Ranting, just ranting.

[jjordan]

Smaug was killed by a skilled archer with his lucky arrow.
If you stabbed Conan in the heart he'd die.
Clerics should only get spells appropriate to their deity's sphere of influence.
People who are 1hp away from possibly bleeding out shouldn't be able to leap chasms.
If you're a warlock and you aren't actively advancing the cause of your patron there should be some freaking consequences.
Magic should be powerful and hard and pretty damn rare and not a matter of going pew, pew, pew every freaking round of combat.
Death spirals are real.
Make stupid choices, win stupid prizes.
Armor works, which is why people wore it.
Armor needs more maintenance than a Harley-Davidson built the Monday after the plant-wide drinking contest.
Logistics are both incredibly boring and the cornerstone of any sort of exploration or long journey.
Gold is rare, people trade in silver.
Frodo spent two freaking months recovering from his wounds (and never did fully recover).
Some specialties are not meant to be used in combat and making them combat classes is ridiculous (cough artificer cough).
Bilbo traveled 1,000 miles over the course of 6 months, fought trolls, goblins, gollum, giant spiders, elves, matched wits with a dragon, fought goblins (again), and had a nice suit of excellent armor, a magic ring, and a magic sword for his troubles.

[Duff]

Most of these - Yep, that's compromises D&D makes to give relatively predictable fights. In games where fights are less predictable you have to have less of them or accept more TPKs.
Clerics and warlocks - Yeah, flavour choices that I'd like to see more of
Magic is hard - Also a flavour choice, but really, there's lots of games which have different levels of and lots of people like this flavour. Same applies to Frodo's gear
Gold and silver - it's a fantasy economy, it should be no surprise it's different
Armour maintenance and logistics - Most people just aren't interested in the paperwork to make this happen. DMs can easily add these in using encumbrance rules, but almost no one actually does this.

What's your favourite system for fantasy games?

[KillianHawkeye]

Frodo spent two freaking months recovering from his wounds (and never did fully recover).

Just a nitpick, but the only reason Frodo never fully recovers is because the Nazgul stabbed him with like a cursed blade or whatever. That is the specific wound that he complains never heals completely. It's the exception which proves the rule.

[Ignimortis]

Smaug was killed by a skilled archer with his lucky arrow.
If you stabbed Conan in the heart he'd die.
Clerics should only get spells appropriate to their deity's sphere of influence.
People who are 1hp away from possibly bleeding out shouldn't be able to leap chasms.
If you're a warlock and you aren't actively advancing the cause of your patron there should be some freaking consequences.
Magic should be powerful and hard and pretty damn rare and not a matter of going pew, pew, pew every freaking round of combat.
Death spirals are real.
Make stupid choices, win stupid prizes.
Armor works, which is why people wore it.
Armor needs more maintenance than a Harley-Davidson built the Monday after the plant-wide drinking contest.
Logistics are both incredibly boring and the cornerstone of any sort of exploration or long journey.
Gold is rare, people trade in silver.
Frodo spent two freaking months recovering from his wounds (and never did fully recover).
Some specialties are not meant to be used in combat and making them combat classes is ridiculous (cough artificer cough).
Bilbo traveled 1,000 miles over the course of 6 months, fought trolls, goblins, gollum, giant spiders, elves, matched wits with a dragon, fought goblins (again), and had a nice suit of excellent armor, a magic ring, and a magic sword for his troubles.

To quote a certain website...

Have you tried not playing D&D?

Seriously, there are quite a few systems that try to do those things you're describing.

[False God]

Smaug was killed by a skilled archer with his lucky arrow.
If you stabbed Conan in the heart he'd die.
I mean, you can add "weakspots" to NPCs when it matters, and either require some additional roll or only trigger on a crit or whatever, not terribly hard to impliment.


Clerics should only get spells appropriate to their deity's sphere of influence.
Well, if you want to give Clerics access to every domain their diety has (usually like, 3-6) this can often be accomplished.


People who are 1hp away from possibly bleeding out shouldn't be able to leap chasms.
If you're a warlock and you aren't actively advancing the cause of your patron there should be some freaking consequences.
These are the domain of the DM. The DM decides what "advancing the cause" means and what those "consequences" are.


Magic should be powerful and hard and pretty damn rare and not a matter of going pew, pew, pew every freaking round of combat.
Well that's just never been D&D.



Armor works, which is why people wore it.
Armor needs more maintenance than a Harley-Davidson built the Monday after the plant-wide drinking contest.
Logistics are both incredibly boring and the cornerstone of any sort of exploration or long journey.
I mean, I'm sure your players are going to love the tedium of "Oh but did you polish your brass today? NO? Well then minus 50 points from griffindor."


Frodo spent two freaking months recovering from his wounds (and never did fully recover).
There's a reason both the books and the movies went SKIP over this portion of time. It was not relevant to the story nor was it interesting to read about the Adventures of Frodo in a Coma.


Some specialties are not meant to be used in combat and making them combat classes is ridiculous (cough artificer cough).
You really have a thing for wanting you players to not actually play the game huh?


Bilbo traveled 1,000 miles over the course of 6 months, fought trolls, goblins, gollum, giant spiders, elves, matched wits with a dragon, fought goblins (again), and had a nice suit of excellent armor, a magic ring, and a magic sword for his troubles.
So....give players loot?

[LibraryOgre]

Well, if you want to give Clerics access to every domain their diety has (usually like, 3-6) this can often be accomplished.


This was a character class idea I suggested in 3e; JUST give clerics domains and their granted powers.

[Saintheart]

Bilbo traveled 1,000 miles over the course of 6 months, fought trolls, goblins, gollum, giant spiders, elves, matched wits with a dragon, fought goblins (again), and had a nice suit of excellent armor, a magic ring, and a magic sword for his troubles.

Bilbo had an inexperienced DM.

[Zombimode]

Ok, I'm not saying that you're wrong.
Instead I try to offer new ways of framing actions either within the rules interface or the context of game.

Because sometimes you just can't make sense of a particular rule or you just don't know how to model an action within the rules. A change of perspective can help sometimes: a different interpretation of a rule interaction, or a different approach of modeling an action within the rules.

In other cases thinking not only in terms of what is fitting to the genre but also in terms of what is fitting for the actual activity. You know, sitting down with friends and playing the game.


Smaug was killed by a skilled archer with his lucky arrow.

What exactly do you want to be possible?
That a dragon could be killed by a single arrow? How likely it should be? Should it be possible for everyone or just select individuals?

If your point of reference is a static narration (like a movie or a book) you get no information about possibility outside the context of the scene and no information whatsoever about probability.
The only thing you know is that is was possible for in that specific situation with that specific actors.

For D&D 3.5 it is possible to recreate the scene with Smaug and Bard (basic principle: get to <=50 damage with one attack, probably thanks to a crit, and then Smaug failing the Fort save vs. massive damage (always a 5% chance).)


If you stabbed Conan in the heart he'd die.

First, this statement is not quite correct. If you stabbed Conan in the heart it is very likely that he'd die.
See the difference? There can be any number of possible reasons why he wouldn't die in any specific situation. "Possible" doesn't mean "likely", but opening your mind to more outcomes than the one you see as most likely will increase your acceptance to more rules-inducted outcomes.

Second, your statement implies that you think in the ruleset you are ranting against Conan getting stabbed in the heart wouldn't result in his death. But be critical: is that actually correct? Maybe you just have not found the correct way of representing "Conan getting stabbed in the heart" within the rules.

Most rule system employ several layers of abstractions. Thus Conan getting hit by a spear can mean a whole lot of things and only one meaning would be "Conan is getting stabbed in the heart by a spear".

Again using D&D 3.5 one way modeling "Conan gettig stabbed in the heart" is a coup-de-grace for which Conans death is a very likely outcome.


Clerics should only get spells appropriate to their deity's sphere of influence.

Depends on your worldbuilding. If your world requires that the servants of the gods have only access to powers closely related to the gods portfolio houserule the cleric class or use a different class.


People who are 1hp away from possibly bleeding out shouldn't be able to leap chasms.

HP totals usually don't have a set meaning.


If you're a warlock and you aren't actively advancing the cause of your patron there should be some freaking consequences.

That is a thing between player and GM, right? If not what do you expect from the rules?


Magic should be powerful and hard and pretty damn rare and not a matter of going pew, pew, pew every freaking round of combat.

That is dependent on the setting and aesthetics.

For D&D 3.5 magic is definitely powerful and is exactly as rare as the GM makes it.

Now, regarding the second part of your statement of magic "going pew, pew, pew every freaking round of combat". You seem to be annoyed by that, but have you considered the alternative? Do you want wizard players not doing anything round after round? Don't you think that a player creating an explicit "wizard" character actually wants to cast spells round after round?

Don't forget that you're sitting together with other people and everyone wants to have fun.


Death spirals are real.
Sure. A lot of things are real. Being "real" is not a good reason by itself to include it in a game.
It's a design choice and a matter of preference.

Games featuring a death spiral are not inherently "better" or even "more realistic". They are just different.


Make stupid choices, win stupid prizes.

I have no idea what that is supposed to mean.


Armor works, which is why people wore it.

The implication being that armor doesn't work in the rule system you're ranting about.

Armor, like most thing related to combat, is a complex thing. Different systems have different approaches on how to model armor. Some are more sophisticated than others. That armor is actually "useless" is something that I have not seen in game so far.
What makes you feel that armor doesn't work?

For D&D 3.5 armor definitely works and is used by both PCs and NPCs because it works.


Armor needs more maintenance than a Harley-Davidson built the Monday after the plant-wide drinking contest.
Logistics are both incredibly boring and the cornerstone of any sort of exploration or long journey.

And you have provided the answer to why equipment maintenance is usually handwaved or ignored completely in most games: it is incredibly boring.


Gold is rare, people trade in silver.

Setting dependent. You can have it be like this in your setting.


Frodo spent two freaking months recovering from his wounds (and never did fully recover).

Bad example as people have already pointed out.
But lets not get hung up on the example. So you want wounds taking long(er) to heal. Have you considered what this would mean in a game?

Again, think of what is fun for all players.


Some specialties are not meant to be used in combat and making them combat classes is ridiculous (cough artificer cough).

If an ability is not "meant" to be used in combat it will be defined in a way that makes it use in combat impractical. For instance requirering a lot of time, special unwieldy equipment etc.

If an ability is defined in a way that its use in combat is very much practical then maybe your assessment that it is not meant to be used in combat is just wrong?


Bilbo traveled 1,000 miles over the course of 6 months, fought trolls, goblins, gollum, giant spiders, elves, matched wits with a dragon, fought goblins (again), and had a nice suit of excellent armor, a magic ring, and a magic sword for his troubles.

And that means what, exactly?

[Willie the Duck]

Smaug was killed by a skilled archer with his lucky arrow.
If you stabbed Conan in the heart he'd die.
Clerics should only get spells appropriate to their deity's sphere of influence.
People who are 1hp away from possibly bleeding out shouldn't be able to leap chasms.
If you're a warlock and you aren't actively advancing the cause of your patron there should be some freaking consequences.
Magic should be powerful and hard and pretty damn rare and not a matter of going pew, pew, pew every freaking round of combat.
Death spirals are real.
Make stupid choices, win stupid prizes.
Armor works, which is why people wore it.
Armor needs more maintenance than a Harley-Davidson built the Monday after the plant-wide drinking contest.
Logistics are both incredibly boring and the cornerstone of any sort of exploration or long journey.
Gold is rare, people trade in silver.
Frodo spent two freaking months recovering from his wounds (and never did fully recover).
Some specialties are not meant to be used in combat and making them combat classes is ridiculous (cough artificer cough).
Bilbo traveled 1,000 miles over the course of 6 months, fought trolls, goblins, gollum, giant spiders, elves, matched wits with a dragon, fought goblins (again), and had a nice suit of excellent armor, a magic ring, and a magic sword for his troubles.

I don't want to be on the 'why are you playing D&D?' train too much, but seriously, just about every single part of this can be accomplished using GURPS. The dragon-with single arrow part would be hard, but that's actually more realistic than Tolkien -- killing an elephant+ sized creature with one arrow (outside maybe a through-the-eye brainshot) ought to be neigh impossible.

This seems to be complaining that the vanilla ice cream at the grocery store doesn't have chocolate in it when the chocolate ice cream is sitting right there on the shelf next to it. D&D does things, some of them just because and some things because they work really well for some preferences. Large scaling HP (without massive penalties for being wounded) work really well as a pacing mechanism in a fight, while still not overly discouraging fighting (which, despite us old timers coming back with 'the game was supposed to be about exploring and treasure-hunting and avoiding combat!' is a major part of the game). That's the primary goal that the ruleset serves, and it does so at the disservice of realism (compared to many other games out there).

[Vinyadan]

Maybe you'd enjoy a Blade and Sorcery system?

[jjordan]

What's your favourite system for fantasy games?Back in the day I enjoyed Rolemaster (2nd Edition). I want so very much to like GURPS but just don't. But good luck finding people to play these with.

To quote a certain website...

Have you tried not playing D&D? Yep. But it's play D&D or don't play. I mean, you're completely correct, but D&D has become synonymous with medieval fantasy gaming for a significant portion of the gaming community.

Bilbo had an inexperienced DM.The depth of that line makes it incredibly funny to me. Well played.


I'm not arguing for change. I see a lot of the design considerations that went into D&D and they make sense. The success of the game/brand speaks to that. I just had a moment of frustration and vented.

[Lacco]

Have you tried not playing D&D?

Seriously, there are quite a few systems that try to do those things you're describing.

I hate to sound like a broken record but...

Riddle of Steel. Blade of the Iron Throne. Even Song of Swords would most probably fit.

Each have their disadvantage (e.g. no functional magic system in RoS) but I think you'd like their approach. Especially since you played Rolemaster.


Back in the day I enjoyed Rolemaster (2nd Edition). I want so very much to like GURPS but just don't. But good luck finding people to play these with.
Yep. But it's play D&D or don't play. I mean, you're completely correct, but D&D has become synonymous with medieval fantasy gaming for a significant portion of the gaming community.

You may be correct that D&D is synonymous for medieval fantasy gaming, but there are always people to play the other games with. May be hard to find, but I've had the luck.


I'm not arguing for change. I see a lot of the design considerations that went into D&D and they make sense. The success of the game/brand speaks to that. I just had a moment of frustration and vented.

Venting completely accepted. It's what made me turn away from DnD long ago. No regrets :smallwink:

[Eldan]

I mean, Bilbo spent half the journey with a DMPC high level wizard (later retconned to be a Celestial when he died) in a party of mostly dwarf bards and they lost pretty much every encounter where they tried combat.

