What irks you about the difference with D&D and Real World logic?

[Avista]

What is it about the real world that just can't translate into D&D? For me, it's fall damage - specifically, fall damage on a polymorphed creature. A mouse can fall from 10 feet and be unfazed, because physics. But a mouse in D&D will probably die from that 1d6 fall damage.

I now want a house rule where if you calculate the force of impact in newtons before damage dice finishes rolling, you get to survive.

[Bad Wolf]

Its not exactly physics, but the fact that damaging spells like Fireball will be the same size wether the caster is Fine size or Colossal feels weird to me.

[Draconi Redfir]

never been a fan that a character a 1hp out of 100 is still able to function at full capacity. You'd think they'd be suffering some kind of penalty, a lopped off arm, woozyness from blood loss, or reduced movement speed from a broken leg or something.

like i understand why it's like that, but i wouldn't mind playing with a mechanic that really enforces the struggle to survive the lower your health gets. Not to the point of completely useless at 25% hp or lower of course, but enough to push for desperation moves and possible permanent consequences like aforementioned disfigurement.

[Spore]

Spell slots. This one is weird but I much rather prefer rolling for if a spell actually manifests like in Warhammer Fantasy (where I think you roll different difficulties if a spell works, and if you fail you corrupt the surrounding area with Chaos).

I can't wrap my head around a wizard that has spent several hours carefully inscribing a spell, then using it for months or years only to say: "Sorry lads, I can't cast Fireball, I haven't got it memorized." Like WHAT?! This thing is your bread and butter.

Similarly, learning new spells is as easy as 1, 2, 3, at least for wizards. "Yeah, I fiddled a bit in my laboratory for a few hours and I can see into the villain's bedroom using a mirror now." Like WHAT? Just yesterday you struggled to remember how an explosion works.

I always like the comparison with a well practiced (al)chemist or pharmacist. They'd actually always be able to remake their aspirin, and they would get quicker the more often they would do it per day (current day aspirin is made in factories because it is much safer and cheaper but you can actually make your own with a bit of lab equipment). You wouldn't go: "yup, that is it, thrice a day and no more." I can understand the explanation of mental fatigue, but Vancian magic is explicitly counting the number of spell uses.

[Koo Rehtorb]

Think of having the spell written down as owning a gun and bullets. Being a wizard is knowing how to load a gun. Memorizing the spell is the act of loading the gun.

[Imbalance]

never been a fan that a character a 1hp out of 100 is still able to function at full capacity. You'd think they'd be suffering some kind of penalty, a lopped off arm, woozyness from blood loss, or reduced movement speed from a broken leg or something.

like i understand why it's like that, but i wouldn't mind playing with a mechanic that really enforces the struggle to survive the lower your health gets. Not to the point of completely useless at 25% hp or lower of course, but enough to push for desperation moves and possible permanent consequences like aforementioned disfigurement.

This is where Wizkids' combat dial shined. Too bad they never made an RPG.

I'll second spell slot weirdness, but mostly because decades of video games taught me that magic is something a caster has a finite supply of, and that more powerful spells will deplete it faster but there will come opportunities to replenish the well. The ammo analogy is the most apt for me - a spellcaster in D&D is playing an FPS and must curate an appropriate loadout for the territory and anticipated enemy forces.

[hotflungwok]

In Pathfinder, as far as I can tell, there's no penalty for being on fire. I've had characters just accept they were burning and carry on as if nothing was wrong because the 1d6 damage per round didn't worry them. If I'm wrong about this please tell me.

Also, lava does 2d6 pts of damage. The lowest level fireball does 5d6, but molten lava doesn't even rate half of that.

[Pex]

I'm in the process of moving. It takes lots of money, paperwork, waiting, more paperwork, packing, more money, more paperwork, more waiting, physical labor.

In D&D it is a) Attack the BBEG in his castle, win, the castle is yours or b) pay X amount of goldpieces and ta da! the house is yours.

[Willie the Duck]

In Pathfinder, as far as I can tell, there's no penalty for being on fire. I've had characters just accept they were burning and carry on as if nothing was wrong because the 1d6 damage per round didn't worry them. If I'm wrong about this please tell me.

Also, lava does 2d6 pts of damage. The lowest level fireball does 5d6, but molten lava doesn't even rate half of that.

But that's comparing different levels of exposure. Complete immersion in lava is 20d6, isn't it?

[Particle_Man]

From the title I thought this would be more like “I sure wish I could cure any disease as easily as a cleric in D&D could!” :smallsmile:

Edit: I saw the last word as "magic" with my tired eyes.

[gkathellar]

Just being near molten rock can suffocate a person, as the air becomes too hot and too dry to breathe and flammable materials combust due to proximity. Complete immersion would crush a person under the weight of the rock, irrespective of their heat resistance.

[Imbalance]

But that's comparing different levels of exposure. Complete immersion in lava is 20d6, isn't it?

That's a closer abstract, I suppose, but this isn't solely a D&D oversight. Generally, a human in a heat-resistant suit can only approach exposed molten rock to within so many feet, and for only a short time before they start to cook. In a magma tube, trapped, superheated air is lethal in a matter of minutes. Mario's overalls would likely have burst into flames before taking ten paces into Bowser's fortress. Games just flagrantly ignore thermal effects and tell you it only hurts if you bathe in lava.


From the title I thought this would be more like “I sure wish I could cure any disease as easily as a cleric in D&D could!” :smallsmile:

Nothing says "universal healthcare" like a red potion drop.

[hotflungwok]

But that's comparing different levels of exposure. Complete immersion in lava is 20d6, isn't it?
I'll have to look again, I don't remember the rules mentioning this.

I remember reading about a person who was walking on an active lava tube and his foot broke through and went into the lava flow and he died instantly from shock.

[The Glyphstone]

Since Fireball was mentioned, the sharply limited range of effect for AoE spells. If you are 19.9 feet away from the epicenter of a Fireball, you suffer potential massive third-degree burns (that don't impede your function in any way unless you drop to negatives, see previous complaints). If you are 20.01 feet away from the center, the raging inferno boils away an inch from your nose without so much as giving you a sunburn. It explicitly even sets things within the radius on fire, so thermal energy is clearly in play.

[patchyman]

Somewhat similar to Glyphstone’s, casters uncanny ability to determine distance precisely to within inches. You cast Fireball, and the epicentre will be exactly 40’ away, and damage the enemy 20’ away without harming your buddy in melee with him.

[hotflungwok]

How much damage a human being is capable of doing with their bare hands, especially compared to what a human being with 3 feet of sharp steel can do.

[Kami2awa]

That a PC would rather die (and be easily resurrected with one spell) than lose all their stuff.

[redwizard007]

Six limbed vertebrates. Just, no.

Said six limbed vertebrates flying with ludacrisly undersized wings and chest muscles.

Afore mentioned six limbed, flying vertebrates belching massive amounts of various caustic material from the same opening through which they intake food and oxygen.

Don't even get me started on subterranean, prison complexes created by dramatically advanced societies, in which incredibly valuable treasures were casually abandoned.

[Wuzza]

What irks you about the difference with D&D and Real World logic?

Please don't take this the wrong way, but when people try to compare a fantasy role playing game with the real world.

If I wanted to do that, I'd play some sort of real world table top simulation.....

[SimonMoon6]

Undersea creatures have lowlight vision. However, as described, lowlight vision is insufficient to see at the levels of darkness that exist in the real world on the sea floor.

Items worn by creatures are somehow indestructible compared to objects not worn by creatures. If you toss paper into lava, the lava will burn the paper. If you toss a person covered in paper (holding paper scrolls, wearing a paper hat, using a paper fan, etc) into lava, the paper will be unharmed as long as the person is alive.

And something that plagues most games: movement is stop and go. You never have races where two people are neck-and-neck. Instead, Person A moves thirty (or sixty) feet away from Person B before Person B can even move. And this has actual game implications. If Person B is chasing Person A, Person A can move 30 feet away and cast Fireball centered on Person B while safely out of the area of effect.

[halfeye]

Just being near molten rock can suffocate a person, as the air becomes too hot and too dry to breathe and flammable materials combust due to proximity.

That may well be something like correct.


Complete immersion would crush a person under the weight of the rock, irrespective of their heat resistance.

This is hogwash, if it was at a nice temperature (which is a whole third argument) the weight of liquid rock would be spread out all around you, and wouldn't do you much harm, people dive to 400 feet deep in water, the pressure there would be higher than at the surface of a pool of lava. The temperature would kill you quickly, the pressure wouldn't do much harm.

[Arbane]

never been a fan that a character a 1hp out of 100 is still able to function at full capacity. You'd think they'd be suffering some kind of penalty, a lopped off arm, woozyness from blood loss, or reduced movement speed from a broken leg or something.

Every single edition of D&D has gone out of their way to make it clear that Hit Points are not Meat Points, and every single generation of players has ignored that text.


like i understand why it's like that, but i wouldn't mind playing with a mechanic that really enforces the struggle to survive the lower your health gets. Not to the point of completely useless at 25% hp or lower of course, but enough to push for desperation moves and possible permanent consequences like aforementioned disfigurement.

Try almost any other RPG.

For me? The economy. High-level magic items cost literally as much money as a small kingdom, and a mid-level PC will have enough cash on hand to crash a village's economy a la Twoflower in the first Discworld novel.


Please don't take this the wrong way, but when people try to compare a fantasy role playing game with the real world.

If I wanted to do that, I'd play some sort of real world table top simulation.....

Not a big GURPS fan, I take it?
:smallbiggrin:

[MrSandman]

Every single edition of D&D has gone out of their way to make it clear that Hit Points are not Meat Points, and every single generation of players has ignored that text.


That's actually one thing that irks me about D&D in general. Yes, there's that one nice paragraph telling you that hp loss doesn't only represent physical damage. That axe that just hit you and left you at 48/53 hp didn't really cause a wound. Now, it so happens that it was posioned, roll a Fort save.

To put it in other words: They go out of their way to say that hp loss doesn't always represent a wound, but mechanically it always works like a wound.

[Max_Killjoy]

Short answer -- everything.

[Max_Killjoy]

Since Fireball was mentioned, the sharply limited range of effect for AoE spells. If you are 19.9 feet away from the epicenter of a Fireball, you suffer potential massive third-degree burns (that don't impede your function in any way unless you drop to negatives, see previous complaints). If you are 20.01 feet away from the center, the raging inferno boils away an inch from your nose without so much as giving you a sunburn. It explicitly even sets things within the radius on fire, so thermal energy is clearly in play.

Love how HERO deals with this -- the Explosion advantage on a ranged attack power. Without getting into the details, the damage drops off with distance from the center of the AOE, and depending on a character's defenses, they might not even be harmed at all despite technically being partway into the radius of the AOE.

[Kyutaru]

That casting Protection from Law doesn't render you immune to litigation.

[gkathellar]

This is hogwash, if it was at a nice temperature (which is a whole third argument) the weight of liquid rock would be spread out all around you, and wouldn't do you much harm, people dive to 400 feet deep in water, the pressure there would be higher than at the surface of a pool of lava. The temperature would kill you quickly, the pressure wouldn't do much harm.

The density of lava is thrice that of water and its viscosity is between 100,000-1,100,000 times greater. To be clear, this means it would be virtually impossible to sink into the stuff and, if you were somehow fully submerged and were somehow not instantly mummified and then disintegrated by the heat, weight, and pressure, you'd rise to the surface. This means I should qualify my statement: lava pressure would escalate far more rapidly than water pressure and crush you far more quickly at a far lesser depth.

[halfeye]

The density of lava is thrice that of water and its viscosity is between 100,000-1,100,000 times greater.

The viscosity depends on the chemisty and the temperature.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9f/Pahoeoe_fountain_edit2.jpg/600px-Pahoeoe_fountain_edit2.jpg

You're saying that's a million times more viscous than water? Wrong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lava


To be clear, this means it would be virtually impossible to sink into the stuff and, if you were somehow fully submerged and were somehow not instantly mummified and then disintegrated by the heat, weight, and pressure, you'd rise to the surface. This means I should qualify my statement: lava pressure would escalate far more rapidly than water pressure and crush you far more quickly at a far lesser depth.

Yeah, it's dense and you'd float. You'd burn too, but we're ignoring that. It's denser than water, but less dense than mercury. If you were fireproof and dragged under by an asbestos or otherwise fireproof rope while wearing a fireproof aqualung, the pressure wouldn't kill you immediately.

[Bohandas]

1.) The way hit dice, skills, saves, and attack bonus are bundled together even in monsters' base statistics that have nothing to do with advancement by character class

2.) The fact that the game can't handle very large or very small creatures, leading to the cat vs. commoner thing, as well as the ability to strike a critical hit against a creature whose knees you can;t even reach, let alone its vital organs.

3.) The skill point cap, preventing an NPC from being very skilled at something without also being relatively high level.

4.) All poisons taking the same amount of time to work

[Lapak]

Please don't take this the wrong way, but when people try to compare a fantasy role playing game with the real world.

If I wanted to do that, I'd play some sort of real world table top simulation.....
This. The physics of a D&D world pretty explicitly cannot map to our world, and nearly every attempt to do so introduces new, worse contradictions rather than verisimilitude.

[Mr Beer]

Pretty much all the mechanisms in D&D glaringly fail to map to the real world. This is not as a result of a conscious decision on the part of the designers but rather got baked in from the earliest editions of D&D when no-one knew how to make an RPG.

If you play D&D you have to accept the silliness. It goes too deep to fix with house rules and if that annoys you, there are a lot of options out there which have either objectively better designs or are better thought out or both.

Complaining about the rules in D&D is like complaining about the writing in The Big Bang Theory. Yes it's cheesy and predictable and cliched and not nearly as funny as <insert better show here>. Well despite all that, it's incredibly popular and durable so it seems to be what the people want. If you hate it, best bet is probably watch something else.

[Xuc Xac]

Every single edition of D&D has gone out of their way to make it clear that Hit Points are not Meat Points, and every single generation of players has ignored that text.



That's actually one thing that irks me about D&D in general. Yes, there's that one nice paragraph telling you that hp loss doesn't only represent physical damage. That axe that just hit you and left you at 48/53 hp didn't really cause a wound. Now, it so happens that it was posioned, roll a Fort save.

To put it in other words: They go out of their way to say that hp loss doesn't always represent a wound, but mechanically it always works like a wound.

Hit points aren't meat points unless you get hit by a poisoned weapon, bitten by a lycanthrope, or any other attack that causes extra effects on a "hit" that only make sense if a "hit" actually breaks skin. "If HP represent my ability to dodge a deadly blow, why am I taking continuous 'bleeding damage' after dodging that attack?"

Also, healing only makes sense as meat points. Cure Light Wounds restores enough hit points to completely heal a first level wizard or commoner who is well into negative hit points. A high level fighter might consider losing 5% of his total hit points to a battle ax to be a "light wound" but a first level wizard with 4hp probably considers losing 8 points to a battle ax to be a little more serious.


The viscosity depends on the chemisty and the temperature.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9f/Pahoeoe_fountain_edit2.jpg/600px-Pahoeoe_fountain_edit2.jpg

You're saying that's a million times more viscous than water? Wrong.
[/URL]

That's a 10 meter spray of lava. The smallest "drops" are still fairly big and chunky. If it was as runny as water, it would be breaking up into a fine mist at the edges. Do an image search for a spraying fire hose and see how the water breaks up into very fine droplets that are much, much finer than the lava in that picture.

Water has a viscosity of 0.00089 Pa*s (Pascal seconds). Lava has viscosities ranging from 100 to 1000 Pa*s. It can be objectively measured. The lava in your picture is at the low end of the range which would put it around 10,000 to 100,000 times as viscous as water.

One of the things that drives me nuts in D&D is anything that treats PCs differently from NPCs for no reason.

PC fighter: I'd like to buy a sword, please.
NPC Merchant: Here you are. That will be 10 gold pieces.
PC: Here you go. *Pays 10 gp*
NPC fighter: I'd like to buy a sword, please. Here are 10 gold pieces.
Merchant: Oh, terribly sorry, sir. I've just sold the last one to this fellow.
PC: Well, I don't really need it. I just wanted to have an extra weapon as a back up. I'll sell it to you if you like.
NPC fighter: I'll give you 5 gp for it and not a copper more.
PC: But it's the same sword that you were going to pay 10 for!
NPC fighter: You're a fighter, not a merchant! You don't know how to do business.
PC: Fine. I'll return it to the merchant and you can pay him for it.
NPC merchant: I'll give you 5gp for it.
PC: What? Why can't you just give me back my 10gp and take his 10gp?
NPC merchant: I'm not paying you full price for used goods.
PC: It's brand new. I just bought it from you!
NPC merchant: You're a fighter, not a merchant! You don't know how to do business.

[Galithar]

One of the things that drives me nuts in D&D is anything that treats PCs differently from NPCs for no reason.

PC fighter: I'd like to buy a sword, please.
NPC Merchant: Here you are. That will be 10 gold pieces.
PC: Here you go. *Pays 10 gp*
NPC fighter: I'd like to buy a sword, please. Here are 10 gold pieces.
Merchant: Oh, terribly sorry, sir. I've just sold the last one to this fellow.
PC: Well, I don't really need it. I just wanted to have an extra weapon as a back up. I'll sell it to you if you like.
NPC fighter: I'll give you 5 gp for it and not a copper more.
PC: But it's the same sword that you were going to pay 10 for!
NPC fighter: You're a fighter, not a merchant! You don't know how to do business.
PC: Fine. I'll return it to the merchant and you can pay him for it.
NPC merchant: I'll give you 5gp for it.
PC: What? Why can't you just give me back my 10gp and take his 10gp?
NPC merchant: I'm not paying you full price for used goods.
PC: It's brand new. I just bought it from you!
NPC merchant: You're a fighter, not a merchant! You don't know how to do business.

I kinda want to see someone actually perform this 'skit' because I heard it all in my head like the Black Knight from Monty Python.

[Arbane]

Also, healing only makes sense as meat points. Cure Light Wounds restores enough hit points to completely heal a first level wizard or commoner who is well into negative hit points. A high level fighter might consider losing 5% of his total hit points to a battle ax to be a "light wound" but a first level wizard with 4hp probably considers losing 8 points to a battle ax to be a little more serious.


Rationalization:
You remember in Lord of the Rings where Ent-Draught is a nice pick-me-up for for the 20-foot-tall tree people, but had a permanent effect on the hobbits? It's like that.

If Gygax had named the spell Restore Plot Armor, the readers would've been confused, as I don't think that term existed yet.

And yes, D&D has NEVER been consistent in-game about what HP are supposed to be, aside from a Damage Meter.

[Kyutaru]

8 dmg to a Fighter isn't the same wound as 8 dmg to a wizard. The wizard got impaled, the fighter got scratched.

Plot armor was a thing in the Star Wars rpg too. You can't suffer repeated blaster bolts and be fine. Heck a single disruptor rifle shot is supposed to kill you. Yet the only things that hit your actual Wound points were crits. Everything else just shaved off your screen time, which they called Vitality, and blatantly spelled out that it was just a representation of near hits and grazes meant for cinematic flair. Cause if you actually watch the Star Wars movies -- the heroes almost never get hit at all.

[Arbane]

If you want a game with 'realistic' damage systems, try Phoenix Command. Just don't get upset when your character is face-down with a sucking chest wound before you got to act.

[olskool]

I kinda want to see someone actually perform this 'skit' because I heard it all in my head like the Black Knight from Monty Python.

Me too!
This forum needs a LIKE Button!

[Telok]

The Three Stooges effect of the skill systems in the last few editions. I know people will claim it's ability checks or that you shouldn't be rolling the dice (wtf, put a system in the game and people are telling me the best thing is to not use it). But really, it's like "hp is not wounds" argument, the game treats hp like wounds and ability checks like skills. Admit the parrot is dead and stop whining about fjords.

If you're using a d20 for checks you have two choices: numbers stay on the die or get off it. If you get off the die some characters stop getting to participate in certain activities. Which is not good. So the last couple editions tried staying on the die.

Which leads to the PCs trying to do things and ending up looking like a Three Stooges skit when nobody can roll over a 12. Or the never-left-the-city street urchin thief beating the druid at surviving in the jungle. Or a gorilla beating the wizard at working the magic portal controls. Or a small child beating your raging goliath barbarian at arm wrestling.

Then people started noticing that if you play this race, have that class ability, snag a common magic item, and take a feat... their numbers are back off the die.

"Congratulations, the druid spots the thing because his passive perception is higher than the rest of you rolling 20s."

[olskool]

never been a fan that a character a 1hp out of 100 is still able to function at full capacity. You'd think they'd be suffering some kind of penalty, a lopped off arm, woozyness from blood loss, or reduced movement speed from a broken leg or something.

like i understand why it's like that, but i wouldn't mind playing with a mechanic that really enforces the struggle to survive the lower your health gets. Not to the point of completely useless at 25% hp or lower of course, but enough to push for desperation moves and possible permanent consequences like aforementioned disfigurement.

Just go "Old School" from the days of 2e and the universal house rules spread at various conventions...

Base Hit Points were your CON SCORE plus a roll of the Hit Die added to that CON score. At each new level, you would roll a new Hit Die and add that to your CON score AS A REPLACEMENT FOR THE PREVIOUSLY ROLLED HIT DIE.. but only IF the roll was bigger than the previous hit die rolled. Otherwise, you would just IGNORE IT and keep the larger previously rolled value.

The second optional rule was to just add 1 HP per Level to the Character's CON score for "non-martial classes" and 2 HP for "martial classes." This gave a predictable progression of HP that helped the DM balance monster and spell damages.

These will give you a better chance of survival at lower levels but increase the threat of death at higher levels. You will have to adjust both Spell Damages and the Damages that some monsters do to restore balance. The "rule of thumb" has always been to just cut damages in half to rebalance, but then 1e and 2e weren't very balanced to begin with.

[olskool]

The Three Stooges effect of the skill systems in the last few editions. I know people will claim it's ability checks or that you shouldn't be rolling the dice (wtf, put a system in the game and people are telling me the best thing is to not use it). But really, it's like "hp is not wounds" argument, the game treats hp like wounds and ability checks like skills. Admit the parrot is dead and stop whining about fjords.

If you're using a d20 for checks you have two choices: numbers stay on the die or get off it. If you get off the die some characters stop getting to participate in certain activities. Which is not good. So the last couple editions tried staying on the die.

Which leads to the PCs trying to do things and ending up looking like a Three Stooges skit when nobody can roll over a 12. Or the never-left-the-city street urchin thief beating the druid at surviving in the jungle. Or a gorilla beating the wizard at working the magic portal controls. Or a small child beating your raging goliath barbarian at arm wrestling.

Then people started noticing that if you play this race, have that class ability, snag a common magic item, and take a feat... their numbers are back off the die.

"Congratulations, the druid spots the thing because his passive perception is higher than the rest of you rolling 20s."

You are spot on with this critique.

This is an issue that could be resolved by tweaking the "Proficiency System" and adding "skill rolls" to certain character abilities but WotC dropped the ball when designing 5e. I personally would have made the Proficiency System a "Central Mechanic" and included both Spell Casting AND Class Abilities in it. You could have those abilities increase with each new Level while secondary or non-class skills only progress every "X Levels" (like they do now) because they were learned later or as an "afterthought." Starting a newly acquired ability at 1st Level (no matter what level you were when you got it) and increasing the penalties to "skill rolls" for "nonproficient characters" would all help too. Proficiencies have ALWAYS been an "afterthought" in D&D (and AD&D) though. Nothing new to see here as a result.

[Florian]

that you shouldn't be rolling the dice (wtf, put a system in the game and people are telling me the best thing is to not use it)

I'm of the opinion that you only should roll the dice when the outcome matters or is contested. That's also the whole reason behind the take10 and take20 mechanics.

You're in no rush to climb that tree, search that room or have a chat with the barkeeper? Why roll, when the possibility of failure doesn't really matter for those activities?

Running away from the manor guard and trying to climb the wall asap? Well, different beast entirely, as the possibility of failure will have a concrete effect.

That's also why I'm of the opinion having skills is not the same as being able to participate.

[Pauly]

Any attempt to relate D&D to real life is doomed to fail. But some of my pet bugbears:
- wearing armor as a skill you have to learn. Anything short of a plate harness is basically the same as putting on protective clothes, and putting on a plate harness can be learned in an hour or two.
- the whole leather armor thing, when in the historical analogue to D&D leather armor was very uncommon. Cloth gambesons were the correct item.
- you can level up and suddenly become proficient in a weapon you’ve never done touched before in your life.
- the multiplicity of weapons that require different skills.
- short swords are not always thrusting swords and long swords are not always cutting swords.

[Xuc Xac]

8 dmg to a Fighter isn't the same wound as 8 dmg to a wizard. The wizard got impaled, the fighter got scratched.


Yes, because the wizard is a scrawny little nerd and the fighter is a mountain of pantherish sinews. Until its time for healing, then the wizard regenerates like Wolverine. "Impaled through the spleen and gasping out your last breath? No problem! Here's a bandaid. Now you're completely fine!" But the fighter has a cut that's deep enough to require stitches? "These grievous wounds are beyond the power of the simple village priest to heal. It will take many days or weeks to recover unless you travel to the great temple in the capital city."

