocking to minimize damage (Though I don't think that makes any sense considering you can go several minutes on fire) Magic Missile should have at least grazed the opponent since it always does damage.


Well, because if you read a book where the characters stopped and argued with an invisible force in the sky about the effects of a spell in mid-combat, you'd feel silly wouldn't you?

There are Webcomics based on D&D where that happens.

JoshuaZ
2017-01-30, 05:22 PM
Even if we go with the interpretation that HP involves turning aside attacks or blocking to minimize damage (Though I don't think that makes any sense considering you can go several minutes on fire) Magic Missile should have at least grazed the opponent since it always does damage.

Why? One can reasonably fluff it as having dodged but doing so was highly straining.




There are Webcomics based on D&D where that happens.

And that sort of thing when it happens is done for comedic effect. A bit harder to do in serious novels.

Tainted_Scholar
2017-01-30, 05:26 PM
Why? One can reasonably fluff it as having dodged but doing so was highly straining.

What, you mean they jumped out of the way but pulled a muscle in doing so?:smallconfused:


And that sort of thing when it happens is done for comedic effect. A bit harder to do in serious novels.

Why do all novels have to be serious? Plenty of novels include humor. Additionally, most webcomics include both humor and drama, the same is true of novels.

Kish
2017-01-30, 05:28 PM
Why? One can reasonably fluff it as having dodged but doing so was highly straining.
Thud the Novice Barbarian, whenever a cleric casts the spell Cure Moderate Wounds on him, is cured of all his damage/strain/whatever.

Thud the Epic Barbarian barely notices the effects of Cure Moderate Wounds anymore. Guess he's been building up nonoptional resistance to magic...

What's that, Thud? Cat's Grace does as much for you as it ever did, it's strictly healing/destraining/whatever-you-call-it magic that does so much less? Then I got nothing.

Keltest
2017-01-30, 05:32 PM
Personally ive always been annoyed when a D&D novel will pull something like "were pouring all our healing magic into him, but its only keeping him stable". Like, I can accept that the character needs to be on death's edge for whatever reason, but having clerics and healing magic suddenly be inexplicably useless for this one case seriously rattles my suspension of disbelief. if you MUST stop healing magic, at least have it explicitly be magic stopping magic rather than the priests all just suddenly being 0th level and barely capable of healing a papercut.

BRC
2017-01-30, 05:39 PM
The general answer is "Somebody Screwed Up". They used the words "Magic Missiles" because it's iconic, but neither writer nor editor knew or cared enough to change it to a different spell that didn't unerringly strike its target.


Longer answer:
The Rules are a system designed to 1) be fun to play, and 2) re-create a certain genre of Story (High-fantasy heroic adventure).

The Settings (like forgotten realms) are a world designed to facilitate the telling of such stories with those rules. A town is menaced by Yuan-Ti because the book gives you stats for Yuan-Ti. This is the primary purpose of the setting. While it is important that the setting be interesting and coherent, it is MORE important that the setting be a good place to run a campaign in. This is why you can have a thriving town despite the fact that it's small militia is incapable of defending it from the local Ogres. It doesn't make much sense for that town to still be standing, much less thriving, but the point is for a group of adventurers to come by and defeat the ogres.

A Novel, is a high-fantasy heroic adventure story told in that setting. It's the sort of story that the Rules+Setting combo is supposed to help you create around a table. But, the purpose of such a book is first and foremost to tell a good story, not to model the rule system. So, you bring in an author who is good at writing high-fantasy heroic adventure, not one who is a stickler for the rules of the setting. You have the book reviewed by an editor, not the game designer.

This is especially true anywhere the rules exist more to be a fun and functional rule system, than to facilitate the telling of a good story. Magic Missiles always hitting isn't a factor that exists because a high-fantasy heroic adventure needs a spell that always hits, but a game system benefits from an option that deals suboptimal, but reliable damage.

Same with hit-points. A more "Realistic" high-lethality system might tell better stories than one in which a peasant with a knife can stab Thud the Barbarian ten times before Thud notices, but high-lethality gameplay doesn't provide the same Heroic-Fantasy experience as shrugging off abstracted hitpoints.

But, a novel doesn't care about a fun rule system, it cares about a good story.
In game, a peasant with a dagger could be expected to deal at most 10 damage (Max damage crit with +2 strength or dex). Not enough to kill even a 1st level barbarian (With max hit points at first level), much less a higher-level barbarian.

However, in the book, Thud gets stabbed with a knife by Rando the Peasant, and it's a big deal, he can still walk around, but he's bleeding out, and later collapses (Despite D&D having no rules for such things outside special "Bleeding" effects, which a normal dagger wouldn't have), because, at that time, it was a better story for Rando the Peasant to deliver the stab.

Tainted_Scholar
2017-01-30, 05:47 PM
The general answer is "Somebody Screwed Up". They used the words "Magic Missiles" because it's iconic, but neither writer nor editor knew or cared enough to change it to a different spell that didn't unerringly strike its target.


Longer answer:
The Rules are a system designed to 1) be fun to play, and 2) re-create a certain genre of Story (High-fantasy heroic adventure).

The Settings (like forgotten realms) are a world designed to facilitate the telling of such stories with those rules. A town is menaced by Yuan-Ti because the book gives you stats for Yuan-Ti. This is the primary purpose of the setting. While it is important that the setting be interesting and coherent, it is MORE important that the setting be a good place to run a campaign in. This is why you can have a thriving town despite the fact that it's small militia is incapable of defending it from the local Ogres. It doesn't make much sense for that town to still be standing, much less thriving, but the point is for a group of adventurers to come by and defeat the ogres.

A Novel, is a high-fantasy heroic adventure story told in that setting. It's the sort of story that the Rules+Setting combo is supposed to help you create around a table. But, the purpose of such a book is first and foremost to tell a good story, not to model the rule system. So, you bring in an author who is good at writing high-fantasy heroic adventure, not one who is a stickler for the rules of the setting. You have the book reviewed by an editor, not the game designer.

This is especially true anywhere the rules exist more to be a fun and functional rule system, than to facilitate the telling of a good story. Magic Missiles always hitting isn't a factor that exists because a high-fantasy heroic adventure needs a spell that always hits, but a game system benefits from an option that deals suboptimal, but reliable damage.

Same with hit-points. A more "Realistic" high-lethality system might tell better stories than one in which a peasant with a knife can stab Thud the Barbarian ten times before Thud notices, but high-lethality gameplay doesn't provide the same Heroic-Fantasy experience as shrugging off abstracted hitpoints.

But, a novel doesn't care about a fun rule system, it cares about a good story.
In game, a peasant with a dagger could be expected to deal at most 10 damage (Max damage crit with +2 strength or dex). Not enough to kill even a 1st level barbarian (With max hit points at first level), much less a higher-level barbarian.

However, in the book, Thud gets stabbed with a knife by Rando the Peasant, and it's a big deal, he can still walk around, but he's bleeding out, and later collapses (Despite D&D having no rules for such things outside special "Bleeding" effects, which a normal dagger wouldn't have), because, at that time, it was a better story for Rando the Peasant to deliver the stab.

I understand what you're saying, however when things like this happen I wonder, Why are they telling a D&D story then? If the novel is based off of D&D then shouldn't at least try to resemble D&D? If D&D's rules don't work for the story you're trying to tell then why are you using D&D?

And if the author isn't familiar with the D&D's rules, again, why are they writing a story about it? It would be like asking someone who knew absolutely nothing about Superman to write a movie/book/show/etc. about Superman.

Segev
2017-01-30, 05:48 PM
I'll just toss in a couple cents' worth of support for "the magic missile visibly missed, but the luck the target expended in it doing so is part of his finite pool of 'not dying' that hit points represent. Throw enough magic missiles at him, and he'll run out of that luck and take a lethal wound from them."

Deophaun
2017-01-30, 05:56 PM
I'll just toss in a couple cents' worth of support for "the magic missile visibly missed, but the luck the target expended in it doing so is part of his finite pool of 'not dying' that hit points represent. Throw enough magic missiles at him, and he'll run out of that luck and take a lethal wound from them."
Yup, like the target saw the missile coming for him and pulled a silver platter off the table just in the nick of time to block it = HP loss.

The problem is later writers for splatbooks think "Wouldn't it be cool if we had a feat/ability/skill for pulling things off of tables to block attacks?" forgetting that the system is supposed to be abstract and that stuff is already considered to be happening. So now the abstract system becomes very, very specific in strange circumstances, leading to confusion as to what is actually happening.

Douglas
2017-01-30, 05:57 PM
Besides rules issues, I've also been annoyed a time or two at egregiously poor tactics. I remember one scene where two high level wizards fight, each of them capable of 9th level spells, and one of them casts Globe of Invulnerability. The other responds by (duh) casting a spell high enough level to ignore the Globe... which the Globe caster really should have seen coming and known better than to bother wasting his time on it.

BRC
2017-01-30, 06:02 PM
I understand what you're saying, however when things like this happen I wonder, Why are they telling a D&D story then? If the novel is based off of D&D then shouldn't at least try to resemble D&D? If D&D's rules don't work for the story you're trying to tell then why are you using D&D?

And if the author isn't familiar with the D&D's rules, again, why are they writing a story about it? It would be like asking someone who knew absolutely nothing about Superman to write a movie/book/show/etc. about Superman.

Because Franchises Sell.

In this case, the Novel is not based off D&D, it's probably based off one of D&D's Settings, like Forgotten Realms.

Somebody likes Forgotten Realms as a setting, so they're more likely to be interested in a book using that setting.

But, what they love about Forgotten Realms is probably the locations, characters, monsters, ect, NOT the exact rules that underline the system the setting is designed for. I don't see anybody picking up a Drizzt book and saying "Oh Boy, I can't wait to read about these wizards casting their unerringly accurate magic missiles!"

People are attracted to familiarity. "If you like X, you'll probably also like Y". "If you like Dungeons and Dragons, then you probably like high-fantasy heroic adventure, and THIS BOOK is a high-fantasy heroic adventure, which you know because we put Dungeons and Dragons on the cover! It will have the sort of Dragons you like, and the heroes you like!"

The Author isn't writing a story about the D&D Rules (Usually, OoTS and similar fare does draw stuff from it), they're writing a story about the Setting, or they're writing the sort of story that D&D is supposed to simulate. The Magic Missile example just means that nobody cared to catch that particular error and change "Magic missiles" to Firebolt or whatever, but there are countless rules in D&D that any author worth their salt would throw out in order to tell a good story.

Segev
2017-01-30, 06:06 PM
Besides rules issues, I've also been annoyed a time or two at egregiously poor tactics. I remember one scene where two high level wizards fight, each of them capable of 9th level spells, and one of them casts Globe of Invulnerability. The other responds by (duh) casting a spell high enough level to ignore the Globe... which the Globe caster really should have seen coming and known better than to bother wasting his time on it.

Actually, unless he seemed surprised by this, it may have been according to his plan: by having globe of invulnerability up, he's forcing his foe to use up higher-level spell slots. He could, in the meantime, keep casting spells of any level.

Tanarii
2017-01-30, 06:07 PM
Because RPG Games in general, and D&D rules in particular, are not about writing stories. They are about two things:
an exciting team-based game;
playing the role of someone experiencing a fantasy world and adventure, and making in-character decisions for them. (Also known as role-playing.)

The version of the former D&D aims for has little to do with stories.

The latter, like living life, is actively anti-story while you're doing it. Although like life, it can be selectively edited later on and you can sometimes make a good story out of it.

Tiadoppler
2017-01-30, 06:09 PM
In a game of D&D, the rules are there to provide a structure for the plot. If you had a Superman tabletop RPG, he would have defined powers with limitations on them, so the game would be able to provide the necessary structure.

In a novel about the characters and settings of D&D, the story has the structure, and it makes sense for the rules to warp as necessary to tell the story the author is trying to tell. A comic book about Superman might even introduce a new power, or new limitation that has never been seen before!








Also, *cough* Magic Missile could miss for a couple years at the beginning of 4e.

Psyren
2017-01-30, 06:20 PM
Why do all novels have to be serious? Plenty of novels include humor. Additionally, most webcomics include both humor and drama, the same is true of novels.

They don't all have to be, but some do. Not everyone wants or needs to write OotS-style "lol @ ludonarratie dissonance."

Freed
2017-01-30, 06:22 PM
There are Webcomics based on D&D where that happens.
Well, those are mainly comedies, Aren't we talking about Drizzt?

LibraryOgre
2017-01-30, 06:30 PM
An old DM of mine claims that, at a con appearance, RA Salvatore claimed that he put at least one rules-improbable situation in every book, just so no one could say "Well, they did it in Book X!"

JoshuaZ
2017-01-30, 06:50 PM
Thud the Novice Barbarian, whenever a cleric casts the spell Cure Moderate Wounds on him, is cured of all his damage/strain/whatever.

Thud the Epic Barbarian barely notices the effects of Cure Moderate Wounds anymore. Guess he's been building up nonoptional resistance to magic...

What's that, Thud? Cat's Grace does as much for you as it ever did, it's strictly healing/destraining/whatever-you-call-it magic that does so much less? Then I got nothing.

Yeah, it really does only go so far. It isn't at all a perfect interpretation of what is going on.

Darth Ultron
2017-01-30, 07:13 PM
I understand what you're saying, however when things like this happen I wonder, Why are they telling a D&D story then? If the novel is based off of D&D then shouldn't at least try to resemble D&D? If D&D's rules don't work for the story you're trying to tell then why are you using D&D?

And if the author isn't familiar with the D&D's rules, again, why are they writing a story about it? It would be like asking someone who knew absolutely nothing about Superman to write a movie/book/show/etc. about Superman.

A novel is not ''about'' D&D at all really, as you can't tell a dramatic story about game mechanics. A novel is just a story, and at best, it is ''based off the fluff'' of D&D...but not the rules.

The average writer hates the very idea of ''rules'': they want to write whatever they want to write any way or shape or from they want. No writer wants to be told they ''can't'' write something because of a rule someone else made.

An author is someone with the right skill set who can write a book. They may or may not be a gamer. Though ''most'' D&D authors will no doubt say or have said that they at least causally have ''played the game''. Though ''having played a game '' does not exactly mean you know the rules.

Though, of course, it should be mentioned that there is the way books are made. The author writes the book and then hands it over the the publisher. Then an editor goes through and edits the book....and it's more then just spellchecking. And it is almost a given that the editor is not a gamer. So they are making changes based on the ''rules of editing'', not D&D. So the original text might say something 100% rules legal for D&D, but it gets changed in editing to make the story better.

Cluedrew
2017-01-30, 08:15 PM
My theory: The stories are told from an in universe perspective at a level of detail where the mechanical abstractions we use to play the game would break down. So they are discarded and only the lore they are supposed to represent is used.

... And some times not even that. I have seen all of one reference to the spell preparation system in all the D&D books I have read. And that was not the preparation system. I still hold that is a pretty flavourless mechanic.

Lord Raziere
2017-01-30, 08:46 PM
Look:
The only time in all of DnD I can honestly see a DnD book referencing anything remotely close to the rules, is when Raistlin explains how his magic is basically vancian casting in more flowery fantasy terms that make it sound mystical and whatnot.

DnD IC =/= DnD Rules.

If a writer thinks the story of an Orc Wizard, Halfling berserker, vampire paladin, and a succubus who somehow only casts lightning magic is one worth telling, they're not going to bother with a rulebook that'll probably say a bunch a stuff about how thats not possible and you should feel bad for breaking the rules. They don't care about Tippyverse, they just want to write what they want to write. fans can clamor but writers are not required to pander to fans and rules stuff, especially if their heart is not in it.

If I were writing a DnD novel, I'd honestly ignore the rules to. I'd just go full on "screw that, I'm telling the tale of this good orc, and I'm going to write it better than Drizz't." because I can, and if anyone didn't like it....well there are a lot of other fantasy books out there on the market, yes?

I'd recommend Brandon Sanderson if you want books that adhere strongly to their own magical rules with very little exception.

Max_Killjoy
2017-01-30, 08:51 PM
It seems like a lot of the novels for Dungeons and Dragons tend to ignore the rules which they are based on. I can understand taking some liberties with the rules for the sake of story telling, but it just confuses me when they show complete disregard for well established traits of D&D.



Because even a mediocre fictional story requires more verisimilitude than the rules of D&D would create... or that the rules of D&D would ever permit.



Look:
DnD IC =/= DnD Rules.


And there's that... D&D rules are too abstracted and disassociated to treat them as a true representation of how the fictional world actually works.

Lappy9001
2017-01-30, 08:54 PM
It only really bothers me when it reaches a ridiculous level of shenanigans *cough*Cadderly*cough*Cleric Quintet*cough*

Tainted_Scholar
2017-01-30, 09:10 PM
Because even a mediocre fictional story requires more verisimilitude than the rules of D&D would create... or that the rules of D&D would ever permit.




And there's that... D&D rules are too abstracted and disassociated to treat them as a true representation of how the fictional world actually works.

Umm, Order of the Stick?

No, the rules aren't "Too abstract" or "Not realistic enough" to tell a story with. The second doubly doesn't make sense considering that writer very rarely give a blame about realism.

JoshuaZ
2017-01-30, 09:15 PM
It only really bothers me when it reaches a ridiculous level of shenanigans *cough*Cadderly*cough*Cleric Quintet*cough*

I only read the first two books in that series. What are you referring to?




I'd recommend Brandon Sanderson if you want books that adhere strongly to their own magical rules with very little exception.

Absolutely; and the strong adherence to the systems is part of what makes them work so well. But the systems are simpler (without hundreds of spells) and clearly defined, which makes Sanderson's job in that regard a little easier. But anyone interested in fiction with clearly defined magic systems should check out his books. Mistborn is especially good.

Max_Killjoy
2017-01-30, 09:16 PM
Umm, Order of the Stick?

No, the rules aren't "Too abstract" or "Not realistic enough" to tell a story with. The second doubly doesn't make sense considering that writer very rarely give a blame about realism.



Parodies, satires, and other deliberate deconstructions don't count.

Where OoTS and similar are following the rules, and still work as fiction, is where they're "calling out" the mechanics, assumptions, and tropes of D&D -- as opposed to slavishly adhering to them.

Lord Raziere
2017-01-30, 09:31 PM
Umm, Order of the Stick?

No, the rules aren't "Too abstract" or "Not realistic enough" to tell a story with. The second doubly doesn't make sense considering that writer very rarely give a blame about realism.

1. its a Comedy webcomic. runs on different rules than novels.

generally, different mediums have different expectations. novels are generally where you write long serious stuff with thought put into it, not comedic fourth-wall breaking with cliche-lampshading silliness verging on a cartoon. comics on the other hand have a long history of lending themselves much better to humor given their ability for expressions and to play with panel space. Unless your going for the "satirical british tone" thing in your novel that Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett had, but they were kind of exceptions to the rule- good satire is surprisingly hard to come by, especially in fantasy/sci-fi because most authors want actual adventure and coolness and excitement rather than satires that have all that be at most be backseat to what they want. I doubt everyone is good as a certain writer at mixing humor and action and whatnot into a novel or story as Burlew, and there are some jokes that just wouldn't translate well to a novel medium.

2. True, but they are rules that don't fit the stories they want to tell. If a writer wants to tell a story of some non-magical dude with a sword killing an arch-wizard in single combat and the rules say that will never happen because wizards are teh optimals, the writer will smile, throw the rule book out, then promptly ignore any fan who tells him that he is doing it wrong without a second thought, with no remorse. Because if something doesn't fit the story they want to tell, its useless at best, and detrimental any time else. No matter what you argue, they simply won't want you want and won't be interested in screwing up the story they've written just to satisfy you, because unlike roleplaying, its the authors story to tell and your just the audience. Your just there to watch and read how it unfolds. Any complaints or suggestions are moot and to be submitted to your friends for discussion after you've all read it, to be done nothing about other than to vent then get back to your life and move on.

Douglas
2017-01-30, 09:33 PM
Actually, unless he seemed surprised by this, it may have been according to his plan: by having globe of invulnerability up, he's forcing his foe to use up higher-level spell slots. He could, in the meantime, keep casting spells of any level.
I don't know about you, but in a battle of wizard vs wizard I sure as hell would not be wasting time on 4th level and below attack spells when I have the entire range of 5th through 9th level spells available. Not unless I thought my opponent was a pushover weakling and no threat, which most definitely was not the case in this battle for either participant. Securing victory against an immediate serious threat is far more important than conserving a few of my 25 to 30 best spell slots.

Some more info, the battle was between the leading archmage of Menzoberranzan and an obvious lich who clearly knew who he was up against and had sought the confrontation anyway. They each cast a few other high level spells first, I think, establishing beyond doubt that they each knew the other's threat level was high. Then the drow cast the Globe, the lich responded with Imprisonment, and the fight ended.

Tainted_Scholar
2017-01-30, 09:34 PM
Parodies, satires, and other deliberate deconstructions don't count.

Of which Oots is none.



Where OoTS and similar are following the rules, and still work as fiction, is where they're "calling out" the mechanics, assumptions, and tropes of D&D -- as opposed to slavishly adhering to them.

Yes, Oots doesn't "Slavishly adhere to the rules", but it does do however is follow the basic rules laid out by D&D. It doesn't completely ignore the way spells and monsters work for sake of story telling. It takes liberties but it doesn't flat out disregard the way D&D operates. And there's no reason for the novels to not do the same.

Lord Raziere
2017-01-30, 09:45 PM
And there's that... D&D rules are too abstracted and disassociated to treat them as a true representation of how the fictional world actually works.