[Vinyadan]

I mean, Bilbo spent half the journey with a DMPC high level wizard (later retconned to be a Celestial when he died) in a party of mostly dwarf bards and they lost pretty much every encounter where they tried combat.
And also those where they used diplomacy, IIRC, with the exception of the feast on the lake:


"Thorin son of Thrain son of Thror King under the Mountain!" said the dwarf in a loud voice, and he looked it, in spite of his torn clothes and draggled hood. The gold gleamed on his neck and waist: his eyes were dark and deep. "I have come back. I wish to see the Master of your town!" Then there was tremendous excitement. Some of the more foolish ran out of the hut as if they expected the Mountain to go golden in the night and all the waters of the lake to turn yellow right away. The captain of the guard came forward.

That's very bard-like. But they really failed with the Elves, for example, or later when they were inside the mountain and Men came to discuss.

[JNAProductions]

Rant accepted. But... I'll echo those who say "Just play another system besides D&D."

I'll ALSO echo those who say "Fun is more important than realism."

[Quertus]

Smaug was killed by a skilled archer with his lucky arrow.

The game needs more of that. (Not 4e's padded sumo)


Clerics should only get spells appropriate to their deity's sphere of influence.

And this is why clerics of pantheons or clerics of ideas are stronger than clerics of individual deities.


If you're a warlock and you aren't actively advancing the cause of your patron there should be some freaking consequences.

Counterpoint: if you've chosen to give your power to the wrong candidate, or cannot either control or utilize their actions, that's on you.


Magic should be powerful and hard and pretty damn rare and not a matter of going pew, pew, pew every freaking round of combat.

Yes, Wizards shouldn't get to play the game.


Make stupid choices, win stupid prizes.

Stupid choices? You mean, like picking "Fighter"?


Armor works, which is why people wore it.

Do people still wear armor today? Why / why not?


Bilbo traveled 1,000 miles over the course of 6 months, fought trolls, goblins, gollum, giant spiders, elves, matched wits with a dragon, fought goblins (again), and had a nice suit of excellent armor, a magic ring, and a magic sword for his troubles.

You mean, the most powerful epic artifact in the world? Dude, why don't my characters get such sweet lot from such low-CR encounters?

(You forgot the mountains of gold (that he gave to the peasants to rebuild entire towns) that he got from the Dragon, so I'm ignoring that encounter).

[Eldan]

If you're a warlock and you aren't actively advancing the cause of your patron there should be some freaking consequences.

I mean, isn't that what a cleric is, not a warlock? I'd say a warlock has a specific pact, while a cleric has more general loyalty. You don't have to philosophically agree with your warlock patron or advance their cause in general.

[Ignimortis]

Yep. But it's play D&D or don't play. I mean, you're completely correct, but D&D has become synonymous with medieval fantasy gaming for a significant portion of the gaming community.


Then I get you completely. It's just that I'm from the camp on the other side of D&D (and so I also don't get to play what I want, most of the time) :D

[Psyren]

Yep. But it's play D&D or don't play.
...
I'm not arguing for change. I see a lot of the design considerations that went into D&D and they make sense. The success of the game/brand speaks to that. I just had a moment of frustration and vented.

The system doesn't need to change, you do. I'm not being facetious here - some of the sources of your frustration (like "Conan getting stabbed in the heart") stem from either a lack of understanding of D&D's rules, or a lack of understanding of what those rules are intended to represent. Blaming the system for that is counterproductive.

[jjordan]

Yes, Wizards shouldn't get to play the game.Sarcasm enjoyed, valid point acknowledged, deeply embedded game design consideration recognized, but I still don't like it. Which is just, like, my opinion, man.


Do people still wear armor today? Why / why not? I know three people who are still this side of the dirt thanks to armor, including someone who was headshot by a sniper. Armor works.


You mean, the most powerful epic artifact in the world? Dude, why don't my characters get such sweet lot from such low-CR encounters? The cursed plot device that let him turn invisible? Yes, that one. But my point was that D&D expects non-casters to get large amounts of magical loot.


I mean, isn't that what a cleric is, not a warlock? I'd say a warlock has a specific pact, while a cleric has more general loyalty. You don't have to philosophically agree with your warlock patron or advance their cause in general.Both of them receive power in return for service. The cleric would likely continue to serve even without the power exchange because of devotion to cause whereas the warlock is more likely, according to lore, to have made the bargain specifically for the purpose of gaining power and would likely abandon the cause of the patron if the power stopped coming. But in both cases they get power from the patron to advance the patron's cause. If the advancement stops happening the power should stop coming. I love clerics and warlocks because they embed themselves in the lore of the world, or should; whereas many other characters are just generic and could be dropped into any setting. My only beefs with D&D on this subject are giving clerics access to every cleric spell instead of deity specific subsets and not having a suggested mechanism to enforce the idea that it's service for power and no service means no power. I understand that this is roleplaying rather than roll-playing and why D&D doesn't attempt to enforce this, but the lack of limitation on the power dynamic still grates on me.

[Eldan]

2nd ed had only sphere-specific spells for clerics, so it can be done. Just homebrew it. That sounds like the solution to most problems.

Alternatively, offer to DM and run some other game. Don't know about your location, but as soon as i mention "I'll run it", I get about six players, no matter the game. Because no one else wants to DM anything.

[Glorthindel]

Smaug was killed by a skilled archer with his lucky arrow.
If you stabbed Conan in the heart he'd die.

Rolemaster


Clerics should only get spells appropriate to their deity's sphere of influence.
Magic should be powerful and hard and pretty damn rare and not a matter of going pew, pew, pew every freaking round of combat.
Death spirals are real.
Armor works, which is why people wore it.
Gold is rare, people trade in silver.
Bilbo traveled 1,000 miles over the course of 6 months, fought trolls, goblins, gollum, giant spiders, elves, matched wits with a dragon, fought goblins (again), and had a nice suit of excellent armor, a magic ring, and a magic sword for his troubles.

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay


People who are 1hp away from possibly bleeding out shouldn't be able to leap chasms.
Frodo spent two freaking months recovering from his wounds (and never did fully recover).
Some specialties are not meant to be used in combat and making them combat classes is ridiculous (cough artificer cough).

Call of Cthulu


Armor needs more maintenance than a Harley-Davidson built the Monday after the plant-wide drinking contest.
Logistics are both incredibly boring and the cornerstone of any sort of exploration or long journey.

Hackmaster


If you're a warlock and you aren't actively advancing the cause of your patron there should be some freaking consequences.

Depends of the GM, there are absolutely consequences in my game if the Warlock ignores his patron

The fact is, other games and other games styles exist which cater to your needs, you just have to find them. D&D for better or worse is at one end (and not even right at the end, there plenty of systems with even more padding around the edges for those who want that) of a very wide spectrum. If you want the blood, gore, and grit, you are gonna have to find the system with what you need. Sure, some of them are 40 years old at this stage, so its going to be an uphill struggle to convince some players to give them a shot, but some most definitely not (WFRP got a new edition last year).

The secret I've always found is to play many different systems, and enjoy each for what it is. Get your grim, gritty darkness one place, get your storming in the door and kicking ass elsewhere. When you have lost two characters in two sessions in CoC, a session of D&D where the system is doing its best to keep you alive despite your own stupidity can be distinctly refreshing.

[LibraryOgre]

Hackmaster. (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/104757/HackMaster-Basic-free?affiliate_id=315505)


Smaug was killed by a skilled archer with his lucky arrow.
If you stabbed Conan in the heart he'd die.


Critical hit tables and penetrating damage dice. It is theoretically possible to kill a dragon with a single knife thrust... you just need an incredibly lucky d6 (and it would help to be a thief who is backstabbing).



Clerics should only get spells appropriate to their deity's sphere of influence.

All cleric classes have an individual spell progression; largely drawing from a common pool, but also including some mage spells, for some.


People who are 1hp away from possibly bleeding out shouldn't be able to leap chasms.

While it does not help this, specifically, big hits might knock you back and might knock you out for seconds of combat... even minutes, if your luck sucks.


If you're a warlock and you aren't actively advancing the cause of your patron there should be some freaking consequences.

No warlocks, though you might call some priests that, and priests can't even worship another deity when appropriate.


Magic should be powerful and hard and pretty damn rare and not a matter of going pew, pew, pew every freaking round of combat.

Limited spell points. Upcasting on mage spells years before 5e. Upcast too much, wear armor you're not allowed, or have some other problem while casting, and there are dangerous mishaps.


Death spirals are real.

Threshold of Pain and Trauma saves, baby. Most fights don't end with everyone dead, just with enough people incapacitated that you can easily kill them.



Make stupid choices, win stupid prizes.
Armor works, which is why people wore it.
Armor needs more maintenance than a Harley-Davidson built the Monday after the plant-wide drinking contest.

Armor adds Damage Reduction and reduces initiative, speed, defense, and movement. Shields actually protect you. Armor takes damage from good hits, even with bad weapons.


Logistics are both incredibly boring and the cornerstone of any sort of exploration or long journey.

Yup.


Gold is rare, people trade in silver.

Silver standard is in the PH.



Frodo spent two freaking months recovering from his wounds (and never did fully recover).

Without medical or magical aid, a 10 point wound will take you 55 days to recover from... and that's without potential attribute damage from a cursed blade.



Some specialties are not meant to be used in combat and making them combat classes is ridiculous (cough artificer cough).
Bilbo traveled 1,000 miles over the course of 6 months, fought trolls, goblins, gollum, giant spiders, elves, matched wits with a dragon, fought goblins (again), and had a nice suit of excellent armor, a magic ring, and a magic sword for his troubles.

Magic items are rare as hens teeth, but exceptional quality weapons and armor are where it's at.

Hackmaster. (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/104757/HackMaster-Basic-free?affiliate_id=315505) The Basic rules, covering Fighter, Thief, Mage, and a few cleric classes (plus humans, dwarves, elves, and halflings) are free.

[kyoryu]

If you stabbed Conan in the heart he'd die.
...
People who are 1hp away from possibly bleeding out shouldn't be able to leap chasms.

Easy enough. Presume most hp damage isn't "damage" and is various bruises, scrapes, mild burns, etc. Annoying, but not serious.

Which means that, no, you're probably not going to stab Conan in the heart in the opening seconds of a duel with him. You'll have to wait until he's tired, scraped up, bruised, and battered. And the people leaping chasms aren't seriously injured.... they're just tired and on the verge of making mistakes.

Treat the mechanical results of an action as constraints on the narration, rather than as hard results. "Oh, okay, so you took 10 damage, which means you have 40 hp left, and no penalties.... sounds like a hard hit to the armor that knocked the wind out of you to me, because clearly that doesn't describe someone who just got run through with a sword!" (Note: People who like hp as meat points, go ahead and hp as meat point all you want. Narrate what makes sense for your world).


If you're a warlock and you aren't actively advancing the cause of your patron there should be some freaking consequences.

So..... do it?


Death spirals are real.[QUOTE=jjordan;24656571]

So compress it at 0 hp and call it a day. Because not only are death spirals real, but if you get actually stabbed you're probably lying on the ground in pain.

[QUOTE=jjordan;24656571]Make stupid choices, win stupid prizes.

Example? And this is why I always use the Chunky Salsa Rule in all games.


Armor works, which is why people wore it.

Armor works in D&D. It's just that other things work too - maybe more than they should.


Armor needs more maintenance than a Harley-Davidson built the Monday after the plant-wide drinking contest.

If that's your idea of fun, add it.


Logistics are both incredibly boring and the cornerstone of any sort of exploration or long journey.

So what you really want is an abstraction that presents the actual interesting decisions without the administrative overhead.

[jjordan]

Make stupid choices, win stupid prizes.


I have no idea what that is supposed to mean.
Everyone harps on preserving player agency and one aspect of that is not forcing players to sit around and not participate. But if players do stupid things and knock themselves out of the gameplay for several rounds then that's what happens. Is it fun for the player in the moment? No.

[kyoryu]

Everyone harps on preserving player agency and one aspect of that is not forcing players to sit around and not participate. But if players do stupid things and knock themselves out of the gameplay for several rounds then that's what happens. Is it fun for the player in the moment? No.

For sure.

But frequently, "stupid games" are the results of differing implicit social contracts, a player having a misconception of something, etc.

So, as a GM, I personally like to be extra clear in those cases about what the likely results of the action are, if the character would know them. And then let the dice fall where they may.

Bad:
Player: "I insult the king!"
GM: "You sure you wanna do that?"
Player: "Yup!"
GM: "The king yells for his guards to capture you, and they massively outlevel you. Let's hope you only get captured and not killed."

The player in this case may well have been operating under a more "heroic fiction" type vibe where insulting the king is something you can get away with, etc., even though their character would probably know the likelihood that this is a Bad Idea.

Better:
Player: "I insult the king!"
GM: "That may not be a good idea. You know this king has a reputation for not having much of a sense of humor, and nobles, in general, tend to stomp out anything that even appears to be insolence. Given how tough the guards are, you're pretty sure they could take you out. Being imprisoned might be the least bad thing that could happen to you."
Player: "Who cares? I do it anyway!"
GM: *sigh*

You haven't given the player anything that the character wouldn't know, and know they know they're playing a stupid game, and so it's perfectly fine that they then win a stupid prize.

[Rizban]

To be fair to Smaug, the Black Arrow was forged personally by dwarven royalty, designed specifically to slay dragons, may have been magical, and seemed to never break or get lost no matter how many times it was shot.

Bard inherited it from his forefathers, potentially also making the Black Arrow a Legacy Weapon.

Bard also had semi-mystical guidance from the Thrush to direct his shot, rolled a nat 20, and then likely rolled max damage on the crit with his composite longbow.

Edit: If you go by movie rather than book, then it was a bolt fired from a ballista.

[Chauncymancer]

Re giving warlocks and clerics more flavor: in a 2014 design talk they talked about how wizards tried this in the playtesting, and playtesters almost universally hated it so it was taken out.

[Lacco]

Better:
Player: "I insult the king!"
GM: "That may not be a good idea. You know this king has a reputation for not having much of a sense of humor, and nobles, in general, tend to stomp out anything that even appears to be insolence. Given how tough the guards are, you're pretty sure they could take you out. Being imprisoned might be the least bad thing that could happen to you."
Player: "Who cares? I do it anyway!"
GM: *sigh*

You haven't given the player anything that the character wouldn't know, and know they know they're playing a stupid game, and so it's perfectly fine that they then win a stupid prize.

Reminds me of one of my players. After the king's servant just relayed their quest to the party, this guy decides to go say "Hi" to the king (because, you know, it's a breach of etiquette to send such stuff via servants).

Riding a horse.

Into his personal bedchamber.

Even fighting guards.

Each of these steps had "That may not be a good idea + explanation" from my side before it.

Facepalms from other players were many. "It's what my character would do" + "It's the custom of my people to enter bedchambers of their lieges horseback!" were also stated in defence.