[Luccan]

Characters should die/be seriously crippled more often. Seriously, the constant wear and tear of adventuring on the body, the severe harm that comes to them that should take months if not years to heal from magic or just regular battle wounds, the psychological trauma from facing some truly horrific things, these things should have serious implications. How is every single adventurer not dead or broken in body and spirit at a young age? I want all my barbarians to die before the age of 25, all my wizards to go insane by third level, and to never, ever, play a hero in a fantasy action tabletop RPG. Is that so much to ask?

And don't even get me started on the lack of physics calculations in spellcasting!

Everyone's complaints are legitimate and part of that is of course that it's all opinion based. But I've never found the lack of realism in various aspects of D&D to be one of its primary issues. Anymore than it is in most other RPGs I've ever heard of, at least.

[gkathellar]

The Three Stooges effect of the skill systems in the last few editions. I know people will claim it's ability checks or that you shouldn't be rolling the dice (wtf, put a system in the game and people are telling me the best thing is to not use it). But really, it's like "hp is not wounds" argument, the game treats hp like wounds and ability checks like skills. Admit the parrot is dead and stop whining about fjords.

If you're using a d20 for checks you have two choices: numbers stay on the die or get off it. If you get off the die some characters stop getting to participate in certain activities. Which is not good. So the last couple editions tried staying on the die.

Which leads to the PCs trying to do things and ending up looking like a Three Stooges skit when nobody can roll over a 12. Or the never-left-the-city street urchin thief beating the druid at surviving in the jungle. Or a gorilla beating the wizard at working the magic portal controls. Or a small child beating your raging goliath barbarian at arm wrestling.

Then people started noticing that if you play this race, have that class ability, snag a common magic item, and take a feat... their numbers are back off the die.

"Congratulations, the druid spots the thing because his passive perception is higher than the rest of you rolling 20s."

The solution for this, which D&D will probably never incorporate, is to take a "fail forward" approach to skill checks - assume a qualified character can perform the action, and roll to determine whether or not doing so has unintended consequences, rather than to determine whether or not they succeed in the first place. There's probably even a way to set benchmarks for when you'd do this - say, if you'd succeed on a 10+, your roll is only determining consequences, not success, but if you'd succeed on a 9+, you're hoping to get lucky and succeed.


You're saying that's a million times more viscous than water? Wrong.

I said it was between 100,000 and 1,000,000 times more viscous than water, which, as Xuc Xac mentions, is measurable and has been measured. Molten rock is still rock, not boiling kool-aid.


Yeah, it's dense and you'd float. You'd burn too, but we're ignoring that. It's denser than water, but less dense than mercury. If you were fireproof and dragged under by an asbestos or otherwise fireproof rope while wearing a fireproof aqualung, the pressure wouldn't kill you immediately.

I already agreed with you on that. "This means I should qualify my statement: lava pressure would escalate far more rapidly than water pressure and crush you far more quickly [than water] at a far lesser depth." You're right that it wouldn't be immediate, but the pressure both starts higher and scales differently, and due to the viscosity, it'd be impossible to move voluntarily while submerged. Full submersion in lava would immobilize and crush a person (if they were somehow immune to heat, but we're granting that).

[Jay R]

Alignment. First, the notion that a crucial Law/Chaos axis exists, in defiance of every ethical system in the history of the world.

Second, the idea that good and evil can be defined by game rules, when the greatest philosophers and thinkers in the world have never agreed on it.

I once had my character argue with another by saying, “Yes, well, that’s because you’re a Paladin, sworn to do what’s Lawful and what’s Good. I’m just a Thief, free to do what’s right.”

[halfeye]

That's a 10 meter spray of lava. The smallest "drops" are still fairly big and chunky. If it was as runny as water, it would be breaking up into a fine mist at the edges. Do an image search for a spraying fire hose and see how the water breaks up into very fine droplets that are much, much finer than the lava in that picture.

The "drops" of lava in the picture are typically flat and squarish, with water, droplets are more or less sphereoidal. Obviously, lava is not water. The lava is cooling and rising in viscosity as it leaves the source of the plume.


Water has a viscosity of 0.00089 Pa*s (Pascal seconds). Lava has viscosities ranging from 100 to 1000 Pa*s. It can be objectively measured. The lava in your picture is at the low end of the range which would put it around 10,000 to 100,000 times as viscous as water.

I suspect it's lower than that. However, as you imply it's a guess on my part. Glass has a higher viscosity than water, and lava, until it melts.


I said it was between 100,000 and 1,000,000 times more viscous than water, which, as Xuc Xac mentions, is measurable and has been measured. Molten rock is still rock, not boiling kool-aid.


Rock being rock means it is dense, the viscosity depends on the temperature and pressure. Higher temperature (for a given chemical composition) means lower viscosity.


I already agreed with you on that. "This means I should qualify my statement: lava pressure would escalate far more rapidly than water pressure and crush you far more quickly [than water] at a far lesser depth." You're right that it wouldn't be immediate, but the pressure both starts higher and scales differently, and due to the viscosity, it'd be impossible to move voluntarily while submerged. Full submersion in lava would immobilize and crush a person (if they were somehow immune to heat, but we're granting that).

Syrup and molasses have significantly higher viscosities than water, but you can move in them. To crush a person would require a pressure gradient, which at the surface of a lava flow you won't have. Water kills a lot of people, but mostly not by crushing them. If the density of lava is only three times the density of water, and people can survive to 400ft in water, it follows that it would take 100ft plus depth of lava for the pressure to kill you. You'd burn, obviously, so this is definitely a "don't attempt this at home", but given a theoretic fireproof person, they'd have about 100ft to sort things out.

[Max_Killjoy]

Hit points aren't meat points unless you get hit by a poisoned weapon, bitten by a lycanthrope, or any other attack that causes extra effects on a "hit" that only make sense if a "hit" actually breaks skin. "If HP represent my ability to dodge a deadly blow, why am I taking continuous 'bleeding damage' after dodging that attack?"

Also, healing only makes sense as meat points. Cure Light Wounds restores enough hit points to completely heal a first level wizard or commoner who is well into negative hit points. A high level fighter might consider losing 5% of his total hit points to a battle ax to be a "light wound" but a first level wizard with 4hp probably considers losing 8 points to a battle ax to be a little more serious.


Add to that the fact that dodging/evasion/avoidance is in AC. Or is it in DEX / Reflex Saves?

Most of the excuses given to "justify" the rapidly scaling HP in D&D end up overlapping with some other part of the system.

It's a muddled mess.

[Imbalance]

There's an exponent missing from your logic. Carry a gallon jug full of water on top of your head for several paces, then cover the same distance with a basalt rock of the same volume. Now imagine that difference in heft pushing on every square inch of your body.

[Max_Killjoy]

Alignment. First, the notion that a crucial Law/Chaos axis exists, in defiance of every ethical system in the history of the world.

Second, the idea that good and evil can be defined by game rules, when the greatest philosophers and thinkers in the world have never agreed on it.

I once had my character argue with another by saying, “Yes, well, that’s because you’re a Paladin, sworn to do what’s Lawful and what’s Good. I’m just a Thief, free to do what’s right.”

That's pretty much how I look at it.

In the standard D&D cosmology, there are these forces labelled Good, Evil, Law, and Chaos -- but they might as well be called Up, Left, Blue, and Terrance.

They bear some passing resemblance to moral terms, but at the end of the day, a small-g good person who is concerned with doing the right thing, will just have to ignore all that GELC noise and do the right thing.

[jjordan]

Alignment. First, the notion that a crucial Law/Chaos axis exists, in defiance of every ethical system in the history of the world.

Second, the idea that good and evil can be defined by game rules, when the greatest philosophers and thinkers in the world have never agreed on it.

I once had my character argue with another by saying, “Yes, well, that’s because you’re a Paladin, sworn to do what’s Lawful and what’s Good. I’m just a Thief, free to do what’s right.”
I agree that alignment as written and the established head-canon based on previous editions is pretty weak. But I like it as a general system for establishing motivations regarding NPCs. I classify good as being selfless and evil as being selfish. Lawful is your tendency to obey the rules and/or view the universe as having underlying order and Chaos is a tendency to do what you want/believe is correct. I like this interpretation because it steps further away from some of the black and white interpretations of earlier material. The predominantly lawful evil population of the big city might be more trustworthy than the chaotic good villagers. Detect evil? Sure, but unless you're finding a hidden devil or demon you're not going to learn much.

[halfeye]

There's an exponent missing from your logic. Carry a gallon jug full of water on top of your head for several paces, then cover the same distance with a basalt rock of the same volume. Now imagine that difference in heft pushing on every square inch of your body.

Have you tried lifting a gallon jug? That's heavy.

You don't feel that weight when swimming. That's the difference I'm talking about, the water you swim in is just as heavy as the water you carry, but it doesn't press on you the way you'd perhaps think it would, because it pushes up as well as down.

[jjordan]

The solution for this, which D&D will probably never incorporate, is to take a "fail forward" approach to skill checks - assume a qualified character can perform the action, and roll to determine whether or not doing so has unintended consequences, rather than to determine whether or not they succeed in the first place. There's probably even a way to set benchmarks for when you'd do this - say, if you'd succeed on a 10+, your roll is only determining consequences, not success, but if you'd succeed on a 9+, you're hoping to get lucky and succeed.
I find your idea intriguing and wish to subscribe to your newsletter. More seriously, I took the time to do a site search on this and didn't find a good discussion of this subject. I'd love to see some sort of system that provides decent weighting on the odds of performing a skill.

[Kyutaru]

Characters should die/be seriously crippled more often. Seriously, the constant wear and tear of adventuring on the body, the severe harm that comes to them that should take months if not years to heal from magic or just regular battle wounds, the psychological trauma from facing some truly horrific things, these things should have serious implications. How is every single adventurer not dead or broken in body and spirit at a young age? I want all my barbarians to die before the age of 25, all my wizards to go insane by third level, and to never, ever, play a hero in a fantasy action tabletop RPG. Is that so much to ask?

All perfectly logical assumptions that Japan made when they started their own take on RPGs.

Can't be a hero unless you're 15 and you're probably going to die before 25. Mental trauma doesn't go away, it makes you crazier. That dude with the one arm and the red coat and the missing eye will still ruin your day. But then, the only reason he can even move his body is because he's already dead and just stubbornly refuses to go to the afterlife.

[Max_Killjoy]

8 dmg to a Fighter isn't the same wound as 8 dmg to a wizard. The wizard got impaled, the fighter got scratched.

Plot armor was a thing in the Star Wars rpg too. You can't suffer repeated blaster bolts and be fine. Heck a single disruptor rifle shot is supposed to kill you. Yet the only things that hit your actual Wound points were crits. Everything else just shaved off your screen time, which they called Vitality, and blatantly spelled out that it was just a representation of near hits and grazes meant for cinematic flair. Cause if you actually watch the Star Wars movies -- the heroes almost never get hit at all.

And that stuff -- "a fighter's HP isn't the same as a wizards HP", and "the same exact hit can mean entirely different things" and "HP as plot armor" -- is exactly what needs to be consigned to the burning barrel of bad ideas that have lingered far too long in RPGs.

[Arbane]

And that stuff -- "a fighter's HP isn't the same as a wizards HP", and "the same exact hit can mean entirely different things" and "HP as plot armor" -- is exactly what needs to be consigned to the burning barrel of bad ideas that have lingered far too long in RPGs.

As I'm sure you're aware, most RPGs that aren't D&D or close derivatives have already done just that.


Alignment. First, the notion that a crucial Law/Chaos axis exists, in defiance of every ethical system in the history of the world.

Second, the idea that good and evil can be defined by game rules, when the greatest philosophers and thinkers in the world have never agreed on it.

Fun fact: Law and Chaos came first, because Gygax was a big fan of Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion stories.

[Luccan]

All perfectly logical assumptions that Japan made when they started their own take on RPGs.

Can't be a hero unless you're 15 and you're probably going to die before 25. Mental trauma doesn't go away, it makes you crazier. That dude with the one arm and the red coat and the missing eye will still ruin your day. But then, the only reason he can even move his body is because he's already dead and just stubbornly refuses to go to the afterlife.

In defense of my sarcastic point: perfectly reasonable if that's the tone you're going for. D&D, particularly for the last 3 editions, is not really that. There are variant rules that can push you in that direction, but the base rules and assunptions don't punish your character for being part of the game.

There are drawbacks to playing it that way, but again I don't find it's the lack of realism in certain avenues that frustrates me about the game. And I don't think D&D needs to change in that regard, though I won't begrudge other RPGs for doing so. I just find that too much focus on realism adds an unnecessary level of crunch that slows the game down.

[Kyutaru]

In defense of my sarcastic point: perfectly reasonable if that's the tone you're going for. D&D, particularly for the last 3 editions, is not really that. There are variant rules that can push you in that direction, but the base rules and assunptions don't punish your character for being part of the game.

There are drawbacks to playing it that way, but again I don't find it's the lack of realism in certain avenues that frustrates me about the game. And I don't think D&D needs to change in that regard, though I won't begrudge other RPGs for doing so. I just find that too much focus on realism adds an unnecessary level of crunch that slows the game down.

Could always go the route of combat is incredibly deadly and everyone carries Phoenix Downs.

Nothing quite like getting hit by an attack that reduces your health to 1 no matter how strong you are. The old Harm spell worked like that and it was glorious.

[Lord Torath]

I suspect it's lower than that. However, as you imply it's a guess on my part. Glass has a higher viscosity than water, and lava, until it melts.Glass doesn't have a viscosity until you melt it. It is not a liquid (http://www.math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/General/Glass/glass.html). The ripples you sometimes see in sheets of old glass are a result of the casting process, and nothing else.


Syrup and molasses have significantly higher viscosities than water, but you can move in them. To crush a person would require a pressure gradient, which at the surface of a lava flow you won't have. Water kills a lot of people, but mostly not by crushing them. If the density of lava is only three times the density of water, and people can survive to 400ft in water, it follows that it would take 100ft plus depth of lava for the pressure to kill you. You'd burn, obviously, so this is definitely a "don't attempt this at home", but given a theoretic fireproof person, they'd have about 100ft to sort things out.Oh, never mind (https://www.xkcd.com/386/). Don't guess. Go look it up.

[Lapak]

I once had my character argue with another by saying, “Yes, well, that’s because you’re a Paladin, sworn to do what’s Lawful and what’s Good. I’m just a Thief, free to do what’s right.”
You're highlighting exactly how the alignment system is supposed to work here! Characters of every alignment believe that what they are doing is right; they just have a different idea of what Right is.

If there is a starving person in the street outside a cruel miser's mansion full of gold, your thief (neutral or chaotic good) may say the right thing to do is steal that money and feed the poor man. The miser has no use for it and the starving man does. The lawful good paladin agrees the poor man needs it more, but if the society you are both in is otherwise just then stealing to feed him is a small step towards breaking down that society, leading to more suffering down the line, so he will feed the man out of his own pocket or help them seek out the charity of others. (He may or may not be correct about future outcomes; this is about what both characters believe is right.)

Meanwhile, the lawful evil miser believes you're both making the society he hoards wealth in both weaker and worse by helping the miserable beggar at all; people who aren't strong or clever enough to support themselves don't contribute to the structure that empowers him and are a useless drain.

Disconnect most of the real-world value judgments from the alignment system and it works moderately well as competing philosophies.

[Clistenes]

All perfectly logical assumptions that Japan made when they started their own take on RPGs.

Can't be a hero unless you're 15 and you're probably going to die before 25. Mental trauma doesn't go away, it makes you crazier. That dude with the one arm and the red coat and the missing eye will still ruin your day. But then, the only reason he can even move his body is because he's already dead and just stubbornly refuses to go to the afterlife.

Heh... the way Japanese see age is funny...

They way they portray it, becoming a salaryman or an office lady is pretty much to be a living dead, so they treat people in their early to mid twenties as experienced adults, and people in their late twenties to early thirties as if they were old coots close to the grave... once you become a full adult with a family and a stable job, you pretty much become a NPC robot...

So when some Japanese people are isekai'ed to another world, those wizards or priests or whatever take a look at the 15 years old brat, the 16 years old schoolgirl, the 25 years old independent, working lady and the 30 years old salaryman, they don't say "hey, those adults are in their prime and they look quite mature... let speak to them!", what they say is: "those old couple look like they are about to die of old age, let recruit the kids instead!".

It makes sense if you take into account that adults with stable jobs tend to be seriously overworked, so they tend to be far from fit, while many teens go through draconian training regimes as part of their school clubs, so they would look healthier and stronger, but the problem is, they portray characters from other societies as being just the same... As in, in most fantasy mangas they allow kids to become adventurers, and they retire in their twenties, and that doesn't make sense... It would make more sense to have the kids train until they are adults, then use them while they are in their 20s and 30s.

[Kyutaru]

As in, in most fantasy mangas they allow kids to become adventurers, and they retire in their twenties, and that doesn't make sense... It would make more sense to have the kids train until they are adults, then use them while they are in their 20s and 30s.

Real world militaries tend to view things the same way. Train the 18 year old recruits to die in battle. If they survive to their 20s, they retire to an officer or elite position that has them overseeing more than engaging.

[Clistenes]

Real world militaries tend to view things the same way. Train the 18 year old recruits to die in battle. If they survive to their 20s, they retire to an officer or elite position that has them overseeing more than engaging.

That was true only in countries and ages when governments had enough manpower that they could afford to throw lives away. But that wasn't always the case...

During the XVI-XVII centuries the Spanish Tercios would refuse recruits under 20 years of age. As for those recruits 20 years or older, they were sent to be trained in Italy, where the fighting was less hard and deadly, and they were sent to Flanders or to other dangerous battlefields only once they were fully trained and bloodied...

Also, we aren't speaking about militaries, but about adventurers in japanese manga, anime and RPGs... People let their 15 years kids buy a sword and go out to hunt demons or whatever... And when choosing a hero to send against the Demon Lord, high-ups tend to ignore trained adults and pick a teen...

[halfeye]

Also, we aren't speaking about militaries, but about adventurers in japanese manga, anime and RPGs... People let their 15 years kids buy a sword and go out to hunt demons or whatever... And when choosing a hero to send against the Demon Lord, high-ups tend to ignore trained adults and pick a teen...

It probably relates to the average age of their audience, if that's how old their audience is on average, then that's the probably the age they will set for the characters.

[Draconi Redfir]

Just go "Old School" from the days of 2e and the universal house rules spread at various conventions...

Base Hit Points were your CON SCORE plus a roll of the Hit Die added to that CON score. At each new level, you would roll a new Hit Die and add that to your CON score AS A REPLACEMENT FOR THE PREVIOUSLY ROLLED HIT DIE.. but only IF the roll was bigger than the previous hit die rolled. Otherwise, you would just IGNORE IT and keep the larger previously rolled value.

The second optional rule was to just add 1 HP per Level to the Character's CON score for "non-martial classes" and 2 HP for "martial classes." This gave a predictable progression of HP that helped the DM balance monster and spell damages.

These will give you a better chance of survival at lower levels but increase the threat of death at higher levels. You will have to adjust both Spell Damages and the Damages that some monsters do to restore balance. The "rule of thumb" has always been to just cut damages in half to rebalance, but then 1e and 2e weren't very balanced to begin with.


i don't want a game that gives me fewer hitpoints. i want a game where if a creature hits me for 25% of my health in a single shot, my arm gets permanently lopped off and i suffer some strength or dex penalty until i can get a mechanichal or magical replacement that maybe has some other fun bonuses. like loosing the arm gives me -2 str and dex, but replacing it with a clockwork arm can either give me that +2 Str and dex back, give me only +1 Str and Dex back but is also able to be used as a crossbow or dagger, or maybe even grants me +3 Str and Dex at the price of some skill check or something.

or if i've progressively lost 75% of my health, i should be suffering some reduced attack rolls from getting blood in my eyes and general exhaustion, things like that.

Basically i want more of what you see in "Wildermyth" or "Goblins; Life through their eyes", where battle can and will have consequences for getting hurt, maybe even permanently. but at the same time, there are a multitude of different ways that you can recover from them, but never to the point you started at.

the biggest disappointment in a game I've ever seen is when someone got hit with a critical hit that severed three of their fingers. Their response was to hold the fingers in place with their good hand, chug a healing potion, and the fingers were sealed back in place. they couldn't move or work properly, but that was fixed just a few rounds later with a single heal spell.

[Kyutaru]

i don't want a game that gives me fewer hitpoints. i want a game where if a creature hits me for 25% of my health in a single shot, my arm gets permanently lopped off and i suffer some strength or dex penalty until i can get a mechanichal or magical replacement that maybe has some other fun bonuses. like loosing the arm gives me -2 str and dex, but replacing it with a clockwork arm can either give me that +2 Str and dex back, give me only +1 Str and Dex back but is also able to be used as a crossbow or dagger, or maybe even grants me +3 Str and Dex at the price of some skill check or something.

or if i've progressively lost 75% of my health, i should be suffering some reduced attack rolls from getting blood in my eyes and general exhaustion, things like that.

Seen that in games with cripple/wound systems. You got your eye poked out, your arm is crippled, your leg is broken, etc. Usually happens because one or more crippling wounds were inflicted. Stacking enough of them could worsen the condition. Minor injuries were easy to heal, major injuries were severe and needed surgery or magic, and Critical injuries had permanent lasting effects.

[Jay R]

But I like it as a general system for establishing motivations regarding NPCs.

If, and only if, the only motivations available are good or evil (or "selfless" or"selfish", in your interpretation), and consistent or inconsistent.


I classify good as being selfless and evil as being selfish.

That's one of many gross oversimplifications in vogue. It's often true that they overlap, but they simply don't mean the same thing.

A person who always helps people and always keeps her word because she knows people will treat her better if she does, is both good and selfish.

A tyrant who sacrifices his personal goals and rules mercilessly not because he wants it for himself, but because he mistakenly believes it's best for everybody else, is both selfless and evil.


Lawful is your tendency to obey the rules and/or view the universe as having underlying order and Chaos is a tendency to do what you want/believe is correct.

Therefore somebody who wants to obey the rules, and believes it's correct that the universe has underlying order, is Lawful Chaotic.

But more importantly, no ethical, moral, philosophical, religious, metaphysical, psychological, or spiritual belief system in the history of the world has considered this to be a distinction worth making.


I like this interpretation because it steps further away from some of the black and white interpretations of earlier material. The predominantly lawful evil population of the big city might be more trustworthy than the chaotic good villagers. Detect evil? Sure, but unless you're finding a hidden devil or demon you're not going to learn much.

I understand that you like it for this reason. I dislike it because it is untrue.

--------------------


You're highlighting exactly how the alignment system is supposed to work here! Characters of every alignment believe that what they are doing is right; they just have a different idea of what Right is.

No, most evil people don't care what Right is. [And if chaotic people existed, they wouldn't believe that there was a universal Right.]


Disconnect most of the real-world value judgments from the alignment system and it works moderately well as competing philosophies.

If you disconnect real-world value systems, then the idea of something being good or evil goes with it.

Besides,the idea of "competing philosophies" can only include creatures who have thought-out philosophies and care about competing ones. The explanations for each alignment in the AD&D1 PH were such that I suggested at the time that only PCs who were INT16+/WIS16+ could hold any alignment, because they were philosophical theories, not simple codes:


The "true" neutral looks upon all other alignments as facets of the system of things. Thus, each aspect - evil and good, chaos and law - of things must be retained in balance to maintain the status quo; for things as they are cannot be improved upon except temporarily, and even then but superficially. Nature will prevail and keep things as they were meant to be, provided the "wheel" surrounding the hub of nature does not become unbalanced due to the work of unnatural forces - such as human and other intelligent creatures interfering with what is meant to be.

This is supposed to be the alignment of a ravening wolf. Nonsense.

-----------------


Fun fact: Law and Chaos came first, because Gygax was a big fan of Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion stories.

Yes and no. The words "Law" and "Chaos" came first, but the concepts were clearly Good and Evil. A high level cleric was a Patriarch if Lawful, or an Evil High Priest if Chaotic. The description of reversed clerical spells, and effects of clerics on undead, referred to evil clerics, not chaotic ones. Assassins couldn't be Lawful. Etc.

But many players in the mid-70s, myself included, pointed out that "Lawful" doesn't mean "Good", and "Chaotic" doesn't mean "Evil".

So Gygax had a choice. He could explain its origins and admit that Law meant Good and Chaos meant Evil in his system. He could try to make the morality system realistic (or at least more in line with fantasy literature). Or he could invent a rule that included the Law/Chaos and good/evil axes in ways inconsistent with any fantasy literature or real-world belief system ever written.

Simple explanation, rational thought, or more complicated set of rules? For Gygax, this was always an easy choice.

So we have the nine-way alignment split, which can never be reconciled with either the actual world or with any fantasy world (even Moorcock's, where the original idea started).

And the arguments of what each category actually meant started then, and have never stopped. Nobody has ever come up with the final answer, and nobody here will, either. There is no final answer (as we are showing in this thread) because there is no actual real-world nine-way alignment system to compare opposing theories to.

[Draconi Redfir]

Seen that in games with cripple/wound systems. You got your eye poked out, your arm is crippled, your leg is broken, etc. Usually happens because one or more crippling wounds were inflicted. Stacking enough of them could worsen the condition. Minor injuries were easy to heal, major injuries were severe and needed surgery or magic, and Critical injuries had permanent lasting effects.

combined with the right world where things like messing with a magical statue could give you a magical replacement eye or something, then that could actually be really interesting.