Agreed. We have very different viewpoints, you and I, but I agree: DnD rules are just too abstract to be used as real representation, to wit:
In DnD Two ten foot long poles are worth more than ladder. buy a ladder. A ladder is ten feet long. dismantle it into two 10ft poles,sell them for a profit, buy another ladder, wash rinse repeat....

in the real world? gamelike shenanigans such as that that don't work. This loop for infinite money? basically a videogame exploit on paper. such an exploit isn't good for either of our points of view, because it brings you out of the setting, while it brings me out of the story.

in turn, it would bring readers out the story of any author who tries to write using DnD rules as written. and thats not even a serious exploit by DnD standards, there are probably a bunch more that make that look like childs play.


Of which Oots is none.


Wait what.

You actually think OOTS isn't a parody? When the author himself has said that its a parody and is thus intended as such? The webcomic full of jokes and fourth-wall breaking? All of which are parody/satire/deconstruction stuff almost exclusively?

:smallconfused:

I'm going to give you a chance explain yourself, before I stop taking you seriously.

JoshuaZ
2017-01-30, 09:46 PM
Of which Oots is none.



Um, OOTS has jokes about characters rolling specific rolls, has characters forgetting to add bonuses when calculating rolls, characters taking advantage of the fact that there are no specific rules about some things, and jokes about metagaming where a character thinks they've failed a spot check.

Max_Killjoy
2017-01-30, 09:54 PM
Of which Oots is none.


... :smallconfused:

http://www.dictionary.com/browse/parody
http://www.dictionary.com/browse/satire

CharonsHelper
2017-01-30, 09:58 PM
I'll just toss in a couple cents' worth of support for "the magic missile visibly missed, but the luck the target expended in it doing so is part of his finite pool of 'not dying' that hit points represent. Throw enough magic missiles at him, and he'll run out of that luck and take a lethal wound from them."

That - and is the OP sure that it wasn't magically resisted? I remember one time where that happened in the prequels of the Drizzt series. Drizzt was a noble drow - with the spell resistance that that entails. (I don't know when it was written - so maybe magic resistance instead.)



I'd recommend Brandon Sanderson if you want books that adhere strongly to their own magical rules with very little exception.

Bwa ha ha ha ha. Sanderson epitomizes the fantasy novel power creep. I couldn't finish the Mistborn trilogy because of how bad it got.

It started out with a cool/interesting way for non-magic people to fight those with magic. A mistborn in the opening sequence was run off by a dozen or so. They couldn't catch him, but they forced him to run. In the 2nd book the protagonist killed 100+ of them without breaking a sweat.

lol... adhering to his own rules. That's a good one.

Mechalich
2017-01-30, 10:49 PM
With regards to D&D novels there's also the specific point about production: despite attempts to accommodate rules changes, most of the novels are written by the same people who have been writing them since the 1980s (seriously the pool of D&D authors is like 50 people total) and therefore all of the novels are built around very old assumptions about how the D&D rules work. For instance Ed Greenwood didn't change the mechanical portrayal of Elminster in his many novels at any point at all from Spellfire (1988) through at least Elminster's Daughter (2004) and probably through subsequent works that I haven't read.

D&D novels are based around an old set of assumptions about what a D&D world would look like formulated by a small group of TSR employees in the late 1980s and those people have never really changed their worlds to accommodate new assumptions, especially not assumptions like 3.X optimization capabilities which most of them recoil from in visceral horror. Considering, as a writer, how ridiculous trying to write up fantasy that encompasses god-wizards and all the other high-op craziness - how do you properly represent the capabilities of an uber-charger turning a stone giant to paste by stabbing it in the shin? - would actually be I can't say I really blame these people.

Douglas
2017-01-30, 11:11 PM
lol... adhering to his own rules. That's a good one.
The rules in question are not about how powerful a character is, but about the mechanics of the abilities used. Power creep is irrelevant to that. Yes, Sanderson's characters tend to increase in power and/or competence as a series continues, but he is very consistent about "X ability does Y in Z way", and that is the issue this discussion is about.

Kane0
2017-01-31, 12:59 AM
Ever heard the saying "Never let the truth get in the way of a good story"? Same principle applies.

Knaight
2017-01-31, 01:04 AM
This pretty much comes down to how actually adhering to the rules of D&D would make the novels suck even harder than they already do. They're not about the rules, they're narratives set within the settings that the rules are models of, and a lot of things that work in the rules (e.g. hitpoint growth) is just stupid when looked at from a setting perspective.

Gideon Falcon
2017-01-31, 02:25 AM
The main thing is that most readers aren't nitpicky about conforming to the rules of D&D. If you don't like it, don't call them D&D novels. For most readers, however, 'because it makes the story better' is plenty of reason to depart from the rules, because even in the game, the rules exist to facilitate story telling, and can be superceded by Rule 0 when necessary. Most DMs don't necessarily do so, because their job is hard enough as it is and they aren't novelists. In the long run, authors of these stories do not consider it a 'D&D story' because it follows the mechanics of D&D, but because it is about D&D elements and campaign settings. Obviously, this is not the same definition you use, but that's fine. Just know that you're probably going to have a difficult time finding the kind of story you want.

TL:DR; The authors have different priorities of what makes a D&D story than you might.

Lord Raziere
2017-01-31, 02:52 AM
The rules in question are not about how powerful a character is, but about the mechanics of the abilities used. Power creep is irrelevant to that. Yes, Sanderson's characters tend to increase in power and/or competence as a series continues, but he is very consistent about "X ability does Y in Z way", and that is the issue this discussion is about.

Exactly.

Though if we are being analytical about Sanderson, you'll notice that while the magic systems are pretty consistent, they are all granted by gods whose rules can change and are basically plot-level powerful. A lot of the Cosmere is the way it is because of some nebulous mythical backstory we're not yet privy to, but when you get into mythical stuff, exceptions tend to become more important than rules anyways, because myths are always defined by their lack of rules and how what applies to one mythical being doesn't apply at all to another. Thor =/= Odin =/= Loki =/= Baldur.

SaintRidley
2017-01-31, 03:05 AM
Pointing out that not only is OotS a parody/satire, it also frequently bends or outright ignores the rules. And does so because they get in the way of telling a good story in a literary medium.

The rules work just fine for telling a story as part of a game. They simply don't work for telling a literary story. You know what the first rule tossed out by any writer writing a D&D based story is? It's the rule that the dice have any say in anything. And that's a far more fundamental rule than any individual spell's minutiae.

Mr Beer
2017-01-31, 04:32 AM
This pretty much comes down to how actually adhering to the rules of D&D would make the novels suck even harder than they already do.

Best answer yet

Douglas
2017-01-31, 04:43 AM
Though if we are being analytical about Sanderson, you'll notice that while the magic systems are pretty consistent, they are all granted by gods whose rules can change and are basically plot-level powerful. A lot of the Cosmere is the way it is because of some nebulous mythical backstory we're not yet privy to, but when you get into mythical stuff, exceptions tend to become more important than rules anyways, because myths are always defined by their lack of rules and how what applies to one mythical being doesn't apply at all to another. Thor =/= Odin =/= Loki =/= Baldur.
I'm pretty sure he's worked out rules for the gods and their metaphysics too, we just haven't seen more than vague hints at most of them yet.

Morty
2017-01-31, 05:00 AM
This pretty much comes down to how actually adhering to the rules of D&D would make the novels suck even harder than they already do. They're not about the rules, they're narratives set within the settings that the rules are models of, and a lot of things that work in the rules (e.g. hitpoint growth) is just stupid when looked at from a setting perspective.

Yeah, I mean, people have been talking about magic, but if the books adhered to D&D combat rules, any martial combat would be people hitting each other a lot. And dangers such as getting smashed by a rock into a trap (which Drizz't's friends are sure killed him) would be treated with nonchalance past a certain point.

bulbaquil
2017-01-31, 06:26 AM
1. It isn't a "D&D" novel, it's a Forgotten Realms novel. Yes, Forgotten Realms is a Wizards-of-the-Coast-owned setting that happens to be the iconic setting for D&D, but you can just as easily run a game there under White Wolf, Pathfinder, Shadowrun, GURPS, FATE, or whatever other system you care to.

2. Even in the game itself, the rules are an abstraction, not the be-all and end-all of physics in the Forgotten Realms world. And even if they were, which D&D system are we using? B/X? OD&D? AD&D? 3.5e? 4e? 5e? Each of those are different rulesets and may allow or disallow things that the other rules don't. Something can literally adhere to and break the laws of physics simultaneously if we treat the rules as final.

3. Because the rules aren't necessary for the story. By definition, every last action, thought, and behavior of every single character in a novel is hamhandedly railroaded by the author. Every last "dice roll" is fudged to produce the desired result. There is no player agency because there are no players. There is no randomness because dice are never rolled.

Cluedrew
2017-01-31, 07:42 AM
Parodies, satires, and other deliberate deconstructions don't count.Why not? Even if the are following the rules as a joke they are still (usually) following them.

JoshuaZ
2017-01-31, 08:10 AM
Why not? Even if the are following the rules as a joke they are still (usually) following them.

The point is that following the rules very closely results in a feeling of unrealness and general funniness. That's not an issue with parodies and the like because they aren't trying in general to draw you in in the same way.

Segev
2017-01-31, 08:56 AM
Bwa ha ha ha ha. Sanderson epitomizes the fantasy novel power creep. I couldn't finish the Mistborn trilogy because of how bad it got.How bad did it get? I did finish it, and I never saw him breaking his established rules. The closest he came was having previously-acknowledged-unknowns be discovered. It feels very natural in its progression, with no rules being broken.

Even in the Alloy of Law series, the rules aren't broken. Apparent changes are not breaking underlying rules, and remain consistent with what was DEMONSTRATED (if not what characters believed was possible) before.


lol... adhering to his own rules. That's a good one.Please, elaborate as to what rules he broke? I'm not seeing any evidence of it in what you say here:


It started out with a cool/interesting way for non-magic people to fight those with magic. A mistborn in the opening sequence was run off by a dozen or so. They couldn't catch him, but they forced him to run. In the 2nd book the protagonist killed 100+ of them without breaking a sweat.


The rules in question are not about how powerful a character is, but about the mechanics of the abilities used. Power creep is irrelevant to that. Yes, Sanderson's characters tend to increase in power and/or competence as a series continues, but he is very consistent about "X ability does Y in Z way", and that is the issue this discussion is about.This is more or less my reply to the above, as well.


Exactly.

Though if we are being analytical about Sanderson, you'll notice that while the magic systems are pretty consistent, they are all granted by gods whose rules can change and are basically plot-level powerful. A lot of the Cosmere is the way it is because of some nebulous mythical backstory we're not yet privy to, but when you get into mythical stuff, exceptions tend to become more important than rules anyways, because myths are always defined by their lack of rules and how what applies to one mythical being doesn't apply at all to another. Thor =/= Odin =/= Loki =/= Baldur.Actually, the gods' rules don't change. In fact, they're quite bound by them.


I'm pretty sure he's worked out rules for the gods and their metaphysics too, we just haven't seen more than vague hints at most of them yet.Even what we DO know tells us a lot of their own limitations. The powers they have DEFINE them. What we have learned from Harmony in the most recent Mistborn series is rather indicative of their limits, and he is perhaps the most powerful of the "gods" of the macrosetting with perhaps the most flexibility in his nature, for reasons I won't go into to avoid spoilers.



So yeah, while I won't deny being a big fan, I am a fan precisely because I adore "Magic A is Magic A" and Sanderson plays that rule to the hilt. So I do challenge the assertion that he breaks his own rules. I would be interested in hearing examples of the rules he set then broke.

Max_Killjoy
2017-01-31, 09:02 AM
Why not? Even if the are following the rules as a joke they are still (usually) following them.

They're following them to deliberately generate the moments of disconnect and dissonance as part of how they "make the funny".

The point is that it's for a joke, and done on purpose.

Segev
2017-01-31, 09:09 AM
There is nothing preventing the rules of D&D from being used in novels, except that writers don't want to. Nobody expects a combat to be described round-by-round, with explicit feat names, but larger things like "how spells work" are reasonable expectations. Now, the lack of it going "Tippy-verse" is a valid, but spurious, complaint, since most games don't go Tippy-verse, either.

CharonsHelper
2017-01-31, 09:49 AM
The rules in question are not about how powerful a character is, but about the mechanics of the abilities used. Power creep is irrelevant to that. Yes, Sanderson's characters tend to increase in power and/or competence as a series continues, but he is very consistent about "X ability does Y in Z way", and that is the issue this discussion is about.

So the fact that he comes up with a thin veneer of rationalization for breaking the rules makes it okay? *shrug* I suppose it's better than it would be without said veneer, but it's still pretty bad.

I'd rather an author just go vague about such things if they don't want to be tied down by their own rules.

But - I'm much more of a stickler for consistent world-building than most people. (Don't even get me started on the Potterverse. Rowling is amazing at pacing - but she is really bad at world-building.)

Segev
2017-01-31, 09:52 AM
So the fact that he comes up with a thin veneer of rationalization for breaking the rules makes it okay? *shrug* I suppose it's better than it would be without said veneer, but it's still pretty bad.

I'd rather an author just go vague about such things if they don't want to be tied down by their own rules.

But - I'm much more of a stickler for consistent world-building than most people. (Don't even get me started on the Potterverse. Rowling is amazing at pacing - but she is really bad at world-building.)

No, I'm sorry, you have to justify your claims that he's breaking the rules he established. World-building is explicitly one of his strengths as an author. "CharonsHelper didn't like his works" is fine. "CharonsHelper didn't like his works because he claims they did something they didn't do" is not. You may as well be telling us that Twilight is a brilliant novel series because of how likable and believable Meyers's main character is, and how she brings a ray of sunshine to every scene she enters.

JoshuaZ
2017-01-31, 09:57 AM
Bwa ha ha ha ha. Sanderson epitomizes the fantasy novel power creep. I couldn't finish the Mistborn trilogy because of how bad it got.

It started out with a cool/interesting way for non-magic people to fight those with magic. A mistborn in the opening sequence was run off by a dozen or so. They couldn't catch him, but they forced him to run. In the 2nd book the protagonist killed 100+ of them without breaking a sweat.

lol... adhering to his own rules. That's a good one.

So, others have already pointed out that power creep but basic consistency of how the systems work (e.g. what each metal uses), but even then your battle comparison doesn't really hold.

First, even in the first book it was clear that Vin had more raw power than Kelsier (note for example her their discussion about how Vin can push more than he would find normal). Second, in the third book it is made explicit why some mistborn are more powerful than others. Third, in the battle in question, Kelsier is up against a combination of hazekillers (trained to fight mistborn) and mistings (who have allomantic power just a single one unlike a mistborn). Kelsier retreats not because he couldn't necessarily win the battle but because more mistings and possibly mistborn may be on their way; his goal at that point is to steal the atium and get out, not to kill everyone. In contrast, the battle where Vin kills hundreds she has the assistance of Zane and also is fighting literally zero mistings; I don't remember if there are any hazekillers in that battle, but there definitely aren't any mistings, just regular human most of whom have minimal training to fight mistings or mistborn. Moreover, even given all that, the characters register surprise that Vin could do what she did, and note explicitly that this shows she's stronger than Kelsier.

Necroticplague
2017-01-31, 10:39 AM
Easy: Because they're written by novelists, not gamers. Novels are couched in one group of genres, with specific tropes associated with them, while games are grouped in another, with different assocaited tropes. That's also why most people act in relatively stupid ways in a lot of non-interactive (or non-interactive portions of interactive) media; it heightens the drama, despite not making much sense. It also means their own personal expectations of things are different. It's why Aerith dies for good when we have 99 pheonix downs in our pocket, just hanging around. Or why some DnD settings still exists when most people haven't seen magic before, yet creatures that can only be harmed by magic exist, and can self-replicate.

Max_Killjoy
2017-01-31, 10:43 AM
Easy: Because they're written by novelists, not gamers. Novels are couched in one group of genres, with specific tropes associated with them, while games are grouped in another, with different assocaited tropes. That's also why most people act in relatively stupid ways in a lot of non-interactive (or non-interactive portions of interactive) media; it heightens the drama, despite not making much sense. It also means their own personal expectations of things are different. It's why Aerith dies for good when we have 99 pheonix downs in our pocket, just hanging around.

And in both cases, those are the things I wish writers AND game devs would fastidiously avoid.

If you're writing fiction and your plot rests on the protagonist holding the idiot ball, start over and try again, until you get it right.

If you're creating a game, and you can't make the setting/fiction and the gameplay (within the game) match up, then you've failed. Try again.

Kish
2017-01-31, 10:44 AM
This pretty much comes down to how actually adhering to the rules of D&D would make the novels suck even harder than they already do.
Indeed. In the D&D movie, in the climactic battle, the hero goes out of his way to maneuver behind the villain and attack him from behind. If you were looking for scrupulous adherence to D&D rules, there it was: the rogue won with an in-combat sneak attack rather than fighting in a way that made any sense in the movie.

If you were most of the viewers, you found "D&D rules followed!" cold comfort.

Segev
2017-01-31, 10:45 AM
Easy: Because they're written by novelists, not gamers. Novels are couched in one group of genres, with specific tropes associated with them, while games are grouped in another, with different assocaited tropes. That's also why most people act in relatively stupid ways in a lot of non-interactive (or non-interactive portions of interactive) media; it heightens the drama, despite not making much sense. It also means their own personal expectations of things are different. It's why Aerith dies for good when we have 99 pheonix downs in our pocket, just hanging around.

I have to agree with Max_Killjoy's oft-expressed disdain for this. The notion that people act stupidly "for the plot" is a hallmark of bad writing. People absolutely can, do, and should act stupidly in fiction, but it should be for in-character reasons, not "because the plot demands." Sure, if you want to set up a character you need to act in a stupid way so that it's in character for him to act that stupid way, go right ahead. That's good writing. It takes work to set that up, and it has to be something the character would do in that situation.

If the audience is cringing, telling him not to and calling him an idiot for it, that's fine...as long as they believe he really would make that idiotic choice. But when people make stupid decisions for no reason other than making the smart one wouldn't result in drama, it's obvious and stupid. It is not justified. It is bad writing.

Segev
2017-01-31, 10:47 AM
Indeed. In the D&D movie, in the climactic battle, the hero goes out of his way to maneuver behind the villain and attack him from behind. If you were looking for scrupulous adherence to D&D rules, there it was: the rogue won with an in-combat sneak attack rather than fighting in a way that made any sense in the movie.

If you were most of the viewers, you found "D&D rules followed!" cold comfort.

Adherence to (or breaking of) D&D rules had little to nothing to do with the flaws of that movie. (And it definitely broke a lot of rules, or relied heavily on DM fiat.)

Knaight
2017-01-31, 11:21 AM
So the fact that he comes up with a thin veneer of rationalization for breaking the rules makes it okay? *shrug* I suppose it's better than it would be without said veneer, but it's still pretty bad.

The rules weren't broken - the ones as presented by the characters were an incomplete set from the beginning, and several events in the novels only make sense taking that into account, including those in the earliest pages. Sanderson develops consistent magic, and then he spends half the book showing his work on said consistent magic instead of focusing on interesting things like characters.

2D8HP
2017-01-31, 11:24 AM
Well they keep changing the rules so dang fast! How are authors supposed to keep up, dagnabbit!

Or do you mean the works that inspired D&D?

.These rules are strictly fantasy. Those wargamers who lack imagination, those who don't care for Burroughs' Martian adventures where John Carter is groping through black pits, who feel no thrill upon reading Howard's Conan saga, who do not enjoy the de Camp & Pratt fantasies or Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser pitting their swords against evil sorceries will not be likely to find Dungeons & Dragons to their taste. But those whose imaginations know no bounds will find that these rules are the answer to their prayers. With this last bit of advice we invite you to read on and enjoy a "world" where the fantastic is fact and magic really works!
E. Gary Gygax
Tactical Studies Rules Editor
1 November 1973
Lake Geneva, Wisconsin
.To cite a few, Law/Chaos started out as the only axis of D&D alignment back in 1974.The literary antecedents of Law and Chaos were Poul Anderson (Three Hearts and Three Lions) and Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melinbourne.
The "Thief" (later the "Rogue") class owes much to Leiber's the "Gray Mouser", Abraham Merritt' The Metal Monster is likely an inspiration for Modrons, and D&D Trolls are much more like the one in "Three Hearts and Three Lions", than the Trolls in Tolkien, and Paladins were inspired by the Holger character in Three Hearts and Three Lions, and "Halflings" are, well...

To mangle Kipling:
"What should they who only know of Dungeons & Dragons, of D&D know?"
(I believe the original poem (http://www.telelib.com/authors/K/KiplingRudyard/verse/volumeXI/englishflag.html) was about some tiny place where it rains a lot, which is clearly not as important as D&D!).
I've been loving RPG's since 1978, but if I had to choose between losing all of RPG material published after then or most any chapter of the APPENDIX N works that inspired D&D, I would not hesitate to save the pre '78 works. I love my musty old books, and I refuse to accept that they're irrelevant!
Imric the elf-earl rode out by night to see what happened in the lands of men. It was a cool spring dark with the moon nearly full, time glittering on the grass and the stars still hard and bright as in winter. The night was very quiet save for the sigh of wind in budding branches, and the world was all sliding shadows and cold white light. The hoofs of Imric's horse was shod with an alloy of silver, and as high clear ringing went where they struck.
He rode into a forest. Night lay heavy between the trees, but from afar he spied a ruddy glimmer. When he came near, he saw it was firefight shinning through cracks in a hut of mud and wattles under a great gnarly oak from whose boughs Imric remembered the Druids cutting mistletoe. He could sense that a witch lived here, so he dismounted and rapped on the door. Get thee to a library!