Surprise! The player felt I was treating him unfair when I told him to roll a new character, as that one was thrown into jail.



Eldan's advice is suprisingly sound. Nobody wanted to switch from our local DnD clone until I just said I'd GM. Give it a try.

I did. And unfortunately, now it means I only get to GM. One other player stepped up, but his games are... well, ever seen a railroad? Well, remove the turnouts. You do not get choices.

@Eldan: On the other hand, most of my usual players live far apart now - so when I tried yelling "I'll GM" out of the window, people just didn't seem to care.

[Wizard_Lizard]

I would say having a patron take away powers if you aren't actively advancing their goals is a little unfair. Particularly if your dm doesn't WANT to run a story that has anything to do with the goals of your patron. This is fine as how it is currently, where the DM CAN take the powers away, but there's no mechanical stuff to FORCE them too. Also taking away someone's class features is kinda rude. Also it can force fiend pact warlocks to be evil and evil players can be problematic, particularly if they are MECHANICALLY forced to be evil. Also I like to think becoming a warlock as a one off thing. You do a thing for your patron, they make you their warlock. You discover your powers by leveling up.

[Man on Fire]

Smaug was killed by a skilled archer with his lucky arrow.
If you stabbed Conan in the heart he'd die.
Clerics should only get spells appropriate to their deity's sphere of influence.
People who are 1hp away from possibly bleeding out shouldn't be able to leap chasms.
If you're a warlock and you aren't actively advancing the cause of your patron there should be some freaking consequences.
Magic should be powerful and hard and pretty damn rare and not a matter of going pew, pew, pew every freaking round of combat.
Death spirals are real.
Make stupid choices, win stupid prizes.
Armor works, which is why people wore it.
Armor needs more maintenance than a Harley-Davidson built the Monday after the plant-wide drinking contest.
Logistics are both incredibly boring and the cornerstone of any sort of exploration or long journey.
Gold is rare, people trade in silver.
Frodo spent two freaking months recovering from his wounds (and never did fully recover).
Some specialties are not meant to be used in combat and making them combat classes is ridiculous (cough artificer cough).
Bilbo traveled 1,000 miles over the course of 6 months, fought trolls, goblins, gollum, giant spiders, elves, matched wits with a dragon, fought goblins (again), and had a nice suit of excellent armor, a magic ring, and a magic sword for his troubles.

Warhammer fantasy has like 4 editions, not to mention many Old School Resisance games like Lamentations of the Flame Princess. Nobody forces you to play d&d.

[jjordan]

I would say having a patron take away powers if you aren't actively advancing their goals is a little unfair. Particularly if your dm doesn't WANT to run a story that has anything to do with the goals of your patron. This is fine as how it is currently, where the DM CAN take the powers away, but there's no mechanical stuff to FORCE them too. Also taking away someone's class features is kinda rude. Also it can force fiend pact warlocks to be evil and evil players can be problematic, particularly if they are MECHANICALLY forced to be evil. Also I like to think becoming a warlock as a one off thing. You do a thing for your patron, they make you their warlock. You discover your powers by leveling up.I like everything about this post.

[icefractal]

If you stabbed Conan in the heart he'd die.
People who are 1hp away from possibly bleeding out shouldn't be able to leap chasms.These two are down to how you interpret HP.

Personally I'd say that if you stab Conan and he goes from 70 hp to 60 hp, then you didn't stab him in the heart. Maybe you tried to do that, but you failed, and the proof is that he's still standing there ready to kick your ass. And similarly, being at any amount of positive HP means you aren't bleeding out or grievously injured. If you were, you'd be in the negatives.

But what if he's chained to an altar and you're the evil high priest trying to sacrifice him? Well that would be a Coup de Grace, and the rules for that are pretty unforgiving. The only way he survives is if he's incredibly, superhumanly tough, or he gets extremely lucky.

That said, I houserule CdG to be always x4 and dex-based if you take an extra round; it's unaesthetic that assassins need to switch from a stiletto to a scythe when they want to kill someone in their sleep.

[Kelb_Panthera]

Smaug was killed by a skilled archer with his lucky arrow.

Others have covered the detail here. It was a -lot- more than just a lucky shot from a skilled archer and an ordinary arrow shouldn't have got anywhere near his heart no matter how good or lucky the archer.


If you stabbed Conan in the heart he'd die.

Yup. It's really, really hard to hit somebody's heart when they're standing and fighting though, particularly a skilled warrior. Get him helpless and CdG and he's -almost- certain to die between damage, save from massive damage, and CdG save. Even a sneak attack or crit doesn't necessarily mean you hit the heart or any other vital organ, just that you made a very telling blow near their vitals.


Clerics should only get spells appropriate to their deity's sphere of influence.

I could see that working but it removes a lot of spells of standard expectation. Restoration, for example, doesn't appear in many domains.


People who are 1hp away from possibly bleeding out shouldn't be able to leap chasms.

1 hp isn't bleeding out. It's a bit banged and scratched but none of the wounds thus far have exceeded skin deep. Deep enough for injury poison but not enough to do much to musculature or cause severe bleeding. If you're at -1 and still mobile (there's a couple ways) then you can still make the attempt but it'll make you bleed out faster and you won't do much else that turn.

Abstraction's gotta abstract, ya know.


If you're a warlock and you aren't actively advancing the cause of your patron there should be some freaking consequences.

If your warlock has a patron. That's a relatively new thing. They've always been influenced by supernatural forces, thus the supernatural abilities, but that hasn't always been a function of an explicit pact like it is in later editions.


Magic should be powerful and hard and pretty damn rare and not a matter of going pew, pew, pew every freaking round of combat.

This amounts to "magic is not for PCs." Not as something an entire class can be devoted to anyway. Rarity is a setting function and it -is- actually relatively rare in most published D&D settings. Even in eberron, the "everyday magic" is magic items that are produced by the rare few that have the talent and know-how to make them.


Death spirals are real.

This feels like an entirely GM related complaint. Narrative focused GMs are gonna cut the spiral off before it reaches its center, pretty much every time. A gameist GM won't. Mechanically, once you're in negatives, you have very little chance of pulling out of it on your own before you bleed out and die, barring special abilities or equipment to mitigate.


Make stupid choices, win stupid prizes.

Second verse, same as the first; see the comment on death spirals, minus the HP bit.


Armor works, which is why people wore it.

... I'm not sure I see the complaint. Other than monks and a rare few others (mostly prestige classes), who doesn't wear armor? Druids wear armor made of natural materials and rogues wear relatively light armor. Wizards? They wear armor unless they've got magic to replace it, unless they're vaguely suicidal or dumber than their int score would suggest.


Armor needs more maintenance than a Harley-Davidson built the Monday after the plant-wide drinking contest.

Exaggeration aside, ya think maybe that might have something to do with some classes favoring less intricate armor? Either way, modeling that adds almost nothing to the game and even then something most players and GMs would just as soon toss out if it was there. Encumberance is less cumbersome and it gets glossed over and hand-waived more than almost any other rule.


Logistics are both incredibly boring and the cornerstone of any sort of exploration or long journey.

Right up until magic items upend that expectation; neverending trail rations, everfull mug, and bag of holding flush that idea right down the toilet. A GM can, of course, disallow those items and keep logistics relevant but then you bump into the armor maintenance/ encumberance issue all over again; most players and GMs would just as soon skip it.


Gold is rare, people trade in silver.

Adventurers are rare. They trade in gold.

Seriously though, why would any sane person take up the mantle of "adventurer" if not for a chance to become dramatically wealthier than their peers in a relatively short time, particularly in world where the dead sometimes walk and there are gigantic, death-breathing lizards flying around, nevermind all the less infamous but no less dangerous critters out there.


Frodo spent two freaking months recovering from his wounds (and never did fully recover).

K. And? That's a bit of narrative that was skipped in the book, it'd be a bit that's skipped in gaming too. If you don't change the time scales of your adventures to match, either you get a -lot- more TPKs, PCs that have to be a -lot- more careful with their HPs, or they fail to stop a lot more of the villains' plots for having to retreat. If you do change time scales to match, then there's no change to the game except that maybe the aging rules come into play for the shortest lived races.


Some specialties are not meant to be used in combat and making them combat classes is ridiculous (cough artificer cough).

Mad, magical inventor that wants to test his tools in the heat of combat while also striking it rich so he can make more mad inventions? Seems like he'd try to find some way to adapt his ability to weave magic into things in a combat-capable, if very temporary, way (hi, infusions). Most other dedicated crafters; magewrights, adepts, and even NPC wizards and clerics that focus on crafting feats; aren't adventurers even if they have greater potential to it than most.


Bilbo traveled 1,000 miles over the course of 6 months, fought trolls, goblins, gollum, giant spiders, elves, matched wits with a dragon, fought goblins (again), and had a nice suit of excellent armor, a magic ring, and a magic sword for his troubles.

Others have pointed out the flaws in this argument so I'll be brief; you forgot the crap-ton of gold and one of the items you did list is a world-bending artifact. In 3e rules, Sting is worth 18k gold pieces, minimum, and there's hardly a weapon better suited to killing orcs.

Though I now have to ask, which edition are these complaints aimed at? The warlock and treasure complaints seem to be at odds with one another as a 5e and 3e complaint, respectively.

I get you're just venting rather than asking for changes, I think, but a lot of this comes down to GM or perspective shifts.

[ImNotTrevor]

I have found that Hit Points make more sense if you pretend HP doesn't stand for Hit Points and instead stands for Hit Protection.

It makes it into an amalgamation of all the things that keep you from taking a big, life-threatening hit.

You can take it to another step if instead of 0 HP being Unconscious, it's Incapacitated. You might be knocked out, sure. You might also be conscious but clutching and curled around the spear stuck into your liver, delirious from the pain.

Call it luck, call it parrying, call it armor, it's all of those things. It's what is keeping this blow from being the one that kills you. It is the things Protecting you from the Hit that will bring you low.

Yeah, it's abstracted, but I find that small switch makes it suddenly make more sense right away.

[kyoryu]

Facepalms from other players were many. "It's what my character would do" + "It's the custom of my people to enter bedchambers of their lieges horseback!" were also stated in defence.

But is it, really?

I find that's often a symptom of poor roleplaying.... playing a character as a two-dimensional (at best!) caricature of a single feature.

Even most uncultured barbarians would know that they're not in their home anymore and that their customs seem to be different from what's on display here.

I know you get this. I just hate this lame excuse.

[Chauncymancer]

I have found that Hit Points make more sense if you pretend HP doesn't stand for Hit Points and instead stands for Hit Protection.

It makes it into an amalgamation of all the things that keep you from taking a big, life-threatening hit.

You can take it to another step if instead of 0 HP being Unconscious, it's Incapacitated. You might be knocked out, sure. You might also be conscious but clutching and curled around the spear stuck into your liver, delirious from the pain.

Call it luck, call it parrying, call it armor, it's all of those things. It's what is keeping this blow from being the one that kills you. It is the things Protecting you from the Hit that will bring you low.

Yeah, it's abstracted, but I find that small switch makes it suddenly make more sense right away.

Except that most editions have also used HP to track things like breathing in chlorine gas and being physically immersed in lava, that could not possibly be ameliorated. As well as using various non-hp mechanics to track the degradation of your ability to defend yourself.

[False God]

This was a character class idea I suggested in 3e; JUST give clerics domains and their granted powers.

Honestly I'm thinking I might try it out, just reverse the way the spell selection works, access to any domain of their god and any spell of the appropriate level therein; and 1 general spell at each level. With the usual alignment restrictions.

[Baine]

I just think it's more impressive when a barbarian flat out tanks an entire fireball instead of going, "Wow, that just baaaarely missed me, but boy do I feel unlucky now!"

[Lacco]

I have found that Hit Points make more sense if you pretend HP doesn't stand for Hit Points and instead stands for Hit Protection.

It makes it into an amalgamation of all the things that keep you from taking a big, life-threatening hit.

You can take it to another step if instead of 0 HP being Unconscious, it's Incapacitated. You might be knocked out, sure. You might also be conscious but clutching and curled around the spear stuck into your liver, delirious from the pain.

Call it luck, call it parrying, call it armor, it's all of those things. It's what is keeping this blow from being the one that kills you. It is the things Protecting you from the Hit that will bring you low.

Yeah, it's abstracted, but I find that small switch makes it suddenly make more sense right away.

Also: I loved the idea from Pratchett's books (it was Sourcery I think) that mages weave many smaller protective spells into their usual spellcasting. Meaning their HP could be all these magical protections.

Basically: ablative magical shields.


But is it, really?

I find that's often a symptom of poor roleplaying.... playing a character as a two-dimensional (at best!) caricature of a single feature.

Even most uncultured barbarians would know that they're not in their home anymore and that their customs seem to be different from what's on display here.

I know you get this. I just hate this lame excuse.

I do.

There are so many other things the character can do instead - all of them perfectly valid, in specific conditions.

I don't play with the guy anymore. Sorted out OOC, asked him not to crash games like that - did not agree with that. He wants to play completely different game as I do.

You know, one without consequences, a full on power trip. Where failed rolls are rerolled, where characters are unbeatable, where everything goes as he likes.

I don't mind beer & pretzel style once in a while. I don't mind power trips - they can be fun - and I usually play games that allow rerolling of failures (Shadowrun's Edge, RoS's Luck/Drama mechanic). I just want characters that are able to address the king "Your majesty" instead of "Hey, fancypants-whatsyername."

:smallbiggrin:

[Willie the Duck]

I have found that Hit Points make more sense if you pretend HP doesn't stand for Hit Points and instead stands for Hit Protection.

Except that most editions have also used HP to track things like breathing in chlorine gas and being physically immersed in lava, that could not possibly be ameliorated. As well as using various non-hp mechanics to track the degradation of your ability to defend yourself.

I just think it's more impressive when a barbarian flat out tanks an entire fireball instead of going, "Wow, that just baaaarely missed me, but boy do I feel unlucky now!"

To (probably miss-) quote one of Gygax and Arneson's playtesters-- 'hit points stand for hit points and they represent hit points.' Every framework from HP=meat to HP=luck to 'a pacing mechanism' are after-the-fact justifications. Hit points exist in the game because they are convenient. They are Link's heart containers or Mega Man's life meter. Is that gamist? Yes, and deliberately so. As much as I wanted to point out to the OP games which did do health differently (usually hit points, but with greater wound-effects and death spirals, making them more 'realistic'), I think that D&D's system works better...as a combat-centric game mechanism. GURPS, as a counterexample, has highly realistic* wounds and death spirals and hit points that rarely double over the course of a character's playtime -- and honestly it works really well for games focused on non-combat. Which...yay in those circumstances, I guess? If you want high-flying swordplay and epic adventure, and I think a lot of gamers do, D&D hp work better, even if you have to stretch your suspension of disbelief/resort to some mental justifications to explain someone surviving a dunk in an acid vat, or the like.
*Well, verisimilitude-supporting.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by jjordan
Bilbo traveled 1,000 miles over the course of 6 months, fought trolls, goblins, gollum, giant spiders, elves, matched wits with a dragon, fought goblins (again), and had a nice suit of excellent armor, a magic ring, and a magic sword for his troubles.