[Arbane]

i don't want a game that gives me fewer hitpoints. i want a game where if a creature hits me for 25% of my health in a single shot, my arm gets permanently lopped off and i suffer some strength or dex penalty until i can get a mechanichal or magical replacement that maybe has some other fun bonuses. like loosing the arm gives me -2 str and dex, but replacing it with a clockwork arm can either give me that +2 Str and dex back, give me only +1 Str and Dex back but is also able to be used as a crossbow or dagger, or maybe even grants me +3 Str and Dex at the price of some skill check or something.


Because meleers in D&D don't have it tough enough already.

[olskool]

i don't want a game that gives me fewer hitpoints. i want a game where if a creature hits me for 25% of my health in a single shot, my arm gets permanently lopped off and i suffer some strength or dex penalty until i can get a mechanichal or magical replacement that maybe has some other fun bonuses. like loosing the arm gives me -2 str and dex, but replacing it with a clockwork arm can either give me that +2 Str and dex back, give me only +1 Str and Dex back but is also able to be used as a crossbow or dagger, or maybe even grants me +3 Str and Dex at the price of some skill check or something.

or if i've progressively lost 75% of my health, i should be suffering some reduced attack rolls from getting blood in my eyes and general exhaustion, things like that.

Basically i want more of what you see in "Wildermyth" or "Goblins; Life through their eyes", where battle can and will have consequences for getting hurt, maybe even permanently. but at the same time, there are a multitude of different ways that you can recover from them, but never to the point you started at.

the biggest disappointment in a game I've ever seen is when someone got hit with a critical hit that severed three of their fingers. Their response was to hold the fingers in place with their good hand, chug a healing potion, and the fingers were sealed back in place. they couldn't move or work properly, but that was fixed just a few rounds later with a single heal spell.

Then you want to play Runequest, Basic Roleplaying (BRP), Mythras or one of the many clones thereof. NOTHING says BRP-based gaming like the all too frequent amputations that occur once the hitpoints per location are exceeded by 3 times the base total (in the latest versions anyway).

[Tanarii]

Basically i want more of what you see in "Wildermyth" or "Goblins; Life through their eyes", where battle can and will have consequences for getting hurt, maybe even permanently. but at the same time, there are a multitude of different ways that you can recover from them, but never to the point you started at.
AKA the death spiral. Every character you roll up eventually dies a bloody death by inches, due to accumulated penalties. Warhammer games can look something like that at times. Although more often you just end gorily as soon as something gets past your wounds.


Because meleers in D&D don't have it tough enough already.
The death spiral is certainly appropriate for people that get into melee combat and continue doing so after taking grievous wounds that never fully heal in terms of real world "logic".

[Draconi Redfir]

Well the whole lost-limb thing doesn't need to happen EVERY fight of course. but it'd be nice if something interesting happened every so often that you weren't expecting.

[Florian]

Because meleers in D&D don't have it tough enough already.

The game systems that use the death spiral or permanent wounds are set up quite differently from D&D, tho. They have multiple layers of active defenses (parry, dodge, block), followed by the passive defense of armor, that has to be broken through. Their actual achilles heel is rather how long they can endure a serious beating/assault.

[Arbane]

The game systems that use the death spiral or permanent wounds are set up quite differently from D&D, tho. They have multiple layers of active defenses (parry, dodge, block), followed by the passive defense of armor, that has to be broken through. Their actual achilles heel is rather how long they can endure a serious beating/assault.

Oh, I know that. But D&D has NONE of those things, so tacking permanent crippling rules onto D&D is a terrible idea.

[Morgaln]

i don't want a game that gives me fewer hitpoints. i want a game where if a creature hits me for 25% of my health in a single shot, my arm gets permanently lopped off and i suffer some strength or dex penalty until i can get a mechanichal or magical replacement that maybe has some other fun bonuses. like loosing the arm gives me -2 str and dex, but replacing it with a clockwork arm can either give me that +2 Str and dex back, give me only +1 Str and Dex back but is also able to be used as a crossbow or dagger, or maybe even grants me +3 Str and Dex at the price of some skill check or something.

or if i've progressively lost 75% of my health, i should be suffering some reduced attack rolls from getting blood in my eyes and general exhaustion, things like that.

Basically i want more of what you see in "Wildermyth" or "Goblins; Life through their eyes", where battle can and will have consequences for getting hurt, maybe even permanently. but at the same time, there are a multitude of different ways that you can recover from them, but never to the point you started at.

the biggest disappointment in a game I've ever seen is when someone got hit with a critical hit that severed three of their fingers. Their response was to hold the fingers in place with their good hand, chug a healing potion, and the fingers were sealed back in place. they couldn't move or work properly, but that was fixed just a few rounds later with a single heal spell.

To be honest, I don't get why people want this in a fantasy RPG, when many Sci-Fi settings already provide that kind of feature with less explaining to do. Games like Cyberpunk and Shadowrun thrive on this kind of body part replacement mechanic, and with Shadowrun, you even have magical aspects to the setting that keep it from being pure Sci-Fi. I don't understand why there is a need to transplant (hah!) limb replacement into a faux-medieval setting that already has magical healing as a way to deal with these issues. Then again, I never understood why D&D needed a fantasy version of the cyborg in form of the warforged either

[Arkhios]

At the risk of being a massive jerk (which I, apparently, happen to be once in a while)...

It's a fantasy game. Fantasy don't have to make perfect sense in terms of Real World physics and logic, otherwise it wouldn't be fantasy.

Especially with a game that involves large amounts of magic being all over the place, any presumptions of Real World Logic can be thrown out of the window, because magic is magic. And, if we're being serious, magic isn't real. Real World doesn't have magic as far as I can tell (then again, I'm not terribly religious and generally believe scientific discoveries more than people with eccentric ideas about earth being flat and what not :smallbiggrin:)

[Malphegor]

It is said on these forums, that you can be mechanically strong enough with Hulking Hurler and War Hulk pre-epic in 3.5 to PICK UP THE PLANET AND THROW IT AT SOMEONE ON THAT PLANET which is the most anime thing I have heard and is based on weird multiplying bonuses...

But despite your incredible strength and throwing ability, you can't jump that impressively. Because that's additive, not multiplicative.

Like, Day 1 Hulk could jump super high through sheer strength, but a PC who can pick up the planet they're on can't.

[Hytheter]

It is said on these forums, that you can be mechanically strong enough with Hulking Hurler and War Hulk pre-epic in 3.5 to PICK UP THE PLANET AND THROW IT AT SOMEONE ON THAT PLANET which is the most anime thing I have heard and is based on weird multiplying bonuses...

Wow someone please tell me more about this

[Kyutaru]

Fantasy readers: "Axes and swords are brute strength weapons while bows require finesse"
Actual weaponry: "You can't pull back a bow? Either bench more or go grab yourself an axe, weakling!"

D&D bows must all be made with magic wood. The weaker you are, the easier it is to use one. Meanwhile, the weapons that take no effort to use are the primary Strength-melee ones.

[gkathellar]

Fantasy readers: "Axes and swords are brute strength weapons while bows require finesse"
Actual weaponry: "You can't pull back a bow? Either bench more or go grab yourself an axe, weakling!"

D&D bows must all be made with magic wood. The weaker you are, the easier it is to use one. Meanwhile, the weapons that take no effort to use are the primary Strength-melee ones.

I'm totally with you on bows, but it's worth noting that anyone weapon - yes, even a fencing epee - requires a lot of strength and endurance to even learn to use, much less really wield in a combat situation. And of course every weapon requires precision and finesse, so ... really, everything should be using both stats.

The real issue imo is that neither Strength nor Dexterity nor Constitution is something that maps to reality, where you have fast-twitch muscles and slow-twitch muscles at varying level of size, quality, and density, and then bone density and tendon strength and oxygen absorption and a whole bunch of other factors that mean all forms of physical conditioning are interconnected in practice.

[Malphegor]

Wow someone please tell me more about this


This thread goes into it some: http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?166459-(3-5)What-is-it-that-makes-the-Hulking-Hurler-War-Hulk-so-powerful
and so does
http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?121355-What-s-so-wrong-with-Hulking-Hurler/page2

It's ignoring the rules on thrown objects generally being capped at 20d6 (which I legit did not know until I looked up the method), but with various boosts (items and spells and drugs) to STR and carrying capacity, as well as being Large, you start off Dorothy Gale-ing your foes with houses, and eventually start reaching the point where you should technically be able to toss celestial bodies if I'm reading it right.

[Max_Killjoy]

I'm totally with you on bows, but it's worth noting that anyone weapon - yes, even a fencing epee - requires a lot of strength and endurance to even learn to use, much less really wield in a combat situation. And of course every weapon requires precision and finesse, so ... really, everything should be using both stats.

The real issue imo is that neither Strength nor Dexterity nor Constitution is something that maps to reality, where you have fast-twitch muscles and slow-twitch muscles at varying level of size, quality, and density, and then bone density and tendon strength and oxygen absorption and a whole bunch of other factors that mean all forms of physical conditioning are interconnected in practice.

If they wanted my input on a hypothetical 6e of D&D, I'd say give every weapon a STR minimum, even a low minimum for daggers and the like; base all to-hit bonuses on DEX, and base all damage bonuses on STR. Then, some Class abilities and Feats would allow the character to use DEX for both, or STR for both, or maybe some other Ability (such as INT for the right hypothetical "I know just where to hit them" thing).

[Kyutaru]

If they wanted my input on a hypothetical 6e of D&D, I'd say give every weapon a STR minimum, even a low minimum for daggers and the like; base all to-hit bonuses on DEX, and base all damage bonuses on STR. Then, some Class abilities and Feats would allow the character to use DEX for both, or STR for both, or maybe some other Ability (such as INT for the right hypothetical "I know just where to hit them" thing).

Many of the more accurate RPGs out there base weapon use requirement minimums on BOTH Strength and Dexterity in varying quantities based on weapon. So to use a Broadsword you might need 16 STR and 14 DEX.

[Draconi Redfir]

To be honest, I don't get why people want this in a fantasy RPG, when many Sci-Fi settings already provide that kind of feature with less explaining to do. Games like Cyberpunk and Shadowrun thrive on this kind of body part replacement mechanic, and with Shadowrun, you even have magical aspects to the setting that keep it from being pure Sci-Fi. I don't understand why there is a need to transplant (hah!) limb replacement into a faux-medieval setting that already has magical healing as a way to deal with these issues. Then again, I never understood why D&D needed a fantasy version of the cyborg in form of the warforged either

because what's more interesting: Your arm gets chopped off and you immediately grow a new one / get it re-attached?

or you leave it as is, and then later on, wander some magical woods, get a splinter that you can't pull out in time, and then find yourself bonding with the spirit of an ancient oak tree, which then results in your missing arm growing back as a magical wooden hand capable of growing a non-magical light weapon for you once per day?

[patchyman]

If they wanted my input on a hypothetical 6e of D&D, I'd say give every weapon a STR minimum, even a low minimum for daggers and the like; base all to-hit bonuses on DEX, and base all damage bonuses on STR. Then, some Class abilities and Feats would allow the character to use DEX for both, or STR for both, or maybe some other Ability (such as INT for the right hypothetical "I know just where to hit them" thing).

This would lead to the 3e problems where to play a melee class you needed Dex and Str and Con, but if you wanted to play a caster, all you needed was your casting stat. This is not a period I wish to revisit.

[Max_Killjoy]

This would lead to the 3e problems where to play a melee class you needed Dex and Str and Con, but if you wanted to play a caster, all you needed was your casting stat. This is not a period I wish to revisit.

If taken in isolation, that could very well be true.

It's not the only change I'd make. :smallsmile:

[Kyutaru]

This would lead to the 3e problems where to play a melee class you needed Dex and Str and Con, but if you wanted to play a caster, all you needed was your casting stat. This is not a period I wish to revisit.

Might be time to update casters to use Int and Wis and Cha. Wisdom as their defense stat, Intelligence as their speed stat, and Charisma as their power stat. Wizards use Int the way Rogues use Dex while most non-divines sport Charisma for mental strength. The holy magics meanwhile are so defense-based that it's no wonder they're healing specialists.

[Willie the Duck]

Might be time to update casters to use Int and Wis and Cha. Wisdom as their defense stat, Intelligence as their speed stat, and Charisma as their power stat. Wizards use Int the way Rogues use Dex while most non-divines sport Charisma for mental strength. The holy magics meanwhile are so defense-based that it's no wonder they're healing specialists.

That would make the caster-martial split balanced, but makes me wonder if the entire point of stats has been missed and they have become a goal unto themselves.

[Talakeal]

That would make the caster-martial split balanced, but makes me wonder if the entire point of stats has been missed and they have become a goal unto themselves.

And "the entire point of stats" is?

[MrSandman]

And "the entire point of stats" is?

To force players to dump at least one. Bonus points if dumping it doesn't have any effects on mechanics and/or roleplay.

[PhoenixPhyre]

That would make the caster-martial split balanced, but makes me wonder if the entire point of stats has been missed and they have become a goal unto themselves.

Yeah. I don't see stats as trying to simulate discrete elements, but rather as trying to enable archetypes. Are you "the buff guy" type? Have a good STR score and choose a class/approach (including combat) that plays to that archetype. This goes along with mighty thews and big weapons, as well as a blunt attitude to things.

Are you a speedster or a back-line type that tries to avoid direct confrontation? DEX is your thing. And since ranged weapons like bows are typical of that type (the sniper, the ambusher, the archer; none of them are conventionally huge), bows use DEX.

CON is good for everyone, but it's about being hearty. Frail person? Low CON. Hale and hearty? High CON.

Are you the "nerd" type, always wanting to know details about things? High INT. INT is bookishness more than IQ.

Are you in-tune with people and things around you, always paying attention and intuitively understanding people and situations? High WIS. Note: there's a conflation here (accidental) between good decisions (the common meaning of wisdom), which aren't an ability-related thing at all, and perceptiveness (modern Wisdom scores)

Are you a people-person or have a high sense of self? CHA. Paladins get it because the Shining Knight archetype brings in a lot of "leader of men" vibe. This one is probably the most over-extended ability score IMO.

But the key is that they're there to enable archetypes, not to model things like grip strength, fast- vs slow-twitch musculature, etc.

[The Glyphstone]

Am I the only person who enjoyed 4E's ability to play with unconventional key stats? I had a Dragonborn Sorcerer who was basically FMA's Alex Armstrong since his magic keyed off STR, and I adored him.

[Max_Killjoy]

Yeah. I don't see stats as trying to simulate discrete elements, but rather as trying to enable archetypes. Are you "the buff guy" type? Have a good STR score and choose a class/approach (including combat) that plays to that archetype. This goes along with mighty thews and big weapons, as well as a blunt attitude to things.

Are you a speedster or a back-line type that tries to avoid direct confrontation? DEX is your thing. And since ranged weapons like bows are typical of that type (the sniper, the ambusher, the archer; none of them are conventionally huge), bows use DEX.

CON is good for everyone, but it's about being hearty. Frail person? Low CON. Hale and hearty? High CON.

Are you the "nerd" type, always wanting to know details about things? High INT. INT is bookishness more than IQ.

Are you in-tune with people and things around you, always paying attention and intuitively understanding people and situations? High WIS. Note: there's a conflation here (accidental) between good decisions (the common meaning of wisdom), which aren't an ability-related thing at all, and perceptiveness (modern Wisdom scores)

Are you a people-person or have a high sense of self? CHA. Paladins get it because the Shining Knight archetype brings in a lot of "leader of men" vibe. This one is probably the most over-extended ability score IMO.

But the key is that they're there to enable archetypes, not to model things like grip strength, fast- vs slow-twitch musculature, etc.

Then don't even have stats. Just have the archetypes.

Meanwhile, as far as I'm concerned, the stats are there to represent something about the character-as-person, not the character-as-trope.



Am I the only person who enjoyed 4E's ability to play with unconventional key stats? I had a Dragonborn Sorcerer who was basically FMA's Alex Armstrong since his magic keyed off STR, and I adored him.

I think it's an idea with significant potential.

[gkathellar]

Am I the only person who enjoyed 4E's ability to play with unconventional key stats? I had a Dragonborn Sorcerer who was basically FMA's Alex Armstrong since his magic keyed off STR, and I adored him.

I'm with you. The mental/physical attribute split between fighters and casters bugs me to no end, because there's no particular reason it should be the case other than (mistaken) notions about athletes being dumb and a supposed need for symmetry. Athletics require all sorts of mental conditioning, and since magic is nonsense that we can do whatever with, we can easily imagine that it would require physical conditioning.

My bitter speculation, from seeing people excuse this by saying, "oh but magic is just like , see," is that this is really a way of keeping magic out of the hands of the jocks. It's ours, damn it.


Then don't even have stats. Just have the archetypes.

Meanwhile, as far as I'm concerned, the stats are there to represent something about the character-as-person, not the character-as-trope.

I would say that dropping attributes is probably the right move in a lot of respects, but the trick is, people really [I]like attributes, and they contribute a lot to how you perceive your character. If a player's concept includes, "oh and he's supah stronk," then being able to put that supah stronkness right at the middle of the sheet, and factor it in as a central number to a bunch of prominently featured calculations, often does a lot of heavy lifting for their ability to appreciate their character.

Perception counts for a lot in game design, for better or worse.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Then don't even have stats. Just have the archetypes.

Meanwhile, as far as I'm concerned, the stats are there to represent something about the character-as-person, not the character-as-trope.


You'll never, ever, ever, under any circumstances be able to meaningfully sum up a person in 6 numbers. The parameter space is just too large. And adding more numbers just increases complexity without actually increasing the resolution much IMO.

Stats are a partial mechanical representation of archetype, with added flexibility. It also allows you to play against type, knowing that you're doing so. Treating it as anything else is just a guarantee of dissatisfaction. Like it or not, modern editions of D&D have decided to go all-in with archetypes. And my players, at least, enjoy that. They like thinking in those terms. So it's a matter of taste, not an objective matter.

[Max_Killjoy]

You'll never, ever, ever, under any circumstances be able to meaningfully sum up a person in 6 numbers. The parameter space is just too large. And adding more numbers just increases complexity without actually increasing the resolution much IMO.

Stats are a partial mechanical representation of archetype, with added flexibility. It also allows you to play against type, knowing that you're doing so. Treating it as anything else is just a guarantee of dissatisfaction. Like it or not, modern editions of D&D have decided to go all-in with archetypes. .

Or, perhaps, it's a guarantee of your dissatisfaction.

Whenever the subject of system-as-model/map comes up, you come across as very much determined to let the perfect be the enemy of the good -- that if one can't develop a perfect model, or a perfect and detailed "fictional physics", then one should not even bother trying, and there's no such thing as good enough that's short of perfect.

You're right, six Abilities, or specifically the six in D&D, aren't enough. CHA is a mashup of unrelated things. DEX probably needs to be split between manual deftness, and agility, at the very least. Etc. That doesn't mean that some higher number of stats can never be "good enough".

[Willie the Duck]

And "the entire point of stats" is?

Sorry, I could have been more clear. Stats, like any other bit of the rules, exist to facilitate gameplay. Yes, they also exist to emulate some kind of real-world quality, however, having them being a front-and-center part of the rules structure exists to serve the game. As a portion of the rules, they literally do not have to be there. If we're making convoluted combinations of mental-social stats just so both martial and magical characters end up using the exact same number of stats (to achieve a supposed parity), it seems that the game rules have been radically altered (and the mental and social stats have been vaguely warped from whatever dynamic they had before they became magical-performance-facilitators. That, to me, seems like attributes, as a rules structure, has become a goal onto itself, divorced from any original purpose. Perhaps at that point, it might be good to start asking what's the point of having this rules structure at all?

[Kyutaru]

Sorry, I could have been more clear. Stats, like any other bit of the rules, exist to facilitate gameplay. Yes, they also exist to emulate some kind of real-world quality, however, having them being a front-and-center part of the rules structure exists to serve the game. As a portion of the rules, they literally do not have to be there. If we're making convoluted combinations of mental-social stats just so both martial and magical characters end up using the exact same number of stats (to achieve a supposed parity), it seems that the game rules have been radically altered (and the mental and social stats have been vaguely warped from whatever dynamic they had before they became magical-performance-facilitators. That, to me, seems like attributes, as a rules structure, has become a goal onto itself, divorced from any original purpose. Perhaps at that point, it might be good to start asking what's the point of having this rules structure at all?

Thing is, physical stats are already that convoluted. Making mental stats similarly complex would change nothing about roleplay and the skills the stats are associated with. All it would do is render caster archetypes as complex and thoughtful as their physical counterparts.

God knows there are players who would gladly use the 25 point buy system to get the following stats:

Str 8
Dex 8
Con 8
Int 27
Wis 8
Cha 8

And that's just not right. The stats and roleplaying are fine. What's not fine is that only martial classes seem to absolutely depend on stat synergy, minimum requirements, and ample amounts of feats.

[SimonMoon6]

One of the things that drives me nuts in D&D is anything that treats PCs differently from NPCs for no reason.
.

I agree with this. I would add as an example, Diplomacy. It has 0 effect on a PC, no matter what. A 100th level Diplomancer with a Diplomacy skill of 1000 (from various modifiers) somehow can have no effect on the weakest 1st level PC.

[Kyutaru]

Or, perhaps, it's a guarantee of your dissatisfaction.

Whenever the subject of system-as-model/map comes up, you come across as very much determined to let the perfect be the enemy of the good -- that if one can't develop a perfect model, or a perfect and detailed "fictional physics", then one should not even bother trying, and there's no such thing as good enough that's short of perfect.

You're right, six Abilities, or specifically the six in D&D, aren't enough. CHA is a mashup of unrelated things. DEX probably needs to be split between manual deftness, and agility, at the very least. Etc. That doesn't mean that some higher number of stats can never be "good enough".

The six stat setup may be bad for D&D but White Wolf's World of Darkness has hordes of stats and skills you can raise and it doesn't make a more in-depth character. Ultimately all you're doing is picking from a list of abilities similar to choosing feats. They tell WHAT your character can do but never what kind of person he is.

If you're to do away with stats as a whole then they need to be replaced with class-specific stats. Then each character class is independent from the rest of the system can be balanced or buffed or nerfed according to their own stat conceptualization. It fits Real World Logic a bit better because there's no reason a Computer Programmer needs to worry about how high his Sports attribute happens to be unless he wants some water cooler talking points. All he needs to focus on is his Coding, Design, Hardware, Software, and Mental Anguish stats.

[Max_Killjoy]

The six stat setup may be bad for D&D but White Wolf's World of Darkness has hordes of stats and skills you can raise and it doesn't make a more in-depth character. Ultimately all you're doing is picking from a list of abilities similar to choosing feats. They tell WHAT your character can do but never what kind of person he is.


In the context of D&D's Abilities, oWoD had its nine Attributes. (Strength, Dexterity, Stamina, Charisma, Manipulation, Appearance, Wits, Intelligence, Perception). Also not a perfect breakdown, just different.

But what would make you think that either one is supposed to encompass "what kind of person" the character is?




If you're to do away with stats as a whole then they need to be replaced with class-specific stats. Then each character class is independent from the rest of the system can be balanced or buffed or nerfed according to their own stat conceptualization. It fits Real World Logic a bit better because there's no reason a Computer Programmer needs to worry about how high his Sports attribute happens to be unless he wants some water cooler talking points. All he needs to focus on is his Coding, Design, Hardware, Software, and Mental Anguish stats.


Though, that's not how real people work, either. Or maybe I just know a lot of people who aren't "optimized".

[Kyutaru]

In the context of D&D's Abilities, oWoD had it's nine Attributes.

But what would make you think that either one is supposed to encompass "what kind of person" the character is?
Oh I don't. My point was that six stats, nine stats, a hundred stats, you're not going to know that regardless. Stats are stats for the mechanical benefit and little else. Even the low intelligence guy might roll a 20 and accomplish something genius. But what they do offer is similar to Fallout or other RPGs a way of distributing your performance metrics in a meaningful way that comes with cost and benefit analysis. All that's needed to make it more meaningful is assigning a purpose for those stats to be desirable even to archetypes that don't use them ordinarily.


Though, that's not how real people work, either. Or maybe I just know a lot of people who aren't "optimized".
Yep, real people aren't quantifiable. But the profession itself can be. Having stats related to your job makes sense. Your boss already measures your productivity and other HR stats. So if you're planning on vacating the standard six, replacing them with strictly mechanical ones per archetype is the next goal.

[Max_Killjoy]

Oh I don't. My point was that six stats, nine stats, a hundred stats, you're not going to know that regardless. Stats are stats for the mechanical benefit and little else. Even the low intelligence guy might roll a 20 and accomplish something genius. But what they do offer is similar to Fallout or other RPGs a way of distributing your performance metrics in a meaningful way that comes with cost and benefit analysis. All that's needed to make it more meaningful is assigning a purpose for those stats to be desirable even to archetypes that don't use them ordinarily.


My stance is that the stats -- Abilities in D&D, in this case, but also Skills in that system -- are there to map the character's basic capabilities and aptitudes and knowledge into the system, to represent those capabilities in shorthand. That's what the similar values do in a system like HERO.