*breathing slows*

*face loses red hue*

I have read some of the newer works that D&D inspired, specifically: I've read two whole chapters of "Homeland", which I put down and picked up a comic book based on that novel, from which I learned that Drow are mostly shaped like body-builders and super-models, which is.... fascinating.

Knaight
2017-01-31, 11:36 AM
[I]These rules are strictly fantasy. Those wargamers who lack imagination, those who don't care for Burroughs' Martian adventures where John Carter is groping through black pits, who feel no thrill upon reading Howard's Conan saga, who do not enjoy the de Camp & Pratt fantasies or Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser pitting their swords against evil sorceries will not be likely to find Dungeons & Dragons to their taste. But those whose imaginations know no bounds will find that these rules are the answer to their prayers. With this last bit of advice we invite you to read on and enjoy a "world" where the fantastic is fact and magic really works!
E. Gary Gygax
Tactical Studies Rules Editor
1 November 1973
Gygax really did have a gift for coming off as staggeringly arrogant towards anyone who didn't follow his one true way.


I have read some of the newer works that D&D inspired, specifically: I've read two whole chapters of "Homeland", which I put down and picked up a comic book based on that novel, from which I learned that Drow are mostly shaped like body-builders and super-models, which is.... fascinating.
Nobody is talking about the works that inspired D&D here - we're talking specifically about D&D novels, of which Homeland is probably one of the stronger ones. It wasn't Fritz Lieber of Michael Moorcock I had in mind when I typed the words "suck even harder than they already do", and I'm pretty sure it's not those works which got Max Killjoy to coin the delightful term "extruded fantasy product". It's not the post D&D fantasy that isn't inspired by D&D (or a Tolkien ripoff) either - there's plenty that's solid there. No, this thread has been about fantasy written for the D&D settings, paid for by TSR and WotC, sucking like a control surface on a leak in a high pressure reactor.

Max_Killjoy
2017-01-31, 11:52 AM
Or do you mean the works that inspired D&D?

These rules are strictly fantasy. Those wargamers who lack imagination, those who don't care for Burroughs' Martian adventures where John Carter is groping through black pits, who feel no thrill upon reading Howard's Conan saga, who do not enjoy the de Camp & Pratt fantasies or Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser pitting their swords against evil sorceries will not be likely to find Dungeons & Dragons to their taste. But those whose imaginations know no bounds will find that these rules are the answer to their prayers. With this last bit of advice we invite you to read on and enjoy a "world" where the fantastic is fact and magic really works!

E. Gary Gygax
Tactical Studies Rules Editor
1 November 1973
Lake Geneva, Wisconsin


Every time I read a quote by Gygax, my opinion of the man takes another downward notch.

His self-assured self-important arrogance was staggering in its immensity. To paraphrase, "Those who don't share my particular tastes are utterly lacking in imagination."

(And interesting where the hodge-podge nature of the default D&D setting is implicit even here, with a mash of different unrelated inspirations just crammed together, and much of it bearing little resemblance to the broad and vague "medieval-era" superficial trappings of D&D )





Gygax really did have a gift for coming off as staggeringly arrogant towards anyone who didn't follow his one true way.


Indeed.




Nobody is talking about the works that inspired D&D here - we're talking specifically about D&D novels, of which Homeland is probably one of the stronger ones. It wasn't Fritz Lieber of Michael Moorcock I had in mind when I typed the words "suck even harder than they already do", and I'm pretty sure it's not those works which got Max Killjoy to coin the delightful term "extruded fantasy product". It's not the post D&D fantasy that isn't inspired by D&D (or a Tolkien ripoff) either - there's plenty that's solid there. No, this thread has been about fantasy written for the D&D settings, paid for by TSR and WotC, sucking like a control surface on a leak in a high pressure reactor.


'Extruded fantasy product" -- write-by-numbers, snap-to-grid fictional works, pantomiming earlier works, and treating the work of Campbell and Lit 101 analytical tools as prescriptive rather descriptive. Either explicitly or implicitly taking the assumptions of D&D and its derivatives as givens, or unconsciously taking their queue cue from the assembly line product that came before and did likewise.

Tolkien, Moorcock, Lieber, etc, have nothing to do with that mess. The issue is with this mass of post-D&D...stuff... mainly garbage, and largely could be lost to time without a hint of consequence.

warty goblin
2017-01-31, 12:12 PM
The rules weren't broken - the ones as presented by the characters were an incomplete set from the beginning, and several events in the novels only make sense taking that into account, including those in the earliest pages. Sanderson develops consistent magic, and then he spends half the book showing his work on said consistent magic instead of focusing on interesting things like characters.

I can't say a lot about Sanderson, since I only ever read Mistborn, and that only after reading basically every other printed word in my dorm room. I thought it basically read like he came up with a couple extremely generic comic book superhero powers, handed them out to his Ubermench protagonists, slapped the whole thing in a dull-as-mud setting, and called it a day. Consistency is easy to achieve when your magic does about six very non-creative things which superheroes have been doing literally as long as there have been superheroes. The run-fast magic consistently making people run fast is roughly as impressive as getting shot in the head consistently seriously altering people's health in terms of astonishing authorial feats. But damn if it doesn't take a lot more tedious pagecount to explain.


On the actual topic, I think it's worth noting that even the D&D authors who definitely do know the game rules ignore them whenever convenient. Probably because playing by the rules doesn't advance the plot, or further one's understanding of the characters or anything. It's just a really basic and dull form of fan service at the end of the day. I can't think many people go "I would have liked it if this had made me feel like a smart member of the special people club for having memorized the PHB a few more times." Because really that's about all it could hope to accomplish, and at the price of being totally nonsensical to a random schmuck who walked into the bookstore and grabbed the novel on a whim.

Segev
2017-01-31, 12:15 PM
...taking their queue...

Minor irritant but major shift in meaning: "queue" means "line" as in "waiting in line." To "queue up" something is to put it in the waiting list of things to get done, as things are churned through.

The word you mean here is the much more intuitively-spelled "cue," which refers to a signal.

"When his ally queued up in the processing line, that was his cue to begin working his way into position to replace the person doing the processing."

Max_Killjoy
2017-01-31, 12:19 PM
Minor irritant but major shift in meaning: "queue" means "line" as in "waiting in line." To "queue up" something is to put it in the waiting list of things to get done, as things are churned through.

The word you mean here is the much more intuitively-spelled "cue," which refers to a signal.

"When his ally queued up in the processing line, that was his cue to begin working his way into position to replace the person doing the processing."


I think I accidentally typed que when I meant cue, and then didn't notice when I let Firefox correct it that I chose queue instead of cue.

Segev
2017-01-31, 12:39 PM
I think I accidentally typed que when I meant cue, and then didn't notice when I let Firefox correct it that I chose queue instead of cue.

Makes sense. Sorry; I was only correcting because this is one of many times I've seen this error on this particular forum, so while it may not have been you in the past, it finally pushed over my tolerance and my inner word Nazi broke free.

@ warty goblin:
As to Mistborn, I don't agree that the setting is dull...though it certainly isn't my usual preference, because it IS dreary.

I'm not sure how far into the books you got, but the examination of the magic is much deeper than that. And...if you think Vin and Kelsier are "ubermenchen," you missed a lot about them. They very much are not. They're more tragic heroes, in the Greek sense. They CERTAINLY are not supposed to represent some perfected ideal of human behavior.

The Allomancy can certainly be seen as "superhero" stuff, but it is still rather interesting how it works. And Feruchemy goes a completely different direction while still being related. And then there's Hemalurgy. Delicious, delicious Hemalurgy.

So yes, you can say "they're just superpowers," but really, isn't all magic?

warty goblin
2017-01-31, 02:37 PM
Makes sense. Sorry; I was only correcting because this is one of many times I've seen this error on this particular forum, so while it may not have been you in the past, it finally pushed over my tolerance and my inner word Nazi broke free.

@ warty goblin:
As to Mistborn, I don't agree that the setting is dull...though it certainly isn't my usual preference, because it IS dreary.

I'm not sure how far into the books you got, but the examination of the magic is much deeper than that. And...if you think Vin and Kelsier are "ubermenchen," you missed a lot about them. They very much are not. They're more tragic heroes, in the Greek sense. They CERTAINLY are not supposed to represent some perfected ideal of human behavior.

The Allomancy can certainly be seen as "superhero" stuff, but it is still rather interesting how it works. And Feruchemy goes a completely different direction while still being related. And then there's Hemalurgy. Delicious, delicious Hemalurgy.

So yes, you can say "they're just superpowers," but really, isn't all magic?

I only read Mistborn, which I found so extremely tedious I set it down for something like five months, and only returned to it after exhausting all other available books. Including a fairly dreadful second wave feminist text on rape. I also read it about a decade ago, so my memory is not exactly crisp.

I didn't find the power set particularly interesting or fantastic. Run fast, improved perception, and turning into a magnet? It's like the X-Men, but with a tiny stable of powers, two of which are really dull. And dear gods, the presentation of this was stupifying. Giant heaps of exposition dialog with zero character. I've had lectures on using random effects to model heterogeneity in fish that have more personality. And compared to something like the exposition on magic in the Witcher novels, which manages to be informative about the characters, sufficiently informative about the magic, philosophically interesting and slightly scary all at once in a few short pages, it's painfully bad.

I also tend to find the combination of inheritable magic and only magical people being useful rather annoying. Particularly if one of the points of the book is supposed to be about the evils of an inheritance based aristocracy and the need for bloodline purity. All good and worthy themes, only totally undercut by making power an inherited attribute. Nobody's better than anybody else, except the super-special magical folks, who by dint of parentage are literally superior to everybody around them. It's annoying in Tolkien, but Tolkien was clever enough to write up his bloodline superiority in clearly mythical terms inside a frame narrative, and notably the most heroic character was a gardener. Mistborn was written in a particularly dull sort of modern realist style, and a character like Sam Gamgee saving the world simply by being a good person was entirely out of the reach of its thought.

2D8HP
2017-01-31, 02:42 PM
...Tolkien, Moorcock, Lieber, etc, have nothing to do with the topic at hand. The issue is with this mass of post-D&D...stuff... mainly garbage, and largely could be lost to time without a hint of consequence.
Well Christopher Tolkien (your fathers "notes" indeed, right... pull the other one why don't you!), Leiber, and Moorcock all have published post D&D works, some of which is pretty good, as for most post D&D stuff being garbage, well that's just Sturgeons Law!

Of fantasy fiction first published in the 21st Century, I've liked some stories by Susanna Clarke, Genevieve Cogman, Neil Gaiman, Rodrigo Garcia y Robertson, and Victoria Schwab but yeah none of that has been real close to D&D rules.

Of the stories that inspired D&D I don't think any come real close to RAW, but Robert Howard's Conan, Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, and Clarl Ashton Smith's "Seven Geases" tales come closest in spirit.

The first story that I read that cleary used some D&D was Leiber's "Sea Magic", which, while it wasn't quite as good as his earlier stuff (what could be!), was still good, and the first novel was Andre Norton's "Quag Keep", which I just couldn't finish.
As for any of the novels published by TSR and WotC? The farthest I could get was two chapters of Salvatore's "Homeland", none of it that I tried to read seemed that good.

If you're going to read Appendix N works, besides some Howard, and Moorcock, and most Leiber, the standouts for me are Ursula LeGuin's "Wizard of Earthsea", and Jack Vance's "Dying Earth".

Flickerdart
2017-01-31, 03:12 PM
Even OotS doesn't always follow the rules, and it's a work where the characters know that the rules exist.

You might as well ask why regular novels (and movies, and TV shows) don't follow the rules of physics. Infinite ammo? Improbable aiming skills? Taking 50 bullets directly to the face and surviving? It's against the rules our reality runs on, but it happens anyway. Magic missile missing its target is nothing in comparison.


I only read Mistborn, which I found so extremely tedious I set it down for something like five months, and only returned to it after exhausting all other available books. Including a fairly dreadful second wave feminist text on rape. I also read it about a decade ago, so my memory is not exactly crisp.

I didn't find the power set particularly interesting or fantastic. Run fast, improved perception, and turning into a magnet? It's like the X-Men, but with a tiny stable of powers, two of which are really dull. And dear gods, the presentation of this was stupifying. Giant heaps of exposition dialog with zero character. I've had lectures on using random effects to model heterogeneity in fish that have more personality. And compared to something like the exposition on magic in the Witcher novels, which manages to be informative about the characters, sufficiently informative about the magic, philosophically interesting and slightly scary all at once in a few short pages, it's painfully bad.

I also tend to find the combination of inheritable magic and only magical people being useful rather annoying. Particularly if one of the points of the book is supposed to be about the evils of an inheritance based aristocracy and the need for bloodline purity. All good and worthy themes, only totally undercut by making power an inherited attribute. Nobody's better than anybody else, except the super-special magical folks, who by dint of parentage are literally superior to everybody around them. It's annoying in Tolkien, but Tolkien was clever enough to write up his bloodline superiority in clearly mythical terms inside a frame narrative, and notably the most heroic character was a gardener. Mistborn was written in a particularly dull sort of modern realist style, and a character like Sam Gamgee saving the world simply by being a good person was entirely out of the reach of its thought.

I'm glad at least someone agrees with me on this. It's hard to go a whole minute without bumping into someone praising Sanderson's writing skills, but the only thing of note the man accomplished was writing a thousand-page book in which nothing in particular had happened.

Segev
2017-01-31, 03:21 PM
I only read Mistborn, which I found so extremely tedious I set it down for something like five months, and only returned to it after exhausting all other available books. Including a fairly dreadful second wave feminist text on rape. I also read it about a decade ago, so my memory is not exactly crisp.

I didn't find the power set particularly interesting or fantastic. Run fast, improved perception, and turning into a magnet? It's like the X-Men, but with a tiny stable of powers, two of which are really dull. And dear gods, the presentation of this was stupifying. Giant heaps of exposition dialog with zero character. I've had lectures on using random effects to model heterogeneity in fish that have more personality. And compared to something like the exposition on magic in the Witcher novels, which manages to be informative about the characters, sufficiently informative about the magic, philosophically interesting and slightly scary all at once in a few short pages, it's painfully bad.

I also tend to find the combination of inheritable magic and only magical people being useful rather annoying. Particularly if one of the points of the book is supposed to be about the evils of an inheritance based aristocracy and the need for bloodline purity. All good and worthy themes, only totally undercut by making power an inherited attribute. Nobody's better than anybody else, except the super-special magical folks, who by dint of parentage are literally superior to everybody around them. It's annoying in Tolkien, but Tolkien was clever enough to write up his bloodline superiority in clearly mythical terms inside a frame narrative, and notably the most heroic character was a gardener. Mistborn was written in a particularly dull sort of modern realist style, and a character like Sam Gamgee saving the world simply by being a good person was entirely out of the reach of its thought.

I'm afraid I disagree with you, but you're entitled to your opinion. Personally, I didn't find there to be all that much exposition that wasn't done with plenty of character. And the USE of those powers was interesting.

The interaction of feruchemy and allomancy was cool, when it finally was revealed. (I'll say no more for fear of spoilers.)

The inheritable powers thing is explored, but is actually not the point. I can't help but think that you skimmed it after being turned off by the ash-covered setting (which I can't entirely blame you for), because the "blood purity" thing is hardly lauded.


I'm glad at least someone agrees with me on this. It's hard to go a whole minute without bumping into someone praising Sanderson's writing skills, but the only thing of note the man accomplished was writing a thousand-page book in which nothing in particular had happened.
Are you sure you're not confusing him with George R.R. Martin and Robert Jordan? (The latter of whom whose story Sanderson actually finished, and managed to write ACTUALLY INTERESTING Mattrim Cauthon chapters.)



I'd recommend Sanderson's Steelheart novel (and its two sequels), but it is explicitly on the surface "superheroes" (albeit the only heroes are non-super, as the supers are pretty much all villains) story. Definitely a more diverse range of powers, and the revelation of how the "magic" works is a slow unfolding across three novels.

Flickerdart
2017-01-31, 03:27 PM
Are you sure you're not confusing him with George R.R. Martin and Robert Jordan? (The latter of whom whose story Sanderson actually finished, and managed to write ACTUALLY INTERESTING Mattrim Cauthon chapters.)

Jordan is a whole 'nother story. Martin is marginally more compelling. But I'm specifically talking about the Stormlight Archive or whatever it's called - I managed to get through the first book, which at times flirts with something happening, but never quite manages to commit to an actual event.

If you want a writer that actually does a plausible magic system while managing to also write a story, read the Watch series.

CharonsHelper
2017-01-31, 03:28 PM
I'm glad at least someone agrees with me on this. It's hard to go a whole minute without bumping into someone praising Sanderson's writing skills, but the only thing of note the man accomplished was writing a thousand-page book in which nothing in particular had happened.

+1


Are you sure you're not confusing him with George R.R. Martin and Robert Jordan? (The latter of whom whose story Sanderson actually finished, and managed to write ACTUALLY INTERESTING Mattrim Cauthon chapters.)

I literally couldn't finish Sanderson's ending to the series, and I'd been reading it since 8th grade when the 8th book came out. It was pretty terrible - and amazingly he added in his customary power creep to a series which already had crazily potent magic.

Admittedly - Jordan's writing had been going downhill since book 5-6. He (and George RR Martin) both fell into the surprisingly common epic fantasy trap of having a ton happening across the world and not wanting ANYTHING to happen 'off stage'. I really did like the first several books of each series though.

I know that in The Wheel of Time, far more of note actually happened in the first 4-5 books than the next 9-10 books combined. And they weren't exactly quick reads. (I've read that The Wheel of Time was originally planned to be 6 books - but with its commercial success he and/or editors/publisher decided to make it longer. They would have been better left at 6 - maybe pushed out to 7-8 at most.)

mikelala
2017-01-31, 03:29 PM
Even so, I think the novels are generally based not necessarily on the rules system, but on the campaign worlds.

Kelb_Panthera
2017-01-31, 03:32 PM
Don't know if it's been mentioned but a lot of older stuff may be from earlier editions where the rules differed and it was much, much more expected that DM's would be changing them with some frequency.

3rd edition was the beginning of the era in which it started being taken as a given that what's on the books goes without the DM explicitly saying otherwise, as I've come to understand.

CharonsHelper
2017-01-31, 03:33 PM
3rd edition was the beginning of the era in which it started being taken as a given that what's on the books goes without the DM explicitly saying otherwise, as I've come to understand.

I think that varied a great deal from table to table pre 3.0. I've actually wondered how much of the shift was actually 3.0 and how much was that the internet was becoming a major thing around the time if it was released.

If 3.0 had been released before the internet, would it have ended up leaning that way so much?

Flickerdart
2017-01-31, 03:40 PM
I think that varied a great deal from table to table pre 3.0. I've actually wondered how much of the shift was actually 3.0 and how much was that the internet was becoming a major thing around the time if it was released.

If 3.0 had been released before the internet, would it have ended up leaning that way so much?

Probably. Part of what made 3e so money-printing was the assumption that a player should have access to any book he wants to read (as long as he can buy a copy). This is relatively incompatible with older D&D's idea of the DM as the rule-changer, because if the DM is the keeper of the books, the players are none the wiser to any change.

3e was also configured in a much more systematic way. The DM didn't need to make as many rulings, because there were rules for all kinds of stuff now. So it became less normal to make rulings, especially rulings that changed what the text said.

Segev
2017-01-31, 03:46 PM
I saw zero power creep in Sanderson's conclusion to Wheel of Time. Nothing every topped the Cheodan Kal, and those were destroyed before Sanderson took over, IIRC.

Stormlight Archive is long. I'm puzzled that you think nothing happened in it. There's a LOT going on throughout.

"Nothing happened" is what Martin is guilty of in the latest book, where he has literal chapter after chapter of his characters faffing about, and when they threaten to actually achieve something, he has an anti-event undo it.

I don't think Martin and Jordan wanted "nothing to happen off-stage." I think their problem was that they wanted to show off their world-settings, and rather than finish one story and start another to show different parts, they forced, twisted, and contorted their characters into wandering the world. Nothing can be allowed to happen because nothing that happens in those parts of the world are pertinent to the actual story they were telling, but they can't continue the story while their characters are languishing in these uninterestingly-presented places. So we get returns to the other places to remind us that characters exist, but they're not allowed to accomplish anything.

Some movement occurred after the whole lot of nothing on the continent when they finally got the continent-walking exiles back to Dorn, but even that had been teased with nothing to show for it for so long that it didn't feel exciting anymore.


Stormlight Archive had no scenes I can think of where nothing happened, except for one. The interlude at the shallow sea was somewhat pointless to that novel; it is probably more important to the overarching Cosmere plot, and Sanderson is indulging a bit there because I think Stormlight Archive is going to eventually be the one that canonizes in novel form much of what's going on with the macro-setting.

Again, I can understand disliking it. It's long. And length can be wearing. But I do object to inaccurate characterizations of its flaws. "Nothing happening" isn't one of them.

2D8HP
2017-01-31, 04:05 PM
Probably. Part of what made 3e so money-printing was.....
3e sounds so very different from old D&D, which has gems such as:

You are a DM aren't you? Because
As this book is the exclusive precinct of the DM, you must view any non-DM player possessing it as something less than worthy of honorable death.

Lord Raziere
2017-01-31, 05:01 PM
.......

You guys do know that Vin WAS NOT the Hero of Ages right? Nor was Kelsier, or Elend or any of those people....it was Sazeed. The guy who was mostly a scholar on religion then gone moping about because he lost faith? None of them did all those heroic things because they were destined to or anything, by then the prophecies had all been manipulated by Ruin into being distorted, Vin was mostly a pawn in a cosmic game of chess.

I think you guys are just Tolkien purists and don't like it that someone is doing things their own way and that people like him for it for being a style that other authors don't have. I personally can't get through any novels written like Tolkien's ones, because you can't tell whats actually happening through all the style being shown off.