No one's mentioned it yet, but the armor was specifically called out as being worth more than the entire Shire. Any point about Bilbo somehow being undercompensated needs to take this into account.

[LibraryOgre]

No one's mentioned it yet, but the armor was specifically called out as being worth more than the entire Shire. Any point about Bilbo somehow being undercompensated needs to take this into account.

He was promised a share of treasure, not the means to carry it back.

He should have gotten a letter of credit.

[jjordan]

Any point about Bilbo somehow being undercompensated needs to take this into account.Kind of my point. Sort of. Bilbo was very well compensated, in my opinion. He got the plot device ring which, as far as he was concerned, was simply a ring of invisibility. He was totally unaware of the curse or the greater power of it. The sword was functionally a +1 magic item which glowed in the presence of orcs. The armor was worth so much money that it had no functional monetary value while being equivalent to a +1 armor (and not the 5e kind that re-sizes itself to fit any humanoid creature, grumble).

In any reasonable, equivalent D&D implementation of The Hobbit players would expect to come away laden down with so much treasure and magic that a bag of holding would be obligatory.

My point was that D&D is magic and treasure bloated. Of course, it has always been magic and treasure bloated.


*Well, verisimilitude-supporting.
:)

[Friv]

Make stupid choices, win stupid prizes.

I have no idea what that is supposed to mean.

It's a modification of a saying that's been floating around the Internet for years, "play stupid games, win stupid prizes." It generally comes up when someone shares a story or video of a person being badly hurt or getting in a ton of trouble, with the message being, "yeah, a bad thing happened to them, but their actions were in my opinion the cause and I wouldn't have done something that bad, so they do not deserve sympathy or support."

I am not a fan of it as a phrase in real life, because it comes from a school of thought that sympathy is something that you have to earn through innocence. I'm doubly not a fan of it in RPGs, because it suggests that all players are coming at the world from the same perspective, attitudes, and information, and that the GM thus has no responsibility to help out (and indeed has a responsibility to be harsh) when the player does something that doesn't match their image of the world. This is, however, a matter of personal taste. Many gamers prefer a world in which making a mistake or oversight leads to player destruction, as they feel more accomplished when they succeed.

[Vinyadan]

Kind of my point. Sort of. Bilbo was very well compensated, in my opinion. He got the plot device ring which, as far as he was concerned, was simply a ring of invisibility. He was totally unaware of the curse or the greater power of it. The sword was functionally a +1 magic item which glowed in the presence of orcs. The armor was worth so much money that it had no functional monetary value while being equivalent to a +1 armor (and not the 5e kind that re-sizes itself to fit any humanoid creature, grumble).

In any reasonable, equivalent D&D implementation of The Hobbit players would expect to come away laden down with so much treasure and magic that a bag of holding would be obligatory.

My point was that D&D is magic and treasure bloated. Of course, it has always been magic and treasure bloated.


:)
What about Bilbo's gold and silver? He took what a strong pony could carry, which would mean around 20 to 30 kg (without accounting for the containers themselves). Not too shabby, I think. If the two chests had equal size, the weight was more or less 2/3 gold and 1/3 silver.

But it's clear that, compared to what was in the mountain, and the 1/14 he was supposed to get, it was just small biscuits.

EDIT: apparently, my estimates of how much a pony can carry are very conservative, and it could get up to 60-70 kg.

[Cazero]

Bilbo stole the Arkenstone. He was lucky to get away with his life.

[jjordan]

It's a modification of a saying that's been floating around the Internet for years, "play stupid games, win stupid prizes." It generally comes up when someone shares a story or video of a person being badly hurt or getting in a ton of trouble, with the message being, "yeah, a bad thing happened to them, but their actions were in my opinion the cause and I wouldn't have done something that bad, so they do not deserve sympathy or support."

I am not a fan of it as a phrase in real life, because it comes from a school of thought that sympathy is something that you have to earn through innocence. I'm doubly not a fan of it in RPGs, because it suggests that all players are coming at the world from the same perspective, attitudes, and information, and that the GM thus has no responsibility to help out (and indeed has a responsibility to be harsh) when the player does something that doesn't match their image of the world. This is, however, a matter of personal taste. Many gamers prefer a world in which making a mistake or oversight leads to player destruction, as they feel more accomplished when they succeed.
Good points. I borrowed a harsh phrase to express discontent with the mind-set that players can get away with anything.

Players - "I think this temple is suspicious. We should break in. I'll climb up the wall to that second story window."

Me - "You have to take a few steps back into the crowded afternoon street, bumping several people as you do so, including someone wearing armor and the city livery, in order to view the window in question. It looks like a fairly easy climb for someone of your abilities."

Players - "Ok, what do I need to roll?"

Me - "Really? Okay, are you trying be stealthy about this?"

Players - "Of course. I rolled a 16! Plus six. Twenty-two!"

Me - "Great. You easily climb this wall and are at the window. The interior shutters appear to be locked. A couple of passersby have stopped to watch you and speculate about your actions."

Players - "But...."

Me - "You climbed a wall facing a busy city street in broad daylight without any sort of plan to distract the attention of the many people traversing this street or working in their shops that face the street. The guy in the city livery seems to be coming back this way."

Players - "Damn, we'll have to kill him."

Pretty sure players got the information they needed to make informed choices. But now I'm in the position of locking them up (tossed without their equipment into the basement room where the city keeps people pre-trial, information that was, again, pre-supplied) and trying to salvage the adventure.

[Friv]

Good points. I borrowed a harsh phrase to express discontent with the mind-set that players can get away with anything.

Players - "I think this temple is suspicious. We should break in. I'll climb up the wall to that second story window."

Me - "You have to take a few steps back into the crowded afternoon street, bumping several people as you do so, including someone wearing armor and the city livery, in order to view the window in question. It looks like a fairly easy climb for someone of your abilities."

Players - "Ok, what do I need to roll?"

Me - "Really? Okay, are you trying be stealthy about this?"

Players - "Of course. I rolled a 16! Plus six. Twenty-two!"

Me - "Great. You easily climb this wall and are at the window. The interior shutters appear to be locked. A couple of passersby have stopped to watch you and speculate about your actions."

Players - "But...."

Me - "You climbed a wall facing a busy city street in broad daylight without any sort of plan to distract the attention of the many people traversing this street or working in their shops that face the street. The guy in the city livery seems to be coming back this way."

Players - "Damn, we'll have to kill him."

Pretty sure players got the information they needed to make informed choices. But now I'm in the position of locking them up (tossed without their equipment into the basement room where the city keeps people pre-trial, information that was, again, pre-supplied) and trying to salvage the adventure.

That's definitely fair. But I think your example actually serves to highlight both of our points! From your perspective, you gave the PC multiple warnings. You told them the street was crowded, you expressed doubt with their plan by asking if they were giving up on stealth, and you provided a partial consequence that didn't invalidate their success and gave the party a way to roll with the situation. That is all very good GMing.

But on the flip side, if I was a player, and the GM asked me if I was trying to be stealthy and I said "of course", I would assume that meant there was a stealthy way to approach the building; come at it from a side, slip up a tree, or something like that. If stealth was impossible, I would have expected the GM to say, "you don't think you can do this and be stealthy." In retropsect, when the reveal happened, I would have gotten what you were trying to convey, but not in the moment.

That's the sort of disconnect that can happen pretty easily in an RPG space. When you wrote "You have to take a few steps back into the crowded afternoon street, bumping several people as you do so, including someone wearing armor and the city livery, in order to view the window in question" you communicated "there are a lot of people around and they're facing the window, making it hard to get in unnoticed", but what I read was, "the street is crowded and people are distracted, so no one's looking up right now. They're not even looking around them, since I bumped into a bunch of them." Under that impression, I could easily see "it's easy to climb up" becoming "you can climb up quickly and easily before anyone spots you."

It can be really surprising just how much information that is obvious to one person turns out to be giving a totally different impression to someone else.

[kyoryu]

Players - "Ok, what do I need to roll?"

Me - "Really? Okay, are you trying be stealthy about this?"

Players - "Of course. I rolled a 16! Plus six. Twenty-two!"

Me - "Great. You easily climb this wall and are at the window. The interior shutters appear to be locked. A couple of passersby have stopped to watch you and speculate about your actions."

Players - "But...."

Me - "You climbed a wall facing a busy city street in broad daylight without any sort of plan to distract the attention of the many people traversing this street or working in their shops that face the street. The guy in the city livery seems to be coming back this way."

So this is where I think it's a better idea for the GM to be clear about the stakes of a roll and what is or is not possible.

After "are you trying to be stealthy about this?" I'd probably say that the GM should say "hey, so, you can try to be stealthy. But climbing up a building on a busy street in the middle of the day is going to get some attention no matter what you do. So, if you succeed at stealth here, you're going to be noticed, but you'll have more time before there's a response. If you want to get up there completely unnoticed, you'll have to find a way that's not as observable."

This is all information that is obvious to the character, even if it's not obvious to the player. So setting the stakes explicitly (you'll be found either way, the stealth check will buy you time), and telling the player what is required to get the result that they probably actually want makes the stakes obvious.

At that point, they own the decision.

[Lacco]

So this is where I think it's a better idea for the GM to be clear about the stakes of a roll and what is or is not possible.

After "are you trying to be stealthy about this?" I'd probably say that the GM should say "hey, so, you can try to be stealthy. But climbing up a building on a busy street in the middle of the day is going to get some attention no matter what you do. So, if you succeed at stealth here, you're going to be noticed, but you'll have more time before there's a response. If you want to get up there completely unnoticed, you'll have to find a way that's not as observable."

This is all information that is obvious to the character, even if it's not obvious to the player. So setting the stakes explicitly (you'll be found either way, the stealth check will buy you time), and telling the player what is required to get the result that they probably actually want makes the stakes obvious.

At that point, they own the decision.

This is actually one point I took from Fate (and saw in several other RPGs): set the stakes. Let them decide.

Their characters - not the players - see the street and should be able* to discern the risk. And you can either tell them both to the players or to the characters.

To the characters "Your thief knows that it would be possible, but there are no distractions - a person climbing this wall will be noticed unless they move extremely stealthy". To the players "Ok, target number is X. Beat this absurdly high number and you are in without anyone seeing. But roll below and you either do not get a chance to climb the wall unnoticed or you get noticed quickly."

Their characters are able to evaluate their chances based on your descriptions.

[kyoryu]

Yeah, I think there's a general principle here of "anything that is obvious to the character should be explicitly communicated to the player."

[kyoryu]

To (probably miss-) quote one of Gygax and Arneson's playtesters-- 'hit points stand for hit points and they represent hit points.'

That sounds like MM.

[jjordan]

Yeah, I think there's a general principle here of "anything that is obvious to the character should be explicitly communicated to the player."

Excellent advice, gentlemen, and I thank you for it.

[KineticDiplomat]

Blade of The Iron Throne. It could use some editing. It requires the occasional house rule when situations pop up. But if you want more Sword and Sorcery with :

-Exciting melee where you feel powerful and are powerful but can still take a spear to the throat and die.

-Magic that is terrifying, hard won, and consequenced in the manner of dark rituals and sacrifice and not “battle mage goes flying pew pew invisible auto-win everyone in the world knows magic if they don’t farm”, well that’s your answer to nearly everything you listed. You don’t want to fail to bind that demon...so you’ll likely set up a human sacrifice if you don’t like going 50/50 on being torn to shreds . Or a virgin sacrifice. Or, for even more dice, seven virgin sacrifices.

-Convenient narrative mechanisms for both play and story direction.

-Injuries that matter, but allow the game to continue.

Song of Swords: Clunkier and less fluid than BoIT, but deliberately designed to allow disparate power levels from “realistic” to “Homeric hero” and multiple races. Of course, you can always just tweak a few stats for races in BoIT if you want to play in a world with elves and dwarves and such.

[Quertus]

I know three people who are still this side of the dirt thanks to armor, including someone who was headshot by a sniper. Armor works.

Not many people IME recognize this fact. Kudos!


Everyone harps on preserving player agency and one aspect of that is not forcing players to sit around and not participate. But if players do stupid things and knock themselves out of the gameplay for several rounds then that's what happens. Is it fun for the player in the moment? No.

… to me, Player Agency includes the agency to "do stupid things and knock themselves out of the gameplay for several rounds".

However, from a gameplay perspective, it's good to remove the *character*, but not the *player* from the game.

This is why I like players running multiple characters, having NPCs that the players can take over, etc, to keep the *player* engaged in the game.

[NigelWalmsley]

Good points. I borrowed a harsh phrase to express discontent with the mind-set that players can get away with anything.

Players - "I think this temple is suspicious. We should break in. I'll climb up the wall to that second story window."

Me - "You have to take a few steps back into the crowded afternoon street, bumping several people as you do so, including someone wearing armor and the city livery, in order to view the window in question. It looks like a fairly easy climb for someone of your abilities."

Players - "Ok, what do I need to roll?"

Me - "Really? Okay, are you trying be stealthy about this?"

Players - "Of course. I rolled a 16! Plus six. Twenty-two!"

Me - "Great. You easily climb this wall and are at the window. The interior shutters appear to be locked. A couple of passersby have stopped to watch you and speculate about your actions."

Players - "But...."

Me - "You climbed a wall facing a busy city street in broad daylight without any sort of plan to distract the attention of the many people traversing this street or working in their shops that face the street. The guy in the city livery seems to be coming back this way."

Players - "Damn, we'll have to kill him."

Pretty sure players got the information they needed to make informed choices. But now I'm in the position of locking them up (tossed without their equipment into the basement room where the city keeps people pre-trial, information that was, again, pre-supplied) and trying to salvage the adventure.

That sounds like the DM didn't accurately communicate what he though "be stealthy" meant to the player. The player thought he meant "roll Stealth", the DM thought he meant "create a distraction". The problem here is that the DM did not communicate effectively.

[ImNotTrevor]

Except that most editions have also used HP to track things like breathing in chlorine gas and being physically immersed in lava, that could not possibly be ameliorated. As well as using various non-hp mechanics to track the degradation of your ability to defend yourself.

Remember: it's not protection from taking any form of damage at all, just not yet taking *the blow that's gonna kill you.* So perhaps yeah, you're coughing and wheezing and things are getting blurry, but you'll be ok if you get out of it soon.