Yep, real people aren't quantifiable. But the profession itself can be. Having stats related to your job makes sense. Your boss already measures your productivity and other HR stats. So if you're planning on vacating the standard six, replacing them with strictly mechanical ones per archetype is the next goal.


Not my plan, my plan would be to get rid of archetypes entirely.

The point is that if you're going to treat D&D Abilities as "enabling archetypes", you just skip the noise and go straight to the archetypes, a sort of "all in" on FATE's Aspects.

[Talakeal]

My stance is that the stats -- Abilities in D&D, in this case, but also Skills in that system -- are there to map the character's basic capabilities and aptitudes and knowledge into the system, to represent those capabilities in shorthand. That's what the similar values do in a system like HERO.




Not my plan, my plan would be to get rid of archetypes entirely.

The point is that if you're going to treat D&D Abilities as "enabling archetypes", you just skip the noise and go straight to the archetypes, a sort of "all in" on FATE's Aspects.

Especially when you consider that D&D is already a class based system to force people into archetypes.

[Arbane]

And "the entire point of stats" is?

To validate the self-worth of the people who rolled high, of course.


because what's more interesting: Your arm gets chopped off and you immediately grow a new one / get it re-attached?

or you leave it as is, and then later on, wander some magical woods, get a splinter that you can't pull out in time, and then find yourself bonding with the spirit of an ancient oak tree, which then results in your missing arm growing back as a magical wooden hand capable of growing a non-magical light weapon for you once per day?

What could possibly be more interesting than being unable to do your chosen role for multiple sessions while the other player characters debate whether to just dump you in the next town with a tin cup or keep carrying you and hope for Divine Intervention?

[PhoenixPhyre]

Especially when you consider that D&D is already a class based system to force people into archetypes.

There are multiple cross-cutting layers of archetypes, and having ability scores not directly and uniquely tied to class-level archetypes lets you have variety within unity. If you only have a "high concept", you miss out on that granularity of diversity. You get the same basic package, just flavored in different ways. In a limited sense, 4e made this same mistake--since every role could be handled by multiple classes using multiple stats, the classes were no longer enough to describe an archetype and everything blended together.

It's the intersection of class, race, and ability scores that defines a character's approach to things and their full archetype set.

You can have two different archetypal "Strong Guys" that play very differently, despite sharing archetypes.

Consider a Goliath Barbarian: High STR, medium DEX, high CON, low mental scores. He's the "strong guy" who is also the "angry guy" and the "unsocial guy". He mainly depends on physical force and endurance to solve problems, butting through them directly.

Now consider a different barbarian: High STR, average DEX, average CON, low INT, average WIS, medium-high CHA. He's also the Strong Angry Guy (in combat), but he's sociable and charming while not being bookish. Wears medium armor to compensate for his sub-par (relative to #1) DEX/CON.

A third barbarian might be the Strong Angry Smart Guy: High STR, average CON, high INT, average WIS, low CHA. A nerd's nerd, except that he believes in muscle magic (I cast FIST). Carries books with him and quotes from abstruse philosophers, but wields a mean axe.

All of these have overlapping archetypes as well as differing ones. The ability scores relate to those archetypes, not to literal measurements of muscle power, IQ, etc. They're emblematic of approaches that the character will invest in. Sure, you can have a low-int Wizard (theoretically). I'm not sure why you would want to, and it certainly isn't the place of the designers to stop you from doing stupid things intentionally. The "safe path" for each archetype bundle (class) is obvious and stated. You can go away from that (they are descriptive archetypes, not prescriptive archetypes), but at your own mechanical risk.

[Kyutaru]

You can have two different archetypal "Strong Guys" that play very differently, despite sharing archetypes.

Consider a Goliath Barbarian: High STR, medium DEX, high CON, low mental scores. He's the "strong guy" who is also the "angry guy" and the "unsocial guy". He mainly depends on physical force and endurance to solve problems, butting through them directly.

Now consider a different barbarian: High STR, average DEX, average CON, low INT, average WIS, medium-high CHA. He's also the Strong Angry Guy (in combat), but he's sociable and charming while not being bookish. Wears medium armor to compensate for his sub-par (relative to #1) DEX/CON.

A third barbarian might be the Strong Angry Smart Guy: High STR, average CON, high INT, average WIS, low CHA. A nerd's nerd, except that he believes in muscle magic (I cast FIST). Carries books with him and quotes from abstruse philosophers, but wields a mean axe.

I was going to mention the same thing but I looked up the FATE system they mentioned first. It has this thing referred to as Aspects that can still provide this distinction of roleplaying flair independent of stats themselves. Basically, you get to choose if you're the smart guy, the antisocial guy, whatever. It's like a background selection or a perk pick in Fallout.

It's possible to remove attributes, switch to an archetype-aspect system, and not really lose much.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I was going to mention the same thing but I looked up the FATE system they mentioned first. It has this thing referred to as Aspects that can still provide this distinction of roleplaying flair independent of stats themselves. Basically, you get to choose if you're the smart guy, the antisocial guy, whatever. It's like a background selection or a perk pick in Fallout.

It's possible to remove attributes, switch to an archetype-aspect system, and not really lose much.

Sure. You can do a lot of things. But you also lose a lot of mechanical representation power by doing so, because those are binary rather than multi-valued. How much does that matter? Depends on the person and the campaign.

I find D&D-style works well when you come at the game fresh and build a character starting from a broad archetype and working toward the specific, rather than trying to instantiate an existing (even if just in the head) character in this system. It's a matter of matching assumptions.

When I'm helping people build characters for 5e (99% of whom are new to the system and to TTRPGs generally, with many new to RPGs), I do the following.
* Present the available races (a subset of the total, based on the campaign world). I describe these thematically and culturally, rather than mechanically. They pick which one sounds interesting.
* Present the available classes as bundles of archetypes and approaches. I've made cards with a bullet-point list of "strengths" and "weaknesses" as well as a "default archetype". They pick the one that sounds interesting.
* Assign the highest stat to the class's primary stat.
* Develop a personality, using the Background as a helper.
* Assign a positive modifier to CON
* Go down the list of the remaining ones, working each into the background. I ask questions like "You said he was a country boy. How did he solve his problems?" and then placing high stats in the places that make sense, getting confirmation each time.
* Make any final choices based on the personality that's been developed, using the stats as a feedback mechanism.

This narrative building helps both me and them to figure out who the person really is and how their stats fit. If we run into issues, we roll things back and retry a different route. The multi-layered approach hasn't given me issues yet, to be honest.

[Max_Killjoy]

Do one, or do the other. Don't try to split the difference. This whole "well you have to start with an archetype but then you can kinda sorta make a person within that archetype" thing just ends up making two implicit promises and then breaking both of them.

Either have a system that actually lets you create the character-as-person, or don't. Either have a system that openly does character-as-archetype, or don't.

If you're going to treat the character as a person, and represent that person, then go all-in on "stats" and forget the archetype straightjackets entirely.

If you're going to treat the character as representing an archetype, then don't pretend anything else, and just do away with the "stats" and have the archetypes with their archetypal abilities and their archetypal personalities and their archetypal etc.

The character can't be both. They can't be an archetype -- a trope, a cliche, a stereotype -- and at the same time be an actual person (even if just a "fictional" person-who-could-be-real). Real people are not archetypes, they're not memes, they're not tropes.

[Draconi Redfir]

[FONT=Comic Sans MS]What could possibly be more interesting than being unable to do your chosen role for multiple sessions while the other player characters debate whether to just dump you in the next town with a tin cup or keep carrying you and hope for Divine Intervention?

"When you roll with the punches, you find yourself at a new angle to explore and take advantage of.

When you stand perfectly still and face the punch head-on, you get a broken and bloody nose."

-Me, just now, 2019.

Honestly kind of shocked you'd react that way, it's not the end of the world if you can't do one thing all of a sudden, and even then, there's no guarantee that you'll be unable to do your chosen role. And if it DOES prevent you from doing that, a good DM would either let you take a hook, peg-leg, or other prosthetic to allow you to continue with some creative thinking, or allow you to swap out some feats so you're not walking around with useless ones.

if the other PC's would literally debate whether or not to dump you out of the party, then honestly, you need better friends. those ones are *******s.

[PhoenixPhyre]

The character can't be both. They can't be an archetype -- a trope, a cliche, a stereotype -- and at the same time be an actual person (even if just a "fictional" person-who-could-be-real). Real people are not archetypes, they're not memes, they're not tropes.

I disagree completely, based on long and repeated experience both in real life and in game. Archetypes describe but do not prescribe behavior. They're tags that can be applied wherever they fit.

I've seen many characters who fit archetypes very cleanly and were actual people with real personalities that could exist in the fictional setting. One current character fits the classic Rogue archetype 100%, but he's got a personality, he's got ties to the setting, his path through the setting is clear. For that matter, I'm a real person who fits the Nerd archetype completely. Yet I'm also more than that.

I've seen many characters who fit archetypes very cleanly but weren't actual people in their setting. Lots of fiction comes to mind. These are stock characters. I had a character in a game who was Barbarian, and only that. Everything was tailored to that archetype/stereotype with nothing left. Fun, but ultimately forgettable.

I've seen many characters who did not fit any clean archetypes (being a mishmash of abilities and traits) yet were real people. I've got a fighter in a game currently who you'd never know was a fighter except by his armor and weapon (which he rarely used). Distinct person? Absolutely. Archetypal person? Not at all.

I've seen many characters who did not fit any clean archetypes and weren't real people either. These are the "optimized bags of stats" characters. Paladins who didn't hold to any Oath in observed behavior, and didn't have any personality beyond "I make big numbers". In fact, this is the most common destination for those who reject archetypes in an archetype-driven game.

I've seen may characters somewhere in the middle. Partial archetype match + some personality without distinction. This is probably the most common. Because getting away from archetypes is hard for most people, and making full characters is hard for most people. And that's ok, especially in a game.

Archetype (especially mechanical archetype) and characterization are orthogonal. Different systems are different and cater toward different styles. Personally, I'd rather have someone who personifies an archetype with no further personality over someone who doesn't do either. Because at least they have something going for them. Between the other two extremes, I'm happier (slightly) with the archetype + personality case, but I'm fine with either. YMMV.

[Jay R]

Do one, or do the other. Don't try to split the difference. This whole "well you have to start with an archetype but then you can kinda sorta make a person within that archetype" thing just ends up making two implicit promises and then breaking both of them.

Either have a system that actually lets you create the character-as-person, or don't. Either have a system that openly does character-as-archetype, or don't.

If you're going to treat the character as a person, and represent that person, then go all-in on "stats" and forget the archetype straightjackets entirely.

If you're going to treat the character as representing an archetype, then don't pretend anything else, and just do away with the "stats" and have the archetypes with their archetypal abilities and their archetypal personalities and their archetypal etc.

The character can't be both. They can't be an archetype -- a trope, a cliche, a stereotype -- and at the same time be an actual person (even if just a "fictional" person-who-could-be-real). Real people are not archetypes, they're not memes, they're not tropes.

This idea sounds reasonable, but it is the opposite of what archetype means (an original from which copies are made).

Superman, Captain Marvel, Hercules, and Doc Savage are from the same heroic archetype, but have very different characters.

Batman, Zorro, Scarlet Pimpernel, and many others are different versions of the same masked avenger archetype, with different characters.

Dumbledore, Gandalf, and Merlin are the aged wizard advisor to the young hero. And they are individuals.

The character can be both. And very often is, in fantasy literature, in literature in general, and, yes, in games.

[gkathellar]

One way to handle this in games is nested archetypes, in which your character becomes more defined and more specialized as they progress. Shadow of the Demon Lord does this to reasonably good effect, starting with very minimal chargen and increasing complexity with level.

[Zhorn]

What is it about the real world that just can't translate into D&D? For me, it's fall damage - specifically, fall damage on a polymorphed creature. A mouse can fall from 10 feet and be unfazed, because physics. But a mouse in D&D will probably die from that 1d6 fall damage.

I now want a house rule where if you calculate the force of impact in newtons before damage dice finishes rolling, you get to survive.

That irked me also. I rule at my table that fall damage dice are the same size as a creature's hit die.
Not perfect, but it makes bigger things fall harder and smaller things fall lighter.

[halfeye]

Glass doesn't have a viscosity until you melt it. It is not a liquid (http://www.math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/General/Glass/glass.html). The ripples you sometimes see in sheets of old glass are a result of the casting process, and nothing else.

Oh, never mind (https://www.xkcd.com/386/). Don't guess. Go look it up.

I decided this discussion was off topic in this thread, but now I've made a new one especially for it:

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?586665-would-lava-crush-a-fireproof-person&p=23870266#post23870266

[Talakeal]

There are multiple cross-cutting layers of archetypes, and having ability scores not directly and uniquely tied to class-level archetypes lets you have variety within unity. If you only have a "high concept", you miss out on that granularity of diversity. You get the same basic package, just flavored in different ways. In a limited sense, 4e made this same mistake--since every role could be handled by multiple classes using multiple stats, the classes were no longer enough to describe an archetype and everything blended together.

It's the intersection of class, race, and ability scores that defines a character's approach to things and their full archetype set.

You can have two different archetypal "Strong Guys" that play very differently, despite sharing archetypes.

Consider a Goliath Barbarian: High STR, medium DEX, high CON, low mental scores. He's the "strong guy" who is also the "angry guy" and the "unsocial guy". He mainly depends on physical force and endurance to solve problems, butting through them directly.

Now consider a different barbarian: High STR, average DEX, average CON, low INT, average WIS, medium-high CHA. He's also the Strong Angry Guy (in combat), but he's sociable and charming while not being bookish. Wears medium armor to compensate for his sub-par (relative to #1) DEX/CON.

A third barbarian might be the Strong Angry Smart Guy: High STR, average CON, high INT, average WIS, low CHA. A nerd's nerd, except that he believes in muscle magic (I cast FIST). Carries books with him and quotes from abstruse philosophers, but wields a mean axe.

All of these have overlapping archetypes as well as differing ones. The ability scores relate to those archetypes, not to literal measurements of muscle power, IQ, etc. They're emblematic of approaches that the character will invest in. Sure, you can have a low-int Wizard (theoretically). I'm not sure why you would want to, and it certainly isn't the place of the designers to stop you from doing stupid things intentionally. The "safe path" for each archetype bundle (class) is obvious and stated. You can go away from that (they are descriptive archetypes, not prescriptive archetypes), but at your own mechanical risk.

I would think feats, skill choices, and equipment choices can reflect that just fine.

To me the ability score system in D&D is just a straight-jacket, with only a few clearly optimal choices per class. Trying to make a big dumb wizard like Crab & Goyle in Harry Potter or a wise tactical fighter like Roy just doesn't work in D&D if you want to be at all effective.

I almost think that it is worth removing ability scores entirely and would have done so in my own system except that they allow characters some sort of minimum competency for skills that they wouldn't actually put character points to and save a lot of space (saying "A belt of giant's hair grants you a +2 bonus to strength" is much easier than saying "A belt of giant's hair provides a +2 bonus to encumbrance, a +4 bonus to might, and a +2 bonus to damage rolls in melee, ranged, and unarmed combat.")

[PhoenixPhyre]

That depends on the table. I have "suboptimal" (ability score wise) characters that are fine. 5e is much more forgiving about that. As long as you have a +2 in your major stat at level 1 and a +3 by tier 3, you're fine.

[GreatWyrmGold]

You can't compare a fantasy TRPG to reality.
Yes, you can. You don't want to, but plenty of people do, and clearly can—evidenced both by how many people have been comparing fantasy TRPGs to reality and how many people have been recommending more realistic fantasy TRPGs. (And, if your problem is comparing fantasy in general to reality, more realistic fantasy works.) If you don't want to talk about the relationship between D&D rules and reality, don't talk about the relationship between D&D rules and reality, and definitely don't complain when others do. I'm not interested in Game of Thrones, but I don't crash threads talking about GoT to tell them why they shouldn't care.
Also, do any of you mind if I quote you the next time somebody says TRPGs are superior to video games because you can do anything you could do in real life as pretty much the only advantage they can think of?



That's actually one thing that irks me about D&D in general. Yes, there's that one nice paragraph telling you that hp loss doesn't only represent physical damage. That axe that just hit you and left you at 48/53 hp didn't really cause a wound. Now, it so happens that it was posioned, roll a Fort save.
To put it in other words: They go out of their way to say that hp loss doesn't always represent a wound, but mechanically it always works like a wound.

Hit points aren't meat points unless you get hit by a poisoned weapon, bitten by a lycanthrope, or any other attack that causes extra effects on a "hit" that only make sense if a "hit" actually breaks skin. "If HP represent my ability to dodge a deadly blow, why am I taking continuous 'bleeding damage' after dodging that attack?"
Also, healing only makes sense as meat points. Cure Light Wounds restores enough hit points to completely heal a first level wizard or commoner who is well into negative hit points. A high level fighter might consider losing 5% of his total hit points to a battle ax to be a "light wound" but a first level wizard with 4hp probably considers losing 8 points to a battle ax to be a little more serious.

Add to that the fact that dodging/evasion/avoidance is in AC. Or is it in DEX / Reflex Saves?
Most of the excuses given to "justify" the rapidly scaling HP in D&D end up overlapping with some other part of the system.
It's a muddled mess.
That, so very much. I'm glad I'm not the only one who feels that way about the "But it's not actually injury" argument.



And that stuff -- "a fighter's HP isn't the same as a wizards HP", and "the same exact hit can mean entirely different things" and "HP as plot armor" -- is exactly what needs to be consigned to the burning barrel of bad ideas that have lingered far too long in RPGs.
Hit Points work perfectly fine mechanically. Some systems have alternate methods of tracking damage*, and I've thought of throwing together a system of what I'd expect HP to look like if it represented plot armor, but a single number that ticks down is more than sufficient for most purposes. But if you're going to examine it, try to justify it, don't just handwave it and then go on doing what you were going to do anyways. Treat it like physical injury and accept the weirdness as a genre convention; give it a simple magical explanation (something like "determination to go on, powered by the soul's might") and move on; treat it like something else consistently; all of those are fine. But don't give a handwave and then go on like you did before.
It reminds me of bad sci-fi technobabble. If you don't explain your FTL drive or shrink ray or whatever, cool. If you give a reasonably coherent explanation that doesn't misuse scientific terminology and has an effect on how your plot resolves, awesome. But don't give some handwave full of misused techno-jargon and then go on like you would have otherwise; that just wastes everyone's time and pisses off anyone who knows what that jargon means. Nobody who wants a scientifically-accurate story would accept that, nobody who doesn't would care, everybody loses.


*Paranoia, Shadowrun, and Traveler come to mind. Paranoia treats damage as a series of conditions ("Okay," "Wounded," "Unconscious," "Dead," and "Vaporized"); Shadowrun used a series of boxes and filled the condition tracker thingy by a certain amount depending on the results of the shooter's attack skill and the victim's tough-it-out score; and Traveler treats damage as temporary penalties to your physical ability scores.



You're highlighting exactly how the alignment system is supposed to work here! Characters of every alignment believe that what they are doing is right; they just have a different idea of what Right is.

If there is a starving person in the street outside a cruel miser's mansion full of gold, your thief (neutral or chaotic good) may say the right thing to do is steal that money and feed the poor man. The miser has no use for it and the starving man does. The lawful good paladin agrees the poor man needs it more, but if the society you are both in is otherwise just then stealing to feed him is a small step towards breaking down that society, leading to more suffering down the line, so he will feed the man out of his own pocket or help them seek out the charity of others. (He may or may not be correct about future outcomes; this is about what both characters believe is right.)

Meanwhile, the lawful evil miser believes you're both making the society he hoards wealth in both weaker and worse by helping the miserable beggar at all; people who aren't strong or clever enough to support themselves don't contribute to the structure that empowers him and are a useless drain.

Disconnect most of the real-world value judgments from the alignment system and it works moderately well as competing philosophies.
Not if you want to go beneath surface-level, lazy-kid's-cartoon philosophy. Law/Chaos: "Following the rules is good!" "No, following the rules stops us from doing good!" Good/Evil is even worse. Sure, you can fit more interesting philosophies into pre-existing alignments, but that crams together plenty of mutually incompatible (or even hostile) philosophies into one alignment.
The only things alignment is good for are marking people (or entire species) as "This is okay to kill" and getting new roleplayers to think about who their characters are, separate from who they are. But most new roleplayers these days are going to have some experience with that from video games, and D&D now has mechanics like backgrounds and factions which fulfill the same goal better, plus spaces for things like Bonds and Flaws which are even better.

I've been working on an alignment system more like what you're describing alignment as—one that separates the Eddard Starks from the Inspector Javerts, the freedom fighters from the hippies, the corrupt businessmen from the literal Nazis, the apathetic from the "Keep good and evil balanced at all costs" from the literal wild animals.



But more importantly, no ethical, moral, philosophical, religious, metaphysical, psychological, or spiritual belief system in the history of the world has considered [law vs. chaos] to be a distinction worth making.
Not true! Basically every Eurasian/North African mythology (and several myths from around the world) have some form of "gods bring order to the chaos" in their creation myth, often in the form of a storm/sky god killing some sort of serpentine monster (or eldritch-horror crocodile for the Aztecs) and building the world from it. In most cases, even the morally-ambiguous or outright evil gods teamed with the good ones to bring order to the void, creating the world.
There are also plenty of (comparatively) modern philosophies with strong opinions on law and order, and whether it's good or bad. For extreme examples, contrast fascism with Randian "objectivism"; Lawful Evil, Chaotic Evil. (My apologies, and condolences, to anyone on this forum who subscribes to either of those philosophies.) For a less-extreme version, look at...something that happened in Europe where a guy nailed stuff to a door. One side thought you needed a central organization to do good, the other thought that the central organization held them back from doing good.

Law vs. Chaos is secondary to Good vs. Evil in all cases I'm familiar with, but it's often a distinct factor, and absolutely a useful (if crude) way to distinguish between philosophies.



I'm totally with you on bows, but it's worth noting that anyone weapon - yes, even a fencing epee - requires a lot of strength and endurance to even learn to use, much less really wield in a combat situation. And of course every weapon requires precision and finesse, so ... really, everything should be using both stats.
GURPS does this. To simplify, Dexterity determines whether or not you hit, but Strength determines how hard you can hit. Of course, GURPS attributes are designed differently from D&D attributes; doing this simple fix in D&D without adjusting anything else would nerf anyone who uses a weapon via multiple-attribute dependency (MAD).



Are you a speedster or a back-line type that tries to avoid direct confrontation? DEX is your thing. And since ranged weapons like bows are typical of that type (the sniper, the ambusher, the archer; none of them are conventionally huge), bows use DEX.
I'd say that Dexterity is more about agility and self-control than speed or...back-of-the-line-ness. Dexterity is for the careful sniper, the graceful duelist, and so on.
But yeah, the "archetypes" thing is spot-on.



Then don't even have stats. Just have the archetypes.
How would that work? How can you get anything near the simplicity and flexibility of "Here are some numbers, here's how they affect your other numbers" with archetypes?



If you're to do away with stats as a whole then they need to be replaced with class-specific stats. Then each character class is independent from the rest of the system can be balanced or buffed or nerfed according to their own stat conceptualization. It fits Real World Logic a bit better because there's no reason a Computer Programmer needs to worry about how high his Sports attribute happens to be unless he wants some water cooler talking points. All he needs to focus on is his Coding, Design, Hardware, Software, and Mental Anguish stats.
First off, I generally don't like class-based systems to begin with. I don't hate them, but I prefer more mix-and-match sorts of systems. D&D has a bit of that with multiclassing, but I like something like Shadowrun or GURPS where you can just invest your points in any combination of skills even better.
I despise the idea of having different "classes" functioning with entirely different mechanics. I despise the idea that only a rogue can learn to pick locks or hide (I haven't played much AD&D), that only scholars can learn knowledge skills, that only fighters can learn to break down doors. I despise idea that with a passion.
A wizard should be able to learn lockpicking, and even untrained wizards can hide. Fighters can go to school, and rogues who broke their last lockpick should be able to batter down a door. If wizards have wizard stats and only wizard stats, if rogues have rogue stats and only rogue stats, if fighters have fighter stats and only fighter stats, there is no way to determine what happens if someone tries to do something outside their narrow specialty.
I could see that idea working if the premise was built around it (say, the player characters are highly-specialized drones of some kind of super-hive), but otherwise, NO.

...But hey, that's just, like, my opinion, man. If you don't think wizards should be able to hide or fighters should be able to read, or even that jocks shouldn't be able to code and computer programmers shouldn't be able to sportsball, go ahead. Just remind me to stay away from your games if that's actually true, alright?
(Also, why would computer programmers have a hardware skill?)



My stance is that the stats -- Abilities in D&D, in this case, but also Skills in that system -- are there to map the character's basic capabilities and aptitudes and knowledge into the system, to represent those capabilities in shorthand.
I think that's just the "archetype" thing, viewed from a different angle. Correct me if I'm wrong, but...
You don't think characters should literally just be a pile of numbers that describe what they do, yes? You presumably think they should be, you know, characters. Characters are forged from archetypes, because that's how basic storytelling (and human psychology) works; you can (and should) tweak the archetypes, but you're still conceptualizing the character at least partly by archetype. Mind you, that archetype is (hopefully) chosen as a "base" because it fits the character's capabilities and quirks and...character, but it's still an archetype.