You can be grognard-y all you want, but new stories always come with each generation, and its better for new stories to come and have their time to shine than for the old to dominate forever. Maybe it doesn't it for you, for your perspective, but maybe its your perspective that the book doesn't really care about and is aiming itself at other people that do like it who'll be important and need to understand things in a different way than you understand them. I certainly understand stuff a lot better from reading Sandersons books than I do Tolkiens. But hey, perhaps Sandersons books are just the ones for my generation, whatever.

Flickerdart
2017-01-31, 05:22 PM
.......

You guys do know that Vin WAS NOT the Hero of Ages right? Nor was Kelsier, or Elend or any of those people....it was Sazeed. The guy who was mostly a scholar on religion then gone moping about because he lost faith? None of them did all those heroic things because they were destined to or anything, by then the prophecies had all been manipulated by Ruin into being distorted, Vin was mostly a pawn in a cosmic game of chess.

I think you guys are just Tolkien purists and don't like it that someone is doing things their own way and that people like him for it for being a style that other authors don't have. I personally can't get through any novels written like Tolkien's ones, because you can't tell whats actually happening through all the style being shown off.

You can be grognard-y all you want, but new stories always come with each generation, and its better for new stories to come and have their time to shine than for the old to dominate forever. Maybe it doesn't it for you, for your perspective, but maybe its your perspective that the book doesn't really care about and is aiming itself at other people that do like it who'll be important and need to understand things in a different way than you understand them. I certainly understand stuff a lot better from reading Sandersons books than I do Tolkiens. But hey, perhaps Sandersons books are just the ones for my generation, whatever.

Cool your jets there, buddy. There's plenty of modern fantasy that's good without being Tolkienesque. It's just that this fantasy isn't written by Sanderson.

CharonsHelper
2017-01-31, 05:30 PM
.......

You guys do know that Vin WAS NOT the Hero of Ages right? Nor was Kelsier, or Elend or any of those people....it was Sazeed. The guy who was mostly a scholar on religion then gone moping about because he lost faith? None of them did all those heroic things because they were destined to or anything, by then the prophecies had all been manipulated by Ruin into being distorted, Vin was mostly a pawn in a cosmic game of chess.

I think you guys are just Tolkien purists and don't like it that someone is doing things their own way and that people like him for it for being a style that other authors don't have. I personally can't get through any novels written like Tolkien's ones, because you can't tell whats actually happening through all the style being shown off.

You can be grognard-y all you want, but new stories always come with each generation, and its better for new stories to come and have their time to shine than for the old to dominate forever. Maybe it doesn't it for you, for your perspective, but maybe its your perspective that the book doesn't really care about and is aiming itself at other people that do like it who'll be important and need to understand things in a different way than you understand them. I certainly understand stuff a lot better from reading Sandersons books than I do Tolkiens. But hey, perhaps Sandersons books are just the ones for my generation, whatever.

I don't much like Tolkien (The Hobbit was pretty good - and I respect his work for basically inventing the modern fantasy novel) or Sanderson. No need to get grumpy because I don't like an author that you do. It's okay if you like bad world-building. :)

Mr Beer
2017-01-31, 05:32 PM
I enjoyed the Mistborn trilogy but not the extent of needing to track down anything he's written. Martin's better but makes Stephen King look like a master of brevity. Tolkien's main contribution to fantasy was inspiring later works IMO, however blasphemous that makes me.

Each to their, I like Joe Abercrombie for example, but apparently that puts me in a minority on this forum.

Anyway, 'you don't like Sanderson therefore you're a grognard' sounds like a specious line of reasoning to me.

Max_Killjoy
2017-01-31, 05:36 PM
I enjoyed the Mistborn trilogy but not the extent of needing to track down anything he's written. Martin's better but makes Stephen King look like a master of brevity. Tolkien's main contribution to fantasy was inspiring later works IMO, however blasphemous that makes me.

Each to their, I like Joe Abercrombie for example, but apparently that puts me in a minority on this forum.

Anyway, 'you don't like Sanderson therefore you're a grognard' sounds like a specious line of reasoning to me.

I liked Ambercrombie for about 2 1/2 books... and then I realized that none of the characters had changed a damn bit.

warty goblin
2017-01-31, 06:00 PM
.......

You guys do know that Vin WAS NOT the Hero of Ages right? Nor was Kelsier, or Elend or any of those people....it was Sazeed. The guy who was mostly a scholar on religion then gone moping about because he lost faith? None of them did all those heroic things because they were destined to or anything, by then the prophecies had all been manipulated by Ruin into being distorted, Vin was mostly a pawn in a cosmic game of chess.

I think you guys are just Tolkien purists and don't like it that someone is doing things their own way and that people like him for it for being a style that other authors don't have. I personally can't get through any novels written like Tolkien's ones, because you can't tell whats actually happening through all the style being shown off.

You can be grognard-y all you want, but new stories always come with each generation, and its better for new stories to come and have their time to shine than for the old to dominate forever. Maybe it doesn't it for you, for your perspective, but maybe its your perspective that the book doesn't really care about and is aiming itself at other people that do like it who'll be important and need to understand things in a different way than you understand them. I certainly understand stuff a lot better from reading Sandersons books than I do Tolkiens. But hey, perhaps Sandersons books are just the ones for my generation, whatever.


It seems a bit disingenuous to label anybody who doesn't like Sanderson as a Tolkien-obsessed grognard. A person may like Tolkien without considering his work the measure of all things, and indeed enjoy contemporary styles as well. Such a person may still find Sanderson unappetizing, even though they are not some sort of troglodytic fantasy revanchist.

I quite like Tolkien, and keep his works on the top shelf next to the other books I consider some of fantasy and sci-fi's best. Also up there is a copy of Tanith Lee's Metallic Love, a first person diary about a teenage girl falling in love with a robot in a jobless, class-stratified post-apocalyptic future. It's also got some of the best meta-commentary on the role of stories in shaping people that I've found between two covers, and it's light-years farther away from Tolkien in theme, style and setting than wizards trying to assassinate Dark Lords.

And what, out of curiosity, are the things made clear by reading Sanderson?

Aedilred
2017-01-31, 06:26 PM
It really depends entirely on which way you look at it.

Each medium of storytelling has different strengths and weaknesses, and different ways of conveying information. Sometimes some things which you take for granted in one medium are almost impossible to pull off in another. To take an everyday example, books and movies are two different ways of telling a story. A book has a lot more place for detail, external monologues, and backstory, but it also has to spell out all details of the appearance of characters and landscapes, or leave the reader to imagine them. A movie is almost entirely the other way round: the viewer is constantly being exposed to what things look like but it's much harder to tell the reader about characters' backstories or specifically what they're thinking at any given moment.

So when adapting a book to a film, the director (et al) has to consider whether his priority is going to be faithfully putting all the details from the book on screen, or whether it's going to be making the best movie he can even if he has to omit or change elements from the book. Usually it will be a trade-off between the two. I'm sure we've all seen films which were a pretty faithful adaptation of the book but just didn't work on screen; we may also have read books that look like they were written backwards from a film and never quite work on the page.

When you employ a writer to create a novel, then, you really want them to be thinking in novel-mode, to create the best story possible that works as well on the page as possible. For a standalone writer, this isn't a problem. For one writing in a proprietary setting, they have to work with the setting that they're given but, depending on the freedom the editors give them, might be able to write their own story or might be heavily constrained by the setting requirements.

Then we get onto the rules, and we have to question what they actually are. Are they what D&D is really about, to the extent that everything derives from them and they take priority in all instances? Or are they a means of representing the activities which take place in the setting and stories in a manageable fashion?

Essentially, do you want your writers to be writing backwards from the rules, or do you want them to come up with the sort of story that a D&D campaign is meant to evoke, even if it means taking some liberties with the rules?

I think if you want the stories to be any good, it pretty much has to be the latter. You want your novelists writing novels first and foremost, the sort of thing that is worth reading for its own sake and gets people interested in setting their own adventures in this world, even if some of the things that happen in the novel couldn't quite happen that way under the rules. If you take the other approach you tend to get very lifeless and mechanical stories, because some things which would create tension or make narrative sense in a story aren't possible under the rules, and so can't happen. It's a trade-off that no novelist worth their money would make.

You don't have to look very far to find examples of this in practice. Most campaign journals, even when well written for their own part, aren't actually much fun to read, because a large part of what makes a campaign entertaining is the medium in which it happens - the immediacy, the tension associated with dice rolls, the showmanship of the GM, the engagement that players naturally have with their characters and their exploits - and that doesn't translate to an authorial-storyteller medium in the same way. (Conversely, GMs who favour a "storytelling" style at the table tend to be the cause of dissatisfaction for their players). Even a story explicitly based on D&D like Order of the Stick plays fairly fast and loose with the rules at times because the story comes first.

The question of "why are you writing a D&D story if you don't want to follow the rules?" generally then comes to "I like the setting but want to tell a good story without the arbitrary constraints of the rules". Or more specifically, in the case of published work, "I was paid to write a D&D story, and my editors were generous enough not to insist the story followed all these long, complicated, silly and inconsistent rules".

The problem (OP) is that you are viewing D&D as a rules system with everything else being secondary and enslaved to the rules, rather than the rules being merely one of a whole set of representative media under the D&D umbrella, with different storytelling priorities being taken depending on the medium through which the story is being expressed.

Max_Killjoy
2017-01-31, 06:52 PM
.......

You guys do know that Vin WAS NOT the Hero of Ages right? Nor was Kelsier, or Elend or any of those people....it was Sazeed. The guy who was mostly a scholar on religion then gone moping about because he lost faith? None of them did all those heroic things because they were destined to or anything, by then the prophecies had all been manipulated by Ruin into being distorted, Vin was mostly a pawn in a cosmic game of chess.

I think you guys are just Tolkien purists and don't like it that someone is doing things their own way and that people like him for it for being a style that other authors don't have. I personally can't get through any novels written like Tolkien's ones, because you can't tell whats actually happening through all the style being shown off.

You can be grognard-y all you want, but new stories always come with each generation, and its better for new stories to come and have their time to shine than for the old to dominate forever. Maybe it doesn't it for you, for your perspective, but maybe its your perspective that the book doesn't really care about and is aiming itself at other people that do like it who'll be important and need to understand things in a different way than you understand them. I certainly understand stuff a lot better from reading Sandersons books than I do Tolkiens. But hey, perhaps Sandersons books are just the ones for my generation, whatever.




It seems a bit disingenuous to label anybody who doesn't like Sanderson as a Tolkien-obsessed grognard. A person may like Tolkien without considering his work the measure of all things, and indeed enjoy contemporary styles as well. Such a person may still find Sanderson unappetizing, even though they are not some sort of troglodytic fantasy revanchist.

I quite like Tolkien, and keep his works on the top shelf next to the other books I consider some of fantasy and sci-fi's best. Also up there is a copy of Tanith Lee's Metallic Love, a first person diary about a teenage girl falling in love with a robot in a jobless, class-stratified post-apocalyptic future. It's also got some of the best meta-commentary on the role of stories in shaping people that I've found between two covers, and it's light-years farther away from Tolkien in theme, style and setting than wizards trying to assassinate Dark Lords.

And what, out of curiosity, are the things made clear by reading Sanderson?


I think that's a good question.

In general, Raziere, I don't think it's useful to impugn the motives of other posters instead of addressing their opinions directly.

ImNotTrevor
2017-01-31, 07:15 PM
I don't much like Tolkien (The Hobbit was pretty good - and I respect his work for basically inventing the modern fantasy novel) or Sanderson. No need to get grumpy because I don't like an author that you do. It's okay if you like bad world-building. :)

Stating your opinions as facts is a good way to come across as a tool. If that is your intention, well done. If not, you might want to tone it back a tad.

I haven't had the opportunity to read Sanderson yet and even I'm rolling my eyes. It generally irks me when people word their opinions as objective truths, though.
"I felt that not much happened in those 1000 pages" is a statement of opinion.

"Nothing happened in those 1000 pages" is a statement of fact.

For whatever reason, people seem to make an attempt to strengthen their opinions by not wording them as such. Which doesn't actually strengthen the opinion any. Because it's an opinion.

I'm not saying Razier was in the right on his tirade, but a lot of the kickback is coming from stating opinions as facts and not as opinions. Which comes across to many as aggressive and condescending.

Feel free to carry on and have whatever feeling about things that you want to have. Just make sure you're not being a condescending jack-hole about it. (Because that just makes things worse.)

CharonsHelper
2017-01-31, 07:45 PM
Stating your opinions as facts is a good way to come across as a tool. If that is your intention, well done. If not, you might want to tone it back a tad.


My last sentence should probably have been in blue - if that answers your question.

JoshuaZ
2017-01-31, 07:57 PM
This was a much more interesting thread before it turned in to an argument about what authors and their magic systems are better by highly subjective standards.

ImNotTrevor
2017-01-31, 08:20 PM
My last sentence should probably have been in blue - if that answers your question.

That was the most recent offense. Not the first. But I agree with the post above me. This thread's line of argument got way less interesting once it started being an argument about not liking things.

Max_Killjoy
2017-01-31, 08:50 PM
This was a much more interesting thread before it turned in to an argument about what authors and their magic systems are better by highly subjective standards.


It's a bit of a tightrope to walk, since one of the reasons is that trying to write (non-parody) fiction while adhering to RPG rules, especially disassociated and abstracted rules like the D&D family tree's, produces bad fiction.

(And no, not in terms of subjective artistic taste... I mean objectively bad as storycraft.)

JoshuaZ
2017-01-31, 08:57 PM
It's a bit of a tightrope to walk, since one of the reasons is that trying to right (non-parody) fiction while adhering to RPG rules, especially disassociated and abstracted rules like the D&D family tree's, produces bad fiction.

(And no, not in terms of subjective artistic taste... I mean objectively bad as storycraft.)

That's a fair point. It isn't like this line of discussion is even that off-topic. And actually understanding this does require looking I think at what does or does not make good storycraft or good literature, and the line between subjective and objective there can be blurry.

Mechalich
2017-01-31, 09:16 PM
The key point isn't what makes good or bad storycraft - it's what game elements make bad storycraft, generally by breaking suspension of disbelief.

Many of the game elements that make for bad storycraft are actually shared across games: hit points and instantaneous perfectly restorative healing being notable ones. Random encounter opponents to provide interactivity even when they serve no narrative purpose are another.

One of the reasons video game movies are generally decried as being universally terrible is that they can't manage to escape the game elements that have influenced the narrative. The requirements of a good game simply aren't the same as the requirements of a good narrative.

Max_Killjoy
2017-01-31, 09:21 PM
The key point isn't what makes good or bad storycraft - it's what game elements make bad storycraft, generally by breaking suspension of disbelief.

Many of the game elements that make for bad storycraft are actually shared across games: hit points and instantaneous perfectly restorative healing being notable ones. Random encounter opponents to provide interactivity even when they serve no narrative purpose are another.

One of the reasons video game movies are generally decried as being universally terrible is that they can't manage to escape the game elements that have influenced the narrative. The requirements of a good game simply aren't the same as the requirements of a good narrative.


Well said.

JoshuaZ
2017-01-31, 09:33 PM
The key point isn't what makes good or bad storycraft - it's what game elements make bad storycraft, generally by breaking suspension of disbelief.

Many of the game elements that make for bad storycraft are actually shared across games: hit points and instantaneous perfectly restorative healing being notable ones. Random encounter opponents to provide interactivity even when they serve no narrative purpose are another.

One of the reasons video game movies are generally decried as being universally terrible is that they can't manage to escape the game elements that have influenced the narrative. The requirements of a good game simply aren't the same as the requirements of a good narrative.

This seems pretty accurate. One of the most annoying things in some of the D&D universe novels are when they throw in what amounts to a random encounter. And the better ones (as they are) don't do that.

Knaight
2017-01-31, 09:34 PM
'Extruded fantasy product" -- write-by-numbers, snap-to-grid fictional works, pantomiming earlier works, and treating the work of Campbell and Lit 101 analytical tools as prescriptive rather descriptive. Either explicitly or implicitly taking the assumptions of D&D and its derivatives as givens, or unconsciously taking their queue cue from the assembly line product that came before and did likewise.

Tolkien, Moorcock, Lieber, etc, have nothing to do with that mess. The issue is with this mass of post-D&D...stuff... mainly garbage, and largely could be lost to time without a hint of consequence.
Post D&D is worth splitting - the D&D knockoffs (or straight up D&D novels) e.g. Salvatore are largely drek worth minimal preservation. On the other hand, you have authors like Nnedi Okorafor who are distinctly post D&D and have roughly 0 D&D influence, generic fantasy influence, or other work-destroying influences.


I think you guys are just Tolkien purists and don't like it that someone is doing things their own way and that people like him for it for being a style that other authors don't have. I personally can't get through any novels written like Tolkien's ones, because you can't tell whats actually happening through all the style being shown off.

Yeah, no. Disliking Sanderson, or even just finding the magic system side tedious (which is where I am) doesn't mean that Tolkien is the sum total of what one likes. I can list post-Tolkien authors doing non-Tolkienien fantasy that I like all day - the Tolkien knockoff group meanwhile is a well that runs dry really quickly as far as quality.

JoshuaZ
2017-01-31, 09:40 PM
There are a handful of D&D setting novels which are not awful. But almost all of those are ones where the authors minimize the amount that the system rules impact things.

Max_Killjoy
2017-01-31, 09:44 PM
Post D&D is worth splitting - the D&D knockoffs (or straight up D&D novels) e.g. Salvatore are largely drek worth minimal preservation. On the other hand, you have authors like Nnedi Okorafor who are distinctly post D&D and have roughly 0 D&D influence, generic fantasy influence, or other work-destroying influences.


Certainly.

And not every work with those influences is bad, nor every work without them good. I'm speaking in general terms here.

2D8HP
2017-01-31, 10:10 PM
......You can be grognard-y all you want....


Hey! I'm only 48!

Grognard's are at least 50!


...Sandersons books are just the ones for my generation, whatever.


I haven't read Sanderson yet, so no opinion yet.

I've tried to read Martin and.Salvatore and was underwhelmed, and I've noticed an odd thing; at least 7/8th of the Science Fiction and Fantasy that I've liked from the 20th century was by men (or at least using male pen names), but about 3/4th of the Fantasy fiction that I've liked from the [I] 21st century has been written by women (I pretty much stopped reading new Science Fiction with the advent of "Cyberpunk").

Just a coincidence?

Necroticplague
2017-01-31, 10:33 PM
The key point isn't what makes good or bad storycraft - it's what game elements make bad storycraft, generally by breaking suspension of disbelief.

Many of the game elements that make for bad storycraft are actually shared across games: hit points and instantaneous perfectly restorative healing being notable ones. Random encounter opponents to provide interactivity even when they serve no narrative purpose are another.

To be slightly fair on random encounters, they're irritating as a game mechanic as well, so you can't expect them to be much better in the media they aren't native to.

And the other two seem really situation as 'bad' as story elements depends heavily on what kind of story your telling. Off the top of my head, many heroic stories seems like they thrive on villians and heroes who can take a lot of punishment before dropping, while nameless mooks fall quickly, something HP do a decent job representing.

EscherEnigma
2017-01-31, 10:52 PM
Read (most of) the first page.

I saw explanations on the meta-level of why the books don't perfectly match the rules/fluff. You did not like those.
I saw explanations of the abstract nature of D&D rules and what a given combat action is supposed to represent vs. what it actually does. You did not like those.
I saw explanations of how narrative needs are different then table-top game needs. You did not like those.

What I did not see was anyone pointing out that in 4th edition Magic Missile was not an auto-hit.

Segev
2017-01-31, 11:04 PM
I don't much like Tolkien (The Hobbit was pretty good - and I respect his work for basically inventing the modern fantasy novel) or Sanderson. No need to get grumpy because I don't like an author that you do. It's okay if you like bad world-building. :)

Having read this page since marking this quote for comment, yes, that hsould have been blue, or otherwise better marked as sarcastic. Because frankly, my reply remains true: You're free to dislike Sanderson's works. His style may not be to your liking. (I find nearly everything he writes to be a page-turner, and I am NOT a fan of works based on who wrote them. If I were, there are a number of movies that I do enjoy that I couldn't watch due to the writers or actors in them.) But it is factually incorrect to say his worldbuilding is bad, particularly when you imply it to be objectively so.

So far, other than "I don't like it," nothing you've said has been an accurate reflection of what I have seen in his works. So I seriously think you have issue with his writing style, and it gets in your way.

I have similar issues with a number of authors and even eras of writing. The style just bores me to tears, so I can't get into the story. Tolkien is a major offender. I've never been able to get all the way through anything he's written. I acknowledge that he's probably actually a pretty skilled author, since so many people laud his works and he doesn't have the "hot teen wangst" demographic to tap into the way certain other high-selling (but seemingly more objectively poorly-written) works do.

2D8HP
2017-02-01, 12:02 AM
I don't much like Tolkien (The Hobbit was pretty good....


While I have read LotR a few times, since as I approach 50 years old my tastes seem to returning to my pre-teen ones (I like bicycling more than motoring, and the Ramones and AC/DC more than Sonic Youth again), I agree. The Hobbits is more fun to read than LotR or The Silmarillion, but I like Leiber and Moorcock even more.

Mechalich
2017-02-01, 12:05 AM
To be slightly fair on random encounters, they're irritating as a game mechanic as well, so you can't expect them to be much better in the media they aren't native to.


In terms of 'random encounters' I was also including the many things you fight through in the average dungeon crawls to get to the boss that really form a faceless horde. That's incredibly common in a game like Skyrim - how many draugr does one murder in a playthrough? They serve as an obstacle, and while some such fights may be challenging they don't really do anything to develop the character, you just need hordes to mow through because running through an empty dungeon seems ridiculous.