Given how Lava works, you don't really... get immersed in lava so much as smack onto the top of it and *maybe* slowly sink into it, since it is very viscous. (It's ROCK, even if it's hot and flowing.) Even then, calling it Hit Protection just makes it narratively more flexible since it's less explicitly tied to "this number is how many times you can be skewered in your meaty bits before you die" and covers a broader range while still allowing it to be the meaty bits.

So mayhaps the Barbarian IS literally becoming immune to pain and his skin is becoming impervious.

But for the mage maybe it means (as a poster suggested) tiny protective spells in his clothes are fizzling out, and for the Rogue maybe it means they're dodging or parrying the blows but they can't keep it up forever. Perhaps the Fighter is somewhere betweennthe Rogue and the Barbarian. She's tough as nails AND she's good at lessening the blows she can't avoid so they aren't fatal.

As for other status conditions, I don't see any reason why those are in conflict. I don't see AC as being in conflict with this idea, either.



I just think it's more impressive when a barbarian flat out tanks an entire fireball instead of going, "Wow, that just baaaarely missed me, but boy do I feel unlucky now!"


The Barbarian can still do that, though? Hit Protection just means "this is not a blow with severity until it's the one that takes you to 0." So with Hit Protection, yeah. The Barbarian can tank that fireball. His leathers are singed, he's got blisters, but he's fine.

Hit Protection just feels more flexible to me than Hit Points. Hit Points feels like it's intrinsically tied to your meat, ya know? Hit Protection can be tied to several different things, including your meat.


Basically:
"Hit Points" as a term implies damage to your fleshy bits, but we know it has to be more abstract than that, logically.
"Hit Protection" doesn't imply fleshy bit damage, but can still mean that. It's just honest about how abstracted it is.

EDIT: Missed a response


To (probably miss-) quote one of Gygax and Arneson's playtesters-- 'hit points stand for hit points and they represent hit points.' Every framework from HP=meat to HP=luck to 'a pacing mechanism' are after-the-fact justifications. Hit points exist in the game because they are convenient. They are Link's heart containers or Mega Man's life meter. Is that gamist? Yes, and deliberately so. As much as I wanted to point out to the OP games which did do health differently (usually hit points, but with greater wound-effects and death spirals, making them more 'realistic'), I think that D&D's system works better...as a combat-centric game mechanism. GURPS, as a counterexample, has highly realistic* wounds and death spirals and hit points that rarely double over the course of a character's playtime -- and honestly it works really well for games focused on non-combat. Which...yay in those circumstances, I guess? If you want high-flying swordplay and epic adventure, and I think a lot of gamers do, D&D hp work better, even if you have to stretch your suspension of disbelief/resort to some mental justifications to explain someone surviving a dunk in an acid vat, or the like.
*Well, verisimilitude-supporting.

Yup, I'm in this boat. The only reason I support the renaming is because people associate "Hit Points" with meaty bits getting lopped off, and changing the name distances that and implies a lot of that fundamental abstraction.

The problem with any sort of wound/damage/illness bits in any system trying to be realistic is that real life is unbelievably messy. Getting shot in the head at point-blank range is not a guaranteed death. Sometimes otherwise healthy people go to bed and never wake up because sleep apnea is a thing. Sometimes people lose an entire arm to a spider bite and experienced, well-rounded animal experts get killed by an animal that has never been documented to have killed anyone before him. (RIP Steve Irwin)

Death, wounds, dying, are all EXTREMELY UNPREDICTABLE. If your system gets anywhere near that level of complexity it will be bogged down to all hell. So at some point the decision needs to be made:
How long do I want taking damage to take in this game? In actual table time, how long should it take?

D&D decided it should take a single-digit number of seconds to resolve the entire thing so they could move on. Other systems, it might take 10, 20, even 60 seconds to figure out the damage taken by a single character in this turn of combat. That's probably fun for someone. Not MOST people, but clearly there is a desire for it.

I'm just not willing to spend that much time on it. And calling it Hit Protection can help some make the mental jump to "oh, it's deeply abstracted." Yup. It is.

[Lacco]

Death, wounds, dying, are all EXTREMELY UNPREDICTABLE. If your system gets anywhere near that level of complexity it will be bogged down to all hell. So at some point the decision needs to be made:
How long do I want taking damage to take in this game? In actual table time, how long should it take?

D&D decided it should take a single-digit number of seconds to resolve the entire thing so they could move on. Other systems, it might take 10, 20, even 60 seconds to figure out the damage taken by a single character in this turn of combat. That's probably fun for someone. Not MOST people, but clearly there is a desire for it.


You are correct, in a way. As a GM from very different side of river, I can say it takes somewhere from 10 to 20 seconds, more for unexperienced GMs.

The difference is amount of times I have to do so. Two or three times per combat that takes up to 5 rounds and in total of 10 or 15 minutes with a semi-experienced group.

Compare this to a level 6-7 combat in DnD with total times. I'm sure the times will add up quickly. I'm not even going to mention levels 10+...

[Cluedrew]

Magic should be powerful and hard and pretty damn rare and not a matter of going pew, pew, pew every freaking round of combat.
Yes, Wizards shouldn't get to play the game.I mean I think the lore behind it really does learn to occasional spells that have proportionately more effect then the "pew, pew, pew" system. It was the system of the earlier editions as well. So I'm generally in favour of this as well.


Some specialties are not meant to be used in combat and making them combat classes is ridiculous (cough artificer cough).I feel more RPGs need to have more support for people who's thing isn't killing other people.

[ImNotTrevor]

I feel more RPGs need to have more support for people who's thing isn't killing other people.

PbtA games tend to do great at this. Just saying. :)

[Satinavian]

I feel more RPGs need to have more support for people who's thing isn't killing other people.A lot of RPGs do this. Maybe even the majority.

I tend to play those.

[Willie the Duck]

That sounds like MM.
Yep. Don't have a link to the quote, and never sure if one should directly reference people by IRL name, but it's Geezer.


I feel more RPGs need to have more support for people who's thing isn't killing other people.
Most of them do. Most don't have a great way of integrating a party of whose-thing-is-killing-people persons and whose-thing-isn't-killing-people persons. The old Cyberpunk/Shadowrun 'everyone else take a break, the Hacker gets one moment per adventure to justify their existence so you just sit tight' issue. Artificers get to be pew pew gunsmiths because D&D wants them to be involved in the combat.

[jjordan]

I feel more RPGs need to have more support for people who's thing isn't killing other people.D&D certainly does. Forcing those character types to fit into the combat-effective mold is a disservice to them, however. Willie the Duck's point about how that creates interaction situations where some players are effectively sidelined is very good and something that I feel very few systems have done a good job of addressing (usually by managing player expectations). It's understandable that D&D would focus on the mechanic that most people focus on.

[ImNotTrevor]

You are correct, in a way. As a GM from very different side of river, I can say it takes somewhere from 10 to 20 seconds, more for unexperienced GMs.

The difference is amount of times I have to do so. Two or three times per combat that takes up to 5 rounds and in total of 10 or 15 minutes with a semi-experienced group.

Compare this to a level 6-7 combat in DnD with total times. I'm sure the times will add up quickly. I'm not even going to mention levels 10+...

I'm sure that if you include the attack rolls and all that, it is indeed more than 10 seconds. I'm talking specifically about resolving the damage, which (outside of things that chuck handfuls of dice) is a second or two of quick math and then reporting said math results.

2d6+3 dmg does not take long to calculate and describe. Say it's a 2 and a 6. That's 11 damage. "You take 11 points of slashing damage"

The end. There are systems where once the hit is confirmed, now we have to bust out a table and see where it hit and calculate the damage to a particular limb and then work out if the limb still works and what that means going forward and....

D&D decided that going through all that was way less fun than just abstracting the heck out of it and calling it a day.

[kyoryu]

The end. There are systems where once the hit is confirmed, now we have to bust out a table and see where it hit and calculate the damage to a particular limb and then work out if the limb still works and what that means going forward and....

D&D decided that going through all that was way less fun than just abstracting the heck out of it and calling it a day.

In the end, my primary concern is overall time to run a combat. IOW, I can deal with calculations taking longer (if justified by the result "quality") if I have to do it fewer times per combat.

[Xervous]

In the end, my primary concern is overall time to run a combat. IOW, I can deal with calculations taking longer (if justified by the result "quality") if I have to do it fewer times per combat.

A shadowrun Ares Alpha burst fire to the rogues TWF sneak attack.

[icefractal]

Players - "I think this temple is suspicious. We should break in. I'll climb up the wall to that second story window."

...

Me - "You climbed a wall facing a busy city street in broad daylight without any sort of plan to distract the attention of the many people traversing this street or working in their shops that face the street. The guy in the city livery seems to be coming back this way."To me, this is a failure on the GM's part as much as the player's.

As the GM you are the players' only interface to the game world. If you didn't tell them something or they didn't understand it, then that interface has failed. Now yeah, a player missing something you said loud and clear is on them. But letting things continue when it's clear that they don't have the same mental picture is on the GM. What should have happened in that example is:

GM - "You are going to climb the wall in view of the many people here? Despite it being illegal? You realize that rolling Stealth won't do anything if you're in plain sight?"

If the player still wants to do it after that, then sure, they win stupid prizes. But more likely:
* They were distracted at the moment you mentioned the crowd and didn't hear it.
* They had a different mental picture and thought the wall in question was less obvious.
* They thought that succeeding a Stealth check also meant finding a stealthy route (which is how it does work in some systems, if a stealthy approach is impossible you can't even roll it).

It can be annoying when players don't pay attention, and so I can understand the desire to make that bite them in the ass, but frankly it's applying IC effects to an OOC situation, the same as "you fail the saving throw because you were 20 minutes late and didn't chip in for pizza".

[kyoryu]

If you didn't tell them something or they didn't understand it, then that interface has failed. Now yeah, a player missing something you said loud and clear is on them. But letting things continue when it's clear that they don't have the same mental picture is on the GM. What should have happened in that example is:

GM - "You are going to climb the wall in view of the many people here? Despite it being illegal? You realize that rolling Stealth won't do anything if you're in plain sight?"

Yeah. There's that whole school of GMing which seems to be based on dropping hints.

Don't. Be more explicit than you think you need to be. If it's obvious what to do if you have the info, then it's not really interesting - try to construct scenarios where there is no obvious best solution instead, and you can let the players debate the pros and cons of various plans.

[NigelWalmsley]

As the GM you are the players' only interface to the game world. If you didn't tell them something or they didn't understand it, then that interface has failed.

Exactly. The DM's (and the rules') job is to ensure that the players are able to make informed decisions about their actions. If a player does something dumb because you didn't make the consequences clear to them, the fault lies with you, not the player. Now, if they do something dumb because they think it's funny, that's a different issue. But a lot of these complaints amount to "I was thinking of 5 and the player guessed 4, aren't they awful?". No, you're awful, because making people play guess the number is a waste of everybody's time.

[ImNotTrevor]

In the end, my primary concern is overall time to run a combat. IOW, I can deal with calculations taking longer (if justified by the result "quality") if I have to do it fewer times per combat.

That is certainly one way to equalize it out, but I feel like it would still be an increase in abstraction either way. Like, for instance, you're not doing an attack roll for every swing of the sword, no, so you've abstracted that portion so that the consequence of a successfully dealt blow can be hashed out in more detail. Which is up to the designer and the players to figure out what they enjoy! But it's one of those cases where it's like:
>Fast Combat
>Granular Attack Mechanics
>Granular Damage Mechanics
>Pick 2.





Yeah. There's that whole school of GMing which seems to be based on dropping hints.

Don't. Be more explicit than you think you need to be. If it's obvious what to do if you have the info, then it's not really interesting - try to construct scenarios where there is no obvious best solution instead, and you can let the players debate the pros and cons of various plans.

I agree with this take. Apocalypse World would call this "State The Consequences and Ask."

Ie, the character in the fiction knows things the player might not. Try as you might, your player sitting at a kitchen table (or via a computer now that [THE BACKSTREET BOYS REUNION TOUR] is going around) is not feeling the crush of the crowd and hearing their voices and the fruit stand guy hawking his wares. He doesn't feel the midday sun on his neck or smell the pungent mix of human sweat, incense, and cattle moving through the air as the wind blows the smell of the bazaar across their path. And if you tried to convey all of this most players would check out. So it's 100% Okay to say:
"Torvald, you know that climbing now would mean ascending in broad daylight in front of a crowd which might include guards and though you're not from around here, you've never been in a city where climbing the outsides of random temples was perfectly acceptable practice. What do you do?"

Their character WOULD know this, having lived their life in some form of society and knowing how eyesight works. So not telling them is... silly. It doesn't mean you've said "the window will never work." You've said "hey dude, there's so many people and the sun is up. This is probably not your angle." Which... what could possibly be the problem there?

[Cluedrew]

PbtA games tend to do great at this. Just saying. :)Yes it is one of many regards I consider the Powered by the Apocalypse family to be superior to the d20 family. (Not strictly better but one of many things they do have going for them.)


A lot of RPGs do this. Maybe even the majority.
Most of them do. [Reasonable theory as to why D&D doesn't.]Maybe but unfortunately a lot of the big names seem to shy away from that. I mean I have seen posters who don't know what a skill based system looks like, you know ones where your combat skills don't get special status. Actually I wonder what the "biggest" skill based system is.


D&D certainly does.Not as PCs it doesn't. Not at a level I've been able to make the non-combat part of my character get off the ground. Let me put it this way: Can you give me a 1-20 level progression of a PC who is definitely not a combatant?

[ImNotTrevor]

Yes it is one of many regards I consider the Powered by the Apocalypse family to be superior to the d20 family. (Not strictly better but one of many things they do have going for them.)

Maybe but unfortunately a lot of the big names seem to shy away from that. I mean I have seen posters who don't know what a skill based system looks like, you know ones where your combat skills don't get special status. Actually I wonder what the "biggest" skill based system is.

Not as PCs it doesn't. Not at a level I've been able to make the non-combat part of my character get off the ground. Let me put it this way: Can you give me a 1-20 level progression of a PC who is definitely not a combatant?

I think the last quote was agreeing with you, overall.

I'm also fairly certain that the reason D&D works the way it does is because while D&D sells itself as THE PREMIER FANTASY RPG THAT CAN DO ANY FANTASY THING, it is not that and cannot do that.

The core gameplay loop of D&D is pretty simple:
Go into dungeon, kill occupants, take their loot, use their loot to buy better stuff to go into dungeons with better loot. Repeat.
The entire game is centered on, and revolves around, this gameplay loop. Which is A GOOD THING, as it happens, since a game that reinforces and most naturally completes its gameplay loop is doing it right, from a design standpoint.