Attributes are like "capability archetypes". If you have high Strength, you're strong and can do strong-guy things. If you have high Dexterity, you're agile and can do agile-guy things. If you have high Wisdom, you're wise and can do...well, not "wise-guy" things, but you get the idea.

They don't map neatly to metrics used to describe human performance, because quite bluntly, people don't understand their own bodies very well. We understand them well enough to survive on the savannahs, but that doesn't include a conscious understanding of the relationship between strength and speed or stuff like that. Some RPGs try to be realistic and account for things like that, but D&D is not that RPG. It's an RPG for playing characters out of your favorite fantasy novels, novels where the big, strong guy is usually slow and stupid.
Attributes are designed to let you build those archetypes, while also letting you tweak them (e.g, a sarcastic fighter with high Intelligence and Wisdom), while also being simple to explain and use.



Do one, or do the other. Don't try to split the difference. This whole "well you have to start with an archetype but then you can kinda sorta make a person within that archetype" thing just ends up making two implicit promises and then breaking both of them.

Either have a system that actually lets you create the character-as-person, or don't. Either have a system that openly does character-as-archetype, or don't.

If you're going to treat the character as a person, and represent that person, then go all-in on "stats" and forget the archetype straightjackets entirely.
Aaand you lost me. How does adding more stats let you treat your character more as a person? It seems like the only difference would be that you're more likely to treat them like a pile of statistics.



This idea sounds reasonable, but it is the opposite of what archetype means (an original from which copies are made).
Sorry, sometimes we use words slightly wrong because we're not sure what you think the right word is. We're talking about something more like that thing in Jungian psychology which describes a set of ideas and motifs associated with each other (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jungian_archetypes), whatever that's called.
(Major nitpick: Etymologies are not definitions.)



To me the ability score system in D&D is just a straight-jacket, with only a few clearly optimal choices per class. Trying to make a big dumb wizard like Crab & Goyle in Harry Potter or a wise tactical fighter like Roy just doesn't work in D&D if you want to be at all effective.
I'd argue that that has more to do with the implementation of attributes in D&D than their existence. And also that the word "wizard" means different things in Harry Potter and Dungeons and Dragons.
I'd also like to see your alternative.



I now want a house rule where if you calculate the force of impact in newtons before damage dice finishes rolling, you get to survive.
I'd rather calculate the energy, so I don't have to make assumptions about how long I'm slowing down. Also, I'd probably make sure my character and equipment massed in at a nice round number if that house rule was in play.



Spell slots.
Vancian magic is the most alien type I've encountered, as far as the raw mechanics go. If you've got an internal mana bar battery, or need certain components, or the spell drains your stamina, or you can just spam it all day because your magical energy comes from some inexhaustible source, cool. But why is magic expended in such discrete amounts? Why can't you use the energy/memory you'd need to cast/prepare a 9th-level spell to cast a few 2nd- or 3rd-level spells, or combine several 1st-level slots for a 3rd-level slot?
It doesn't help that the few systems where I've seen Vancian magic used don't really try to explain it.



Six limbed vertebrates. Just, no.
Said six limbed vertebrates flying with ludacrisly [sic] undersized wings and chest muscles.
Afore mentioned [sic] six limbed, flying vertebrates belching massive amounts of various caustic material from the same opening through which they intake food and oxygen.
Dragons are far from the worst crimes against naturalism in the Monster Manual. Just look at any aberration (or "monstrosity," as the kids call 'em these days). For me, it's so common that I go from being irritated by it to not minding at all; it's just a part of the setting, like active gods or thieves trustworthy enough to form professional guilds.



Love how HERO deals with this -- the Explosion advantage on a ranged attack power. Without getting into the details, the damage drops off with distance from the center of the AOE, and depending on a character's defenses, they might not even be harmed at all despite technically being partway into the radius of the AOE.
GURPS has something similar for explosives and some powers. There's a separate "area effect" enhancement for if you don't want to deal with all that bookkeeping.



One of the things that drives me nuts in D&D is anything that treats PCs differently from NPCs for no reason.

PC fighter: I'd like to buy a sword, please.
NPC Merchant: Here you are. That will be 10 gold pieces.
PC: Here you go. *Pays 10 gp*
NPC fighter: I'd like to buy a sword, please. Here are 10 gold pieces.
Merchant: Oh, terribly sorry, sir. I've just sold the last one to this fellow.
PC: Well, I don't really need it. I just wanted to have an extra weapon as a back up. I'll sell it to you if you like.
NPC fighter: I'll give you 5 gp for it and not a copper more.
PC: But it's the same sword that you were going to pay 10 for!
NPC fighter: You're a fighter, not a merchant! You don't know how to do business.
PC: Fine. I'll return it to the merchant and you can pay him for it.
NPC merchant: I'll give you 5gp for it.
PC: What? Why can't you just give me back my 10gp and take his 10gp?
NPC merchant: I'm not paying you full price for used goods.
PC: It's brand new. I just bought it from you!
NPC merchant: You're a fighter, not a merchant! You don't know how to do business.
That rule doesn't seem odd to me, though that might just be because we don't roleplay mundane sword-shopping (or sell swords 20 seconds after buying them, because that's a stupid edge case scenario that exists to make this general-case rule look stupid). I assume that shopkeepers buy items at half price from anyone, then increase the price so they don't go bankrupt.


I agree with this. I would add as an example, Diplomacy. It has 0 effect on a PC, no matter what. A 100th level Diplomancer with a Diplomacy skill of 1000 (from various modifiers) somehow can have no effect on the weakest 1st level PC.
That's absolutely an example of rules working differently on PCs, but...well, it would suck to have control of your character taken from you with nothing more than "The NPC was really persuasive, just trust me on this". So they don't let that happen.
For years, I've been contemplating a "social conflict" system which gives enough agency to players that failing a diplomacy check feels more like dying in battle than failing a saving throw versus phantasmal killer. If D&D had that, yeah, PCs should be bound by it. But it doesn't, soo...



If they wanted my input on a hypothetical 6e of D&D, I'd say give every weapon a STR minimum, even a low minimum for daggers and the like; base all to-hit bonuses on DEX, and base all damage bonuses on STR. Then, some Class abilities and Feats would allow the character to use DEX for both, or STR for both, or maybe some other Ability (such as INT for the right hypothetical "I know just where to hit them" thing).

If taken in isolation, that could very well be true.

It's not the only change I'd make. :smallsmile:
The Max Killjoy Fantasy RPG sounds interesting, but I don't want D&D to be that. I want D&D—the most prominent and best-known tabletop RPG in the world—to remain a good introductory TRPG. That way, people who pick up and play this game they've heard of have better odds of enjoying it, staying in the hobby, and maybe eventually tiring of D&D and moving on to Shadowrun or Pathfinder of MKFRPG or something.




I'm in the process of moving. It takes lots of money, paperwork, waiting, more paperwork, packing, more money, more paperwork, more waiting, physical labor.

In D&D it is a) Attack the BBEG in his castle, win, the castle is yours or b) pay X amount of goldpieces and ta da! the house is yours.
That's the benefit of living in a world where the world is always about to end, ankhegs and ghouls ravage the countryside, and the cities are locked up in a shadow war between the thieves' guild and the illithid cult camped out in the nearby cave. It probably doesn't help that most dynasties last, like, three generations max before they're overthrown by a virtuous resistance or villainous usurper, or killed by some dragon or whatever, or they just give away their title as a quest reward like they're Beowulf or something.


Which brings me to my biggest irk-point. By default, D&D has lots of little pieces of lore. Most of these are decent, many could spark a campaign, and some would even work as the seed for a whole setting. But none of them are explored very deeply, for a few reasons. They want to leave things open for the benefit of DMs and future adventures alike, they don't want to step on anyone's vision of generic fantasy, they're keeping it concise, etc...but I suspect there's another reason. If they explored any ideas in depth, it would swiftly become apparent that none of this lore meshes together.
Mind, I'm not saying it's all contradictory, especially not in 5e. But back in 3.5, in the era of splatbooks that did go into depth about lore and stuff, those details frequently clashed with the details in other splatbooks. But that's not what I'm complaining about right now. What I'm complaining about is how nearly all the standard D&D lore exists in its own little bubbles.
I was just looking at 5e ghoul lore, so let's examine that. The first ghoul was an elf that turned bad, which meant he couldn't be an elf anymore, so he turned into a ghoul. He served Orcus for a while, then Yeenoghu trashed his stuff and Orcus didn't help, so the ghoul went back to the elven gods, and they accepted him. But this bit of lore doesn't interact with demon lore (beyond "Orcus is a demon lord of undeath, and Yeenoghu exists"), nor with gnollish or elven lore. Heck, it doesn't even interact with other parts of ghoul lore! Ghasts are apparently ghouls that Orcus blessed with more abyssal energy, but ghouls turned away from him, remember? (And it must have been all ghouls, since that's used as a just-so story for why elves are immune to ghoul paralysis.) The lore doesn't indicate, say, that ghasts are ghouls who stayed loyal to Orcus and were rewarded for their loyalty; it's isolated from that other tidbit of ghoul lore.

Worse, D&D worldbuilding focuses hard on making sure there are tons of adventure hooks and institutions that enable (or at least don't interfere with) groups of powerful, independent adventurers to wander around solving problems that the local government should be at least assisting with...yet it doesn't seem to consider the impact that adventurers and especially adventures would have on the world.
Most worlds have whole guilds of adventurers, sometimes even organizations for individual classes (thieves' guilds, wizarding colleges, etc), and while these latter organizations aren't all adventurers, their leaders are often noted as having once been. But even if you only have a couple taverns' worth of adventurers for each major city, if they can find enough orc warlords and megalomaniacal necromancers and almost-unsealed elder evils to cover their tab and whatnot (usually with enough left over to buy some magical equipment to help in the next adventure), the world should not look like Middle Earth or Westeros. Those worldsonly have one or two major adventure hooks each plus local bandit issues and whatnot; that's enough to support a thin population of 2nd- and 3rd-level adventurers and one high-level party, but nowhere near enough to stock a guild (even one with low standards).
Saving the town from a goblin attack shouldn't make the PCs regional heroes; they need to stop at least a kingdom-level threat to make a mark on the world. Peasants shouldn't be farming peacefully in their fields for decades until some odd monster or orc army or whatever sweeps through only to be stopped by the heroes; they should be expecting the other shoe to drop any year now, doing what they can to prepare themselves and keep good relations with the local population of overpowered vagrants. Cities would need to be like fortresses, since they're such obvious targets for marauding dragons or crazed cultists; many would probably pass laws where the city pays for the room and board of sufficiently-qualified adventurers as long as they actively patrol the region for threats and come to aid the city in times of need, just to make sure they have people on hand to deal with the inevitable threats that will pop up. And don't get me started on the rats in tavern basements! (Mostly because I can't remember a case of that trope being played straight.)
Beyond that, the different threats should interact! Why don't we ever hear about kobold tribes fleeing from their homeland by illithid slavers, or orc farmers having their fields trampled by marauding bulettes, or demons making a mess in the gnoll homelands? Heck, why aren't there bands of "monstrous" adventurers dealing with threats to their lives and people? Why doesn't the Goblin King hire goblinoid vagrants, who gain enough levels and magical equipment to stave off elven incursions into their lands? Why are high-level orcs and gnolls and drow treated as anomalies, as singular villains that form the lynchpin of entire armies, instead of being as common as high-level "civilized" adventurers, with similar goals and activities?

Part of why this frustrates me is that this world has so many possibilities. There's great peril, but also ridiculous amount of magic and might to drive it off. How would people react to this sort of situation? How would they adapt? What kinds of societies would thrive in this world?

Campaign settings with a more focused concept than "Let's make another generic fantasy world, but with WotC IP in it" do better at this. They take any bits of core D&D lore which they can expand to fit their concept, add novel ideas that set the world apart, and finally build enough connective tissue around these fragments of lore to make something interesting.

[Kyutaru]

Part of why this frustrates me is that this world has so many possibilities. There's great peril, but also ridiculous amount of magic and might to drive it off.
This irks me as well but in a different way. In the out of game sense, the DM should be applying his own logic to the world and maintaining it. Gravity should work the way he declares. Spell availability should be as he sees fit. The number of magic items for sale at the local bazaar can be the entire book or zero.

Like, just to touch on an example from another topic, here's an imaginary dev conversation with wizards:

Devs: Here's your 2nd edition spell rules. Pick your school and what magic you want to be banned from.

Wizard: What? I can't play Sauron and be a necromancer with invisibility?

Devs: Um... fine, we'll make a new edition and give you the ability to use whatever you want.

Wizard: ...what? So I can pick from any spells in the book with no limits?

Devs: Well no, your DM still has the--

Wizard: SILENCE MORTAL! YOU ADDRESS A GOD!!!


Like... Tolkien as a DM clearly established his boundaries and determined his world's logic. Gandalf doesn't run around casting Haste and buffing people with Blur. He never once cast Magic Missile. Being deep in the caves where oxygen should be a problem wasn't. Ghosts can apparently die. He laid down the law and to hell with real world logic.

[Willie the Duck]

That, so very much. I'm glad I'm not the only one who feels that way about the "But it's not actually injury" argument.

Hit Points work perfectly fine mechanically. Some systems have alternate methods of tracking damage*, and I've thought of throwing together a system of what I'd expect HP to look like if it represented plot armor, but a single number that ticks down is more than sufficient for most purposes. But if you're going to examine it, try to justify it, don't just handwave it and then go on doing what you were going to do anyways. Treat it like physical injury and accept the weirdness as a genre convention; give it a simple magical explanation (something like "determination to go on, powered by the soul's might") and move on; treat it like something else consistently; all of those are fine. But don't give a handwave and then go on like you did before.

Generally, my response is always, 'people complain about hit points until they've tried to design their own system*, and then the recognize how convenient they are. Maybe not from a verisimilitude perspective, but from a gamist system, they work. It is the levelling system, I feel, that screw them up. Otherwise, one could just say that hit point damage is wounds, but only the one that drops you to 0 is a grievous one. It's when an experienced veteran has 2x, 3x, or 20x as much capacity to bear wounds as a novice that this falls apart.
*Any system except a gritty one, at least.


How would that work? How can you get anything near the simplicity and flexibility of "Here are some numbers, here's how they affect your other numbers" with archetypes?

Strictly speaking, attributes aren't necessary to make the game work.
When my friends and I first started playing BECMI D&D, we somehow glossed over the table where attributes turned into a -3-+3 on various actions. We used the roll-under for various 'skill check' like activities as we'd seen in the B/X books that the 'big kids' (9 year olds) had, and of course the xp bonus for high prime reqs. But otherwise stats were descriptive. You didn't get a bonus to hit from high strength, you just used the 'to-hit' table based on level and class.
This was an error on our part, but the same could be the case in a real D&D-like game (oD&D being mostly like that already, pre-supplement I). Just have the base to-hits and save DCs and the like, and modify them up or down to be balanced. But then have more things like a fighter's fighting style effects. So you could have an archetype of 'archer' and that be your +2 to hit.


...But hey, that's just, like, my opinion, man. If you don't think wizards should be able to hide or fighters should be able to read, or even that jocks shouldn't be able to code and computer programmers shouldn't be able to sportsball, go ahead. Just remind me to stay away from your games if that's actually true, alright?

Nothing Kyutaru said is deserving of this level of angst.



The Max Killjoy Fantasy RPG sounds interesting, but I don't want D&D to be that. I want D&D—the most prominent and best-known tabletop RPG in the world—to remain a good introductory TRPG. That way, people who pick up and play this game they've heard of have better odds of enjoying it, staying in the hobby, and maybe eventually tiring of D&D and moving on to Shadowrun or Pathfinder of MKFRPG or something.


I agree. This does, however, limit D&D from become 'a great example of _____,' in that it needs to stick to a level of buy-in from the base (sacred cows) that it has to stay somewhat of the mongrel beast it always has been.


Which brings me to my biggest irk-point. By default, D&D has lots of little pieces of lore. Most of these are decent, many could spark a campaign, and some would even work as the seed for a whole setting. But none of them are explored very deeply, for a few reasons. They want to leave things open for the benefit of DMs and future adventures alike, they don't want to step on anyone's vision of generic fantasy, they're keeping it concise, etc...but I suspect there's another reason. If they explored any ideas in depth, it would swiftly become apparent that none of this lore meshes together.

Well, yes. They don't mesh together because they came into being at different times and for different reasons and certainly not to serve any goal of perfect cohesion and in-depth-analysis-rigor. D&D lore is like Star Trek or Dr Who continuity -- sure there are after-the-fact justifications, but the honest answer is that it was written some week when a script was needed and a deadline was approaching, and now it is a treasured part of someone's childhood, so by golly your going to come up with an explanation, but that doesn't change it from being an after-the-fact justification (:smallbiggrin:).

[Talakeal]

@Greatwyrmgold: What is this Aztec eldritch-horror crocodile of whom you speak? I have not heard that myth and you have piqued my interest.

[gkathellar]

@Greatwyrmgold: What is this Aztec eldritch-horror crocodile of whom you speak? I have not heard that myth and you have piqued my interest.

Cipactli (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cipactli), Mesoamerica's resident version of the primeval water dragon myth.

[Talakeal]

I'd argue that that has more to do with the implementation of attributes in D&D than their existence. And also that the word "wizard" means different things in Harry Potter and Dungeons and Dragons.
I'd also like to see your alternative.

Agreed. It is poor implementation.

As for a solution, well in my own system I just make sure to have every ability score be useful for every character type. Sometimes it is a bit tough, but generally it works out all right.

One could easily go further, something like Fate aspects or simply have characters purchase every number on their sheet with building points independent of the other numbers; but that can create a lot of clutter and make for some weirdly balanced characters who are mostly binary in their capabilities.



or thieves trustworthy enough to form professional guilds.

Organized crime seems to be fairly ubiquitous irl, it doesn't strike me as odd in D&D. The weirdest part is the name, thieve's guild, although that might actually be pretty accurate; it is my understanding that real world guilds were actually a lot closer to cartels than labor unions.


Cipactli (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cipactli), Mesoamerica's resident version of the primeval water dragon myth.

Thank you!

[GreatWyrmGold]

It is the levelling system, I feel, that screw them up. Otherwise, one could just say that hit point damage is wounds, but only the one that drops you to 0 is a grievous one. It's when an experienced veteran has 2x, 3x, or 20x as much capacity to bear wounds as a novice that this falls apart.
I'd argue that the screw-up comes from people having a range of hit points wider than (what our intuitions say is) the range of human durability.. A blow that instantly kills a first-level wizard with four hit points might not even phase a first-level barbarian with fifteen.


Strictly speaking, attributes aren't necessary to make the game work.
That's true, but irrelevant. Strictly speaking, rules aren't necessary to make the game work; this argument is meaningless. You can remove literally any rule from the game and make some new bits to fill the hole left behind; that doesn't mean the rule didn't accomplish something important.


Nothing Kyutaru said is deserving of this level of angst.
More sarcasm than angst.


I agree. This does, however, limit D&D from become 'a great example of _____,' in that it needs to stick to a level of buy-in from the base (sacred cows) that it has to stay somewhat of the mongrel beast it always has been.
I'd think that "a great first RPG" is something worth striving for. Besides, as long as D&D tries to cover every generic fantasy base, it's not going to be great at any of it.


Well, yes. They don't mesh together because they came into being at different times and for different reasons and certainly not to serve any goal of perfect cohesion and in-depth-analysis-rigor. D&D lore is like Star Trek or Dr Who continuity -- sure there are after-the-fact justifications, but the honest answer is that it was written some week when a script was needed and a deadline was approaching, and now it is a treasured part of someone's childhood, so by golly your going to come up with an explanation, but that doesn't change it from being an after-the-fact justification (:smallbiggrin:).
No argument there.

I suppose I wouldn't mind so much if the D&D hodgepodge was part of an attempt to evoke a mythic tone. Mythologies accumulated ideas, characters, and stories in much the same way (though slower and less centralized), and wound up with a collection of ideas about specific characters that didn't quite work. Sure, people could rationalize them (look at Hesiod's Theogony), but that requires effort and rewriting some details.
Buuut, the rest of D&D evokes the structure and tone of modern fantasy more than mythology. The gods take a backseat to mortals, heroes fight to save the world instead of for their own glory, magic is well-understood and controlled, etc etc. I think I prefer that over a game where the PCs' success or failure hinges on the actions of the gods, PCs don't have any compelling motivation to do one adventure over random crap, the GM has license to make basically anything they want happen, etc...but it does mean that mythic inconsistency feels like crappy worldbuilding rather than anything interesting.



Organized crime seems to be fairly ubiquitous irl, it doesn't strike me as odd in D&D. The weirdest part is the name, thieve's guild, although that might actually be pretty accurate; it is my understanding that real world guilds were actually a lot closer to cartels than labor unions.
I guess it's the "feel" of thieves' guilds as they're portrayed more than the concept. They generally feel less like a Mafia family or a Triad circle or an inner-city gang, and more like...well...a guild, professional crooks and burglars who run formal apprenticeship programs and make labor contracts and whatnot. I guess that's analogous to stuff criminal syndicates do, but it doesn't have the same "feel". Does that make any sense?

[PhoenixPhyre]

[1] I'd think that "a great first RPG" is something worth striving for. Besides, as long as D&D tries to cover every generic fantasy base, it's not going to be great at any of it.

[2] I suppose I wouldn't mind so much if the D&D hodgepodge was part of an attempt to evoke a mythic tone. Mythologies accumulated ideas, characters, and stories in much the same way (though slower and less centralized), and wound up with a collection of ideas about specific characters that didn't quite work. Sure, people could rationalize them (look at Hesiod's Theogony), but that requires effort and rewriting some details.
Buuut, the rest of D&D evokes the structure and tone of modern fantasy more than mythology. The gods take a backseat to mortals, heroes fight to save the world instead of for their own glory, magic is well-understood and controlled, etc etc. I think I prefer that over a game where the PCs' success or failure hinges on the actions of the gods, PCs don't have any compelling motivation to do one adventure over random crap, the GM has license to make basically anything they want happen, etc...but it does mean that mythic inconsistency feels like crappy worldbuilding rather than anything interesting.

[1] As I've said before, I have yet to see where modern editions (4e or 5e, the ones I'm familiar with directly) have attempted to "cover every generic fantasy base". They cover a swath of them, and due to historical effects many people equate "fantasy" with "D&D-style fantasy", but that's reverse causality there. A lot of the rest of generic fantasy tries to be like D&D (as seen through a very warped mirror), not vice versa.

[2] Sturgeon's Law in action. Yeah, there's tons of bad worldbuilding in D&D history (past and present). That's made exponentially worse (combinatorially, to be precise) when you have bunches of splats all writing about the same setting with a primary goal of pumping out lots of books. Inconsistencies accumulate really fast that way. Part of the issue is that people lost sight of the role of the DM as curator of micro-setting (the actual play area), macro-setting (FR, for example), and mechanical content. When people started treating PrCs as entitlements and the fluff requirements as mere window dressing, when people started to insist on RAW over table-based policy, and a bunch of other similar moves, they accentuated the inconsistencies. Before you could simply choose one of the sources as "real" and ignore the rest, while after you're stuck with contradictions.

[jjordan]

I guess it's the "feel" of thieves' guilds as they're portrayed more than the concept. They generally feel less like a Mafia family or a Triad circle or an inner-city gang, and more like...well...a guild, professional crooks and burglars who run formal apprenticeship programs and make labor contracts and whatnot. I guess that's analogous to stuff criminal syndicates do, but it doesn't have the same "feel". Does that make any sense?Talakeal is right about Medieval/Renaissance guilds; they were organizations that existed to create and protect a monopoly. Far more like cartels than unions or professional associations. To fix your 'Thieves Guild' issue just look up a couple of organized crime and gang organizations (see here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_criminal_enterprises,_gangs_and_syndicates )) and grab some details from specific groups. Most particularly note the difference between affiliate members and full members and what one has to do to become, and remain, a full member. Then drop the Thieves Guild label and pick something cool (The Urban Dragons, The Shadow Council, Ceryl's Crew, The Night Guild, the Carters Guild, etc...) to call your group. Also, drop the idea of a single thieves cant and make several varieties that are peculiar to specific groups.

[Max_Killjoy]

That, so very much. I'm glad I'm not the only one who feels that way about the "But it's not actually injury" argument.

Hit Points work perfectly fine mechanically. Some systems have alternate methods of tracking damage*, and I've thought of throwing together a system of what I'd expect HP to look like if it represented plot armor, but a single number that ticks down is more than sufficient for most purposes. But if you're going to examine it, try to justify it, don't just handwave it and then go on doing what you were going to do anyways. Treat it like physical injury and accept the weirdness as a genre convention; give it a simple magical explanation (something like "determination to go on, powered by the soul's might") and move on; treat it like something else consistently; all of those are fine. But don't give a handwave and then go on like you did before.



Generally, my response is always, 'people complain about hit points until they've tried to design their own system*, and then the recognize how convenient they are. Maybe not from a verisimilitude perspective, but from a gamist system, they work. It is the levelling system, I feel, that screw them up. Otherwise, one could just say that hit point damage is wounds, but only the one that drops you to 0 is a grievous one. It's when an experienced veteran has 2x, 3x, or 20x as much capacity to bear wounds as a novice that this falls apart.
*Any system except a gritty one, at least..