And the other two seem really situation as 'bad' as story elements depends heavily on what kind of story your telling. Off the top of my head, many heroic stories seems like they thrive on villians and heroes who can take a lot of punishment before dropping, while nameless mooks fall quickly, something HP do a decent job representing.

Yes and no. Certain kinds of heroic fiction rely heavily on a mechanism that is in some ways similar to HP: a combination of plot armor and total removal of blunt force trauma as a form of damage that actually functions. It is quite common in superhero stories or manga for characters to be punched literally through walls and be fine, but to start bleeding out instantly upon receiving even a very modest stab wound. This is actually a cunning mechanism designed to maintain suspension of disbelief by playing on the ignorance of modern audiences to combat and how damage is actually applied to the human body. It's quite common to see people in modern media die of decidedly non-lethal gunshot wounds while surviving massive blunt force blows to the head and spine that would absolutely result in instant death as if nothing happened. This is something that does get annoying and ruins suspension of disbelief once you start to recognize it.

HP, by contrast, treats all forms of damage as fungible and ignores the debilitating effect of wounds. A character can have 1% of their life bar and be fine, they can in fact be visibly unharmed despite having had swords shoved through their chests repeatedly and be functioning at full combat capability (in Sword Art Online, a story that takes place within a video game construct this happens more than once).

What is particularly problematic though, is writing characters as if they have HP and are aware of it. Heroic fiction with plot armor expects characters to try and dodge all attacks. Characters with HP, by contrast, can function according to a completely different calculus. Writing out in prose or portraying in a movie a combat scenario where the average character takes lethal levels of damage multiple times over but survives through magical healing (which happens in a fight with just about any MMO raid boss ever) isn't going to work.

This is admittedly a fine line. Certain scenarios are able to be more 'gamey' than others. Mech combat, for example, can treat armor as HP in prose almost exactly the way it does in game (and this totally happens in Battletech novels), because it's 'armor' and it is expected that the reader understands that damage to the Mech doesn't cause searing hideous pain in the pilot, which means that fighting with a mech that has had both legs and one arm blown off is an act of heroic badassery, while seeing a person attempt the same is the Black Knight Monty Python sketch.

Cazero
2017-02-01, 05:46 AM
One of the reasons video game movies are generally decried as being universally terrible is that they can't manage to escape the game elements that have influenced the narrative. The requirements of a good game simply aren't the same as the requirements of a good narrative.
This reminds me, I read two Starcraft books.
One had general Edmund Duke watching SCVs working when he receives new orders. The other gave us insight into the drug-induced mental conditioning of marines. Guess wich one was better.

Keltest
2017-02-01, 09:09 AM
This reminds me, I read two Starcraft books.
One had general Edmund Duke watching SCVs working when he receives new orders. The other gave us insight into the drug-induced mental conditioning of marines. Guess wich one was better.

The newest one is pretty good. I like that it answers the question of "what happens if you hit a zerg with an anti-starship weapon?"

Max_Killjoy
2017-02-01, 09:29 AM
Yes and no. Certain kinds of heroic fiction rely heavily on a mechanism that is in some ways similar to HP: a combination of plot armor and total removal of blunt force trauma as a form of damage that actually functions. It is quite common in superhero stories or manga for characters to be punched literally through walls and be fine, but to start bleeding out instantly upon receiving even a very modest stab wound. This is actually a cunning mechanism designed to maintain suspension of disbelief by playing on the ignorance of modern audiences to combat and how damage is actually applied to the human body. It's quite common to see people in modern media die of decidedly non-lethal gunshot wounds while surviving massive blunt force blows to the head and spine that would absolutely result in instant death as if nothing happened. This is something that does get annoying and ruins suspension of disbelief once you start to recognize it.


Yeah. It gets into "hang by the neck until dead" territory (see signature). The random lethality of wounds based on "story needs" and the total "no sell" of blunt trauma gets grating as hell.




HP, by contrast, treats all forms of damage as fungible and ignores the debilitating effect of wounds. A character can have 1% of their life bar and be fine, they can in fact be visibly unharmed despite having had swords shoved through their chests repeatedly and be functioning at full combat capability (in Sword Art Online, a story that takes place within a video game construct this happens more than once).

What is particularly problematic though, is writing characters as if they have HP and are aware of it. Heroic fiction with plot armor expects characters to try and dodge all attacks. Characters with HP, by contrast, can function according to a completely different calculus. Writing out in prose or portraying in a movie a combat scenario where the average character takes lethal levels of damage multiple times over but survives through magical healing (which happens in a fight with just about any MMO raid boss ever) isn't going to work.


Haven't you heard? HP represents "evasion" and "glancing blows". Until it doesn't. :smallconfused:

GungHo
2017-02-01, 11:18 AM
I understand what you're saying, however when things like this happen I wonder, Why are they telling a D&D story then? If the novel is based off of D&D then shouldn't at least try to resemble D&D? If D&D's rules don't work for the story you're trying to tell then why are you using D&D?

And if the author isn't familiar with the D&D's rules, again, why are they writing a story about it? It would be like asking someone who knew absolutely nothing about Superman to write a movie/book/show/etc. about Superman.

Because they want to get paid. Not everyone's an auteur, looking to write the next great American novel. They know stamping that Forgotten Realms logo on their book gets them a decent upfront, some setting work they don't have to do, an expected level of sales, and a publisher that has a dedicated, themed area in book stores.


An old DM of mine claims that, at a con appearance, RA Salvatore claimed that he put at least one rules-improbable situation in every book, just so no one could say "Well, they did it in Book X!"
And then the stuff would find its way into the damn rules. I can absolutely believe that he'd do that, just like I believe GRRM kills characters to make people cry. Stephen King trolls his fans (and un-fans) now and again, too.

Flickerdart
2017-02-01, 11:21 AM
I actually enjoyed Abercrombie's First Law books. Did he write anything else?


I liked Ambercrombie for about 2 1/2 books... and then I realized that none of the characters had changed a damn bit.
The characters sort-of change - Jezal and Sand most notably.

S@tanicoaldo
2017-02-01, 11:27 AM
Bad writing?

Segev
2017-02-01, 11:33 AM
Haven't you heard? HP represents "evasion" and "glancing blows". Until it doesn't. :smallconfused:

Not sure what's confusing about that. The guy you quoted said it was fungible. HP are "you haven't gotten seriously hurt yet" points. Whatever it is that keeps you safe - luck, stamina for dodging, a thick hide, speed with a parrying blade - is rolled up in your hp. If one guy really is tough/driven enough to have three swords shoved through his torso and still be fully functional, great. He can fluff it that way. If another is just a master of dodging and parrying, superb. A third has more lucky breaks than anybody deserves? Fine! Luck runs out; stamina gets exhausted, and eventually that damage overwhelms even the hardiest of beasts. That's hp depletion.

When you go to zero, you finally take a debilitating blow.

Tanarii
2017-02-01, 12:52 PM
The requirements of a good game simply aren't the same as the requirements of a good narrative.Yes. This is the reason that when DMs/GMs/Players start thinking in terms of 'narrative' and 'plot' and 'story' or even 'collaborative storytelling' for (many) RPGs, it's generally a disaster. What makes for good in-character decision making with appropriate outcomes & consequences*, aka Roleplaying, has nothing to do with those things. What (mostly) makes them good for Playing a Game has nothing to do with those things ... unless they're very specifically being designed, from the ground up, to have to do with those things.


*as I've said before, interacting with an imaginary world and getting imaginary outcomes is about as much to do with 'story' and 'plot' as they do with our real lives. Actively experiencing and interacting and making decisions and seeing outcomes is the opposite of story/narrative, whether it be at a game table or living life. It's only when you go back and selectively edit them to make a coherent narrative, plot, etc that they end up as a story.

Max_Killjoy
2017-02-01, 01:03 PM
Not sure what's confusing about that. The guy you quoted said it was fungible. HP are "you haven't gotten seriously hurt yet" points. Whatever it is that keeps you safe - luck, stamina for dodging, a thick hide, speed with a parrying blade - is rolled up in your hp. If one guy really is tough/driven enough to have three swords shoved through his torso and still be fully functional, great. He can fluff it that way. If another is just a master of dodging and parrying, superb. A third has more lucky breaks than anybody deserves? Fine! Luck runs out; stamina gets exhausted, and eventually that damage overwhelms even the hardiest of beasts. That's hp depletion.

When you go to zero, you finally take a debilitating blow.

It's not confusing, it's just a horrible mechanic... to the point that making fun of it is almost embarrassingly easy.


It's a mashup mechanic that conflates a bunch of unrelated issues into a blurry "how hard are they to kill / how much abuse can they live through?" abstraction, and overlaps with other mechanics. It breaks down and creates dissonance as soon as one starts to ask questions of it, or put it in situations where one of the conflated elements shouldn't apply. It makes adjustments or modifiers based on one of the conflated elements harder to viably determine.

If a character is hard to hit, model it as them being harder to hit. If a character can take more actual physical abuse, then model that. If the character is lucky, then model that somehow.

This is why I vastly prefer a system like HERO over one like D&D. In HERO, all these elements are broken out and explicit.





Yes. This is the reason that when DMs/GMs/Players start thinking in terms of 'narrative' and 'plot' and 'story' or even 'collaborative storytelling' for (many) RPGs, it's generally a disaster. What makes for good in-character decision making with appropriate outcomes & consequences*, aka Roleplaying, has nothing to do with those things. What (mostly) makes them good for Playing a Game has nothing to do with those things ... unless they're very specifically being designed, from the ground up, to have to do with those things.


*as I've said before, interacting with an imaginary world and getting imaginary outcomes is about as much to do with 'story' and 'plot' as they do with our real lives. Actively experiencing and interacting and making decisions and seeing outcomes is the opposite of story/narrative, whether it be at a game table or living life. It's only when you go back and selectively edit them to make a coherent narrative, plot, etc that they end up as a story.


If a player is asking "What would make the best story?" instead of "What would this character do in this situation?", I consider that metagaming of a sort.

Segev
2017-02-01, 01:05 PM
It's not confusing, it's just a horrible mechanic... to the point that making fun of it is almost embarrassingly easy.


It's a mashup mechanic that conflates a bunch of unrelated issues into a blurry "how hard are they to kill / how much abuse can they live through?" abstraction, and overlaps with other mechanics. It breaks down and creates dissonance as soon as one starts to ask questions of it, or put it in situations where one of the conflated elements shouldn't apply. It makes adjustments or modifiers based on one of the conflated elements harder to viably determine.

If a character is hard to hit, model it as them being harder to hit. If a character can take more actual physical abuse, then model that. If the character is lucky, then model that somehow.


True. We've been down this road before. I disagree that it's a horrible mechanic. It represents something distinct from the other mechanics that you feel overlap, though I see why you feel the way you do. I just disagree. And we won't convince each other.

Mr Beer
2017-02-01, 01:41 PM
I actually enjoyed Abercrombie's First Law books. Did he write anything else?

Yes, I think the First Law ones were the best though if you liked them, you'll like his others.



The characters sort-of change - Jezal and Sand most notably.


I was thinking about this last night, these two change you mention change. Bayaz (aka Bad Gandalf) doesn't at all but he's incredibly old so that's as it should be. Logan Ninefingers doesn't change during the First Law trilogy but has changed since his spree-killing days with Bethod.

warty goblin
2017-02-01, 01:45 PM
Yes, I think the First Law ones were the best though if you liked them, you'll like his others.


I was thinking about this last night, these two change you mention change. Bayaz (aka Bad Gandalf) doesn't at all but he's incredibly old so that's as it should be. Logan Ninefingers doesn't change during the First Law trilogy but has changed since his spree-killing days with Bethod.

I rather permanently lost patience with The First Law books when the first one failed to have a plot, except for like the very last chapter.

CharonsHelper
2017-02-01, 01:47 PM
It's not confusing, it's just a horrible mechanic... to the point that making fun of it is almost embarrassingly easy.


It's a mashup mechanic that conflates a bunch of unrelated issues into a blurry "how hard are they to kill / how much abuse can they live through?" abstraction, and overlaps with other mechanics. It breaks down and creates dissonance as soon as one starts to ask questions of it, or put it in situations where one of the conflated elements shouldn't apply. It makes adjustments or modifiers based on one of the conflated elements harder to viably determine.

If a character is hard to hit, model it as them being harder to hit. If a character can take more actual physical abuse, then model that. If the character is lucky, then model that somehow.

This is why I vastly prefer a system like HERO over one like D&D. In HERO, all these elements are broken out and explicit.


While I have no inherent problem with HP systems (though I do with how it's sometimes used - like with poison/secondary effects), out of curiosity - do you feel the same way about Vitality/Wound systems? Each side of the coin is a more distinct pool, but still somewhat abstract.

Tanarii
2017-02-01, 02:00 PM
If a player is asking "What would make the best story?" instead of "What would this character do in this situation?", I consider that metagaming of a sort.Generally speaking, I agree. Although in some cases the game itself is very intentionally designed to work with that kind of metagaming on the part of the player. In others, it's not intended at all, although it may encourage other kinds of metagaming in it's place.

Edit: I also think it's metagaming on the part of the DM if he's asking "which outcomes & consequences as a result of the player's actions will result in the best story?" instead of "What are the appropriate outcomes & consequences as a result of the player's actions in this in-game world?" But the line there is fuzzier.

This includes during adventure design.

Cazero
2017-02-01, 02:19 PM
The more problematic issue with HP tends to show up alongside the recovery system. HP not being meat makes all verisimilitude crumble down when surgery helps you recover from not being shot.

Max_Killjoy
2017-02-01, 02:24 PM
The more problematic issue with HP tends to show up alongside the recovery system. HP not being meat makes all verisimilitude crumble down when surgery helps you recover from not being shot.


A very good example. By conflating "not getting shot" with "too tough to fall down from getting shot, but still took the bullet"... D&D-style HP pools in turn make medical attention, healing, etc, into a mess.




While I have no inherent problem with HP systems (though I do with how it's sometimes used - like with poison/secondary effects), out of curiosity - do you feel the same way about Vitality/Wound systems? Each side of the coin is a more distinct pool, but still somewhat abstract.


As long as each represents something discrete and non-overlapping, that doesn't conflate, I'm OK with it. For example, Wounds represent actual ability to withstand being wounded, and Vitality representing something more like Endurance, or HERO system's STUN.

CharonsHelper
2017-02-01, 02:27 PM
The more problematic issue with HP tends to show up alongside the recovery system. HP not being meat makes all verisimilitude crumble down when surgery helps you recover from not being shot.

This I totally agree with. Healing magic is all sorts of odd. It was one thing I liked about 4e healing - where it was all based upon healing surges which were 1/4 of your HP, no matter how high that HP total was.

In my own Vitality/Wound system, Vitality all comes back after a long rest, and it's only Wounds which require healing. (Plus it's sci-fi, so no magic healing to worry about.)

Segev
2017-02-01, 02:27 PM
The more problematic issue with HP tends to show up alongside the recovery system. HP not being meat makes all verisimilitude crumble down when surgery helps you recover from not being shot.

Depends. In D&D, at least, the Heal skill can't do a whole lot. The small number of hp it restores can easily be anything from the serious injury that represents the last couple hp to successful splinting or bandaging of wounds that would otherwise slow you down.

Even when you use "it's lucky I didn't get hit, but my luck will not hold forever" as the hp excuse, it's fairly common to assume that anything which does hp damage at least does something superficial. ("Common" is not "universal.") So that lucky miss was that it grazed your ribs rather than penetrating your stomach. Or that arrow left a gash on your arm rather than doing something serious. Or that blow from that mace hit your armor solidly enough not to just bounce off, but was disbursed enough to just leave a deep bruise.

CharonsHelper
2017-02-01, 02:31 PM
Depends. In D&D, at least, the Heal skill can't do a whole lot. The small number of hp it restores can easily be anything from the serious injury that represents the last couple hp to successful splinting or bandaging of wounds that would otherwise slow you down.

Right - but the bigger issue is how Cure Light Wounds can bring a peasant back from death's door but it can barely heal a paper cut on a high level barbarian.

(The only halfway decent fluff explanation I've heard is that all mid-high level characters basically have demi-god level resistances to everything including healing magic, so you need more potent healing magic to do anything to them. But that still feels like a pretty awkward rationalization.)

Tanarii
2017-02-01, 02:33 PM
A very good example. By conflating "not getting shot" with "too tough to fall down from getting shot, but still took the bullet"... D&D-style HP pools in turn make medical attention, healing, etc, into a mess.
What do you expect from a (war)gamist system that evolved from "does this attack kill or not kill the unit" and then was extend to individual creatures?

There's a quote somewhere out there about hit points representing what Gygax needed to make combat work how he wanted it to. They aren't supposed to be a simulation ... and of course, D&D incorporates a certain level of simulation just by dealing with actions etc of individual creatures.

Generally speaking, if I'm not willing to just embrace it as a totally abstract gamist concept (I usually am), then I definitely would prefer to go to HPs + Wounds/Vitality, or use the Palladium SDC/HPs method.

Max_Killjoy
2017-02-01, 02:34 PM
Depends. In D&D, at least, the Heal skill can't do a whole lot. The small number of hp it restores can easily be anything from the serious injury that represents the last couple hp to successful splinting or bandaging of wounds that would otherwise slow you down.

Even when you use "it's lucky I didn't get hit, but my luck will not hold forever" as the hp excuse, it's fairly common to assume that anything which does hp damage at least does something superficial. ("Common" is not "universal.") So that lucky miss was that it grazed your ribs rather than penetrating your stomach. Or that arrow left a gash on your arm rather than doing something serious. Or that blow from that mace hit your armor solidly enough not to just bounce off, but was disbursed enough to just leave a deep bruise.

And there's another issue -- a 5 HP hit doesn't map to anything, it doesn't even represent the same thing to the same character depending on how many HP they have at the time they take the wound.

Tanarii
2017-02-01, 02:42 PM
And there's another issue -- a 5 HP hit doesn't map to anything, it doesn't even represent the same thing to the same character depending on how many HP they have at the time they take the wound.
That's only an issue if you require the rules to be a simulation of the in-game physics, as opposed to an abstract thing that can be mapped as needed. There's no requirement that it "map to anything" consistently for the game to work as a game.

Edit: In other words, the fact you see it as an issue belies your underlying simulation assumptions & thinking.

Segev
2017-02-01, 02:47 PM
Right - but the bigger issue is how Cure Light Wounds can bring a peasant back from death's door but it can barely heal a paper cut on a high level barbarian.

(The only halfway decent fluff explanation I've heard is that all mid-high level characters basically have demi-god level resistances to everything including healing magic, so you need more potent healing magic to do anything to them. But that still feels like a pretty awkward rationalization.)Actually, it can bring both the barbarian and the peasant back from death's door. It just can also help the barbarian, who is far LESS wounded than the peasant, regain greater stamina and luck and whatever.

Mechanically, if both the 20th level barbarian and the 1st level commoner are at -2 hp and bleeding out, cure light wounds brings both of them up away from death's door. Physically, they may both be equally healthy, with similar-looking wounds. The barbarian isn't actually "more hurt" than the peasant when both are at, say, 5 hp after healing.

The peasant, however, can't gain anything more from further healing magics; he has no greater stamina to restore, no luck to recuperate via divine blessing, no precise combat movements that a minor twinge in his right calf could throw off. He couldn't even move the muscles to trigger that minor twinge, because he lacks the training of the higher-level character.

The barbarian, meanwhile, could take another cure spell, or even a heal, because he has stamina, luck, or whatever, that is still depleted.

More hp beyond "the last one" is essentially additional "tanks" of "something." Since it doesn't matter in what order they're depleted, all the "tanks" are poured into one metric: hp.


And there's another issue -- a 5 HP hit doesn't map to anything, it doesn't even represent the same thing to the same character depending on how many HP they have at the time they take the wound.It does map to different things depending on how you fluff it, but it doesn't map to nothing. You could simulate it on a much finer level, but it isn't necessary. The mechanic works, and can be made sense of if one is willing. While innocent tunnel vision can occur, after having the options outlined, it takes a certain amount of deliberate myopia to find irreparable problem with it. You don't like the mechanic, which is fine, but that doesn't make it objectively bad. Nor make "it means nothing" objectively true.

Max_Killjoy
2017-02-01, 03:15 PM
Actually, it can bring both the barbarian and the peasant back from death's door. It just can also help the barbarian, who is far LESS wounded than the peasant, regain greater stamina and luck and whatever.

Mechanically, if both the 20th level barbarian and the 1st level commoner are at -2 hp and bleeding out, cure light wounds brings both of them up away from death's door. Physically, they may both be equally healthy, with similar-looking wounds. The barbarian isn't actually "more hurt" than the peasant when both are at, say, 5 hp after healing.

The peasant, however, can't gain anything more from further healing magics; he has no greater stamina to restore, no luck to recuperate via divine blessing, no precise combat movements that a minor twinge in his right calf could throw off. He couldn't even move the muscles to trigger that minor twinge, because he lacks the training of the higher-level character.

The barbarian, meanwhile, could take another cure spell, or even a heal, because he has stamina, luck, or whatever, that is still depleted.

More hp beyond "the last one" is essentially additional "tanks" of "something." Since it doesn't matter in what order they're depleted, all the "tanks" are poured into one metric: hp.


And yet many of the healing spells are called "cure _______ wounds". Only, by this abstract conflated model, they're not curing actual wounds most of the time, but rather doing something else entirely.