The problem is that D&D tries to tell you it's the rpg that can do anything in fantasy. It is The King Of RPGs, so how could it NOT do it all? Sadly, it does not do it all. Not even close. Pushing against that core gameplay loop breaks and bogs down the system entirely. All this stuff about economies and politics and worldbuilding? That's window dressing for the [Dungeon > Murder > Loot > Dungeon] loop. Hence why D&D doesn't care about it at all, and handwaves it. Which means those of us who bought the marketing that this game was good for deep world building scratch our heads and go "wait none of this works at all." Because it's not meant to. D&D does not care about that part.

Equipment is for dungeon stuff.
Spells are designed for dungeon stuff.
Classes are built for dungeon stuff.
Monsters are made for dungeon stuff.

It's IN THE NAME. What's the two things that D&D cares about? Dungeons and Dragons. To interperet a bit, Dungeons and What Is Found Therein is what D&D cares about. Trying to make it do more or have explanations for more is kinda like drawing from an empty well. There's nothing for you down that rabbit hole, and nothing ever was.

[jjordan]

Not as PCs it doesn't. Not at a level I've been able to make the non-combat part of my character get off the ground. Let me put it this way: Can you give me a 1-20 level progression of a PC who is definitely not a combatant?Which ignores the rest of my statement where I say that I understand why a combat-oriented game like D&D doesn't put much work into non-combat oriented PC classes and instead shoehorns them into combat roles.

I can give you a 1-20 level progression of a non-combat-oriented PC class. You'll hate it because in combat, the focus of D&D, it will be sub-optimal. Which doesn't bother me. But I'm not a typical D&D player. Which brings us back to: I should be playing another game. :)

[Cluedrew]

On Non-Combat: Yes I get it, I've made the argument myself in the past. Dungeons and Dragon is about dungeons filled with monsters and not a lot more than that. People acting like it is more than that are... well either fooling themselves or doing a very good job with a square peg and round hole. People have put enough time and homebrew into it that sure you can do it, but you are working from an awkward base.

To jjordan: If you have that level progression at the ready I would be happy to see it just for curiosities sake.

[King of Nowhere]

If you stabbed Conan in the heart he'd die.


movie: conan fights 20 opponents, skillfully dodging all of their blows.

gaming reality: conan fights 1 lame goblin with terminal cancer. Lame goblin with terminal cancer rolls a 20*. "wooops, sorry jim. i guess you roll a new character"

*or a double 20, or whatever it takes in your system to get the "stab in the heart" effect. you know if you keep fighting long enough, it will happen

analyzed in this light, your sentence is not a stab at gaming, but a stab at movies. they are completely irrealistic. nobody can be that good to do those kind of stunts regularly. you can manage once, you can even manage most times, but eventually it will go bad. and you get killed. the only thing that gaming can do to prevent your beloved character from getting killed on a regular base it to make it unkillable through regular means. or to give a chance for resurrection.


People who are 1hp away from possibly bleeding out shouldn't be able to leap chasms.
many dm tried to give increasing penalties for being wounded. i've never heard of anyone who didn't concluded that it was more bookkeeping than it was worth.


Magic should be powerful and hard and pretty damn rare and not a matter of going pew, pew, pew every freaking round of combat.
magic should be just another branch of science, it should be reliable and exploitable like any technology.
Prove me wrong.

[Lacco]

That is certainly one way to equalize it out, but I feel like it would still be an increase in abstraction either way. Like, for instance, you're not doing an attack roll for every swing of the sword, no, so you've abstracted that portion so that the consequence of a successfully dealt blow can be hashed out in more detail.

Except for the crazy games where they do an attack & defense roll for every swing of the sword.

There you abstract your combat capabilities - but you do the same in DnD.


I think the last quote was agreeing with you, overall.

I'm also fairly certain that the reason D&D works the way it does is because while D&D sells itself as THE PREMIER FANTASY RPG THAT CAN DO ANY FANTASY THING, it is not that and cannot do that.

The core gameplay loop of D&D is pretty simple:
Go into dungeon, kill occupants, take their loot, use their loot to buy better stuff to go into dungeons with better loot. Repeat.
The entire game is centered on, and revolves around, this gameplay loop. Which is A GOOD THING, as it happens, since a game that reinforces and most naturally completes its gameplay loop is doing it right, from a design standpoint.

The problem is that D&D tries to tell you it's the rpg that can do anything in fantasy. It is The King Of RPGs, so how could it NOT do it all? Sadly, it does not do it all. Not even close. Pushing against that core gameplay loop breaks and bogs down the system entirely. All this stuff about economies and politics and worldbuilding? That's window dressing for the [Dungeon > Murder > Loot > Dungeon] loop. Hence why D&D doesn't care about it at all, and handwaves it. Which means those of us who bought the marketing that this game was good for deep world building scratch our heads and go "wait none of this works at all." Because it's not meant to. D&D does not care about that part.

Equipment is for dungeon stuff.
Spells are designed for dungeon stuff.
Classes are built for dungeon stuff.
Monsters are made for dungeon stuff.

It's IN THE NAME. What's the two things that D&D cares about? Dungeons and Dragons. To interperet a bit, Dungeons and What Is Found Therein is what D&D cares about. Trying to make it do more or have explanations for more is kinda like drawing from an empty well. There's nothing for you down that rabbit hole, and nothing ever was.

I completely agree.

And I will go further and agree that e.g. Riddle of Steel is a terrible system for dungeon crawls - DnD is there for that. Just as Fate would be most probably clunky as dungeon crawler. And Shadowrun... well, it could work as En Garde-style game where you try to raise your status through duels & marriage, but not as written.

Dungeons & Dragons shines best when used with dungeons. And dragons.

But for specific things - e.g. duels, noir-style break-ins or narrative games fueled by players? There may be better systems to scratch that specific itch.

Knowing this makes OP's post relatively easy to solve. Choose another system.


movie: conan fights 20 opponents, skillfully dodging all of their blows.

gaming reality: conan fights 1 lame goblin with terminal cancer. Lame goblin with terminal cancer rolls a 20*. "wooops, sorry jim. i guess you roll a new character"

Not going into the new movie, but in the first one, you never see Conan fight 20 opponents at the same time.

Two. Or three.

In books - yes, I remember him fighting off something around 8-10 traitors, but most of them had no armor and only knives, while he wielded his usual weapon. And he still got wounded.


many dm tried to give increasing penalties for being wounded. i've never heard of anyone who didn't concluded that it was more bookkeeping than it was worth.

Imagine for a moment playing a different system. You do not roll a d20, but several d10s - depending on your skill, attributes & condition. Each round you get - let's say - 10d10. Enough to fill a small bowl.

When you get hurt, GM tells you a two numbers. You mark those on a character sheet and remove dice from your bowl equal to your number.

Hard bookkeeping?


magic should be just another branch of science, it should be reliable and exploitable like any technology.
Prove me wrong.

In RL? I'd prefer the same :smallbiggrin:

In games? I prefer to have a wide choice. Vancian is one possibility. Not the only one. Same as DnD.

[Cluedrew]

movie: conan fights 20 opponents, skillfully dodging all of their blows.

gaming reality: conan fights 1 lame goblin with terminal cancer. Lame goblin with terminal cancer rolls a 20*. "wooops, sorry jim. i guess you roll a new character"I think this is more about the issues with the d20 system than some intrinsic reality of gaming. I once played a combat focused character in a system where you don't have to be a combat character - in fact I had the only one amongst the PCs. I didn't miss a combat roll the entire campaign but chip damage meant my character was still in really bad shape by the end of the campaign. How is that for a happy middle ground?


magic should be just another branch of science, it should be reliable and exploitable like any technology.
Prove me wrong.I mean I can't prove anything but while we are talking about branches of science what about instead of ~physics or ~chemistry its ~phycology or ~sociology? You know something that is studied but is also not as predictable or consistent as swinging a sword. And although it leaves science I did a magic system I compared to philosophy once. There are plenty of real areas of study that are much harder to pin down.


Except for the crazy games where they do an attack & defense roll for every swing of the sword.Why stop there? "Three undead skeletons come out of the tunnel, DC 15." {Rolls} "22."

If you think that is a terrible idea, why is it a good idea for so many other parts of the game?

[King of Nowhere]

Not going into the new movie, but in the first one, you never see Conan fight 20 opponents at the same time.

Two. Or three.

In books - yes, I remember him fighting off something around 8-10 traitors, but most of them had no armor and only knives, while he wielded his usual weapon. And he still got wounded.


never seen any of the movies, or books, in fact i don't know much about conan. what i know is that in real life, even a highly trained professional against a completely untrained guy is not a 100% guarantee of victory. untrained guy may try something desperate and get lucky. they may be just a bit faster than you'd expect them. professional fighter will occasionally make a mistake.
having that in a system with lots of combat increases the lethality for pcs above what most people want for their games.




Imagine for a moment playing a different system. You do not roll a d20, but several d10s - depending on your skill, attributes & condition. Each round you get - let's say - 10d10. Enough to fill a small bowl.

When you get hurt, GM tells you a two numbers. You mark those on a character sheet and remove dice from your bowl equal to your number.

Hard bookkeeping?


i don't know much of other systems, what i know is that i read several threads in this forum about someone trying to apply penalties for getting wounded, and i never heard of it going well. i'm sure there are systems where it can be done without excessive bookkeeping, but it's not trivial.

[Xervous]

never seen any of the movies, or books, in fact i don't know much about conan. what i know is that in real life, even a highly trained professional against a completely untrained guy is not a 100% guarantee of victory. untrained guy may try something desperate and get lucky. they may be just a bit faster than you'd expect them. professional fighter will occasionally make a mistake.
having that in a system with lots of combat increases the lethality for pcs above what most people want for their games.


i don't know much of other systems, what i know is that i read several threads in this forum about someone trying to apply penalties for getting wounded, and i never heard of it going well. i'm sure there are systems where it can be done without excessive bookkeeping, but it's not trivial.

Wound penalties are much easier to run with systems that focus on avoiding damage rather than those that race damage like D&D tends to assume. D&D also isn’t doing any favors with generating large quantities of attacks.

[Enixon]

What about Bilbo's gold and silver? He took what a strong pony could carry, which would mean around 20 to 30 kg (without accounting for the containers themselves). Not too shabby, I think. If the two chests had equal size, the weight was more or less 2/3 gold and 1/3 silver.

But it's clear that, compared to what was in the mountain, and the 1/14 he was supposed to get, it was just small biscuits.

EDIT: apparently, my estimates of how much a pony can carry are very conservative, and it could get up to 60-70 kg.


it's said in fellowship that treasure is "almost gone" which means it supported Bilbo's "rural gentleman" lifestyle for the 60 years between The Hobbit and Fellowship of the Ring with a bit left over. I don't remember if Bilbo is ever stated to have an actual job or not to supplement the treasure or not.



As for the Warlocks, there's a small bit of lore in the Neverwinter MMO that I found surprisingly good.

Basically in the game, as far as quest dialog is concerned all player Warlocks have Belial as their Patron, but you're never forced to do anything evil to appease him. You find out that this is by design, that Belial rarely if ever makes his "heroic" Warlocks do anything evil, heck he might not even claim their soul after death. If he does have them do a quest for him, it'll be something like taking out a rival devil's cult or stopping a demon incursion, things that a Good aligned individual would have no problem with doing, but still helps Belial's call in the long run.

The reason for this being essentially "good press" the people of the world see these heroic warlocks doing great and noble deeds despite the source of their power and start to think "Well, maybe trafficking with the lower planes isn't such a bad thing after all, I mean, the Hero of Neverwinter is a warlock after all." meaning more and more people are willing to pull out a ouija board and make a deal, people that might not word their pact as carefully as the Warlock hero did, meaning more souls for Belial.

[kyoryu]

The reason for this being essentially "good press" the people of the world see these heroic warlocks doing great and noble deeds despite the source of their power and start to think "Well, maybe trafficking with the lower planes isn't such a bad thing after all, I mean, the Hero of Neverwinter is a warlock after all." meaning more and more people are willing to pull out a ouija board and make a deal, people that might not word their pact as carefully as the Warlock hero did, meaning more souls for Belial.

Ah, its MLM, essentially.

That's a fitting level of Evil.

[Lacco]

Why stop there? "Three undead skeletons come out of the tunnel, DC 15." {Rolls} "22."

If you think that is a terrible idea, why is it a good idea for so many other parts of the game?

As one of those who always defend & propagate the "crazy" games I talked about (after all, I'm still the guy who thinks Riddle of Steel should be played by everyone at least once in their lifetime), I'm not even against this solution. It would have its merits in certain systems (e.g. if focus were mainly on social combat instead of actual combat) and campaigns.

This example is actually close to how Fate deals with insignificant foes if I remember correctly - just a straight roll. Your character either shines and crushes the skellies or gets a bit mangled before the main course, the evil necromancer - not really a chance of dying if you aren't playing the damsel in distress.

I assume I have been misread, but in this case - I'm the guy who loves the "sword swing = roll" mechanics. The opposite is fine too, but not really the ideal for me.


never seen any of the movies, or books, in fact i don't know much about conan. what i know is that in real life, even a highly trained professional against a completely untrained guy is not a 100% guarantee of victory. untrained guy may try something desperate and get lucky. they may be just a bit faster than you'd expect them. professional fighter will occasionally make a mistake.
having that in a system with lots of combat increases the lethality for pcs above what most people want for their games.

And here I agree. I prefer systems where if a high-level swordsman stands against three skilled swordsmen and beats them without a scratch, players will consider the guy a legend. That is the level of lethality that I like. A fight should be a challenge, and shouldn't be a calm calculation... but it should also be a choice in that case. But that's like... my opinion. You know. Not applicable everywhere.

Also, Xervous hit the nail on its head.


i don't know much of other systems, what i know is that i read several threads in this forum about someone trying to apply penalties for getting wounded, and i never heard of it going well. i'm sure there are systems where it can be done without excessive bookkeeping, but it's not trivial.

You should branch out. Definitely - I think you would find the experience very interesting (and I mean it in the best way possible - you seem like you have an open mind and would benefit a lot from getting an outside view).

[Telwar]

A shadowrun Ares Alpha burst fire to the rogues TWF sneak attack.

...which of those is the harder one? Both are trivial if you take a smidge of time and have your calculations written down so you can refer to them, and make modifications as needed.

Last time I ran Shadowrun, I had the fight-y NPCs ready to roll with pools for all their listed weapons and common situations, because that made my life easier. And in 3e I had all my attacks written down, and would roll hit and damage all at the same time, in the appropriate hand, with color-coordinated dice.

... okay, maybe I'm a little weird. :)

[Wizard_Lizard]

it's said in fellowship that treasure is "almost gone" which means it supported Bilbo's "rural gentleman" lifestyle for the 60 years between The Hobbit and Fellowship of the Ring with a bit left over. I don't remember if Bilbo is ever stated to have an actual job or not to supplement the treasure or not.