The thing we were discussing, however, was not "hit point" as used across the multitude of RPG systems that use then concept or something like it. The thing we were discussing was specifically D&D's hyper-scaling hit points, that have long been and continue to be the subject of much muddled excuse-making in their defense, that always seem to supposedly be a thing until being that thing makes them not make sense... and then they're supposedly something else...

I have no issue with various sorts of "hit point"-like abstracted measures of "ability to endure injury and keep functioning". HERO even has two such pools, STUN and BODY, to represent short term wear vs longer-term injury.

It's only when they scale up massively with character progression and suddenly you get otherwise identical hits against two characters that supposedly aren't actually the same hit because raisins, in order to back-justify the ability of the higher-level character to endure half a dozen wounds identical to the one that would have killed the same character earlier. And of course, there's the "but it's not really the same wound" excuse, and the "plot armor" excuse, and the "evading hits and turning solid hits into glancing blows" excuse, and so on, each time overlapping some other thing already dealt with in other parts of the system into the HP mashup.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Talakeal is right about Medieval/Renaissance guilds; they were organizations that existed to create and protect a monopoly. Far more like cartels than unions or professional associations. To fix your 'Thieves Guild' issue just look up a couple of organized crime and gang organizations (see here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_criminal_enterprises,_gangs_and_syndicates )) and grab some details from specific groups. Most particularly note the difference between affiliate members and full members and what one has to do to become, and remain, a full member. Then drop the Thieves Guild label and pick something cool (The Urban Dragons, The Shadow Council, Ceryl's Crew, The Night Guild, the Carters Guild, etc...) to call your group. Also, drop the idea of a single thieves cant and make several varieties that are peculiar to specific groups.

I have an group literally named "The Thieves Guild" in my setting, but that's a bit tongue in cheek in universe. The whole nation is controlled by a coalition of guilds, and the Thieves Guild regulates all vice + the official legal system + the low-justice police. So you hire a judge or investigator (or both) from the TG for prosecuting things like theft, fraud, torts, contract disputes, etc. Same if you want a prostitute (other than the temple ones) or need want to get high.

There is another actual crime group in that nation, but they don't go by that name and they find the Theives Guild to be in really bad taste and be sellouts.

[DavidSh]

Six limbed vertebrates. Just, no.



There are six-limbed vertebrates in the real word, but they are fish.
And if you say fins don't count as limbs, I would say take a look at the skeleton of a coelacanth. The paired pectoral fins and paired pelvic fins, and the unpaired anal and second dorsal fins are very limb-like. I can't imagine making a dragon that way -- the unpaired fins wouldn't be useful for walking or flying.

[GreatWyrmGold]

As I've said before, I have yet to see where modern editions (4e or 5e, the ones I'm familiar with directly) have attempted to "cover every generic fantasy base". They cover a swath of them, and due to historical effects many people equate "fantasy" with "D&D-style fantasy", but that's reverse causality there. A lot of the rest of generic fantasy tries to be like D&D (as seen through a very warped mirror), not vice versa.
...I'm not sure how you expect me to prove or disprove this sort of statement?
D&D has always drawn lore from sources of popular fantasy. First it was Tolkien, Vance, Lovecraft, Howard, etc. It eventually started to include "old D&D lore" as one of those sources, but it hasn't stopped finding new inspiration. Look at psionics, for Pelor's sake! Sure, there were psychic powers in old D&D...as innate powers held by a few rare and bizarre monsters. What about that do you think inspired the psionic classes in 3.5? It's impossible to prove, but I'm thinking they drew inspiration from an outside source to try and broaden the kind of fantasy story they could tell. And psionic classes were still present in 4e. (I think there's technically a psionic class for 5e, but I'm not sure if it ever left Unearthed Arcana.)
But beyond that...most settings with elves or dwarves or whatever try to put some spin on the classic tropes. For instance, the Elder Scrolls games have dwarves (well, dwemer) as an extinct precursor race, A Song of Ice and Fire has giants that are basically big sasquatches, Warhammer 40k's version of Warhammer's elves were hedonists to the point that they spawned an eldritch god...heck, even Eragon (a series criticized for ripping off foundational generic-fantasy material) threw in some quirks to its dragons (like the gemstone soul-jars they can cough up). D&D could work to differentiate its strain of generic fantasy from the rest...but it hasn't.
Unless, of course, you continue to assert that D&D isn't trying to be generic and supporting this with the claim that generic fantasy is just drawing from D&D, and that all similarities between D&D and generic fantasy are because of that, but since that claim is patently unfalsifiable...

[PhoenixPhyre]

...I'm not sure how you expect me to prove or disprove this sort of statement?
D&D has always drawn lore from sources of popular fantasy. First it was Tolkien, Vance, Lovecraft, Howard, etc. It eventually started to include "old D&D lore" as one of those sources, but it hasn't stopped finding new inspiration. Look at psionics, for Pelor's sake! Sure, there were psychic powers in old D&D...as innate powers held by a few rare and bizarre monsters. What about that do you think inspired the psionic classes in 3.5? It's impossible to prove, but I'm thinking they drew inspiration from an outside source to try and broaden the kind of fantasy story they could tell. And psionic classes were still present in 4e. (I think there's technically a psionic class for 5e, but I'm not sure if it ever left Unearthed Arcana.)
But beyond that...most settings with elves or dwarves or whatever try to put some spin on the classic tropes. For instance, the Elder Scrolls games have dwarves (well, dwemer) as an extinct precursor race, A Song of Ice and Fire has giants that are basically big sasquatches, Warhammer 40k's version of Warhammer's elves were hedonists to the point that they spawned an eldritch god...heck, even Eragon (a series criticized for ripping off foundational generic-fantasy material) threw in some quirks to its dragons (like the gemstone soul-jars they can cough up). D&D could work to differentiate its strain of generic fantasy from the rest...but it hasn't.
Unless, of course, you continue to assert that D&D isn't trying to be generic and supporting this with the claim that generic fantasy is just drawing from D&D, and that all similarities between D&D and generic fantasy are because of that, but since that claim is patently unfalsifiable...

It's not trying to cover all the bases. It's merely trying to be itself, which happens to be relatively generic. It's (4e and 5e) very firmly rooted in "heroic group of adventurers going and performing heroic acts in fantastic places." It doesn't try to do a lot of things that are relatively common in fantasy (including things like the "everyman hero" who gets by on wits alone or "leader of men"-style mass battles), it doesn't claim to let you recreate any fantasy character, or many other "generic" or "universal" claims. It's a system for playing D&D, as circular as that is.

And I'd accept quotes from the developers or even from the marketing material. 5e is really specific that it doesn't want to do things other than fantasy adventures in a relatively-specific multiverse setting. From what I've been told, 3e tried to position itself (or more precisely the core d20 system) as being universal. 4e and 5e make no such claims.

Sure, many settings have lots of stuff that looks similar to fantasy novels or whatever. And D&D has drawn inspiration from lots of sources. But it's not trying to emulate such sources--it's taken those materials and mutated them into something uniquely D&D. That uniqueness has been muddled by the fact that lots of other sources have drawn from D&D itself in a form of cross-pollenization. Circular inspiration, because then modern editions have drawn from those sources that were drawing on D&D.

But then again, originality is over-rated IMO. Nothing new under the sun and all that.

[Tanarii]

Talakeal is right about Medieval/Renaissance guilds; they were organizations that existed to create and protect a monopoly. Far more like cartels than unions or professional associations.
I thought the D&D concept of a Thieves Guild was lifted straight out of Leiber's Lankhmar?

[Arbane]

But beyond that...most settings with elves or dwarves or whatever try to put some spin on the classic tropes.

I'm pretty sure the 'classic tropes' for elves don't actually predate J. R. R. Tolkien. Dwarves less so, as he ripped them off from Norse myth.

[Clistenes]

I thought the D&D concept of a Thieves Guild was lifted straight out of Leiber's Lankhmar?

Not really. 1604 novel Rinconete y Cortadillo (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rinconete_y_Cortadillo) already shows a typical Thieves Guild, so the concept has been around for quite a long time...


I'm pretty sure the 'classic tropes' for elves don't actually predate J. R. R. Tolkien. Dwarves less so, as he ripped them off from Norse myth.

Tolkien's Elves owe more to a mix of Irish Tuatha Dé Danann, Norse deities and Finnish heroes than to mythical Elves... Mythical Elves tended to be invisible beings who stalk humans and cause them illness and death or succubi-like tempters who lure men and curse or kill them...

Heck, we barely know anything about mythical Ljósálfar ("Light Elves") who should be the closest to Tolkien's Elves...

[FaerieGodfather]

How much damage a human being is capable of doing with their bare hands, especially compared to what a human being with 3 feet of sharp steel can do.

Weapon damage, full stop. The idea that a single blow from flamberge is more likely to be lethal than a blow from a stiletto is ludicrous.

[Max_Killjoy]

Weapon damage, full stop. The idea that a single blow from flamberge is more likely to be lethal than a blow from a stiletto is ludicrous.

Depends on the context of the fight or attack.

[Tanarii]

Weapon damage, full stop. The idea that a single blow from flamberge is more likely to be lethal than a blow from a stiletto is ludicrous.
Wait, what? :smallconfused:

[Talakeal]

I'm pretty sure the 'classic tropes' for elves don't actually predate J. R. R. Tolkien. Dwarves less so, as he ripped them off from Norse myth.

I always wonder why Disney's Snow White doesn't get more credit for creating the modern image of dwarves as both it and the Hobbit came out within months of each other.

[Arbane]

I always wonder why Disney's Snow White doesn't get more credit for creating the modern image of dwarves as both it and the Hobbit came out within months of each other.[/QUOTE]

Nobody wants to admit they based their badass Dwarven Tunnelguard Thorgrimm Bloodaxe on Sneezy. :smallamused:

[Xuc Xac]

Weapon damage, full stop. The idea that a single blow from flamberge is more likely to be lethal than a blow from a stiletto is ludicrous.

That's one more strike against "hit points aren't meat points". In earlier editions, weapons did a different amount of damage against large targets. There was one damage rating for small and medium targets and a different one for large targets. Sometimes the large damage was less because a dagger can hit a human's heart but wouldn't reach that deeply on a giant's body. Sometimes the large damage was more, because if you hit a human in the chest with a spear and it comes out of the target's back, pushing it in more won't do anything: they aren't getting any more impaled. Sticking 3 feet of spear in someone's chest makes the same hole as only 1 foot of spear; if you stab a giant with it, you can keep pushing the spear in deeper and disrupting more flesh and organs.

That was the official TSR explanation for why weapons did different, inconsistent amounts of damage against large creatures.

[FaerieGodfather]

Many of the more accurate RPGs out there base weapon use requirement minimums on BOTH Strength and Dexterity in varying quantities based on weapon. So to use a Broadsword you might need 16 STR and 14 DEX.

So, which weapons would be available to the average human soldier?


Wait, what? :smallconfused:

I really don't know how to state it more directly than I already have. The various greatswords are deadly weapons and I respect them-- I prefer them-- but in a straight-up combat, you are more likely to survive and keep fighting after a blow from one than you would be from a successful blow from a dagger.

Systems that replace Armor Class with Damage Reduction are even worse, because the dagger's lower damage die make it singularly worse than any other weapon for the specific thing it was best at, and the reason that knights and soldiers always carried one.

On the other hand, D&D does not at all represent the advantages of reach, leverage, and momentum and it awards no bonus to the greatsword for unhorsing cavalry or breaching pike formations.


---

As far as hit points go, if I'm not trying to use D&D for any kind of non-D&D fantasy, I tend to just lean into the D&Dishness of it all: hit points are the living body's reservoir of positive healing energy, and its capacity to instantaneously recover from injuries that a less energized organism would find debilitating.

I'm tempted to house rule that the base die for cure wounds spells isn't a d8, but rather the target's own Hit Die.


That was the official TSR explanation for why weapons did different, inconsistent amounts of damage against large creatures.

You know, I will say until I am blue in the face that Wizards needs to go back and reexamine AD&D... but man, AD&D sure had a lot of ridiculous, unnecessary, and just plain bad rules compared to Original/Classic D&D.

[Tanarii]

I really don't know how to state it more directly than I already have. The various greatswords are deadly weapons and I respect them-- I prefer them-- but in a straight-up combat, you are more likely to survive and keep fighting after a blow from one than you would be from a successful blow from a dagger.Oh. A "successful blow". That's not what I thought you meant. I thought you meant "an attack", not "a solid hit appropriate to the weapon".

I was wondering how anyone could envision a battlefield where people were using a stilleto as their primary go to weapon out the gate, because attacks with them were more dangerous and likely to get through defenses than other weapons. :smallamused:

[Beleriphon]

I always wonder why Disney's Snow White doesn't get more credit for creating the modern image of dwarves as both it and the Hobbit came out within months of each other.


Nobody wants to admit they based their badass Dwarven Tunnelguard Thorgrimm Bloodaxe on Sneezy. :smallamused:

You tell me Pikel Bouldershoulder isn't Dopey and Thibbledorf Pwent isn't Angry. Go on convince me. ;)

[gkathellar]

I really don't know how to state it more directly than I already have. The various greatswords are deadly weapons and I respect them-- I prefer them-- but in a straight-up combat, you are more likely to survive and keep fighting after a blow from one than you would be from a successful blow from a dagger.

Er. While we do know that knife fights were deadlier than sword fights in periods of history for which we have records of such, that should not be taken as a straightforward indicator of lethality. Shorter knives and daggers have very little in the way of defensive utility (with some notable exceptions), and the only way to really win a fight with one is to stick it somewhere deadly. With a sword, on the other hand, it's much more likely that you'll be able to defend yourself without killing the other party. Knives are also likely to be employed in contexts where the possibility of lost life is high - informal engagements with no armor and no rules. As Max said above, lethality is a question of context.

But having a rapier jammed three inches into your chest is no less likely to kill than the same from a poignard, and a Bowie knife will sever the important bits of a throat with no greater effectiveness than a longsword.

[Mr Beer]

I really don't know how to state it more directly than I already have. The various greatswords are deadly weapons and I respect them-- I prefer them-- but in a straight-up combat, you are more likely to survive and keep fighting after a blow from one than you would be from a successful blow from a dagger.

Assuming a lack of immediate modern medical treatment, typically a slashing injury is less likely to kill someone than one that punctures the abdomen because without surgery and antibiotics, you probably get peritonitis and die.

Whether that means a greatsword produces a less deadly injury is debateable though, because you can easily deliver blows that sever a leg at the thigh, cleave halfway through a torso or behead a man, all of which tend to be sub-optimal to the victim's chances of survival. So it likely depends on more on context than simply saying 'daggers are more deadly than greatswords'.

I doubt the 'keep fighting' statement as well. A puncture wound that will kill you at some point in the future won't stop you fighting whereas a survivable injury such as getting your hand chopped off probably will. This is one reason why knife fights are really dangerous - people carry on fighting even though they have life-threatening injuries.

[Clistenes]

I really don't know how to state it more directly than I already have. The various greatswords are deadly weapons and I respect them-- I prefer them-- but in a straight-up combat, you are more likely to survive and keep fighting after a blow from one than you would be from a successful blow from a dagger.

A blow from a greatsword can cut your head, cleave your skull spilling your brains out or sever your arm. And of course, it can be used to stab you just like a knife, only the wound will be deeper and wider...

On the other hand, people have kept fighting after being stabbed with a knife in different parts of their bodies more than a dozen times.

Now, if somebody is fighting with something like khyber sword (http://www.arms2armor.com/Swords/khyberswrd001.htm), it has been said that, while slashes have more stopping power (they can mess an arm and stop an enemy cold) stabs would be more deadly... if they reach a vital organ (somebody who is stabbed in the gut may die of septicemia the day after tomorrow, but you want him dead now).


Er. While we do know that knife fights were deadlier than sword fights in periods of history for which we have records of such, that should not be taken as a straightforward indicator of lethality. Shorter knives and daggers have very little in the way of defensive utility (with some notable exceptions), and the only way to really win a fight with one is to stick it somewhere deadly. With a sword, on the other hand, it's much more likely that you'll be able to defend yourself without killing the other party. Knives are also likely to be employed in contexts where the possibility of lost life is high - informal engagements with no armor and no rules. As Max said above, lethality is a question of context.

But having a rapier jammed three inches into your chest is no less likely to kill than the same from a poignard, and a Bowie knife will sever the important bits of a throat with no greater effectiveness than a longsword.

Yep, for what I have heard, if two people armed with dagger or knives are fighting, it's really, really, really hard to win the fight without being stabbed in turn...

Now, if somebody comes at you with a knife, and you are wielding a greatsword, you can cut them down before they stab you quite easily...

[Florian]

@Clistenes:

The whole point here is armor, really. Till early renaissance, armor was constantly ahead in the arms race, so you need a way to either ignore it or bypass it. Weapons like the warhammer or greatsword have enough mass to transfer enough kinetic force for effect, like unmounting a knight or breaking bones beneath plate armor. Quite contrary to that, weapons like the stiletto or misericords can pierce the weak points and deliver a killing strike, even to armored combatants.

[gkathellar]

@Clistenes:

The whole point here is armor, really. Till early renaissance, armor was constantly ahead in the arms race, so you need a way to either ignore it or bypass it. Weapons like the warhammer or greatsword have enough mass to transfer enough kinetic force for effect, like unmounting a knight or breaking bones beneath plate armor. Quite contrary to that, weapons like the stiletto or misericords can pierce the weak points and deliver a killing strike, even to armored combatants.

So, first of all, armor remained in the arms race well into the Renaissance.

Second, a war hammer doesn't overcome armor by way of mass, but by way of construction that allows for a very high, very focused amount of kinetic energy towards 1-4 closely spaced points, depending on head design - it's a puncturing weapon as much as a bashing one. A mace more aptly fits your description, but even maces had a lot of design tricks to increase power generation from a skilled user.

Third, even large swords generally have the wrong construction to overcome armor using conventional techniques (the weight of a sword is at the back), requiring half-swording or mordhau (we don't actually really know with certainty what greatswords were used for, other than bodyguard work and probably fighting pikes).

Fourth, while thin, heavily constructed daggers (spikes, really) were used for armored combat, that's not a function of their superiority in general so much as it is the result of the tendency of full-plate fighting to turn into a wrestling match. Daggers may be usable at grappling range, but what's even more important is how useful they are when the grapple is won and you need to off a pinned or otherwise disabled opponent. Daggers are amazing for fighting at extremely close range and for executions. But while approaching a mobile, resisting opponent, is a dagger deadlier than an estoc? Absolutely not.

[FaerieGodfather]

Point is, every weapon is a tool and every different kind of battle is a different problem to solve. That's a very difficult design problem to solve in a game like D&D and I'm not sure I'd want to play the game that solved it-- but the default D&D solution is too frequently diametrically opposed to reality.

Kinda like everything having to do with firearms in Pathfinder.

Honestly, on paper it sounds like the worst kind of gamist abstraction, but I'm inclined to think that class-based weapon damage is the most realistic solution that's viable within a D&D space.

[gkathellar]

Point is, every weapon is a tool and every different kind of battle is a different problem to solve. That's a very difficult design problem to solve in a game like D&D and I'm not sure I'd want to play the game that solved it-- but the default D&D solution is too frequently diametrically opposed to reality.

Kinda like everything having to do with firearms in Pathfinder.

This, I can absolutely agree with. D&D is a genre fiction emulation engine (never mind that its genre has increasingly been itself), and that frequently puts it at odds with both reality and good game design.


Honestly, on paper it sounds like the worst kind of gamist abstraction, but I'm inclined to think that class-based weapon damage is the most realistic solution that's viable within a D&D space.

I tend to agree, although allowing different weapons to be treated as archetypes, with real differences in how they work, might be another option to explore. Or it might just be way too complicated to be worth bothering with.

[Kyutaru]

Swords historically even had issues with leather armor. D&D makes it only a +2 AC thing but it was much tougher than that. It's just one of those balance mechanics like making Shotguns useless past 8 meters. Completely unrealistic but necessary.

Old AD&D even had different armors with different AC modifiers by weapon type in the Weapon vs Armor table. I prefer the 2e version that just focused on three attack types, the three weapon damage types. So like platemail would be better against slashing weapons than it would against piercing and bludgeoning weapons. Or chainmail would be great against slashing and piercing but suck against bludgeoning. In fact, bludgeoning tended to be really good against heavy armor and really bad against unarmored or light armored targets and some medium armors.

It created this situation where you weren't just choosing your armor types based on a flat single AC value. AC4 wasn't necessarily better than AC6 because maybe AC6 had a -1 bonus against bludgeoning while AC4 had a +2 penalty. The final result was AC6 becomes AC5 while AC4 became AC6 effectively. If you ever wondered why certain armors exist that seem redundant it's because of these modifiers that made them once unique and a viable alternative by damage type.

Since all of that was removed with 3rd edition, we lost any sort of advantages damage type or specific weapons had against different types of armor. Yes, daggers are better against platemail than a sword will be and this was reflected in the table. Year after year, edition after edition, the rule makers have stripped away complex or tedious aspects of the game to pull away from realism and wargaming crunch to better accommodate casual speed play and put the focus on roleplaying rather than looking up rules and charts.


I tend to agree, although allowing different weapons to be treated as archetypes, with real differences in how they work, might be another option to explore. Or it might just be way too complicated to be worth bothering with.
That's actually how old D&D worked already, treating different weapons with different armor bonuses and speeds and damage types to small/large to create a unique feel for each. Some weapons even gave you a better armor class like the quarterstaff. All of that went out the window for the sake of simplicity and to eliminate the need to constantly reference charts during combat.

[PhoenixPhyre]

From my perspective, all of those changes are a feature, not a bug. I'll take "unrealistic" over "slow to play" any day and twice on Sundays. Having to look up a table during combat, or worse multiple times per turn or having to memorize a bunch of tables is not what I consider fun.

That goes for a lot of things. I guess I don't try to apply "real world logic" to the game world (or more particularly the rules of the game) by default. I'll discuss it when it amuses me to notice it, but it never really bugs me. The rules are just the interface, not the actual underlying principles of the world. And I'd rather have a simple interface that lets me get on playing rather than one where you have to spend all your time playing the interface rather than playing the game. :shrug:

[Kyutaru]

From my perspective, all of those changes are a feature, not a bug. I'll take "unrealistic" over "slow to play" any day and twice on Sundays. Having to look up a table during combat, or worse multiple times per turn or having to memorize a bunch of tables is not what I consider fun.

That goes for a lot of things. I guess I don't try to apply "real world logic" to the game world (or more particularly the rules of the game) by default. I'll discuss it when it amuses me to notice it, but it never really bugs me. The rules are just the interface, not the actual underlying principles of the world. And I'd rather have a simple interface that lets me get on playing rather than one where you have to spend all your time playing the interface rather than playing the game. :shrug:

I agree with your position. I mention it because some people seem to want to go back to that old way of doing things. If you other guys want complex and realistic, check out 1st and 2nd edition. They had lots more of that. For all the crap THAC0 received, it was actually a better system if counter intuitive with how lower is better.

Thac0 origins and why it makes sense
https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/3au0ie/thac0_origins_and_context/?depth=1

I actually really liked the old weapon type advantages when they were part of the TSR Gold box video games. Since all the math and stat tracking was done for me behind the scenes it didn't annoy me. My cleric felt really strong against heavily armored targets because of the bonus to bludgeoning while fighters actually had reasons to swap weapons sometimes to get an advantage against a certain type of armor class the enemy is wearing. "His hide is thick, better use piercing weapons" was a thing. And since in 2nd edition Platemail had a +4 bonus vs Slashing and a +3 bonus vs Piercing, using Bludgeoning weapons on all your characters was huge whenever you were up against Plate enemies.

Here's a visual chart someone made for 3.5 edition using that armor adjustment system:
http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?115753-(3-5)-Armor-vs-Weapon-Types

[Eldan]

Spell slots. This one is weird but I much rather prefer rolling for if a spell actually manifests like in Warhammer Fantasy (where I think you roll different difficulties if a spell works, and if you fail you corrupt the surrounding area with Chaos).

I can't wrap my head around a wizard that has spent several hours carefully inscribing a spell, then using it for months or years only to say: "Sorry lads, I can't cast Fireball, I haven't got it memorized." Like WHAT?! This thing is your bread and butter.

Similarly, learning new spells is as easy as 1, 2, 3, at least for wizards. "Yeah, I fiddled a bit in my laboratory for a few hours and I can see into the villain's bedroom using a mirror now." Like WHAT? Just yesterday you struggled to remember how an explosion works.

I always like the comparison with a well practiced (al)chemist or pharmacist. They'd actually always be able to remake their aspirin, and they would get quicker the more often they would do it per day (current day aspirin is made in factories because it is much safer and cheaper but you can actually make your own with a bit of lab equipment). You wouldn't go: "yup, that is it, thrice a day and no more." I can understand the explanation of mental fatigue, but Vancian magic is explicitly counting the number of spell uses.

It's not mental fatigue, it's preparation time. Spells take far too long to cast in combat, so wizards cast all their spells early in the morning, then keep the almost-cast spells stored in their heads.