It does map to different things depending on how you fluff it, but it doesn't map to nothing. You could simulate it on a much finer level, but it isn't necessary. The mechanic works, and can be made sense of if one is willing. While innocent tunnel vision can occur, after having the options outlined, it takes a certain amount of deliberate myopia to find irreparable problem with it. You don't like the mechanic, which is fine, but that doesn't make it objectively bad. Nor make "it means nothing" objectively true.


Oh, it means "something", it just has to mean something different each time you look at it, because each explanation ends up contradicting at least one of the other explanations.

I shouldn't have to "repair" problems with the mechanism in order to get it to make a stilted sort of sense. This is getting dangerously close to "If you just let yourself believe, it can be real!" territory.




That's only an issue if you require the rules to be a simulation of the in-game physics, as opposed to an abstract thing that can be mapped as needed. There's no requirement that it "map to anything" consistently for the game to work as a game.

Edit: In other words, the fact you see it as an issue belies your underlying simulation assumptions & thinking.


If it doesn't map to anything (or maps to different things subjectively, depending on the angle, the phase of the moon, and whether Mars is in retrograde) then there's nothing to fact-check the results against.

warty goblin
2017-02-01, 03:25 PM
IIRC, Chainmail started out using a combat matrix for checking whether a hit destroyed a unit or not. Creature X needs to roll Y to destroy creature Z, pretty straight forwards, and sensible for a wargame. When Dave Arneson started to emphasize the individual heroes more than the armies, he ditched the elimination matrix, and replaced it a hitpoint model he'd been using for a game about American Civil War navel/riverboat combat.

HP makes a certain amount of sense for ship hulls, it's literally how much punishment the thing can take before disintegrating or sinking. Having a roll to hit on top of that still makes sense, since cannons tend to miss, and various factors can affect their hit chance. For individual heroes I don't think HP makes a huge amount of sense in terms of simulating or representing anything. It's very handy for players though, because it's a fast-to-reference number that basically tells you how much longer you can stay in this particular fight. It also maps quite well to the original concept of hit dice, i.e. your HD is literally how many hits you can survive from such and such a weapon.

Segev
2017-02-01, 03:28 PM
And yet many of the healing spells are called "cure _______ wounds". Only, by this abstract conflated model, they're not curing actual wounds most of the time, but rather doing something else entirely. Indeed. And I will freely admit that that is a flaw in the naming of the spells, because the justification (while usable) is just that: a post-hoc justification.


Oh, it means "something", it just has to mean something different each time you look at it, because each explanation ends up contradicting at least one of the other explanations. It doesn't have to mean something different every time. It just CAN mean something different every time. And no, there's no contradiction. You're inventing that with your objection to there being an abstraction.


I shouldn't have to "repair" problems with the mechanism in order to get it to make a stilted sort of sense. This is getting dangerously close to "If you just let yourself believe, it can be real!" territory.Not really. You don't have to repair anything. Just accept the abstraction, and run with it. As is true with any abstraction, yes, you have to let yourself run with it.

But that's true of any simulation that doesn't get down to the quantum mechanical level. You're letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.


If it doesn't map to anything (or maps to different things subjectively, depending on the angle, the phase of the moon, and whether Mars is in retrograde) then there's nothing to fact-check the results against.What fact-checking are you needing? It's a model that is tracking how much more you can endure before something is going to get a fatal wound in.

Keltest
2017-02-01, 03:31 PM
And yet many of the healing spells are called "cure _______ wounds". Only, by this abstract conflated model, they're not curing actual wounds most of the time, but rather doing something else entirely.
Because calling them "restoring energy/luck/divine protection/skill/missing meat/energy/attention span" is needlessly distracting. It is generally understood what is meant by "wounds".





Oh, it means "something", it just has to mean something different each time you look at it, because each explanation ends up contradicting at least one of the other explanations.

I shouldn't have to "repair" problems with the mechanism in order to get it to make a stilted sort of sense. This is getting dangerously close to "If you just let yourself believe, it can be real!" territory.

Its only a problem if you demand that it be a problem. D&D as a whole was never meant to be a literal representation of every action. Even a single round of combat isn't just one swing of the weapon every 6 seconds, video game style. Hit point loss represents everything you've done in those 6 seconds to bring your opponent closer to falling down and dying. You could get more detailed, but doing so is needlessly complicated and bogs down the already slow combat phase.



If it doesn't map to anything (or maps to different things subjectively, depending on the angle, the phase of the moon, and whether Mars is in retrograde) then there's nothing to fact-check the results against.

Fact check in what sense? When you do hit point damage, you bring your opponent closer to death. how much closer depends on your opponent and yourself. Youre simultaneously saying that it needs to be more complex and is too complex.

Max_Killjoy
2017-02-01, 03:57 PM
Indeed. And I will freely admit that that is a flaw in the naming of the spells, because the justification (while usable) is just that: a post-hoc justification.


Post-hoc, retroactive justifications should never be necessary, in RPG rules or in fictional works. In both cases, needing them on the back end is a sure sign something went wrong on the front end.




It doesn't have to mean something different every time. It just CAN mean something different every time. And no, there's no contradiction. You're inventing that with your objection to there being an abstraction.


If HP represents luck, that would imply that characters with more HP should be luckier in other ways, until at higher levels they keep getting kicked out of gambling house, winning so much that the proprietors are convinced they're cheating. But that doesn't happen.

If HP represents stamina, why doesn't a forced march across bad terrain cost a character any HP by the end of the day?

If HP represents evading, why don't characters who are partially restrained or heavily encumbered have reduced HP?

If HP represents actual ability to endure wounds...

And that's not even getting into where the rules for different sources of injury work differently and in ways that imply contradictory things about what HP are and are not.




Not really. You don't have to repair anything. Just accept the abstraction, and run with it. As is true with any abstraction, yes, you have to let yourself run with it.

But that's true of any simulation that doesn't get down to the quantum mechanical level. You're letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.


I'm letting the "good enough" be the enemy of the "doesn't make any damn sense".




What fact-checking are you needing? It's a model that is tracking how much more you can endure before something is going to get a fatal wound in.


The fact-checking is needed, so that the mechanical results of what happens to the character make sense, when viewed outside the rules/game mechanics.

Start with "how potentially lethal is this event" -- compare how potentially lethal it is within the reality you're trying to model, to how potentially lethal it is in the rules. If getting HP represents different things or just whatever depending, then what are you comparing? Yeah, the to-hit roll was successful, and the damage roll for the sword blow was X, but if that might or might not even representing the sword even touching the target character... what exactly are you measuring against? And how do you set the damage for weapons, etc, if you don't even know what you're scaling them to?


(And by the way, yes, this is related to why D&D fiction -- novels or otherwise -- doesn't slavishly adhere to D&D RPG rules. Once you leave the sphere of "rules as rules", those rules largely fall apart.)

Segev
2017-02-01, 04:18 PM
Post-hoc, retroactive justifications should never be necessary, in RPG rules or in fictional works. In both cases, needing them on the back end is a sure sign something went wrong on the front end. Like I said, the spells are not named well. That is what the post-hoc justifications would be fore. This is not proof that hp is objectively bad as a mechanic.


If HP represents luck, that would imply that characters with more HP should be luckier in other ways, until at higher levels they keep getting kicked out of gambling house, winning so much that the proprietors are convinced they're cheating. But that doesn't happen. Nonsense. Just because we think of "luck" as a universal trait doesn't mean that it is. Now YOU are trying to impose an abstraction of luck in all things as an overarching stat. HP-as-luck represent the very specific "I'm so lucky I didn't just die" kind of luck.

I know somebody who has remarkable luck with dice. He does not have this luck with cards. That is just one example.


If HP represents stamina, why doesn't a forced march across bad terrain cost a character any HP by the end of the day? It can, actually. If you push past exhaustion, it goes into nonlethal damage. Which, for these purposes, is functionally the same.

And again, you're attempting to abstract all stamina to the same pool, which is essentially the sin you're hating HP for (except HP is a pool of "not getting killed yet"). HP-as-stamina refers to specifically the mental and physical strain on the particular elements of your body which control how well you move whatever you need to move, and observe whatever you need to observe, and react to whatever you need to react to, in order to keep from taking a fatal injury.

The muscles worn out by fighting are quite different from those worn out by lugging a backpack 30 miles. The mental energies expended are on different mental tasks.


If HP represents evading, why don't characters who are partially restrained or heavily encumbered have reduced HP? Functionally, they do. They're vulnerable to coup de grace.


If HP represents actual ability to endure wounds... It can, depending on where the hp are coming from. Constructs, where they expressly get bonus hp for size, almost certainly are representing it by increased capacity to take physical punishment without being destroyed.


And that's not even getting into where the rules for different sources of injury work differently and in ways that imply contradictory things about what HP are and are not. Since you haven't deigned to go into it, I'll guess you're complaining about things like injury-induced poisons.

Since the "near miss" and even the "increased toughness" explanations for hp still can allow for superficial injury (which, incidentally, is the source of the post-hoc justification for cure _____ wounds having the word "wounds" in the spell name), injury poisons still can be introduced even if the wound itself wasn't fatal.

All those scenes with the smug assassin smirking at his victim after his victim scoffs that it was just a scratch? The assassin hit him and did some amount of hp damage. The hp expended were not enough to let the assassin make a lethal blow with the strike itself. But the poison still was introduced.


I'm letting the "good enough" be the enemy of the "doesn't make any damn sense". It only doesn't make sense because you don't want it to. Sorry.


The fact-checking is needed, so that the mechanical results of what happens to the character make sense, when viewed outside the rules/game mechanics. It does. As discussed repeatedly. That you don't like the explanations doesn't change that.


Start with "how potentially lethal is this event" -- compare how potentially lethal it is within the reality you're trying to model, to how potentially lethal it is in the rules. If getting HP represents different things or just whatever depending, then what are you comparing? Yeah, the to-hit roll was successful, and the damage roll for the sword blow was X, but if that might or might not even representing the sword even touching the target character... what exactly are you measuring against?Let's assume hit, since without a hit, the hp question never arises. The amount of hp done represents how dangerous this strike is. How skilled or lucky or tough the target must be to prevent the attack from actually striking a vital organ or otherwise doing lethal damage.

One could make the argument that the only "sensible" way to judge damage is to have extremely granular hit locations, and check every organ individually to see if it was hit, and different probably-lethal effects (and different bleed-out rates with different times-to-expiration) with each different hit location and organ. But we don't, because trying to model that is too cumbersome.

Instead, any blow which knocks you to 0 or lower hp did SOMETHING lethal (or very close to it). Actually, I'd like to ask about this. Do you have issue with this level of abstraction? That a "lethal blow" could be any number of potentially fatal wounds, rather than having to specifically model a means of determining WHAT manner of lethal injury is done?


And how do you set the damage for weapons, etc, if you don't even know what you're scaling them to?You're scaling them to each other, and presumably scaling at least low-level hp to that. A greatsword is likely fatal to most low-level characters, even with a single swing. A dagger can be to commoners and wizards, but is less likely to be to anybody hardier/better trained in self-defense.

The hp of class-granted HD almost invariably represent more "self defense skill" than anything else (though barbarians and other "beefy" classes might have some legitimate toughness-increases).

The hp damage of an attack compares to the hp a target can take and you're scaling the inherent potential lethality of the attack against the ability of the target to defend himself in such a way that it only grazes him.


(And by the way, yes, this is related to why D&D fiction -- novels or otherwise -- doesn't slavishly adhere to D&D RPG rules. Once you leave the sphere of "rules as rules", those rules largely fall apart.)Eh, yes and no. They don't slavishly adhere, in this respect, to the interpretation you want to impose. That is different from being unable to be modeled by the rules.

Clistenes
2017-02-01, 04:35 PM
Well, it would look ridiculous if heroes kept fighting with twenty arrows in their bodies. Or if they fell from the top of a tower without barely any damage. Or if half the warrior types were physically stronger than their own warhorses. Or if tough people could survive without sleeping, eating, drinking or even breathing successfully pulling one Con check after another. Of if a dagger to the chest were treated as a minor scratch when done by a peasant. Or if that deadly poison or sleep drug stopped working on you because you are more experienced. Or if people who kill a lot of foes became better at picking locks or healing despite not having healed anybody or picked a lock for months...etc.

D&D rules are bad as simulating reality, and novels and movies have to look kinda like reality plus some fantastic elements in order to help the suspension of disbelief.

Segev
2017-02-01, 04:46 PM
D&D rules are bad as simulating reality, and novels and movies have to look kinda like reality plus some fantastic elements in order to help the suspension of disbelief.

They're only bad at simulating reality if you insist on defining what they model in a way that is bad.

Yes, it's silly to assume that a high-level wizard, who is still this scrawny dude, can keep going with arrows riddling him and after taking club blows that can smash stone. It is equally silly to assume that combat consists solely of people standing five feet apart and waiting their turn in six-second increments to make a single swing of their weapon while their target stands there, and that they sometimes hit, and sometimes have their target casually step out of the way, and that people wearing armor step out of the way more often.

Neither of those, however, is actually what the relevant mechanics are modeling.

Mechalich
2017-02-01, 05:39 PM
Leaving aside HP in D&D - with it's bizarre pseudo-explanations that attempt to have it both ways, in most games that have hit points and health bars more health is, in game, quite explicitly more health. In Skyrim the Dragonborn gains health as they level, period. The exact same wounds do proportionally less damage to them as their health goes up. Enemies with more health take more sword hits to the face to drop than those with less health. There is no abstraction, the game mechanic is various obvious - you can watch the blood splatter out with each strike.

And it's a mechanic that works in games but doesn't work in narratives. Take a really obvious example: in the more recent Fallout games you can use VATS to reliably shoot enemies in the head, with large caliber ammunition. In game, if you crank the difficulty, enemies can be sufficiently blood-sponge such that it may take 3-4 critical hits by a .45 caliber round penetrating their skull to drop them. In VATS, the game lets you watch those bullets hit home. And it works for Fallout, it's an incredibly popular game franchise and the gameplay is generally well-liked.

But just try, try, to make a sci-fi action film where people get repeatedly shot in the head and still run around as if unhurt.

Segev
2017-02-01, 05:50 PM
But just try, try, to make a sci-fi action film where people get repeatedly shot in the head and still run around as if unhurt.

Star Trek, in going the opposite direction (from TV narratives to a massively multiplayer online video game), had to justify going to letting people get shot repeatedly. They gave everybody personal force field generators. The force fields can take so much damage before collapsing.

(I think STO also has a hit point bar beneath it, which makes less sense, though.)

Max_Killjoy
2017-02-01, 06:34 PM
Like I said, the spells are not named well. That is what the post-hoc justifications would be fore. This is not proof that hp is objectively bad as a mechanic.


If it requires a post-hoc justification, then it is objectively bad.




Nonsense. Just because we think of "luck" as a universal trait doesn't mean that it is. Now YOU are trying to impose an abstraction of luck in all things as an overarching stat. HP-as-luck represent the very specific "I'm so lucky I didn't just die" kind of luck.

I know somebody who has remarkable luck with dice. He does not have this luck with cards. That is just one example.


Nonsense to you as well, then.

I'm doing nothing of the sort. "Luck" doesn't even make sense as a concept, and it's a flimsy excuse for a terrible mechanism. But if that's the excuse, it implies either that a broader effect is missing from the rules, OR that it's getting oddly specific about how ALL characters are lucky in one specific way as they increase in level... but only in that peculiar specific way.




It can, actually. If you push past exhaustion, it goes into nonlethal damage. Which, for these purposes, is functionally the same.

And again, you're attempting to abstract all stamina to the same pool, which is essentially the sin you're hating HP for (except HP is a pool of "not getting killed yet"). HP-as-stamina refers to specifically the mental and physical strain on the particular elements of your body which control how well you move whatever you need to move, and observe whatever you need to observe, and react to whatever you need to react to, in order to keep from taking a fatal injury.

The muscles worn out by fighting are quite different from those worn out by lugging a backpack 30 miles. The mental energies expended are on different mental tasks.


So now we have different rules for fighting-muscles and walking-muscles? And fighting-brain and walking-brain? Just to retroactively come up with a quasi-workable explanation of what's going on with HP?

Just how far down the rabbit-hole are we going here, just to avoid the elephant in the room?




Functionally, they do. They're vulnerable to coup de grace.


Wait, characters walking in thick mud or having to haul an extra-large burden go from being able to resist potentially dozens of sword blows...to being vulnerable to a single hit? No middle ground?

And this makes sense?




It can, depending on where the hp are coming from. Constructs, where they expressly get bonus hp for size, almost certainly are representing it by increased capacity to take physical punishment without being destroyed.

Since you haven't deigned to go into it, I'll guess you're complaining about things like injury-induced poisons.

Since the "near miss" and even the "increased toughness" explanations for hp still can allow for superficial injury (which, incidentally, is the source of the post-hoc justification for cure _____ wounds having the word "wounds" in the spell name), injury poisons still can be introduced even if the wound itself wasn't fatal.

All those scenes with the smug assassin smirking at his victim after his victim scoffs that it was just a scratch? The assassin hit him and did some amount of hp damage. The hp expended were not enough to let the assassin make a lethal blow with the strike itself. But the poison still was introduced.


Yes, of course, the injury is "just superficial enough"... of course. :smallconfused:




It only doesn't make sense because you don't want it to. Sorry.


One cannot will something to make sense... thing thing either works, or it does not.




It does. As discussed repeatedly. That you don't like the explanations doesn't change that.


Your idea of "makes sense" includes instances where one has to come up with post hoc justifications -- which are nothing more than retroactive excuses, work-arounds, and kludges.

Mine does not.




Let's assume hit, since without a hit, the hp question never arises. The amount of hp done represents how dangerous this strike is. How skilled or lucky or tough the target must be to prevent the attack from actually striking a vital organ or otherwise doing lethal damage.



You're scaling them to each other, and presumably scaling at least low-level hp to that. A greatsword is likely fatal to most low-level characters, even with a single swing. A dagger can be to commoners and wizards, but is less likely to be to anybody hardier/better trained in self-defense.

The hp of class-granted HD almost invariably represent more "self defense skill" than anything else (though barbarians and other "beefy" classes might have some legitimate toughness-increases).

The hp damage of an attack compares to the hp a target can take and you're scaling the inherent potential lethality of the attack against the ability of the target to defend himself in such a way that it only grazes him.


Except that it doesn't represent how dangerous the strike is. In the system under discussion, an attack that succeeds by the same margin and does the same number of hit points, is of arbitrary danger, depending not on anything that changes about the strike, but rather on how many HP the target happens to have at that exact moment. A strike that does 10 HP damage can be instantly lethal or barely a scratch, depending not just on which character it hits, but when -- as in when during the same damn fight.

Two hits, just seconds apart -- that both succeed by X margin and do Y number of hit points -- can represent "a scratch", and "lethal".




One could make the argument that the only "sensible" way to judge damage is to have extremely granular hit locations, and check every organ individually to see if it was hit, and different probably-lethal effects (and different bleed-out rates with different times-to-expiration) with each different hit location and organ. But we don't, because trying to model that is too cumbersome.

Instead, any blow which knocks you to 0 or lower hp did SOMETHING lethal (or very close to it). Actually, I'd like to ask about this. Do you have issue with this level of abstraction? That a "lethal blow" could be any number of potentially fatal wounds, rather than having to specifically model a means of determining WHAT manner of lethal injury is done?


Hypothetically, an ideal system would include that level of granularity and be able to both determine and track injury and bleeding and other effects at a very fine level of detail.

In reality, I have yet to see a system that can do that, without impossing an excessive, massive cost in time and overhead. So, something short of that level of detail needs to be found -- something that doesn't go so far in the other direction that it's a disassociated, abstracted mess.




Eh, yes and no. They don't slavishly adhere, in this respect, to the interpretation you want to impose. That is different from being unable to be modeled by the rules.

It's not my interpretation, and I'm not impossing anything. The interpretation that falls apart once it leaves the realm of "game as game, rules as rules" is the one being suggested here that D&D HP "work" as long as you're willing to cheerfully make excuses for it, as a sort of Schroedinger's rule, that's whatever it needs to be to "make sense" each time you open the box, but isn't really anything in particular until you look.




Leaving aside HP in D&D - with its bizarre pseudo-explanations that attempt to have it both ways


Precisely what's going on.

Segev
2017-02-01, 06:41 PM
The interpretation holds up just fine in narrative, unless you decide to deliberately describe it poorly.

The post-hoc justification doesn't extend from hp. It extends from the naming of the spell. The spells are named poorly, and thus a post-hoc justification for their name is needed. You are right: this is evidence that the naming of the spells is poor. You are wrong to extend it beyond that. It's like saying, "Because D&D is not a perfect role-playing system, the very concept of role-playing is objectively bad." It's extending beyond the scope of the actual error source.

Max_Killjoy
2017-02-01, 06:49 PM
The interpretation holds up just fine in narrative, unless you decide to deliberately describe it poorly.

The post-hoc justification doesn't extend from hp. It extends from the naming of the spell. The spells are named poorly, and thus a post-hoc justification for their name is needed. You are right: this is evidence that the naming of the spells is poor. You are wrong to extend it beyond that. It's like saying, "Because D&D is not a perfect role-playing system, the very concept of role-playing is objectively bad." It's extending beyond the scope of the actual error source.




They're only bad at simulating reality if you insist on defining what they model in a way that is bad.

Yes, it's silly to assume that a high-level wizard, who is still this scrawny dude, can keep going with arrows riddling him and after taking club blows that can smash stone. It is equally silly to assume that combat consists solely of people standing five feet apart and waiting their turn in six-second increments to make a single swing of their weapon while their target stands there, and that they sometimes hit, and sometimes have their target casually step out of the way, and that people wearing armor step out of the way more often.

Neither of those, however, is actually what the relevant mechanics are modeling.


