Quote Originally Posted by jjordan View Post
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).