I love D&D's vancian magic system, personally. It's deep, it's complex, and it's more flavourful than most magic I've encountered in other RPGs. I'm just kinda bored of all the games where a wizard can just say "well, I'll just cast whatever I'll need at the moment". D&D is not a very flawed implementation, sure, but at least it tries to force wizards to do some thinking ahead and preparation. All those "roll for strain" or "spend mana" systems just let you do whatever with magic.

[PhoenixPhyre]

As with most complex mechanics, things like that work best when they're automated and transparent to the players. It's why MMOs can have way more complex fights and mechanics without slogging the game down.

[Max_Killjoy]

It's not mental fatigue, it's preparation time. Spells take far too long to cast in combat, so wizards cast all their spells early in the morning, then keep the almost-cast spells stored in their heads.

I love D&D's vancian magic system, personally. It's deep, it's complex, and it's more flavourful than most magic I've encountered in other RPGs. I'm just kinda bored of all the games where a wizard can just say "well, I'll just cast whatever I'll need at the moment". D&D is not a very flawed implementation, sure, but at least it tries to force wizards to do some thinking ahead and preparation. All those "roll for strain" or "spend mana" systems just let you do whatever with magic.

What?

D&D gives literally ZERO explanation for what's actually going in with magic (other than handwaving about "the weave" in one setting), and treats spells like black boxes that just do what they do. There's no depth there, it's just slots and shots. There's no flavor there at all, it's just a purely gamist mechanic.

As for "I'm casting the spell and then holding it in my head until I unleash it", personally I have no use for that as a concept, and objectively it only fits a bare handful of possible settings.

[Hytheter]

As for "I'm casting the spell and then holding it in my head until I unleash it", personally I have no use for that as a concept, and objectively it only fits a bare handful of possible settings.

It doesn't even really make sense in D&D anymore, since in 5e you can cast a prepared spell any number of times.

[Talakeal]

It's not mental fatigue, it's preparation time. Spells take far too long to cast in combat, so wizards cast all their spells early in the morning, then keep the almost-cast spells stored in their heads.

I love D&D's vancian magic system, personally. It's deep, it's complex, and it's more flavourful than most magic I've encountered in other RPGs. I'm just kinda bored of all the games where a wizard can just say "well, I'll just cast whatever I'll need at the moment". D&D is not a very flawed implementation, sure, but at least it tries to force wizards to do some thinking ahead and preparation. All those "roll for strain" or "spend mana" systems just let you do whatever with magic.

So in my Heart of Darkness system players can either prepare spells beforehand, in which case they are automatically successful, or leave the slot open and cast them on the spot which requires a skill check with a difficulty of the power level of the spell.

In have been running the system for almost 20 years now, and I have NEVER had a player choose to prepare a spell beforehand.

[PhoenixPhyre]

It doesn't even really make sense in D&D anymore, since in 5e you can cast a prepared spell any number of times.

Correct. 4e and 5e completely broke with that model. They're Vancian only in name at this point (meaning that you have a fixed number of slots/day), and I'm not sure that the 5e D&D PHB or DMG ever even uses that term. I know if I called it "vancian" casting to my players, none of them would understand what I'm talking about.

This is why I made my (5e-centric) model for D&D spell-casting that involves separating the spell slot (a packet of energy held within a soul) and the spells (metaphysical patterns which cause the universe to resonate in certain ways when energy is fed into them properly). You can know the spells (in universe) without being able to cast them, so there can be scholars of magic who can't light a candle. You can have spell slots that you don't have any spells for (c.f. multi-classed casters with high-level slots but no high-level spells).

[RedMage125]

Don't even get me started on subterranean, prison complexes created by dramatically advanced societies, in which incredibly valuable treasures were casually abandoned.

This reminds me of one of the first few lines in the D&D comic from a few years ago.

"Why does it always have to be dungeons?"

"In a world with dragons, underground complexes large enough for a man, but not much larger, it's just good sense."

[hamishspence]

"Why does it always have to be dungeons?"

"In a world with dragons, underground complexes large enough for a man, but not much larger, it's just good sense."

It also comes up in the Zogonia comic: "The things in here are hiding from the things out there".

[Avista]

Magic logic in D&D never bothered me. I think they left it intentionally blank so DMs/Players can fill it with their own interpretations.

I have my own theories involving energy 'pools' and how preparing spells is just manipulating your pool to conform a certain way. Once you deplete your pool, you need a long/short rest to replenish it.

[Arbane]

Strength determines climbing ability.

Elephants are better at unskilled climbing than squirrels. You heard it here first, folks.

[Luccan]

Strength determines climbing ability.

Elephants are better at unskilled climbing than squirrels. You heard it here first, folks.

In 3.5, having a climb speed gives you a +8 bonus on all climb checks. If they were statted, it would make sense for squirrels to have a climb speed. Further, several creatures, including some animals, specifically use their Dex instead of Strength to determine their total bonus to Climb. Again, squirrels would probably have something similar. Plus, squirrels would probably have a further racial bonus to Climb anyway.

In 5e, the check made to climb is determined by the DM and even if they go for the normal Athletics, they can still decide it uses Dexterity rather than Strength in the case of a squirrel, either making an in-game call or by making that a native ability of the squirrel (which I'm pretty sure is unstatted in 5e as well, so it would have to be homebrewed). A thinking DM would also apply disadvantage to the Elephant's ability to climb anything that it logically couldn't and Elephants have a large Strength bonus, but no Athletics bonus, meaning they probably wouldn't end up very good at it. And again, squirrels would probably have some inherent bonus to their skill checks related to climbing. Also, 5e calls out several times you don't need to make a check if there's no chance of failure and I don't think most situations give squirrels a chance of failing to climb.

In other words, elephants would not be better climbers unless you specifically ignored every example, guideline, and actual rule. At least in those two editions.

[gkathellar]

In 3.5, squirrels aside, elephants are still pretty damn good climbers - certainly better than most humans. This is one of those, “the skill rules were written for PCs,” things, but it is silly.

In 5E, the skill rules are too intangible to make qualitative statements about.

[Hytheter]

In 3.5, squirrels aside, elephants are still pretty damn good climbers - certainly better than most humans. This is one of those, “the skill rules were written for PCs,” things, but it is silly.

In 5E, the skill rules are too intangible to make qualitative statements about.

That said, 5e does have other rules that break down in a similar way: the jumping rules.

Jump height is 3+ your STR modifier, while jump distance is just your STR Score.

A cat, with its -4 STR modifier therefore can't jump vertically at all.

Meanwhile an elephant has 22/+6 STR, all but allowing it to leap over a small house.

[Imbalance]

Q: Why did the elephant paint his toenails red?
A: To hide in a cherry tree.

[Willie the Duck]

In 3.5, squirrels aside, elephants are still pretty damn good climbers - certainly better than most humans. This is one of those, “the skill rules were written for PCs,” things, but it is silly.

Reminds me of 3.5's grappling horses (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0200.html).

[hotflungwok]

In 3.5, squirrels aside, elephants are still pretty damn good climbers - certainly better than most humans.
How else do you think the elephants made it over the Alps? Hannibal was a total meta-gamer.

[RedMage125]

Reminds me of 3.5's grappling horses (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0200.html).

Forget Horses, a level 1 druid in 3.5 could have a camel as an animal companion. +10 Grapple check!

[Kyutaru]

Forget Horses, a level 1 druid in 3.5 could have a camel as an animal companion. +10 Grapple check!

Why is that even a thing?

[Willie the Duck]

Forget Horses, a level 1 druid in 3.5 could have a camel as an animal companion. +10 Grapple check!

Hmmm, the Hellenistic era of Egyptian leadership (e.g. Cleopatra) coincided with the era of the original Olympic games. I am now imagining a story of someone entering a camel in the wrestling competition as a joke, and them ending up winning (and then eating) the olive leaves. :smallbiggrin:


Why is that even a thing?

Because either:
1) No one thought to limit grappling to creatures with arms, or
2) people did thought of it, but decided that too many creatures could then by insta-defeated by a grapple build if they lowered their #s too much, or
3) simply a casualty of 3e's 'build everything using a prescribed set of rules' mentality

[Clistenes]

Weight should give you a bonus or a penalty to climb and jump. But that would add more numbers and calculations, so they probably chose to not do it...

[Kyutaru]

Weight should give you a bonus or a penalty to climb and jump. But that would add more numbers and calculations, so they probably chose to not do it...

It should also give a bonus to grappling. Some of these creatures with massive grappling bonuses are just to prevent strong fighters from muscling them around.

[halfeye]

3) simply a casualty of 3e's 'build everything using a proscribed set of rules' mentality

"Proscribed" means banned, for example on these forums thread necromancy is proscribed.

The word you wanted was probably prescribed, which means literally written before, and also allowed.

[Willie the Duck]

"Proscribed" means banned, for example on these forums thread necromancy is proscribed.

The word you wanted was probably prescribed, which means literally written before, and also allowed.

You are right about my intended word choice. If it was not clear before, I spend much of my time on these forums working without a net (I have learned to type up long responses in a notepad, lest the forum editor eat my work, but that's it).

[RedMage125]

Why is that even a thing?


Hmmm, the Hellenistic era of Egyptian leadership (e.g. Cleopatra) coincided with the era of the original Olympic games. I am now imagining a story of someone entering a camel in the wrestling competition as a joke, and them ending up winning (and then eating) the olive leaves. :smallbiggrin:



Because either:
1) No one thought to limit grappling to creatures with arms, or
2) people did thought of it, but decided that too many creatures could then by insta-defeated by a grapple build if they lowered their #s too much, or
3) simply a casualty of 3e's 'build everything using a prescribed set of rules' mentality

#3 is pretty much correct.
In 3.5e EVERY creature needed a listed Grapple Check Modifier because you never know when some creature is going to try and grapple IT, and Grapple Modifiers had to include bonuses based on size, so having it pre-calculated was handy when some player may want to initiate a grapple. So it's not so much that the mechanics of how a Camel would do the grappling is taken into account, so much as that it is very difficult to grapple a camel. They're size category Large, incredibly strong (18 STR)), and have 3 HD for a +2 BAB.

BUT, since those mechanics are identical, there's absolutely no reason that a camel could not initiate a grapple itself. Maybe it grabs the opponent and sits on it, or uses one hoof to hold it down. Either way, most CR1-3 creatures can't compete with a +10.

[Beleriphon]

#3 is pretty much correct.
In 3.5e EVERY creature needed a listed Grapple Check Modifier because you never know when some creature is going to try and grapple IT, and Grapple Modifiers had to include bonuses based on size, so having it pre-calculated was handy when some player may want to initiate a grapple. So it's not so much that the mechanics of how a Camel would do the grappling is taken into account, so much as that it is very difficult to grapple a camel. They're size category Large, incredibly strong (18 STR)), and have 3 HD for a +2 BAB.

BUT, since those mechanics are identical, there's absolutely no reason that a camel could not initiate a grapple itself. Maybe it grabs the opponent and sits on it, or uses one hoof to hold it down. Either way, most CR1-3 creatures can't compete with a +10.

A +10 grapple isn't unreasonable when you consider a big creature can just sit on a smaller one, as you point out with the camel. Its not like its supposed to be biting the fighter and swing them around.

[Mendicant]

I've never been much bothered by HP's fuzzy edges and I like Vancian magic (particularly the spellbook kind), but I haaaaaaate scrolls. I don't even have a problem with the mechanical niche they fill, but ask me to conceptualize what the hell happens when you cast off a scroll in 6 seconds during the heat of combat and I will come up blank every time.

[Beleriphon]

I've never been much bothered by HP's fuzzy edges and I like Vancian magic (particularly the spellbook kind), but I haaaaaaate scrolls. I don't even have a problem with the mechanical niche they fill, but ask me to conceptualize what the hell happens when you cast off a scroll in 6 seconds during the heat of combat and I will come up blank every time.

The spell is charged ready to go off other than the last syllable or something. Utter that single sound and BAM Fireball to the Face!(TM)

[Vyanie]

Yeah. I don't see stats as trying to simulate discrete elements, but rather as trying to enable archetypes. Are you "the buff guy" type? Have a good STR score and choose a class/approach (including combat) that plays to that archetype. This goes along with mighty thews and big weapons, as well as a blunt attitude to things.

Are you a speedster or a back-line type that tries to avoid direct confrontation? DEX is your thing. And since ranged weapons like bows are typical of that type (the sniper, the ambusher, the archer; none of them are conventionally huge), bows use DEX.

CON is good for everyone, but it's about being hearty. Frail person? Low CON. Hale and hearty? High CON.

Are you the "nerd" type, always wanting to know details about things? High INT. INT is bookishness more than IQ.

Are you in-tune with people and things around you, always paying attention and intuitively understanding people and situations? High WIS. Note: there's a conflation here (accidental) between good decisions (the common meaning of wisdom), which aren't an ability-related thing at all, and perceptiveness (modern Wisdom scores)

Are you a people-person or have a high sense of self? CHA. Paladins get it because the Shining Knight archetype brings in a lot of "leader of men" vibe. This one is probably the most over-extended ability score IMO.

But the key is that they're there to enable archetypes, not to model things like grip strength, fast- vs slow-twitch musculature, etc.

I honestly HATE that definition of dex, its not just about speed its about accuracy and finesse, sure the big guy can hit a door twice in 6 seconds to break it down.... a fencer might hit it 3 -4 times in the perfect spots and it falls apart as well

[RedMage125]

A +10 grapple isn't unreasonable when you consider a big creature can just sit on a smaller one, as you point out with the camel. Its not like its supposed to be biting the fighter and swing them around.

Never said the modifier was unreasonable. But a grappling camel just SEEMS silly.

Also, a human Fighter (Str 18) who take IUS and Improved Grapple at level 1 has a +9 modifier. Meanwhile, camels are an option for a companion animal to a Tier 1 Primary Spellcaster class at level 1. So it COULD, by the RAW, "bite the fighter and swing him around".

[PhoenixPhyre]

I honestly HATE that definition of dex, its not just about speed its about accuracy and finesse, sure the big guy can hit a door twice in 6 seconds to break it down.... a fencer might hit it 3 -4 times in the perfect spots and it falls apart as well

Yeah, I mis-stated that part. In my mind, the "speedster" archetype overlaps almost completely with the "hit softer, but in the right spot," rather than the "overcome it with brute force" type. It's not about physically moving faster but about moving just right.

[Beleriphon]

Never said the modifier was unreasonable. But a grappling camel just SEEMS silly.

Also, a human Fighter (Str 18) who take IUS and Improved Grapple at level 1 has a +9 modifier. Meanwhile, camels are an option for a companion animal to a Tier 1 Primary Spellcaster class at level 1. So it COULD, by the RAW, "bite the fighter and swing him around".

Yes, they could do that if you narrate it that way, obviously it the grapple score is supposed to be used to describe other grapply actions, like sitting on them, or trying to step on them, or just pushing the person around with their body.

[RedMage125]

Yes, they could do that if you narrate it that way, obviously it the grapple score is supposed to be used to describe other grapply actions, like sitting on them, or trying to step on them, or just pushing the person around with their body.

I only brought it up because someone mentioned "Grappling Horses", and I remembered that Camels grapple even better. And the only thing of note about that is that Camels are an acceptable Animal Companion for a 1st level Druid. Seems kind of unbalanced when the class feature of a primary spellcaster can get a better Grapple Check at level 1 than a PC built for Grappling. Only if one took a race with a STR bonus like a half-orc, and made a Fighter (to get 2 feats at level 1), could one even EQUAL the Camel's Grapple check. The only remotely balancing factor is that the camel's only natural attack (bite) is still considered a "secondary attack", and thus it has an attack bonus of +0 (due to -5 penalty to secondary attacks). But when you only have to hit Touch AC, that's not too hard.


What the Grapple Check is "supposed to be" is just hypothesis about RAI. RAW is very clear that Camels are excellent grapplers.
...
...
...
And now I'm picturing a Camel in a luchador mask.

[awa]

quoted from the 3rd edition srd in the

http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/intro.htm

"Natural Tendencies

Some creatures simply aren’t made for certain types of physical activity. If it seems clear that a particular creature simply is not made for a particular physical activity, that creature takes a -8 penalty on skill checks that defy its natural tendencies.

In extreme circumstances the creature fails the check automatically. "

elephants are bad climbers

[AMFV]

What the Grapple Check is "supposed to be" is just hypothesis about RAI. RAW is very clear that Camels are excellent grapplers.
...
...
...
And now I'm picturing a Camel in a luchador mask.

Camels are huge. They weigh in at around a thousand pounds each, if you try and push one around, it'll definitely be the one doing the pushing.

[Arbane]

quoted from the 3rd edition srd in the

http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/intro.htm

"Natural Tendencies

Some creatures simply aren’t made for certain types of physical activity. If it seems clear that a particular creature simply is not made for a particular physical activity, that creature takes a -8 penalty on skill checks that defy its natural tendencies.

In extreme circumstances the creature fails the check automatically. "

elephants are bad climbers

What does your common sense tell you about goats as climbers? :smallamused:

[hamishspence]

Camels are huge. They weigh in at around a thousand pounds each, if you try and push one around, it'll definitely be the one doing the pushing.

And a big specimen of the bigger two-humped species can be over 2000 pounds.

[AMFV]

And a big specimen of the bigger two-humped species can be over 2000 pounds.

Yeah, I definitely wouldn't want to wrestle one. If I see a Luchadore Camel, I'm walking the other way.

[hamishspence]

It's kind of a pity that there's no actual Dire Camel statblock as far as I am aware:

http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0564.html

given that some prehistoric camels are estimated at over 5000 pounds and would be perfect "dire camels".

[Tvtyrant]

Also the whole "knock it down and stamp on it" thing is real, which is what I envision a grappling camel doing. Where a bear grapples by hugging and a croc by smiling suggestively with the person in their mouth.

[RedMage125]

Camels are huge. They weigh in at around a thousand pounds each, if you try and push one around, it'll definitely be the one doing the pushing.
Size category Large, but I know what you mean :smallwink:

Yeah, I definitely wouldn't want to wrestle one. If I see a Luchadore Camel, I'm walking the other way.

NEW CHARACTER CONCEPT!!

[halfeye]

I believe camels bite, and pictures of their teeth are horrible, yellow-grey and sharp looking. They are herbivores, so they don't bite meat for a living, but I believe they can kick and spit too. Domesticated ones are tame but wild ones may well not be.

[John Campbell]

A +10 grapple isn't unreasonable when you consider a big creature can just sit on a smaller one, as you point out with the camel. Its not like its supposed to be biting the fighter and swing them around.

Even that's not as ridiculous as you might think. One of the guys I game with has told stories about the horse he had growing up picking a sheep up by the scruff of the neck and throwing it over a fence. Horses are big, and have a surprisingly powerful bite and strong necks. And camels have all that, and a nasty, bloody-minded attitude to go with it. You're not winning a wrestling match with one.


More ridiculous: Swim is Strength-based. It doesn't take buoyancy into account except minimally with ACP, which doesn't apply to things that aren't wearing actual armor.

Greater stone golems are amazing swimmers.

[awa]

Even that's not as ridiculous as you might think. One of the guys I game with has told stories about the horse he had growing up picking a sheep up by the scruff of the neck and throwing it over a fence. Horses are big, and have a surprisingly powerful bite and strong necks. And camels have all that, and a nasty, bloody-minded attitude to go with it. You're not winning a wrestling match with one.


More ridiculous: Swim is Strength-based. It doesn't take buoyancy into account except minimally with ACP, which doesn't apply to things that aren't wearing actual armor.

Greater stone golems are amazing swimmers.

except for the fact that they auto fail

[Pauly]

quoted from the 3rd edition srd in the

http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/intro.htm

"Natural Tendencies

Some creatures simply aren’t made for certain types of physical activity. If it seems clear that a particular creature simply is not made for a particular physical activity, that creature takes a -8 penalty on skill checks that defy its natural tendencies.

In extreme circumstances the creature fails the check automatically. "

elephavnts are bad climbers

Have you ever seen an elephant hiding in a tree?

That’s because they are so good at hiding.

[Enixon]

I think they left it intentionally blank so DMs/Players can fill it with their own interpretations.



I wish these forums had a "like" function becasue this line here just hits the nail on the head for me in regards to SO many complaints I've heard people make about the lore in game settings.



The spell is charged ready to go off other than the last syllable or something. Utter that single sound and BAM Fireball to the Face!(TM)

You know, people keep claiming there's explanation for what "preparing spells" actauly IS in universe, but I remember the third edition player's handbook saying that the quote above is almost exactaly how it's intended to work, that when prepping spells you're doing the ritual work for the spell but stopping right before the last trigger word/gesture/whatever, do other editions not have that explanation? :smallconfused:

[Luccan]

What does your common sense tell you about goats as climbers? :smallamused:

So your argument here is that elephants are good climbers? I guess there was no issue after all.

[Max_Killjoy]

Magic logic in D&D never bothered me. I think they left it intentionally blank so DMs/Players can fill it with their own interpretations.


The problem with "leaving it blank" is that they're then not basing the rules on anything in particular, so they're all over the place, and the magic doesn't come up against any limits.




You know, people keep claiming there's explanation for what "preparing spells" actauly IS in universe, but I remember the third edition player's handbook saying that the quote above is almost exactly how it's intended to work, that when prepping spells you're doing the ritual work for the spell but stopping right before the last trigger word/gesture/whatever, do other editions not have that explanation? :smallconfused:


That's a sign of the slot-and-prep casting system's Vancian roots. It's bonkers, but at least it's something.

[Florian]

@Max:

You already use a lot of things that are engineered to be used without understanding the core principles of why they function when you use them. Unless you have some serious programming skills and an expansive understanding how our baking system works, firing up your bank account app should be a total enigma to you, yet you take it for granted because it provides what you need from it. You function just fine without understanding how the whole frontend, backend, network you use and so on function. They are all a black box to you.

[gkathellar]

@Max:

You already use a lot of things that are engineered to be used without understanding the core principles of why they function when you use them. Unless you have some serious programming skills and an expansive understanding how our baking system works, firing up your bank account app should be a total enigma to you, yet you take it for granted because it provides what you need from it. You function just fine without understanding how the whole frontend, backend, network you use and so on function. They are all a black box to you.

Just because an opaque system is usable doesn't mean its opacity is a good thing. [Insert snarky comment about international finance.] D&D's magic system is functional, but that doesn't mean it wouldn't be improved by some kind of clarity.

[Max_Killjoy]

@Max:

You already use a lot of things that are engineered to be used without understanding the core principles of why they function when you use them. Unless you have some serious programming skills and an expansive understanding how our baking system works, firing up your bank account app should be a total enigma to you, yet you take it for granted because it provides what you need from it. You function just fine without understanding how the whole frontend, backend, network you use and so on function. They are all a black box to you.


I don't use a banking app.

But no, they're not a total enigmas.

There seems to be this pernicious fallacy now, that comes up in these discussions in particular, that if you don't understand something as well as the greatest expert, then you supposedly don't understand it at all.

It also shows up in "the tech world" with this growing idea that the user just needs to have their hand held while big mommy tech takes care of this for them, that we don't need access to most of the settings or controls because we'll just mess something up, so that instead of the user controlling the tool, the tool controls the user. It's vile.



Just because an opaque system is usable doesn't mean its opacity is a good thing. [Insert snarky comment about international finance.] D&D's magic system is functional, but that doesn't mean it wouldn't be improved by some kind of clarity.

This is true as well. Most of the opacity in these "black boxes" is deliberate, not inherent. It's a smoke screen.

And yeah, back to topic, D&D's magic, at a setting level, would really benefit from having the guts exposed.

[Imbalance]

Have you ever seen an elephant hiding in a tree?

That’s because they are so good at hiding.

Precisely.

[PhoenixPhyre]

And yeah, back to topic, D&D's magic, at a setting level, would really benefit from having the guts exposed.

What if (advocatus diaboli here), the "guts" of D&D magic, at a setting level, are that there is no deeper explanation? That it is that way because the universe was created with certain built-in "cheat codes"? Or that it is that way because someone with the proper power decided it would be that way (which is the canon explanation for the Forgotten Realms, and is the true meta-reason)? That may be unsatisfying, but it doesn't hamper the ability of a player to portray a character within the rules. They can be assured that

a) their spells and abilities will function exactly as written--if it says it deals damage/opens locks/teleports, it will do that.
b) their spells and abilities will do nothing that they do not say they do--ray of frost does not freeze water.
c) their spells and abilities will only interact with other spells and abilities in specific, defined ways.

That's enough, IMO, to play a character. Anything beyond that is scenery dressing and there are many "valid" choices for that dressing.

[King of Nowhere]

My two complaints are both meta-complaints

1) some people actually expect real world logic to apply.
I've seen many people with strong opinion on the falling rules, because a real person would not survive. Ok, but those same people expect the person to skewer a dragon with a sword that's not big enough to reach its vitals. or they don't balk when a creature that, according to the draconomicon, weights 500 tons start flying on muscle power and wings that would be far too small.
It's clear that this world works on totally different premises. Of course I expect some things will stay the same (an elephant cannot climb without magical aid, for example) but what is and what is not possible for a person to accomplish is clearly completely different.