They're not modelling anything. They're abstracted and disassociated, and nothing is actually represented. Only, instead of being disassociated in the service of putting the player in "author stance" (blah...) in the way of "story games", they're disassociated in an older way. Hell, might as well call it OG -- "Original Gamist". D&D's mechanics and rules are, at heart, purely the rules of a game, as in "This is a game, here are the rules, we play by these rules". There was never any attempt made to make them model or map anything at all.

The irony is that the more people try to "make sense" of them with retroactive kludges and conflicting excuses -- oh, I'm sorry, "post hoc justifications" -- the more convoluted and ridiculous the whole thing gets.

Keltest
2017-02-01, 06:59 PM
They're not modelling anything. They're abstracted and disassociated, and nothing is actually represented. Only, instead of being disassociated in the service of putting the player in "author stance" (blah...) in the way of "story games", they're disassociated in an older way. Hell, might as well call it OG -- "Original Gamist". D&D's mechanics and rules are, at heart, purely the rules of a game, as in "This is a game, here are the rules, we play by these rules". There was never any attempt made to make them model or map anything at all.

The irony is that the more people try to "make sense" of them with retroactive kludges and conflicting excuses -- oh, I'm sorry, "post hoc justifications" -- the more convoluted and ridiculous the whole thing gets.

Hit points represent your ability to not die. That ability can take a number of different forms depending on the circumstances, but acting like this isn't perfectly clear is fairly disingenuous.

As I said before, your argument alternates between accusing hit points of trying to do too much and of doing too little. Pick one please.

Mr Beer
2017-02-01, 07:36 PM
As I said before, your argument alternates between accusing hit points of trying to do too much and of doing too little. Pick one please.

To be fair, they do simultaneously do too much (by lumping a bunch of discrete elements together) and too little (by ignoring non-binary dead/not_dead effects of injury).

Keltest
2017-02-01, 07:54 PM
To be fair, they do simultaneously do too much (by lumping a bunch of discrete elements together) and too little (by ignoring non-binary dead/not_dead effects of injury).

the non-wound effects of injury tend to be covered in other systems, if theyre covered at all. Frankly, attaching them to hit points would be a rather silly move specifically because hit point damage does not represent any given injury (plus, theres the Death Spiral, but that's a different topic altogether).

Max_Killjoy
2017-02-01, 08:22 PM
Hit points represent your ability to not die.

There is no such thing. It doesn't exist.




To be fair, they do simultaneously do too much (by lumping a bunch of discrete elements together) and too little (by ignoring non-binary dead/not_dead effects of injury).

Exactly.

Keltest
2017-02-01, 08:39 PM
There is no such thing. It doesn't exist.

The fact that people continue to be not dead, even when they have been violently attacked, suggests that there is such a thing.

Max_Killjoy
2017-02-01, 08:55 PM
The fact that people continue to be not dead, even when they have been violently attacked, suggests that there is such a thing.


No, it doesn't.

Your argument here rests firmly on the same mistaken conflation of disparate talents, skills, abilities, qualities, and so on, that underlies the HP mechanism of D&D.

Keltest
2017-02-01, 08:58 PM
No, it doesn't.

Your argument here rests firmly on the same mistaken conflation of disparate talents, skills, abilities, qualities, and so on, that underlies the HP mechanism of D&D.

So nothing anybody does has any effect on their survivability at all? They cannot take blows on their armor, parry blows, or dodge attacks? Theyre incapable of shrugging off bruises or fighting on in spite of a cracked rib? They cannot get lucky and slip to have the arrow that would otherwise have hit them fly over their head?

Max_Killjoy
2017-02-01, 09:06 PM
So nothing anybody does has any effect on their survivability at all? They cannot take blows on their armor, parry blows, or dodge attacks? Theyre incapable of shrugging off bruises or fighting on in spite of a cracked rib? They cannot get lucky and slip to have the arrow that would otherwise have hit them fly over their head?

That's not what I said. I said that there is no single, combined ability "to not die".

Armor is not parrying is not dodging is not shrugging off bruises and scrapes or toughing it out is not luck is not the blessing of a god or fate or karma is not any other way one might evade, resist, or endure taking harm to one's body.

Keltest
2017-02-01, 09:12 PM
That's not what I said. I said that there is no single, combined ability "to not die".

Armor is not parrying is not dodging is not shrugging off bruises and scrapes or toughing it out is not luck is not the blessing of a god or fate or karma is not any other way one might evade, resist, or endure taking harm to one's body.

Youre right. Hit points is an abstraction of all of those, because modeling each one individually is needlessly complex and adds nothing to the game.

What you seem to want from the game is not especially practical. I would go so far as to call it nonfunctional.

Almost nothing in D&D translates into a literal representation of whats going on. Why is HP so bad then?

Max_Killjoy
2017-02-01, 09:31 PM
Youre right. Hit points is an abstraction of all of those, because modeling each one individually is needlessly complex and adds nothing to the game.

What you seem to want from the game is not especially practical. I would go so far as to call it nonfunctional.


Yet other games split quite a bit of it out, and do so quite functionally. They don't fall apart or drag along (any slower than the typical D&D game) at the first sign of combat.

And in many cases, the distinction they make between the disparate elements that D&D HP conflates, allows for far more nuance and variation in characters and combat styles, and allows more decisions points to exist. They allow things that interact with the character to do so distinctly and in ways that reflect what's actually going on. Being bogged down and less able to evade can be handled in a way that feels more like that, and separately from whether or not one's armor actually works, and so on.

That is, it adds something to the game.




Almost nothing in D&D translates into a literal representation of whats going on.


Or even into the sort the decent approximation of what's going on that some systems manage.

See also, related to thread... why even D&D fiction tends to ignore D&D's game mechanics.




Why is HP so bad then?


Asked and answered. (In this very thread, multiple times.)

Knaight
2017-02-01, 09:43 PM
What you seem to want from the game is not especially practical. I would go so far as to call it nonfunctional.

Almost nothing in D&D translates into a literal representation of whats going on. Why is HP so bad then?

For a nonfunctional mechanic wound penalties sure turn up a lot in functional games.

Keltest
2017-02-01, 09:51 PM
For a nonfunctional mechanic wound penalties sure turn up a lot in functional games.

not wound mechanics, a system that models every different way to mitigate damage with its own roll.

Max_Killjoy
2017-02-01, 10:09 PM
not wound mechanics, a system that models every different way to mitigate damage with its own roll.

No one said anything about all of them being best modeled as rolls.

Mechalich
2017-02-01, 10:32 PM
Almost nothing in D&D translates into a literal representation of whats going on. Why is HP so bad then?

HP is bad because the thing is represents has a verisimilitude level so low it might as well be negative.

HP represents the fact that it takes some quantity of damage to drop a being from a fight and/or kill/destroy them. That's fine, that is something you need to represent. Some people are tougher than others, some creatures are just bigger and require more damage to take down, sometimes wounds that appear very similar will deal very different quantities of damage due to slicing an artery or piercing just far enough to puncture critical organs. It makes sense that characters in a story would be able to take different levels of punishment even when they're all roughly the same type of person doing roughly the same thing: thus characters in tactical combat simulations often have some variances in HP to represent this, but the natural range is that the squishiest guy has like 6 HP and the toughest has like 15 and many weapons are fully capable of doing more than enough damage to kill everyone (Exalted actually has a health level distribution somewhat along these lines and...it causes major lethality problems because characters die way too easily).

The issue many games have with HP is that it is possible for high-power characters to have some value that become ludicrous when looked at from a narrative perspective. Dwarf Barbarians with more HP than Godzilla for example (in Pathfinder, Godzilla is the Kaiju Mogaru and has 697 hp, I'm sure there's a build that can beat that, albeit a rather stupid build since maximizing for HP is pointless). It makes sense that you might have to stick a nearly infinite amount of swords into Godzilla to kill him - he's a city stomping lizard beast the size of skyscraper. It doesn't make sense that you'd have to do the same thing to Gimli son of Gloin.

Mogaru's bite attack does 8d6+20 damage, a solid 47 average - which to the 20th level character fighting him is a modest inconvenience. So if you wrote a D&D narrative by the rules, Godzilla can literally chomp down on the fighters midsection using teeth that are equal to him in size and deal some modest level of wounding that doesn't prevent him from using all his combat abilities and also doesn't so much as scratch his armor (I mean Mogaru's got greater sunder, but still). Good luck actually trying to do that.

HP is at the center of the game mechanics vs. narrative incongruity of writing this kind of fantasy. How do you represent the ability to give and taken amounts of damage that when removed from their game context become blatantly stupid in description. To a lesser extent this happens with spells too, save or suck and save or die spells work in fiction, but are narratively unsatisfying. There's a sequence in one of the Rogue Dragons FR novels where a monk successfully quivering palm's a dragon to death. It's written pretty close to the rules: monk slaps dragon, dragon shivers briefly and falls over dead. Underwhelming as all get out.

So writers go alternate routes. RA Salvatore has lots of flaws as a writer, but he's pretty good (and absurdly well-practiced) at writing one vs. one sword duels. Does he write them as if people have HP? Of course not. Drizzt and Entreri aren't repeatedly stabbing each other through the bowels, they're dodging and weaving and maneuvering for position until they find an opening allowing them to strike home.

Games that utilize alternative damage tracks actually have more options. Science fiction settings that have 'shields' are much more accommodating of taking bits and pieces of shield damage on a meter in a narrative context because people accept that a shielding mechanism or armoring mechanism will work that way - as a result X-wings behave very similarly in narratives to how they do in games like TIE fighter. If shields weren't so awkward to portray in highly choreographed personal combats we'd see them in Hollywood much more often (but they barely even managed to get them into Dune).

This sort of thing can make its way into fantasy too. Characters in RWBY have 'auras' that protect them from damage an function just like an HP track. They don't actually take physical harm until their aura bar (and it's actually shown as a bar in the arena sequences) is depleted all the way. Cheesy as such a mechanic can be, it's a good way to justify wuxia-style shenanigans beyond simple narrative fiat.

D&D novels have the big problem that there is no such mechanic. Instead there's a huge gap between things that are viable if described according to the rules and things that are actually viable with narrative barriers in play. Go and read any of the fight sequences between Drizzt and high level fiends (there's a couple) and you can practically feel Salvatore twisting himself into knots attempting to make it work.

CharonsHelper
2017-02-01, 11:24 PM
RA Salvatore has lots of flaws as a writer, but he's pretty good (and absurdly well-practiced) at writing one vs. one sword duels. Does he write them as if people have HP? Of course not. Drizzt and Entreri aren't repeatedly stabbing each other through the bowels, they're dodging and weaving and maneuvering for position until they find an opening allowing them to strike home.

Frankly - Salvatore is fun as long as you don't take his writing seriously. It's popcorn fiction. I put it in the same category as cheesy wire fu movies or "bad" B movies like Dredd which are still fun to watch if you're in right sort of the mood.

ImNotTrevor
2017-02-01, 11:26 PM
HP in D&D is 100% a game thing.
It relates directly to being harder to make more deader.

How?
By making it harder for folks to un-alive you.

In what way?
The way that makes it harder for folks to un-alive you.

It is literally "Resistiveness to no longer being alive."
It's a thing that game characters frequently have.
It's not a thing real people have.

Label it in whatever way makes sense to you. Maybe it works like Gurren Lagan's Spiral Power. You just refuse to die so hard that you just don't die.
Maybe D&D characters really DO just shrug off wounds that would fell a lesser man.
Maybe it is a sort of weird luck thing.
Maybe it's all of those things.
Maybe it's none of those things.

If your nitpicking about the details makes it impossible for you to enjoy a game with HP, then don't play games with HP.

I, for one, am OK with having a bit in the game that is there for game reasons. "Rather than making you track several meters of various kinds of not-dying, we just give you one to save on paperwork," is an OK thing in my book. I don't care that it doesn't make sense when closely examined. If your D&D game is getting derailed by discussions about what HP is, your game has either gotten WAY too meta, or your game is really boring if no one has anything better to do at the table.

But of all the things to start beef about over the internet. HP? REALLY?
Bruh.

Efrate
2017-02-02, 01:26 AM
My biggest gripe is when Mary Sue dark elf beats things well above his CR, with little inconvience, with abilities he and his equipment do not have, or that his CR 2 mary sue-ery kitty contributes as more than an attack of opportunity soaker versus almost literally everything.

I understand narrative license, but if you are going to go to the trouble to stat him, at least account for all his so called abilities. You have a stat block, a few tweaks and at the very least you can put ice knife is empathic, grants FR 10 and overcomes DR of things with the fire subtype or something.

Nevermind by 3.0 rules he could not have scratched the Balor IIRC, but he kills it, and said Balor is portrayed like 12 year old who hasn't outgrown his temper tantrums and uses none of his abilities that has kept him alive for ages in a realm of constant backstabbing demons. Hubris is fine and understandable but Balors have enough INT and WIS to realize oh *&^% stuff is going bad time to use my big guns.

Abstractions like HP, skills, etc are fine, no issue, but if you stat something then at least get all the abilities. You can add a bit of fluff about more powers yet to be awakened or some kind stuff but don't just ignore your own stuff 100%. And yes I know Salvatore didn't have a hand in writing FRCS but still.

hamishspence
2017-02-02, 02:25 AM
Both of Drizzt's battles with Errtu took place in 1st and 2nd ed, not 3.0. Back than, balors had DR/+3 or so, and if I remember rightly, both Drizzt's weapons were +3 or higher.

Mechalich
2017-02-02, 06:19 AM
Both of Drizzt's battles with Errtu took place in 1st and 2nd ed, not 3.0. Back than, balors had DR/+3 or so, and if I remember rightly, both Drizzt's weapons were +3 or higher.

The frostbrand scimitar was actually +6 in that situation, since Salvatore interpreted demons as part of the creatures of fire category. The more important factor is actually how the edition changes impacted magic. In 1e and 2e magic resistance is a flat percentage - meaning if you cast spells at something with a high magic resistance they just flat fail. there's no level or attribute or eat bonuses you can adjust, it was just a matter of rolling percentile dice. And as anyone who's ever parked a skeleton warrior (90% MR) next to a high level caster in BG II knows, magic resistance can really mess with a mage's day. In addition, you still got to save after MR was applied should it fail, and since saves were based on flat values that didn't scale, high level warriors were more likely to save than not. When you combine the two things together it really changes the strategy that Errtu would use from one edition to the next.

Most D&D authors started writing during 1e or 2e and haven't changed stylistically since then. The martials versus casters balance point in those earlier editions was very different than what is is in 3.X, and especially when talking about moderate or higher optimization levels in 3.X. Casters still have the overall advantage but the balance point is much, much closer and the differences in hit point totals, resistance, and save setups meant that the spell selection strategy was totally different.

Keltest
2017-02-02, 08:42 AM
The frostbrand scimitar was actually +6 in that situation, since Salvatore interpreted demons as part of the creatures of fire category. The more important factor is actually how the edition changes impacted magic. In 1e and 2e magic resistance is a flat percentage - meaning if you cast spells at something with a high magic resistance they just flat fail. there's no level or attribute or eat bonuses you can adjust, it was just a matter of rolling percentile dice. And as anyone who's ever parked a skeleton warrior (90% MR) next to a high level caster in BG II knows, magic resistance can really mess with a mage's day. In addition, you still got to save after MR was applied should it fail, and since saves were based on flat values that didn't scale, high level warriors were more likely to save than not. When you combine the two things together it really changes the strategy that Errtu would use from one edition to the next.

Most D&D authors started writing during 1e or 2e and haven't changed stylistically since then. The martials versus casters balance point in those earlier editions was very different than what is is in 3.X, and especially when talking about moderate or higher optimization levels in 3.X. Casters still have the overall advantage but the balance point is much, much closer and the differences in hit point totals, resistance, and save setups meant that the spell selection strategy was totally different.

I should also like to add that, while it is an easy detail to miss, Drizzt carved himself up some "warding runes" he remembered from his childhood before the battle that explicitly helped protect him from some of Errtu's nastier stuff for a little bit.

Morty
2017-02-02, 10:14 AM
If your nitpicking about the details makes it impossible for you to enjoy a game with HP, then don't play games with HP.

Game with HP. Not games. Game. There's no RPG that uses hit points the way D&D does. Plenty use a pool of points you lose until you die/drop, but the way D&D's hit points scale and outpace attack power is unique to it.

Max_Killjoy
2017-02-02, 11:23 AM
Game with HP. Not games. Game. There's no RPG that uses hit points the way D&D does. Plenty use a pool of points you lose until you die/drop, but the way D&D's hit points scale and outpace attack power is unique to it.


Important point.

awa
2017-02-02, 11:38 AM
Maybe they dont scale exactly the same way but Ive played plenty of games that end up with the same problem; where some characters are required to be hit over and over with attacks that should be deadly. Sometimes its because of level and increasing hp in others its because some damaging options are just so wildly ineffective they break suspension of disbelief.

CharonsHelper
2017-02-02, 11:42 AM
Maybe they dont scale exactly the same way but Ive played plenty of games that end up with the same problem; where some characters are required to be hit over and over with attacks that should be deadly. Sometimes its because of level and increasing hp in others its because some damaging options are just so wildly ineffective they break suspension of disbelief.

True. I've never seen a system where HP goes as high as in D&D, but it also has substantial boosts to damage, both in actual damage & multiple swings. People complain about high levels being 'rocket tag'.

Many systems don't have HP go as high, but they have few if any ways to increase damage substantially.

Flickerdart
2017-02-02, 01:03 PM
Game with HP. Not games. Game. There's no RPG that uses hit points the way D&D does. Plenty use a pool of points you lose until you die/drop, but the way D&D's hit points scale and outpace attack power is unique to it.

I would say that absurd HP scaling is more the rule rather than exception. There are plenty of non-pnp RPGs with HP scaling much more egregious than D&D could dream of. JRPGs specifically are guilty of this.

Max_Killjoy
2017-02-02, 01:06 PM
I would say that absurd HP scaling is more the rule rather than exception. There are plenty of non-pnp RPGs with HP scaling much more egregious than D&D could dream of. JRPGs specifically are guilty of this.

Computer games are a different beast.

Morty
2017-02-02, 01:12 PM
I would say that absurd HP scaling is more the rule rather than exception. There are plenty of non-pnp RPGs with HP scaling much more egregious than D&D could dream of. JRPGs specifically are guilty of this.


Computer games are a different beast.

Yes, this. We're talking about tabletop games here. Video games have their own expectations and standards.

ImNotTrevor
2017-02-02, 01:52 PM
Game with HP. Not games. Game. There's no RPG that uses hit points the way D&D does. Plenty use a pool of points you lose until you die/drop, but the way D&D's hit points scale and outpace attack power is unique to it.

I'm questioning the wisdom of claiming that there exists no non-D&D tabletop RPG with high HP scaling. I'm not about to take the time out of my day to double check, but I'm quite positive that there are enough Heartbreakers out there to make D&D non-unique in this regard.

And that doesn't actually do anything to my point. Which was:
Nobody has a gun to your head forcing you to play the game.
If that issue is so egregious that your enjoyment of the game is ruined, there's this new concept called "Play something else."

And since apparently there are literally no other games that exist with this problem, that should be really easy. So why are we feeling the need to be pissy about the suggestion to play one of the thousands of games that aren't D&D so you don't have this problem?

I literally don't understand the basis by which this becomes a big enough deal to have a multi-page argument about it on the Internet.

Koo Rehtorb
2017-02-02, 01:52 PM
I agree that hit points don't make sense in a simulationist "what are these modeling?" sense.

I don't agree that this necessarily makes them a problem. Call them, I don't know, Heroic Potential, and admit that, for whatever reason, some people in D&D settings are just superhumanly difficult to kill. There can be different reasons for why this is the case, the details aren't particularly important.

Traab
2017-02-02, 02:13 PM
I only read the first two books in that series. What are you referring to?



Absolutely; and the strong adherence to the systems is part of what makes them work so well. But the systems are simpler (without hundreds of spells) and clearly defined, which makes Sanderson's job in that regard a little easier. But anyone interested in fiction with clearly defined magic systems should check out his books. Mistborn is especially good.

Sorry if this got covered earlier on, I didnt read the entire thread to make sure. If you really want to know what cadderly does thats so absurd, A few examples are, he basically mind controls a dragon thats an old enough age to be a literal army killer, im talking everything on the evil tree from goblins to giants all getting obliterated. Then after he and his party ride it like a giant friendly horse through the mountains, they pick a fight with said army, the dragon breaks free of his control, he somehow casts spells to steal entire centuries of life from this dragon, reducing it to such a young and vulnerable age his group of buddies can kill it. Thats.... thats not how clerics work!!!! Also, he doesnt do silly things like memorize spells, oh no, he casts a near endless supply of whatever magic he feels he needs, acting more like a sorcerer who can cast pretty much literally anything he wants with the justification of his whole mental image of the magic of denir being like a river and he just has to find different tributaries to locate the spell school he wants or whatever.


As for the topic itself, my viewpoint got covered early on. These arent setup as D&D campaigns, these are stories set in the specific setting d&d players will recognize. If you really insist on thinking of it in terms of game rules, imagine its a campaign run by a dm who house rules the heck out of things and is known to fudge dice rolls in the name of the rule of cool. So instead of his buddy's uber leet drow warrior getting wtfpwned by some magic missile spamming caster, the dm lets him evade it in some fashion so the fight can continue. Because it would suck if the main character dies before the story is even partially complete.

Segev
2017-02-02, 02:28 PM
I'll just chime in one last time on the hp issue: We're not going to convince those who wish to claim their dislike of hp makes hp objectively bad that hp has any redeeming qualities. They will continue to insist that any point raised to counter their position is nonsense, even (or especially) if it directly answers their objection.