As for the Warlocks, there's a small bit of lore in the Neverwinter MMO that I found surprisingly good.

Basically in the game, as far as quest dialog is concerned all player Warlocks have Belial as their Patron, but you're never forced to do anything evil to appease him. You find out that this is by design, that Belial rarely if ever makes his "heroic" Warlocks do anything evil, heck he might not even claim their soul after death. If he does have them do a quest for him, it'll be something like taking out a rival devil's cult or stopping a demon incursion, things that a Good aligned individual would have no problem with doing, but still helps Belial's call in the long run.

The reason for this being essentially "good press" the people of the world see these heroic warlocks doing great and noble deeds despite the source of their power and start to think "Well, maybe trafficking with the lower planes isn't such a bad thing after all, I mean, the Hero of Neverwinter is a warlock after all." meaning more and more people are willing to pull out a ouija board and make a deal, people that might not word their pact as carefully as the Warlock hero did, meaning more souls for Belial.

I actually love this. Warlocks are just for PR purposes.

[Ninjadeadbeard]

None of this is really serious, but...

Smaug wasn’t playing D&D.
That’s a big If.
When all the Gods are in the same pantheon, sharing is caring.
HP does not stand for Meat Points.
I give you the character Spawn. If the Warlock backs out of the deal, send in a team of demonic repo men.
Opinion.
Then why are you trying to create them with that HP thing?
True.
Also true.
That’s what the lifestyle expense is for.
Yes. In real life, and in gaming.
Yeah. That’s why my players get paid in copper if they work for peasants.
Frodo wasn’t playing D&D.
If we’re being that specific, then only Fighters should fight in combat, while the rogues run away and the clerics pray for deliverance.
Bilbo was also not playing D&D.

[Trafalgar]

Armor works, which is why people wore it.




Do people still wear armor today? Why / why not?


Yes they do. Current body armor used by the Army has ceramic plates to blunt/ lessen damage from small arm munitions.

The problem with D&D and armor is that Armor Class combines two very different concepts. The first is someone's ability to dodge or parry and attack. The second is the extent that armor absorbs or deflects damage from the attack. So a more realistic system would have one roll to hit the target unaffected by the armor type. The armor would the then absorb some of the damage. Kind of like the Heavy Armor Master Feat.

[Wizard_Lizard]

Yes they do. Current body armor used by the Army has ceramic plates to blunt/ lessen damage from small arm munitions.

The problem with D&D and armor is that Armor Class combines two very different concepts. The first is someone's ability to dodge or parry and attack. The second is the extent that armor absorbs or deflects damage from the attack. So a more realistic system would have one roll to hit the target unaffected by the armor type. The armor would the then absorb some of the damage. Kind of like the Heavy Armor Master Feat.

Yeah I think heavy armour giving some kind of damage reduction without the feat would be alright, although balancing it could be iffy.

[Trafalgar]

Yeah I think heavy armour giving some kind of damage reduction without the feat would be alright, although balancing it could be iffy.

Someone once suggested that crit damage not be applied to heavy armor.... But that's only going to help 1/20 of the time.

[Xervous]

...which of those is the harder one? Both are trivial if you take a smidge of time and have your calculations written down so you can refer to them, and make modifications as needed.

Last time I ran Shadowrun, I had the fight-y NPCs ready to roll with pools for all their listed weapons and common situations, because that made my life easier. And in 3e I had all my attacks written down, and would roll hit and damage all at the same time, in the appropriate hand, with color-coordinated dice.

... okay, maybe I'm a little weird. :)

This contrast was drawn to illustrate how multi attack in one system is abstracted down to the standard rolling baseline by means of a few modifiers while the other system layers on progressively more and more rolls as characters progress. The shadowrun gun adept will progress to better manage recoil and potentially sustain longer burst fire sprees. This is at no procedural alteration to their attack resolution. The rogue, even with an arranged structure for prerolling everything, must still incrementally check each attack through the “is it dead yet?” query leading to potential retargeting in the middle of resolution. A hasted tripper is probably the worst culprit for branching resolutions as most actions have the potential to generate more actions adding even more layers of query and confirmation to the turn resolution.

[kyoryu]

Yes they do. Current body armor used by the Army has ceramic plates to blunt/ lessen damage from small arm munitions.

The problem with D&D and armor is that Armor Class combines two very different concepts. The first is someone's ability to dodge or parry and attack. The second is the extent that armor absorbs or deflects damage from the attack. So a more realistic system would have one roll to hit the target unaffected by the armor type. The armor would the then absorb some of the damage. Kind of like the Heavy Armor Master Feat.

That doesn't match with a lot of current thoughts about armor, which show that even fairly "light" armor tends to have a "hit or miss" type of effect, where a hit that doesn't land exactly right or at a weak point will effectively be nullified, but hits that do find vulnerable spots will still be deadly. I mean, presuming you still are going with a "hit" meaning "I actually hit and hurt them".

Also, from a gameplay perspective, reductive armor tends to have issues in that it drastically over-values weapons that do single large hits over ones which do multiple lighter hits. So if you want someone dual-wielding short swords to do as much damage as a greatsword (for instance), it becomes difficult to get that right... you can bump the damage to make them equal against heavy armor, but then the shortsword user will do too much damage against light armor. The current AC model in D&D doesn't have that issue.

[jjordan]

That doesn't match with a lot of current thoughts about armor, which show that even fairly "light" armor tends to have a "hit or miss" type of effect, where a hit that doesn't land exactly right or at a weak point will effectively be nullified, but hits that do find vulnerable spots will still be deadly. I mean, presuming you still are going with a "hit" meaning "I actually hit and hurt them".

Also, from a gameplay perspective, reductive armor tends to have issues in that it drastically over-values weapons that do single large hits over ones which do multiple lighter hits. So if you want someone dual-wielding short swords to do as much damage as a greatsword (for instance), it becomes difficult to get that right... you can bump the damage to make them equal against heavy armor, but then the shortsword user will do too much damage against light armor. The current AC model in D&D doesn't have that issue.Modern (North Hollywood Shootout) and medieval evidence (fechtbucher and modern recreations and experimentation) demonstrate that armor works quite well. Defeating the armor requires the same solutions now as it did then, find the open spot and inflict the damage there or inflict more concentrated force to defeat the armor.

D&D abstracts combat nicely but it makes some 'mistakes'. Damage is averaged out over the course of a single round, for instance, rather than over a longer period of time. But over a longer period of time that short sword is going to be more useful in a wide variety of terrain whereas the greatsword is going to be next to useless as anything other than a short spear in a lot of adventuring terrain. It's not really a mistake, though, it's a design choice to optimize short-term fun for most players.

For my part I prefer a system where the armor reduces the amount of damage you take rather than making you harder to hit. I also prefer that armor require maintenance. The better the armor, the more it costs to maintain it. Armor that isn't maintained doesn't absorb damage as well. And the next time someone tells me they're going to swim in armor...

[KineticDiplomat]

Once you acknowledge that D&D does not try to be in any way realistic/accurate/etc. about melee, the happier everyone will be in a reality based conversation. Real weapons did not exist for balance. They do not steadily chip away at someone's health until that person magically collapses. No one said "ah, right then, lets make sure that those knights over there are roughly even with a man stabbing someone with two daggers in a super cool kung fu knife fight."

Armor, particularly armor that exceeds the average human ability to generate sufficient force to penetrate (aka, most metal armors), works exceedingly well. The guy with two daggers doesn't slash through chain mail, the end. It does not matter if he is "coolio mc cool dude of knife fighting skool." The guy with a sword might potentially thrust through mail, but he'd need a really solid connection. More likely he flips his blade over for a murder stroke and bashes the guy with the pommel.

And once you get into plate armor, honestly there's a good chance it's going to become a wrestling match because all but the heaviest blunt weapons making good connections are going to be mostly irrelevant. And then the transferred force is going to shatter a bone and end the fight with no further consideration of "HP".

[NigelWalmsley]

It's also worth noting that D&D frequently postulates that one or both combatants are superhumans, monsters, magically enhanced, or wielding weapons that are magical or made of fictional materials. There's no "realistic" answer for what happens when an elf blade dancer wielding a magical sword stabs a fire giant in adamantine full plate, because none of those things are real.

[jjordan]

Once you acknowledge that D&D does not try to be in any way realistic/accurate/etc. about melee, the happier everyone will be in a reality based conversation. Bringing us back to: I should be playing a different game. :)

[Sebastian]

To be fair to Smaug, the Black Arrow was forged personally by dwarven royalty, designed specifically to slay dragons, may have been magical, and seemed to never break or get lost no matter how many times it was shot.

Bard inherited it from his forefathers, potentially also making the Black Arrow a Legacy Weapon.

Bard also had semi-mystical guidance from the Thrush to direct his shot, rolled a nat 20, and then likely rolled max damage on the crit with his composite longbow.

Edit: If you go by movie rather than book, then it was a bolt fired from a ballista.

Wait, "designed specifically to slay dragons"? Everything else sound right but where that come from?

[KineticDiplomat]

Oh yes, playing something that is not D&D is one of the best answers you’ll come across for most problems. It’s a pretty mediocre system with a large market presence, and it’s better than the more atrocious systems you might find, but it’s still not very good. Honestly, it does far better as a CRPG than a TTRPG.

Anyhow - if giants and blade dancers. None of these things are “real”, but we can make some extrapolation grounded in our reality. A fire giant is supposedly a little over twice as large as an average human. They mass in at 9,000 lbs, blowing the square cube law out of the water with power to spare. If our giant friend decides to wear four square meters of plate armor 50mm thick, it’ll be proportionate to a human in a full harness, but penetration will require force and specific impulse in a small area roughly the equivalent of a mid WWII anti-tank gun.

And since he’s wearing let’s call it “+1” against a “+1” sword we can reasonably guess the material science cancels out.

In contrast, even if we assume that the giant can only generate force at a reduced output per lb (square cube again) the effect of a club is going to be like getting hit with a car.

[The Random NPC]

Wait, "designed specifically to slay dragons"? Everything else sound right but where that come from?

Looks like they're pulling that from the movie, where the arrows (there are multiple in the movie) are ballista bolts designed for dragon killing.

[Xervous]

Looks like they're pulling that from the movie, where the arrows (there are multiple in the movie) are ballista bolts designed for dragon killing.

If we’re pulling from the movies those are designed for killing wyverns clearly

[InvisibleBison]

If we’re pulling from the movies those are designed for killing wyverns clearly

Why would you say that? As far as I know, there are no wyverns in Middle-Earth.

[Mastikator]

Why would you say that? As far as I know, there are no wyverns in Middle-Earth.

What about Smaug?

[ImNotTrevor]

Why would you say that? As far as I know, there are no wyverns in Middle-Earth.

There is a meme that tries to dictate to the world what is and is not a Dragon, by defining various body layouts as different dragonoids.

It's 100% arbitrary and only loosely based on anything historical.

I ignore it since it has no authority to dictate what is and isn't a dragon, nor do its supporters.

[InvisibleBison]

What about Smaug?

Smaug is a dragon.

[Lord Torath]

The first drawings I saw of Smaug had two wings, two arms, and two legs. Other drawings lack the arms. Some people consider dragons to have six limbs including wings, and winged reptiles with only four limbs are not true dragons. Others consider any winged reptile that breathes fire (or has a breath weapon of any kind) dragons.

I personally like my dragons to have six limbs, but I also don't think it's worth getting upset over. My son likes to joke about there not being any dragons in Skyrim, as they all have only 4 limbs. :smallamused:

[Mastikator]

Smaug is a dragon.

A wyvern dragon. No front legs/arms (like a bird or bat) = wyvern

[Khedrac]

A wyvern dragon. No front legs/arms (like a bird or bat) = wyvern

Wrong. Check out Tolkein's illustrations of Smaug: the front legs are a bit hidden by the wings, but they are most definitely there.

I have not seen the 2nd and 3rd Hobbit films - the first was bad enough. Peter Jackson is very good at coming up with lovely cinematic shots that get the terrain completely wrong, so I see no reason to treat his film's depictions of Smaug as canon for anything.


1. Edoras - described as "indefensible" in both book and film (in the book it sits in the centre of a shallow depression). In the film it is perched on one of the best natural strongholds I have ever seen. I agree that it could not be held against the army coming, but it was anything but indefensible.
2. Thorin & Co's journey to Rivendel - there's a lovely aerial shot of the party moving across the trackless lands, which is weird as they are on the main road (or trail - it wouldn't have been paved).

[Darth Credence]

A wyvern dragon. No front legs/arms (like a bird or bat) = wyvern

According to whom? The image considered to be the oldest one of a modern western dragon (link here) (http://bestiary.ca/manuscripts/manu1020.htm) has four legs and four wings - does that mean that's the only correct dragon? 10 years later, you get this image (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon#/media/File:St_George_and_the_Dragon_Verona_ms_1853_26r.j pg) of St George slaying a dragon - two legs, two wings.
That doesn't even begin to get in to all of the other dragons from around the world. There is no such thing as a specific body form of what makes something a dragon, because there is no such thing as a dragon. It's all artistic interpretation.

[LibraryOgre]

There is a meme that tries to dictate to the world what is and is not a Dragon, by defining various body layouts as different dragonoids.

It's 100% arbitrary and only loosely based on anything historical.

I ignore it since it has no authority to dictate what is and isn't a dragon, nor do its supporters.

Yeah... that's a taxonomy for one person's fictional world, it doesn't have anything to do with anything other than their world.

[Hytheter]

Wrong. Check out Tolkein's illustrations of Smaug: the front legs are a bit hidden by the wings, but they are most definitely there.

The discussion stemmed from a statement about the movies, which (I assume, having not seen them) depicts Smaug without forelegs.

[Vinyadan]

According to whom? The image considered to be the oldest one of a modern western dragon (link here) (http://bestiary.ca/manuscripts/manu1020.htm) has four legs and four wings - does that mean that's the only correct dragon? 10 years later, you get this image (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon#/media/File:St_George_and_the_Dragon_Verona_ms_1853_26r.j pg) of St George slaying a dragon - two legs, two wings.
That doesn't even begin to get in to all of the other dragons from around the world. There is no such thing as a specific body form of what makes something a dragon, because there is no such thing as a dragon. It's all artistic interpretation.
I think you raised an interesting point when you said "western". St. George actually follows an older iconography that comes from the East (a Georgian example (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7d/Kondakov_1890._St_George_icon_from_Likhauri.jpg) from the XII century), with two legs and wings. I have a theory about how the dragon got four legs and four wings: monsters were sometimes shown on squared stones atop columns. It's easier to understand by looking at an image: https://i.postimg.cc/9M1FXXG1/Mostro-che-divora-un-bambino-Chiesa-di-Saint-Pierre-XII-secolo-Chauvigny-e1454868907591.jpg The monster was meant to be seen either from one of the sides, or from the corner where the two sides would join, where the face was located, so that you could see the monster either as having two legs and two wings (from the side) or four legs and four wings (if the observer was facing the corner and considering the two figures as one).