2) some people expect RAW logic to apply
which is the other extreme, and equally bad. "So, an elephant has a lot of STR, so my elephant animal companion climbs". well, we already have several hundreds of pages of rules. of course you cannot recreate the real world with a manual of rules. there's a reason our actual attempt at deciphering the rules for the real world, i.e. science, has produced thousands upon thousands of volumes and still we don't know everything. So, ultimately you have to accept that RAW cannot handle everything, and sometimes the DM will just have to adjudicate something arbitrarily according to logic. Just, you know, not real world logic, because that one does not work.

So, overall it's a golden mean between logic and rules that can be difficult to achieve.

[PhoenixPhyre]

So, overall it's a golden mean between logic and rules that can be difficult to achieve.

For me, personally, the relevant "logic" is game logic. What makes the game most enjoyable for everyone involved? That's something that can't be written down, because it depends on the people involved. Heck, between the 3 active tables I'm at (2 as DM, one as a player, both of the ones with me as DM in the same setting), the balance of logic differs strongly. In one, "silly" elements are a fact of life (like the Ring of Spelling, letting someone change the name of a spell by one letter as its being cast once per day, turning a fireball into a sireball and summoning the BBEG's long-dead father). In another, "realistic" logic (with appropriate edits for game purposes) rules the day. The third runs closer to RAW.

[Mendicant]

You know, people keep claiming there's explanation for what "preparing spells" actauly IS in universe, but I remember the third edition player's handbook saying that the quote above is almost exactaly how it's intended to work, that when prepping spells you're doing the ritual work for the spell but stopping right before the last trigger word/gesture/whatever, do other editions not have that explanation? :smallconfused:

However prep and slot works, the scroll still doesn't make any sense to me. The act of removing a scroll from storage, unfurling it, and reading off the last word or syllable all in six seconds of combat just reads as farce to me.

[Frozen_Feet]

@PP: hey, we all know that in D&D, the GM is God (as in, God and gods are literally roles the GM is supposed to play in the game) and both magic and morality work because God Wills it, in the way He Wills it, and it is Good because He says it's Good, damn it!

Based on past discussions, I'm pretty sure this makes Max cry tears of blood. :smallamused:

[AMFV]

@PP: hey, we all know that in D&D, the GM is God (as in, God and gods are literally roles the GM is supposed to play in the game) and both magic and morality work because God Wills it, in the way He Wills it, and it is Good because He says it's Good, damn it!

The Gods are roles the DM is supposed to play in most games. The Magic system is not his fault though, unless you're doing some kind of weird homebrew one.

[Avista]

When I first posted this thread, I was expecting more like 'laws of physics don't apply here!'

And you might counter the 'climbing elephant' by saying the object being climbed (cliff, tree, etc) can't support the large creature.

[Diceomancer]

More powerful creatures being rarer and weaker creatures being more common is in defiance of the logic of natural selection, but it is usually assumed in most settings. The need for more prey than predators to exist might partially explain this, but not completely.

Magic is generally treated like technology in that new discoveries can be made that improve upon it. Despite this, ancient magic is often regarded as more powerful, especially in the case of artifacts more powerful than anything that can be created in modern times.

Couatls are very underpowered compared to what they should be based on their backstory.

It seems like there should be more spells that aren't designed for battle.

[hamishspence]

More powerful creatures being rarer and weaker creatures being more common is in defiance of the logic of natural selection, but it is usually assumed in most settings. The need for more prey than predators to exist might partially explain this, but not completely.

The most common complaint I've seen regarding this is that D&D is far too "top-heavy" with there being vastly more powerful, predatory creatures than are feedable:

More Predators Than Prey (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MorePredatorsThanPrey)

Even when it comes to herbivores, it just makes sense for rabbits to be more common than deer in most places that have them both.

[Hytheter]

More powerful creatures being rarer and weaker creatures being more common is in defiance of the logic of natural selection

Whereas in real life, powerful creatures like tigers and elephants are obviously far more common than weaker ones like ants and earthworms, as they should be because that's how natural selection works!

[halfeye]

The most common complaint I've seen regarding this is that D&D is far too "top-heavy" with there being vastly more powerful, predatory creatures than are feedable:

More Predators Than Prey (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MorePredatorsThanPrey)

Even when it comes to herbivores, it just makes sense for rabbits to be more common than deer in most places that have them both.

Rabbits are a lot less common than they would/should be due to Myxamatosis and Rabbit haemorrhagic disease, and even at their peak they would be a lot less common than voles. Voles are very good at hiding and most of the time they are not seen even though they are present in large numbers.

There are probably more tonnes of rabbits than deer, and more mass of voles than either.

[hamishspence]

There are probably more tonnes of rabbits than deer, and more mass of voles than either.

Indeed. And if you're counting by the individual rather than by the ton, there will be lots more voles than larger herbivores, with there being a significant decrease in commonness with each "size niche".

[HouseRules]

More Predators Than Prey

Aren't Predators Preys to other Predators?
Predators should eat other Predators when this occurs. In real life, top of the food chain predators will cannibalize when the situation occurs. Thus, there should be fewer predators eventually, with a very powerful predator at the top to sustain the ecosystem.

[PhoenixPhyre]

More Predators Than Prey

Aren't Predators Preys to other Predators?
Predators should eat other Predators when this occurs. In real life, top of the food chain predators will cannibalize when the situation occurs. Thus, there should be fewer predators eventually, with a very powerful predator at the top to sustain the ecosystem.

The big issue with "standard" D&D ecosystems is that you have tons of apex predators, those whose only predator is adventurers (who don't usually eat their foe). One of the things I had to do in order to have societies of dragons and giants was reconfigure their metabolism so that they don't need as much food as they should normally for that bulk.

[hamishspence]

More Predators Than Prey

Aren't Predators Preys to other Predators?
Predators should eat other Predators when this occurs. In real life, top of the food chain predators will cannibalize when the situation occurs. Thus, there should be fewer predators eventually, with a very powerful predator at the top to sustain the ecosystem.

Indeed. Plus there's the "big predator eats littler predator which eats littler predator, which eats herbivores" thing, though that's more usual in the ocean than on land. On land big predators seem like they're much more likely to skip straight to eating big herbivores.

[HouseRules]

Look at r selection K selection.

Top Predators are K selected, and they have a live-span of a dozen times sexual maturity.

Age of Sexual Maturity = mature enough to make children, but not considered adult.

[Clistenes]

More Predators Than Prey

Aren't Predators Preys to other Predators?
Predators should eat other Predators when this occurs. In real life, top of the food chain predators will cannibalize when the situation occurs. Thus, there should be fewer predators eventually, with a very powerful predator at the top to sustain the ecosystem.

A 200 kg adult male lion needs 7 kg of meat per day... so they basically eat their own weight every month.

A lion needs around 144 Thomson's gazelles per year (and I am being generous here, teeth, horns and hooves aren't edible, and other bits of the gazelle, like bones, for example, would provide far less calories than meat...).

Let say a lion ate jackals only. That lion would need to eat more than 250-265 jackals every year, who in turn would need to eat 1500-1590 gazelles per year...

So predators relying on eating other predators isn't a sustainable model...

[hamishspence]

So predators relying on eating other predators isn't a sustainable model...

It works in the ocean, when it's whales eating vast amounts of tiny but still predatory fish, squid, krill, etc.

Not quite so much on land. Though some might subsist entirely on predatory insects - the closest land counterpart to krill. Or eat the eaters of insects, like a hobby falcon subsisting on dragonflies and swallows.

[HouseRules]

So predators relying on eating other predators isn't a sustainable model...

I've said that it is not a stable point, but a transition back towards More Prey Than Predator.

More Predator Than Prey is an unstable point, but like flying machines are always unstable.... I'm not going to finish the statement.

[Frozen_Feet]

Prey-predator-ratios over time are governed by Lotka-Volterra-equations, which are nonlinear differential equations. "Nonlinear differential equations" are one of the ways God is telling you they hate you. :smalltongue: Modelling populations of more than two interacting species at once quickly becomes something that'd make Baby Jesus cry.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Prey-predator-ratios over time are governed by Lotka-Volterra-equations, which are nonlinear differential equations. "Nonlinear differential equations" are one of the ways God is telling you they hate you. :smalltongue: Modelling populations of more than two interacting species at once quickly becomes something that'd make Baby Jesus cry.

If nonlinear differential equations are God being a hater, what about coupled nonlinear differential equations (like the Einstein equations of general relativity)?

But yes. All sorts of "interesting" things can happen when you start using that kind of math to describe (not govern...pet peeve of mine) situations.

[FaerieGodfather]

It seems like there should be more spells that aren't designed for battle.

There are. They're just not printed in the books about people who crawl into holes to kill things and take their stuff.

[Frozen_Feet]

If nonlinear differential equations are God being a hater, what about coupled nonlinear differential equations (like the Einstein equations of general relativity)?


A restatement of divine wrath, of course. :smalltongue:

[PhoenixPhyre]

A restatement of divine wrath, of course. :smalltongue:

Especially because it's the ultimate source of Rocks Fall (from the sky), Everyone Dies. :smallbiggrin:

[HouseRules]

Especially because it's the ultimate source of Rocks Fall (from the sky), Everyone Dies. :smallbiggrin:

Is that a cave-in or is that a volcanic eruption?

[PhoenixPhyre]

Is that a cave-in or is that a volcanic eruption?

Asteroid strike.

[HouseRules]

Asteroid strike.

Not planet strike or star fall. Throwing stars is very possible by the gods.

[Xuc Xac]

An odd quirk of the rules for fitting round things like fireballs on a grid for combat: in D&D, pi equals 4.

[Edreyn]

There are no hit point in real life. A bullet to the head will kill rookie and veteran in the same way.

[FaerieGodfather]

There are no hit point in real life. A bullet to the head will kill rookie and veteran in the same way.

Except when it doesn't, which D&D doesn't model well either.

[Edreyn]

I mean that a chance to survive a bullet to the head doesn't depend on age or experience.
Helmet and pure luck can help, but it isn't connected to hit points or anything.

[Willie the Duck]

I mean that a chance to survive a bullet to the head doesn't depend on age or experience.
Helmet and pure luck can help, but it isn't connected to hit points or anything.

I think you missed FaerieGodfather's point. A bullet to the head can kill, or it can not kill. There are a wealth of factors at play, none of which D&D combat models well (or for that matter was intended to model).

[PhoenixPhyre]

I think you missed FaerieGodfather's point. A bullet to the head can kill, or it can not kill. There are a wealth of factors at play, none of which D&D combat models well (or for that matter was intended to model).

Starting with the fact that "to the head" is not a meaningful statement in D&D--there are no hit locations. Plus HP isn't meat and all that.

[awa]

Minor nitpick that actually depends on edition, in second edition (combat and tactics i think the supplement was called) it was possible to get hit in the head with a crit, they had a fun table to see what happened. I never actually used it so i cant tell you if it was remotely balanced but it did exist.

[Sebastian]

More powerful creatures being rarer and weaker creatures being more common is in defiance of the logic of natural selection, but it is usually assumed in most settings. The need for more prey than predators to exist might partially explain this, but not completely.


It is a common misconception.

Natural selection is not "survival of the strongest", it is "survival of the fittest", which have noting to do with 'power'.

[Max_Killjoy]

It is a common misconception.

Natural selection is not "survival of the strongest", it is "survival of the fittest", which have noting to do with 'power'.


To expand on this... where "fitness" is roughly the ability to have offspring and then have those offspring have offspring...

[halfeye]

To expand on this... where "fitness" is roughly the ability to have offspring and then have those offspring have offspring...

Yeah, voles are very fit.


The field vole breeds throughout the year but the breeding season peaks in spring and summer. ... The gestation period is about three weeks and up to a dozen young are borne. These grow rapidly, suckle for twelve days and leave the nest at twenty one days, reaching sexual maturity soon afterwards. ... Life expectancy is about two years but is lower for spring-born individuals than for ones born later in the year.[7]

...

Status

The field vole is common over most of its very wide range, although thinning out towards the peripheries and may be locally scarce where conditions are less suitable. The population seems stable over the long term though there are marked fluctuations from year to year. The IUCN in its Red List of Threatened Species has therefore listed it as being of "Least Concern".[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_vole

[awa]

Now all of that is true but their is still a problem . D&d has so many apex predators one of those should be the most Apex (at least in a given region) and wiped out all the rest. For instance if a wood has worgs it probably should not have wolves they are directly competing and one is simply better than the other.

Their are a lot of extremely powerful magical beasts that are competing with regular old animals, in the real world brains and poison and all that stuff cost calories so theirs a balance but not for d&d monsters. No way a crocodile is competing with a hydra.

Their is a little wiggle room for some combos say dire wolves may dominate large game forcing wolves to eat mice and stuff but D&d has so many predators their are a finite number of ways this can be divided and when that happens well dire wolves can eat wolves.

[HouseRules]

Now all of that is true but their is still a problem . D&d has so many apex predators one of those should be the most Apex (at least in a given region) and wiped out all the rest. For instance if a wood has worgs it probably should not have wolves they are directly competing and one is simply better than the other.

Their are a lot of extremely powerful magical beasts that are competing with regular old animals, in the real world brains and poison and all that stuff cost calories so theirs a balance but not for d&d monsters. No way a crocodile is competing with a hydra.

Their is a little wiggle room for some combos say dire wolves may dominate large game forcing wolves to eat mice and stuff but D&d has so many predators their are a finite number of ways this can be divided and when that happens well dire wolves can eat wolves.

A bear could always take food from a pack of wolves, but they cannot beat an entire pack of wolves on their own.

[Max_Killjoy]

Now all of that is true but their is still a problem . D&d has so many apex predators one of those should be the most Apex (at least in a given region) and wiped out all the rest. For instance if a wood has worgs it probably should not have wolves they are directly competing and one is simply better than the other.

Their are a lot of extremely powerful magical beasts that are competing with regular old animals, in the real world brains and poison and all that stuff cost calories so theirs a balance but not for d&d monsters. No way a crocodile is competing with a hydra.

Their is a little wiggle room for some combos say dire wolves may dominate large game forcing wolves to eat mice and stuff but D&d has so many predators their are a finite number of ways this can be divided and when that happens well dire wolves can eat wolves.


Predators overlap in range, and focus somewhat on different prey while also competing for the same prey in some instances.

Consider that an area of forest in northern North America might have some combination of grizzly bears, black bears, cougars, lynx, wolves, coyotes, foxes, wolverines, weasels or the like, and so on.

Or that lions, leopards, hyenas, cheetahs, wild dogs, etc, have overlapping ranges in parts of Africa.

[Willie the Duck]

Now all of that is true but their is still a problem . D&d has so many apex predators one of those should be the most Apex (at least in a given region) and wiped out all the rest. For instance if a wood has worgs it probably should not have wolves they are directly competing and one is simply better than the other.

Their are a lot of extremely powerful magical beasts that are competing with regular old animals, in the real world brains and poison and all that stuff cost calories so theirs a balance but not for d&d monsters. No way a crocodile is competing with a hydra.

Their is a little wiggle room for some combos say dire wolves may dominate large game forcing wolves to eat mice and stuff but D&d has so many predators their are a finite number of ways this can be divided and when that happens well dire wolves can eat wolves.


Well, it is going to depend a lot on how your DM pictures their world (or how each game world is published). The 'wandering monster by terrain type' model that older editions used certainly imply that all monsters exist everywhere, but that might be a shorthand. If the dire wolves exist in the Plains of Whereever, and Worgs exist in the Plains of Nowhere (the two Separated by the Mountains of Nevermore), and the regular wolves exist across the Sea of Sorrow, well then they all satisfy the 'a given stable niche will not have two creatures filling it' rule because their niches are geographically distinct.

That said, there are regions where wolves and coyotes overlap (and wolves will eat/kill coyotes), and they do so in a way that the dire wolves and wolves (including 'dire wolves can eat wolves') model can work. The wolves just eat smaller prey than the dire wolves, and avoid the dire wolves. If the wolves are better at eating the small things than the dire wolves are (and sufficiently good at avoiding the dire wolves), then the dire wolves will focus on larger prey (such that the wolves become mousers and the dire wolves eat the elk or moose or whatever).

This, however, is assuming a world in relative equilibrium, which isn't really what most D&D worlds seem to be. D&D worlds always seem to be on a path of recovery from some great cataclysm, such that societies are expanding back out into the frontier/wilderness, and there are usually great big open places between kingdoms which otherwise shouldn't be able to exist as neighbors (because one is a bronze age society with hoplites and the other is an early renaissance society with platemail and firearms, or some other impossible combo). The wildlife could be the same. The Worgs and Direwolves might not be able to exist indefinitely together in the same land, but we're just seeing the mid-step in that process (and of course it will turn out that neither will survive once the Treents develop a taste for sentient evil canine blood :smalltongue:).

[halfeye]

There are no hit point in real life. A bullet to the head will kill rookie and veteran in the same way.

Depends on where in the head the hit is.

Serpico Survived.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Serpico

neckshot victims generally didn't.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Blokhin


Blokhin's most infamous act was the April 1940 execution by shooting of about 7,000 Polish prisoners interned in the Ostashkov prisoner of war camp in the Katyn forest.

...

Blokhin initially decided on an ambitious quota of 300 executions per night; and engineered an efficient system in which the prisoners were individually led to a small antechamber—which had been painted red and was known as the "Leninist room"—for a brief and cursory positive identification, before being handcuffed and led into the execution room next door.

...

Then, without a hearing, the reading of a sentence or any other formalities, each prisoner was brought in and restrained by guards while Blokhin shot him once in the base of the skull with a German Walther Model 2 .25 ACP pistol.[12][13][14] He had brought a briefcase full of his own Walther pistols, since he did not trust the reliability of the standard-issue Soviet TT-30 for the frequent, heavy use he intended.

...

Although some of the executions were carried out by Senior Lieutenant of State Security Andrei Rubanov, Blokhin was the primary executioner and, true to his reputation, liked to work continuously and rapidly without interruption.[13] In keeping with NKVD policy and the overall "wet" nature of the operation, the executions were conducted at night, starting at dark and continuing until just prior to dawn. The bodies were continuously loaded onto covered flat-bed trucks through a back door in the execution chamber and trucked, twice a night, to Mednoye, where Blokhin had arranged for a bulldozer and two NKVD drivers to dispose of bodies at an unfenced site. Each night, 24–25 trenches were dug, measuring 8 to 10 metres (26 to 33 ft) in length, to hold that night's corpses, and each trench was covered over before dawn.[16]

...

His count of 7,000 shot in 28 days remains the most organized and protracted mass murder by a single individual on record,[3

[awa]

A bear could always take food from a pack of wolves, but they cannot beat an entire pack of wolves on their own.


Yes but worgs arnt bears, worgs also live in packs and are smarter and more skilled as well as stronger and tougher. Wolves are wildly out classed.

And that's a relatively easy match up the power level is not that big there are probably dozens of vaguely wolf and dog like critters all of whom are far more powerful than wolves. Some of whom greatly more powerful.

Like i said their is some room for different niches, but the real problem isn't just power but intellect. In our world humans have wiped out or strongly limited all the big predators why would an evil intelligent species like a worg tolerate any competition from a species unable to resist the.

Many of these species are easily able to migrate and once say a bullette enters a region other mundane apex predators simply cant compete. Lions and tigers and bears are just more food as far as a land shark is concerned.

There are to many powerful predators and not enough food sources to sustain them all.

These things work fine if you treat them as greek monsters individuals rather than species

[King of Nowhere]

To expand on this... where "fitness" is roughly the ability to have offspring and then have those offspring have offspring...

To expand even more...
the major limiting factor is food availability, especially for carnivorous. Sure, you could get big muscles and teeth and claws and stuff. But all those things require proteins, and then they require energy to maintain. Just moving with all this extra mass is going to take more energy.
So, you evolved all those powerful stuff. Congratulations! Now you have to eat more. And you are probably slower, so you are less good at catching prey. Because nature very rarely sees a fight.

So, evolution does not push towards stronger, more powerful creatures. It pushes towards creatures that are just barely strong enough to do what they need to do, don't need much to eat, and avoid bigger animals.

Consider one of the most "powerful" animals who ever lived, the tyrannosaurus. because of its bulk and bipedal locomotion, it could not run fast. Some argue that it could not run at all. So, unleashed into the modern savannah, it would be unable to catch any prey. Maybe it would be able to catch elephants, but elephant tusks are still a lethal threat to a tyrannosaurus; elephants are also pack animals that are smart enough to fight with some coordination. So, the poor tyrannosaurus would need to face a potentially deadly encounter every few days just to stay alive.
It may maybe get an ecological niche by smelling a freshly dead animal, and coming to steal it from other predators. A tyrannosaurus would certainly be able to chase away a pack of lions. It would need to be close and come fast, before the lions are done eating, though.
So, the powerful tyrannosaurus would likely go extinct again.
A cat performs much better, as it's adaptable and good at catching prey.

Ultimately, I justify most monsters as being mutated products of "magical radiation". They were normal creatures that were turned into monsters by random magic. Monsters don't normally reproduce, and would not survive much on their own. Of course, if left unchecked, they still can do a lot of damage. places with too strong magical radiation cannot be settled simply because there are too many monsters. voles still live well in those places, because they can hide/escape well and outbreed their losses.

Incidentally, another thing that irks me is how most monsters are intelligent, and yet they are expected to behave like they are not.
If they are intelligent, they have formed some kind of social organization. They are also smart enough to not attack everything on sight. They should also be able to have free will instead of being "intelligent but always evil". And they should definitely be willing to negotiate instead of fighting all the time. Natural selection favors those that don't fight; they have a higher survival chance. Intelligence tells you that you can't make an enemy of everyone and expect to get away with it.

i downgraded most monsters to "not intelligent" regardless of what's written in their stat block. And I've played with the "evil" and "always fight" traits in several ways.

[awa]

Well, it is going to depend a lot on how your DM pictures their world (or how each game world is published). The 'wandering monster by terrain type' model that older editions used certainly imply that all monsters exist everywhere, but that might be a shorthand. If the dire wolves exist in the Plains of Whereever, and Worgs exist in the Plains of Nowhere (the two Separated by the Mountains of Nevermore), and the regular wolves exist across the Sea of Sorrow, well then they all satisfy the 'a given stable niche will not have two creatures filling it' rule because their niches are geographically distinct.

That said, there are regions where wolves and coyotes overlap (and wolves will eat/kill coyotes), and they do so in a way that the dire wolves and wolves (including 'dire wolves can eat wolves') model can work. The wolves just eat smaller prey than the dire wolves, and avoid the dire wolves. If the wolves are better at eating the small things than the dire wolves are (and sufficiently good at avoiding the dire wolves), then the dire wolves will focus on larger prey (such that the wolves become mousers and the dire wolves eat the elk or moose or whatever).

This, however, is assuming a world in relative equilibrium, which isn't really what most D&D worlds seem to be. D&D worlds always seem to be on a path of recovery from some great cataclysm, such that societies are expanding back out into the frontier/wilderness, and there are usually great big open places between kingdoms which otherwise shouldn't be able to exist as neighbors (because one is a bronze age society with hoplites and the other is an early renaissance society with platemail and firearms, or some other impossible combo). The wildlife could be the same. The Worgs and Direwolves might not be able to exist indefinitely together in the same land, but we're just seeing the mid-step in that process (and of course it will turn out that neither will survive once the Treents develop a taste for sentient evil canine blood :smalltongue:).

yes wolves and dire wolves could easily coexist like that though I would expect the wolves to start becoming smaller and running in smaller packs. Course dire-wolves would wipe out grizzles though black bear might be able to survive.

Of course the problem is compounded with each mm/ fiend folio you include.


Predators overlap in range, and focus somewhat on different prey while also competing for the same prey in some instances.

Consider that an area of forest in northern North America might have some combination of grizzly bears, black bears, cougars, lynx, wolves, coyotes, foxes, wolverines, weasels or the like, and so on.

Or that lions, leopards, hyenas, cheetahs, wild dogs, etc, have overlapping ranges in parts of Africa.

yes but most of those are not apex predators so we can ignore them focusing only on grizzly, cougar and wolves they are fine because none of those can eat the others and have different food sources. if we throw dire wolves into the mix things change, wolves are at best dropped out of the apex predator role and move exclusively into carrion and game to small to interest a dire wolf so are now in hard competition with coyotes and one or the other will get wiped out in the region. Grizzlies become dinner a grizzly can't defend itself against a pack of dire wolves. Sure a big male might be strong enough to keep a small pack at bay, but females with young and immature bears wont be able to. Even if they don't get eaten directly constantly having to watch their backs while they fish will greatly hinder their ability to pack on fat quite possible fatally so.

Mountain lions will be find from dire wolves they just wont live in the forest, of course their are far worse monster in the hills and mountains so they are in bad shape two. Giants, griffins, land-sharks, chimera those are wildly unfair match ups for a simple animal.

[Avista]

Can we discuss mimics? Real world animals can use camouflage to hide from predators and attract prey, so it's fair to say the mimic pretends to be a chest for the explicit purpose of hunting adventurers. But how did it evolve like this? How can a mimic in some deep, dark, musty dungeon rely on a steady food source of unsuspecting adventurers? Why a treasure chest, of all things? Only creatures that would be interested are the ones actively searching for treasure. How do they even get enough adventurers to sustain their calorie count? They're in some forgotten hole. Unless they move around to migrate to areas of higher adventurer density for a better foodsource. But you never see a mimic move, do you?