Those who dislike hp are not going to convince those of us who are fine with it that it is objectively bad. We will continue to point out what hp models and how the model is consistent. We will continue to frustratedly refute claims that we find to be untrue, regardless of how often those claims are repeated nor how insulting and condescending the tone in which they're made.

Both sides of this are illustrated by the repeated insistence that hp requires post-hoc explanation. Those who feel hp are fine will say it does not. The explanations can clearly be stated before the mechanics are invoked. The result of the mechanics doesn't change what the explanations will be. The ONLY post hoc explanations that have been acknowledged are due to the name of spells, not due to the existence of hp. But the anti-hp position will keep insisting that this acknowledge post hoc explanation means not that the acknowledged flaw is there, but that all hp is flawed and every use of hp required extensive post hoc justification.

Since we can't even agree on what we're saying, it's a pointless argument.

Moreover, it's off topic. Except insofar as the anti-hp crowd will insist that novels having attacks from daggers ever deal lethal damage to powerful characters is "breaking the rules" while pro-hp folks will tend to feel it within the bounds of the rules.

Morty
2017-02-02, 02:35 PM
I'm questioning the wisdom of claiming that there exists no non-D&D tabletop RPG with high HP scaling. I'm not about to take the time out of my day to double check, but I'm quite positive that there are enough Heartbreakers out there to make D&D non-unique in this regard.

And that doesn't actually do anything to my point. Which was:
Nobody has a gun to your head forcing you to play the game.
If that issue is so egregious that your enjoyment of the game is ruined, there's this new concept called "Play something else."

And since apparently there are literally no other games that exist with this problem, that should be really easy. So why are we feeling the need to be pissy about the suggestion to play one of the thousands of games that aren't D&D so you don't have this problem?

I literally don't understand the basis by which this becomes a big enough deal to have a multi-page argument about it on the Internet.

This thread asked a question. To some, the answer to this question is "because D&D rules are detrimental to telling a good story". And HP are, again to some, an example of where D&D rules fail here. This caused an argument when other people claimed that D&D rules, and HP in particular, do serve their intended function and don't obstruct fiction.

So, no, I'm not seeing how "play something else" is an answer to anything here. We already are playing something else - at least, I am. But we also give an answer to the thread's question that we believe to be true.

Koo Rehtorb
2017-02-02, 03:00 PM
I don't think HP is antithetical to telling a good story. I do think it's antithetical to telling a story in a traditional fantasy setting. Around like level 5 D&D characters are literally superhuman, and that's just scratching the surface of the weird things D&D rules imply. If you're following D&D rules then you're going to be ending up with a unique product.

You can't use D&D rules to tell something like Game of Thrones, or even really Lord of the Rings. All you can use D&D rules to tell is "medieval fantasy superheroes".

Flickerdart
2017-02-02, 03:02 PM
You can't use D&D rules to tell something like Game of Thrones, or even really Lord of the Rings. All you can use D&D rules to tell is "medieval fantasy superheroes".

You can! It just involves even more aggressive level caps than normal. Game of Thrones works fine with everyone being level 1 or 2. Gandalf was a 5th level magic user. And so on.

Koo Rehtorb
2017-02-02, 03:05 PM
You can! It just involves even more aggressive level caps than normal. Game of Thrones works fine with everyone being level 1 or 2. Gandalf was a 5th level magic user. And so on.

Okay sure, yes, you can houserule the hell out of D&D and get something vaguely appropriate. But you'd probably be better off playing a different system in that case because D&D really isn't designed to work like that and you're throwing out the strengths of the system to accomplish that particular goal.

Flickerdart
2017-02-02, 03:08 PM
Okay sure, yes, you can houserule the hell out of D&D and get something vaguely appropriate. But you'd probably be better off playing a different system in that case because D&D really isn't designed to work like that and you're throwing out the strengths of the system to accomplish that particular goal.

I don't see how "the characters start at level 1" is a houserule at all, much less "houseruling the hell out of D&D."

Segev
2017-02-02, 03:11 PM
Okay sure, yes, you can houserule the hell out of D&D and get something vaguely appropriate. But you'd probably be better off playing a different system in that case because D&D really isn't designed to work like that and you're throwing out the strengths of the system to accomplish that particular goal.

While I won't usually say "no, go ahead and use D&D, it can be made to work," when there exist better systems, I object to the assertion that level cap limits are "throwing out the strengths of the system." It isn't "hosueruling the hell out of D&D to get something vaguely appropriate."

You could run a game at EXACTLY level 5, and never be any other level, and if that power level of game ran your campaign the way you wanted it, it wouldn't be breaking D&D in any way. If the only house rule is "start here, no advancement in level," it's not in any way unrecognizable as D&D


Now, there are other things to look at for Game of Thrones. Chiefly, how its magic system doesn't really align with D&D's.

Koo Rehtorb
2017-02-02, 03:16 PM
I don't see how "the characters start at level 1" is a houserule at all, much less "houseruling the hell out of D&D."

Not that part, no. The level cap part. One of the primary parts of D&D is the whole concept of the leveling system.

"You fight things, to get xp and loot, which enable you to fight bigger things, for more xp and loot." is the core of the D&D system, at least in my opinion.

Segev
2017-02-02, 03:20 PM
Not that part, no. The level cap part. One of the primary parts of D&D is the whole concept of the leveling system.

"You fight things, to get xp and loot, which enable you to fight bigger things, for more xp and loot." is the core of the D&D system, at least in my opinion.

It really isn't. The core is the gameplay. The advancement is a key motivator, but it can be entirely ignored without damaging the game at all.

Koo Rehtorb
2017-02-02, 03:23 PM
It really isn't. The core is the gameplay. The advancement is a key motivator, but it can be entirely ignored without damaging the game at all.

I completely disagree. In my opinion if you take out advancement then D&D has very little left to offer. It's a game about personal power progression and using that personal power progression to fight bigger and bigger things in new and interesting ways.

That isn't to say you can't use it to do other things, but then you've probably reached the point where some other system would do a better job of it.

Max_Killjoy
2017-02-02, 03:26 PM
I'll just chime in one last time on the hp issue: We're not going to convince those who wish to claim their dislike of hp makes hp objectively bad that hp has any redeeming qualities. They will continue to insist that any point raised to counter their position is nonsense, even (or especially) if it directly answers their objection.

Those who dislike hp are not going to convince those of us who are fine with it that it is objectively bad. We will continue to point out what hp models and how the model is consistent. We will continue to frustratedly refute claims that we find to be untrue, regardless of how often those claims are repeated nor how insulting and condescending the tone in which they're made.

Both sides of this are illustrated by the repeated insistence that hp requires post-hoc explanation. Those who feel hp are fine will say it does not. The explanations can clearly be stated before the mechanics are invoked. The result of the mechanics doesn't change what the explanations will be. The ONLY post hoc explanations that have been acknowledged are due to the name of spells, not due to the existence of hp. But the anti-hp position will keep insisting that this acknowledge post hoc explanation means not that the acknowledged flaw is there, but that all hp is flawed and every use of hp required extensive post hoc justification.

Since we can't even agree on what we're saying, it's a pointless argument.


First, the side-discussion about HP is specifically about D&D-style large-pool HP. Other systems that don't have escalating health pools and happen to call the stuff in their (far more static as character's "advance") pools "hit points" aren't nearly as impacted by the issues being discussed, if they're impacted at all.

Second, "post hoc explanation" -- this isn't about whether the explanations can be stated before or after the mechanics are invoked in play. It's about having to go back and retroactively "explain" the rules years after they were designed. It's all these kludges, a murkily intermingled pool of sometimes-toughness, sometimes-skill, sometimes-luck, sometimes-ineffible-hero-mojo, sometimes-whatever, that in places mutually conflict, and in places overlap with other rules that cover the same aspects, invoked in different combinations to justify different aspects of the system and how a large escalating HP pool interacts with other rules.

The reason this HP thing started is that it's a good example of D&D rules not working as a framework for fiction because they don't really map to anything, and make a poor framework for writing.

But instead of just dealing with the fact that that D&D-like HPs are an example of a rules-as-rules abstract system, the defenders of D&D-like HP systems offer up something that HP is supposed to represent. And when they're confronted with some other D&D rule that explanation doesn't mesh with, or some other mechanics effect that would be implied but doesn't exist, or some rule-setting intersection where it doesn't map well, the defenders insist that HP represents something else. And when that doesn't mesh or doesn't map, they offer up yet another explanation. Eventually, they get back to the first explanation, and we're left with a mashup. It's toughness -- except when it isn't. It's evasiveness -- except when it isn't. It's luck -- except when it isn't. It's mojo --except when it isn't.




Moreover, it's off topic. Except insofar as the anti-hp crowd will insist that novels having attacks from daggers ever deal lethal damage to powerful characters is "breaking the rules" while pro-hp folks will tend to feel it within the bounds of the rules.


I'd guess that someone complaining that the fiction doesn't follow the rules of D&D would say that a dagger shouldn't instantly kill a powerful character in one stab.

ImNotTrevor
2017-02-02, 04:07 PM
This thread asked a question. To some, the answer to this question is "because D&D rules are detrimental to telling a good story". And HP are, again to some, an example of where D&D rules fail here. This caused an argument when other people claimed that D&D rules, and HP in particular, do serve their intended function and don't obstruct fiction.

I think we are both aware enough to know that the argument about HP has strayed away from the original point on several levels.

But HP is game stuff. Characters in novels don't talk about their AC or earn XP either. Becaude they're Gamestuff.



So, no, I'm not seeing how "play something else" is an answer to anything here. We already are playing something else - at least, I am. But we also give an answer to the thread's question that we believe to be true.

The answer was given a while ago.
"Game Stuff and Novel Stuff have different needs."

That covers this and most problems in the OP.
So I still don't get the why of this conversation still going.

Segev
2017-02-02, 04:36 PM
The explanations are not post hoc because they weren't made up after the fact. They were part and parcel of the original explanations for what hp represented, all the way back at least as early as 1e AD&D. (I don't own books older than that, so can't comment on them.)

And the explanations work just fine, if you don't try to plaster your own re-interpretation over them and then say that anything other than your interpretation is "a kludge" and that your interpretation is silly so hp are silly.

Max_Killjoy
2017-02-02, 04:50 PM
The explanations are not post hoc because they weren't made up after the fact. They were part and parcel of the original explanations for what hp represented, all the way back at least as early as 1e AD&D. (I don't own books older than that, so can't comment on them.)

And the explanations work just fine, if you don't try to plaster your own re-interpretation over them and then say that anything other than your interpretation is "a kludge" and that your interpretation is silly so hp are silly.

AGAIN, it's not my re-interpretation.

These are the retro-"explanations" given by apologists for the D&D-style HP system, instead of just saying "yeah, it's a purely abstract "gamist" construct, so that characters get tougher as they gain levels" and moving on.

Segev
2017-02-02, 04:55 PM
AGAIN, it's not my re-interpretation.

These are the retro-"explanations" given by apologists for the D&D-style HP system, instead of just saying "yeah, it's a purely abstract "gamist" construct, so that characters get tougher as they gain levels" and moving on.

Like I said, we can't even agree on the interpretation. We're not convincing each other. You claim you're not re-interpreting. I point to where you are, and you claim I'm the one re-interpreting. I point out why I say I'm not, and you say that it doesn't count for reasons you list that I'm not going to bother right now.

We will never convince each other on this. We're repeating ourselves not just from prior debates, now, but from things said in this very thread. We're reduced to "Uh-huh!" "Nuh-uh!" contradiction, because neither of us accepts the others' fundamental claims. You, obviously, feel I'm a horribly unreasonable prat for this. I feel you're far too wedded to the conclusion you wish to draw.

So...I'm going to TRY to not respond to this topic in this thread again. I won't promise success; those who've seen me around here know I'm stubborn and mouthy. But if I do succeed, it's not because I'm conceding or because I'm trying to disrespect anybody by ignoring them. I'm just trying to stop spinning wheels needlessly in an argument that's serving nobody.

Max_Killjoy
2017-02-02, 05:04 PM
You claim you're not re-interpreting. I point to where you are, and you claim I'm the one re-interpreting.


1) You have yet to point to anything I've "reinterpreted", and furthermore you cannot point to such a thing, because it's not happening. I've been listing off what other people have written in their statements that D&D-like HP represent as they try to claim that they actually represent anything at all. I've gone on to point out that exactly what they're claimed to represent shifts around depending on what angle one comes at claim from. There's no fair or reasonable way to call that "reinterpretation" on my part.

You've accused me of "reinterpreting", which is not the same thing as actually being able to point out where it's happened.

So, you know, sorry, I guess, for holding people who claim that D&D-like HP actually map to something to their actual statements on the matter.


2) WHERE have I said that YOU are reinterpreting?



And by the way this...



They were part and parcel of the original explanations for what hp represented, all the way back at least as early as 1e AD&D. (I don't own books older than that, so can't comment on them.)


...ignores the actual history of D&D-like HP:



In a 2004 interview with GameSpy, D&D's co-creator Dave Arneson explained that the earliest version of the game didn't have hit points. The rules had evolved from wargames he and fellow D&D inventor Gary Gygax played, in which a single successful attack was all it took for a soldier to die.

That changed when they started experimenting with having players control individual heroes rather than entire armies, as players identified with them much more strongly. As Arneson put it, “They didn't care if they could kill a monster in one blow, but they didn't want the monster to kill them in one blow.”

Arneson had previously made his own rules for a naval wargame set during the Civil War called Ironclads, and together with Gygax had collaborated on a Napoleonic naval game called Don't Give Up The Ship! Both games had a mechanic that allowed for ships to take multiple hits before being sunk, which they'd borrowed from the wargaming rules designed by author Fletcher Pratt in the 1930s. They borrowed those rules again for D&D.


So even any comment about what HP might represent published in AD&D 1e was a retroactive explanation instituted after the fact.

.

Kish
2017-02-02, 07:04 PM
So I still don't get the why of this conversation still going.
The conversation is still going because some people want to convince some other people that the rules must be followed regardless of context, and other people want to convince the first group of people that "rules lawyer" is an insult, not a compliment. And no one wants to be convinced, only to convince.

CharonsHelper
2017-02-02, 07:24 PM
And no one wants to be convinced, only to convince.

Welcome to the internet! :P

Segev
2017-02-02, 08:16 PM
Welcome to the internet! :P

Thanks! I'm new here!

Let me give you all of my personal identifying information and reply to this Nigerian Prince who wants me to help him get his fortune and beautiful heiress sister out of his country...

2D8HP
2017-02-03, 08:03 AM
Let me give you all of my personal identifying information and reply to this Nigerian Prince who wants me to help him get his fortune and beautiful heiress sister out of his country...


Please tell me more about this beautiful heiress...

:amused:

While it's mostly about Armor Class, Hit points are also mentioned, so I thought this piece by one of the guys who helped write rules for early D&D would be germane:
What we really meant—Pt. 1--AC


In recent weeks I have found myself, as part of an exciting new project I have embarked upon, doing a lot of synopsizing what some have come to see as complex or confusing concepts. One example that springs to mind is the old stat known as Armor or Armor Class (AC). In OD&D it was a really simple system that ranked plain old street clothes as AC9, while at the other end of the non-magical spectrum was plate mail and a shield at AC2


If Hit Points (HP) are considered to be your ability to avoid/evade a mortal blow (which they were in OD&D), then AC was how hard you were “to hit” (in this case threaten your well-being to some degree).


“To Hit” is another term that does not exactly mean what it seems to mean based on just the words. Confused yet? Consider “the Mountain” from Game of Thrones on HBO. This is one HUGE dude encased in metal. If three or four puny (normal-sized) guys attack him, chances are that their weapons will actually make physical contact with The Mountain lots of times; this is not what is referenced in “To Hit”. Of those several physical contacts, only a small proportion of them will actually strike with a potential to do actual damage; i.e. pierce the armor at a weak point or joint, or slice or pierce some flesh. Those are what are winnowed out of the combat to be represented by the To Hit number.

Back to AC; something as small and ephemeral as a pixie or sprite, or small and quick like a stirge would be somewhat difficult to simply swat out of the air like an over-sized wasp. To simulate that facet of their being I make them hard “to hit” by giving them a very good AC.


(OD&D had a descending AC system starting at 9 and going down; other systems use an ascending system, where 1 is street togs and 7 or 8 is really buff. Readjust this in your head to match your system; the concepts remain constant. Something slow and ponderous, such as a pachyderm, would be easier to strike, but the thickness of the skin somewhat mitigates this as well as the high number of HP an elephant or mammoth might have.)


AC does not always indicate what is being worn. AC is a combination of several concepts, not only the weight of the metal being worn.


To maintain perspective remember this: we were trying to bring miniatures to the table top. Several of the seemingly complex considerations and calculations were second nature to miniatures gamers. We tried to abstract a lot of what was second nature in minis to a whole new milieu—Table-top Role-playing (and this before it was even called role-playing).


Once this concept is grasped in the abstract, it then becomes more clear why extraordinary attributes can affect AC, or otherwise make the PC harder “To Hit”. These same attributes also can grant the PC more HP, all in recognition of how that last, fatal blow is just that, fatal. I have never counted anything more than “dead”; hit 0 HP and you died. Whether or not your PC can be Raised or Resurrected is another matter entirely. We had PC’s brought back from dead several times, although not always with absolute best results.



But anyway, that’s what we meant.


I also thought this would fit this thread:


Time passed and the game continued to grow as well as expand in unexpected directions. Level-creep--PC’s at high Levels that were never considered, let alone allowed for, began to proliferate. In the early years PC’s “retired” at Lvl 9 or 10 and a new PC started; this level-creep was eating up the game. We were getting pleas for help from DM’s and players alike.


The tipping point came one day in a letter I had to open that day that spurred a supplement almost that very week. (I must have “had the duty” that day; we took turns opening and reading mail to TSR.) In this powerful thought provoker, a bewildered DM wrote the following, more or less (I will paraphrase a bit):


“Dear TSR, I don’t know where to go with my campaign next. Last session, my players went to Valhalla. They killed Loki, all the Valar, a dozen Valkyries, Thor and Odin and destroyed the Bifrost Bridge. “


I read this aloud to Gary and Brian; when we picked ourselves up off the floor or regained our senses, as the case may have been, ( I swear to you that this is true) we knew level-creep had gone too far. That week saw the impetus for one more supplement gather enough steam that I set out to edit the last of the RPG-oriented supplements,*Gods, Demi-Gods & Heroes. This was the closest to a rule book that we came; we felt that PC’s should not be powerful enough to knock off gods. So we gave them really high amounts of HP: Odin 300, Thor 275. We charted out character levels undreamed of in the original game.

The source of the quote is here (http://kaskoid.blogspot.com/2016/02/how-i-helped-to-pull-rope-that-tolled.html?m=1).

Morty
2017-02-04, 11:39 AM
What the original designers had in mind 30 years ago is interesting trivia, but not very relevant to a discussion about whether or not the HP model is beneficial to the game.

Tanarii
2017-02-04, 12:17 PM
I completely disagree. In my opinion if you take out advancement then D&D has very little left to offer. It's a game about personal power progression and using that personal power progression to fight bigger and bigger things in new and interesting ways.

That isn't to say you can't use it to do other things, but then you've probably reached the point where some other system would do a better job of it.
I take it you've only played D&D since 3e then?

Koo Rehtorb
2017-02-04, 12:26 PM
I take it you've only played D&D since 3e then?

Started with 2e, and retroactively went back and played a whole bunch of Moldvay (which is my favourite edition). Admittedly I was mainly talking about 3e and on, but it applies to the earlier ones to a lesser extent. There's still bigger and bigger monsters, you still sometimes need to fight them. Progression is still the main focus of the game, you just have a slightly different way of pursuing it. Any edition of D&D would suck a whole lot if you were just locked into level 1-2 forever.

Tanarii
2017-02-04, 12:38 PM
Started with 2e, and retroactively went back and played a whole bunch of Moldvay (which is my favourite edition). Admittedly I was mainly talking about 3e and on, but it applies to the earlier ones to a lesser extent. There's still bigger and bigger monsters, you still sometimes need to fight them. Progression is still the main focus of the game, you just have a slightly different way of pursuing it. Any edition of D&D would suck a whole lot if you were just locked into level 1-2 forever.
Having played the Palladium system extensively, especially Robotech, which doesn't have the exponential power gain that D&D has, I both agree and disagree. It would not play like traditional D&D, as in tomb-robbing & other adventure-site delving for riches until name level, followed by raising armies to conquer the world. But it might work just fine for other campaign styles. Historical settings (especially Greek or Viking), super gritty realism (since one shot will kill you forever), horror, intrigue/political ...

Okay maybe not the last. D&D isn't really a system for that at all. :smallbiggrin:

Segev
2017-02-04, 01:05 PM
What the original designers had in mind 30 years ago is interesting trivia, but not very relevant to a discussion about whether or not the HP model is beneficial to the game.

It is relevant when one side insists that any explanation that isn't theirs must be made up when the system is first conceived, lest it be considered a kludge.

But in general, I agree with you.

CharonsHelper
2017-02-04, 01:16 PM
Okay maybe not the last. D&D isn't really a system for that at all. :smallbiggrin:

This. D&D certainly isn't perfect - but many complaints about it are from when people try to have D&D do things where it's not in its element.

Koo Rehtorb
2017-02-04, 01:27 PM
But it might work just fine for other campaign styles. Historical settings (especially Greek or Viking), super gritty realism (since one shot will kill you forever), horror, intrigue/political ...

Okay maybe not the last. D&D isn't really a system for that at all. :smallbiggrin:

Well that's the point I was trying to make in the first place. Yes you could try to force D&D to do those other things, but then you're discarding the strengths of the system and not getting anything in return for it. You'd be better served by a system that's actually trying to do one of those things.