[Xervous]

The discussion stemmed from a statement about the movies, which (I assume, having not seen them) depicts Smaug without forelegs.

The latter two movies do. The first one has forelegs when Smaug is seen in a flashback, but it’s only in the third movie he dies, having survived a shot in the time period of the flashback. hence it only kills wyverns. I try not to think too much about the movies with all the terrible choices they made, like putting in Legolas of all things.

[InvisibleBison]

A wyvern dragon. No front legs/arms (like a bird or bat) = wyvern

No. In both the book and the movies, Smaug is called a dragon. Thus, Smaug is a dragon. In neither the book nor the movies is Smaug called a wyvern. Thus, Smaug is not a wyvern. Your insistence otherwise is pure linguistic prescriptivism, and is of no merit whatsoever.

[Lord Torath]

You know, going by the thread title, I guess this is the correct thread for this Wyvren/Dragon discussion. Should I go get some popcorn?

[Mastikator]

No. In both the book and the movies, Smaug is called a dragon. Thus, Smaug is a dragon. In neither the book nor the movies is Smaug called a wyvern. Thus, Smaug is not a wyvern. Your insistence otherwise is pure linguistic prescriptivism, and is of no merit whatsoever.

Wyverns are a kind of dragon, Smaug is a dragon, a wyvern dragon. To say he's not a wyvern because he's a dragon is nonsensical. To say he's not a wyvern because he doesn't fit the description would make sense but he does match the description of a wyvern. The fact that he's called a dragon doesn't mean he's not a wyvern because wyverns are dragons.

----


According to whom? The image considered to be the oldest one of a modern western dragon (link here) (http://bestiary.ca/manuscripts/manu1020.htm) has four legs and four wings - does that mean that's the only correct dragon? 10 years later, you get this image (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon#/media/File:St_George_and_the_Dragon_Verona_ms_1853_26r.j pg) of St George slaying a dragon - two legs, two wings.
That doesn't even begin to get in to all of the other dragons from around the world. There is no such thing as a specific body form of what makes something a dragon, because there is no such thing as a dragon. It's all artistic interpretation.

Those pictures do indeed depict dragons with 4 legs and 2 wings, this picture of smaug from the movie (https://i.imgur.com/WDMwH2u.jpg) depicts him with 2 legs and 2 wings. If you type "wyvern" into google images you'll find mostly pictures of dragons with 2 legs. All those wyverns are dragons for sure. If however you type "dragon" into google images you'll find mostly pictures of dragons with 4 legs and 2 wings, and some few with 2 legs and 2 wings. Both configurations are dragons, but only the ones with 2 legs are wyvern dragons.

---

Edit-
@Lord Torath get popcorn :smalltongue:. This argument will probably continue and get nowhere. I believe I've contributed everything there is to contribute but there's always some irrelevant minutia to get angry about.:smallsigh:

---

2nd edit-
@Khedrac I was talking about the movie. The art for the book (which I haven't read) depicts Smaug as a 4 legged dragon like you said, the movie does not. I did not know at the time of my first posting that they differed so much, or that the statement would stir up such controversy or emotions.

[InvisibleBison]

Wyverns are a kind of dragon, Smaug is a dragon, a wyvern dragon. To say he's not a wyvern because he's a dragon is nonsensical. To say he's not a wyvern because he doesn't fit the description would make sense but he does match the description of a wyvern. The fact that he's called a dragon doesn't mean he's not a wyvern because wyverns are dragons.

Except that there are no wyverns in Middle-Earth. Tolkien never used the term. Calling Smaug a wyvern is just wrong. you don't have the authority to override Tolkien's worldbuilding. The fact that you like to call four-limbed dragons wyverns is irrelevant.

[LibraryOgre]

Besides, everyone knows Smaug has two wings and four legs. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2ipiVZ2WjA)

[Wizard_Lizard]

I vaguely remember smaug being referred to as a wyrm although I could very well be mistaken.

[Quertus]

Except that there are no wyverns in Middle-Earth. Tolkien never used the term. Calling Smaug a wyvern is just wrong. you don't have the authority to override Tolkien's worldbuilding. The fact that you like to call four-limbed dragons wyverns is irrelevant.

Small quibble: even if Tolkien never described Smaug as mauve, Smaug could still be accurately described as mauve, if depicted so.

Like most words, I find "wyvern" to have at least 2 meanings. One is a shape; the other, a race. Racially, Smaug is a Dragon, and not a wyvern. Smaug *may* be wyvern-shaped.

Personally, I still wouldn't call Smaug a "wyvern", regardless of whether or not it might be technically correct to describe a particular rendition of him thusly. It feels… not anachronistic, but… is there a word for how out of place the term feels?

[Eldan]

I'll never get why English-speaking people are so hung up over this Wyvern/Dragon distinction. They are the same thing. Mythological and medieval dragons both have anywhere from 0 to 12 legs depending on the illustration and no one ever doubts they are dragons. Wings are optional too. Just because you have a favourite shape doesn't mean dragons of other shapes aren't dragons.

A dragon:
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn%3AANd9GcQDHWyCwUGv-hQ4EJawd3KbSqtMGpb_Yy7sjg&usqp=CAU

Also a dragon:
https://blogs.bl.uk/.a/6a00d8341c464853ef01a511a51380970c-500wi

Also dragons:
http://www.thehistoryblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Alexander-fights-dragons-with-emeralds-in-their-heads.jpg

Obviously dragons:
http://www.thehistoryblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Alexander-slays-more-dragons.jpg

[LibraryOgre]

I vaguely remember smaug being referred to as a wyrm although I could very well be mistaken.

That's because wyrm means dragon, and just because some people have a morphic taxonmy in their head of "dragon" v. "wyrm" v. "wyvern" doesn't mean that someone writing 70-80 years ago went along with their relatively recent taxonomy.

[NigelWalmsley]

I'll never get why English-speaking people are so hung up over this Wyvern/Dragon distinction.

Most mythological distinctions are like that. Much of the stuff that gets classified as "Vampire myths" today weren't thought of as particularly distinct from the "Demon myths" in the same culture. These words are to a very large degree interchangeable, and even to the degree that they are not, there is no agreed-upon definition of what any particular one means. What one author, game, or other source calls a "Wyvern", others would be perfectly happy to refer to as a "Dragon".

[PhoenixPhyre]

Most mythological distinctions are like that. Much of the stuff that gets classified as "Vampire myths" today weren't thought of as particularly distinct from the "Demon myths" in the same culture. These words are to a very large degree interchangeable, and even to the degree that they are not, there is no agreed-upon definition of what any particular one means. What one author, game, or other source calls a "Wyvern", others would be perfectly happy to refer to as a "Dragon".

Yeah. Plus a lot of weapon and armor classification schemes. The names varied tremendously over history and were often all lumped together or split in ways that seem weird to us today. I think we often care way more about our nice little terminological pigeon-holes than the people living with them ever did. And then we project this anachronistic terminology back onto those worlds and blame them for not getting it "right".

[Democratus]

It's all fiction. So if the words you use work in your fictional dictionary - then that's how they work.

There's no "one true way" with make-believe.

[Wizard_Lizard]

Seem to recall that the original dragons from Greek mythology had no wings at all. Just were big lizards so...

[NigelWalmsley]

"Original dragons" is a bit of a strange notion, as it's not like there's a single unified mythological origin of "dragons". Take a look at Wikipedia's list of dragon mythology (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dragons_in_mythology_and_folklore). As with most stuff, there's room to declare whatever answer you're personally invested in as "correct".

[ImNotTrevor]

"Original dragons" is a bit of a strange notion, as it's not like there's a single unified mythological origin of "dragons". Take a look at Wikipedia's list of dragon mythology (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dragons_in_mythology_and_folklore). As with most stuff, there's room to declare whatever answer you're personally invested in as "correct".

If you wanna argue from Primacy, the oldest known Dragon myth is *technically* Tiamat, of ancient Babylonian fame (not the D&D one).

She's not ALWAYS a dragon, and when she is a dragon, she's an unusual one. Sometimes basically being a snake with udders.

And in a discussion with a particularly stubborn person on this topic a few years back, rather than step away from a Primacy argument, doubled down and decided that if the oldest identified dragon was a snake with udders, then anything we called a dragon that wasn't a snake with udders was therefore not a dragon.

It was a very strange conversation. I was baffled by the end.

[Luccan]

If you wanna argue from Primacy, the oldest known Dragon myth is *technically* Tiamat, of ancient Babylonian fame (not the D&D one).

She's not ALWAYS a dragon, and when she is a dragon, she's an unusual one. Sometimes basically being a snake with udders.

And in a discussion with a particularly stubborn person on this topic a few years back, rather than step away from a Primacy argument, doubled down and decided that if the oldest identified dragon was a snake with udders, then anything we called a dragon that wasn't a snake with udders was therefore not a dragon.

It was a very strange conversation. I was baffled by the end.

What I'm getting from this discussion (and some reflection on things I've seen called dragons) is that "dragon" is basically just another word for "monster". Not even "big monster", since a lot of medieval depictions show them as usually no larger than a horse. Maybe "non-humanoid monster" more specifically.

[Vinyadan]

"Original dragons" is a bit of a strange notion, as it's not like there's a single unified mythological origin of "dragons". Take a look at Wikipedia's list of dragon mythology (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dragons_in_mythology_and_folklore). As with most stuff, there's room to declare whatever answer you're personally invested in as "correct".
If by original dragons you mean the first thing called a dragon, and you pursue this outside of English, then it's clearly snakes -- drakon means snake in ancient Greek, and there's a good number of mythical ones, from Python who lived in Delphi before Apollo slew him, to the ones from Thebes. Dragons in Western tradition follow a clear line from these figures, gradually adding bells and whistles.

Wyvern isn't too different from this point of view, given that it ultimately comes from Latin vipera, a viper.

[NigelWalmsley]

If you wanna argue from Primacy, the oldest known Dragon myth is *technically* Tiamat, of ancient Babylonian fame (not the D&D one).

Even then, there are plenty of dragon myths that evolved separately from Tiamat. Quetzalcoatl's a dragon by modern reckoning, and while the myths about him are younger than the ones about Tiamat, it's not likely they're descended from or influenced by them.


What I'm getting from this discussion (and some reflection on things I've seen called dragons) is that "dragon" is basically just another word for "monster". Not even "big monster", since a lot of medieval depictions show them as usually no larger than a horse. Maybe "non-humanoid monster" more specifically.

It's all words for "monster". Prior to the (relatively) modern day, there's no notion that these things are "dragons" and those things are "spirits" and those things are "giants". It's basically all just "monsters", and any cross-cultural groups are very much after the fact.

[ImNotTrevor]

Even then, there are plenty of dragon myths that evolved separately from Tiamat. Quetzalcoatl's a dragon by modern reckoning, and while the myths about him are younger than the ones about Tiamat, it's not likely they're descended from or influenced by them.

Yes, hence why arguing by Primacy is really, really dumb and I was so dumbfounded that the guy doubled down and decided that snakes with udders are the only true dragons.



It's all words for "monster". Prior to the (relatively) modern day, there's no notion that these things are "dragons" and those things are "spirits" and those things are "giants". It's basically all just "monsters", and any cross-cultural groups are very much after the fact.

I understand the desire to lump things together, if not just because there are some recurring themes in what humans find scary.

Large predators, emaciated humanoid figures, things that have to do with blood, death, and decay, snakes, flying things, dark and unknown things, giant things that could eat you, things that mimic human life but aren't... there's some common touchpoints.

With the introduction of things like biological classification of life and the increasing social pressure towards having things in neat and understandable categories, it's not *surprising* that people want to impose order upon the seemingly chaotic mess that is dragonkind.

They're not right, and they're quite silly, but I can understand the urge.

[NigelWalmsley]

I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with grouping stuff. The categories won't exactly match the way people thought about things, but that's the nature of categories. People get a general idea of "scaled flying monster that breaths something nasty" from "dragon", even if there are particular dragons that don't exactly match some or all of those.

[Luccan]

It's all words for "monster". Prior to the (relatively) modern day, there's no notion that these things are "dragons" and those things are "spirits" and those things are "giants". It's basically all just "monsters", and any cross-cultural groups are very much after the fact.

While the cross-cultural groupings didn't necessarily exist (although with the massive multi-cultural empires I wouldn't be surprised if there was some attempt at reclassification of similar creatures), there are definitely distinct classifications of monsters within a culture as far back as Mesopotamia.

[Xervous]

If only we had a stand-alone word for proper differentiation in discussions.

Wyvern
Ampithere
Lindwyrm
Lung

All of these have been called dragons, giving us the broader category but for lack of a term we can only reuse dragon rather than dropping draconus occidentis or some other more specific term.

[LibraryOgre]

If only we had a stand-alone word for proper differentiation in discussions.

Wyvern
Ampithere
Lindwyrm
Lung

All of these have been called dragons, giving us the broader category but for lack of a term we can only reuse dragon rather than dropping draconus occidentis or some other more specific term.

Draco causticus sputem

[Xervous]

Draco causticus sputem

How oddly specific. It feels somewhat rare to pull up dragons that wield highly reactive substances that aren’t bursting into flame. Did you have a myth in mind, or a skull dragon’s guise drifting among those thoughts?

I still recall the peculiar four? headed dragon whose mention surfaced in Beowulf breathing water and earth among other things. But face melting goodness? Have yet to chance on that.

[LibraryOgre]

Draco causticus sputem


How oddly specific. It feels somewhat rare to pull up dragons that wield highly reactive substances that aren’t bursting into flame. Did you have a myth in mind, or a skull dragon’s guise drifting among those thoughts?


1e AD&D gave every dragon "scientific" names. Draco causticus sputem was black dragons. White were Draco rigidus frigidus.

Black (Draco Causticus Sputem)
Blue (Draco Electricus)
Brass (Draco lrnpudentus Gallus)
Bronze (Draco Gerus Bronzo)
Copper (Draco Comes Stabuli)
Gold (Draco Orientalus Sino Dux)
Green (Draco Chlorinous Nauseous Respiratorus)
Red (Draco Conflagratio Horriblis)
Silver (Draco Nobilis Argentum)
White (Draco Rigidus Frigidus)

It is a deeply silly, but highly specific, taxonomy of dragons.

The problem is not the taxonomy of dragons that goes around (wyvern/dragon/lindwurm/whatever), the problem is folks pretending that absolutely everyone is going to use that taxonomy in creating their dracoforms. I mean, by that taxonomy, a 1e gold dragon is not a dragon, but a dragonne is.