D&D thread
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@Gurth said in D&D thread:
@PleegWat said in D&D thread:
@Gurth Armor works on to-hit instead of damage? I didn't recall that.
It does in all editions of D&D I’ve played (which is to say AD&D2, D&D3 and D&D3.5). It never reduces damage you take, it always makes you harder to hit.
Yup. And reworking that would require redoing the entire combat system. It's a core assumption.
I do now recall what made me finally quit that game: at some point I encountered monsters which inflicted negative levels
Oh, those suck, badly.
Thankfully, 5e did away with negative levels. Because it sucks for everyone.
And of course, a PC game doesn't have a human GM who can be lenient when something like that happened to the party.
That’s why I doubt we’ll ever have true computerised RPGs rather than MMORPGs.
Right. TTRPGs are a different breed of thing than CRPGs. Fundamental differences at the core level. And trying to use tropes from one on the other generally fails without significant manipulation.
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@PleegWat said in D&D thread:
@Gurth Armor works on to-hit instead of damage? I didn't recall that.
Yeah, that's the other major flaw of D&D: there's only one "defense stat." Armor makes you harder to hit. If the hit overcomes your "armor class" and lands successfully, you take full damage, otherwise it misses entirely. Which, of course, is completely absurd from a reality-simulation perspective.
One of the better implementations of armor I've seen comes from the classic roguelike ADOM. It has two defense stats: Defense Value and Protection Value. DV is your chance to evade an attack entirely; shields and your DEX stat increase it, but body armor actually decreases it by impeding your mobility. PV is the amount that damage is reduced by if it manages to get through your DV and land a successful hit. (So it's quite possible for a monster to successfully hit you for 0 damage, if their damage roll is lower than your PV.)
If D&D would adopt a similar system, it would be a better game.
And of course, a PC game doesn't have a human GM who can be lenient when something like that happened to the party. Instead you can savescum, but games which 'require' savescumming are generally not fun to me.
Yeah, this was what ruined Pathfinder: Kingmaker for me. It was just too rigid and mechanistic in its application of game mechanics, creating absurd difficulty even on "low difficulty levels" in some specific cases.
How is it that Neverwinter Nights was such a perfect D&D videogame but nothing else has been able to get it right?
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@Mason_Wheeler said in D&D thread:
@PleegWat said in D&D thread:
@Gurth Armor works on to-hit instead of damage? I didn't recall that.
Yeah, that's the other major flaw of D&D: there's only one "defense stat." Armor makes you harder to hit. If the hit overcomes your "armor class" and lands successfully, you take full damage, otherwise it misses entirely. Which, of course, is completely absurd from a reality-simulation perspective.
One of the better implementations of armor I've seen comes from the classic roguelike ADOM. It has two defense stats: Defense Value and Protection Value. DV is your chance to evade an attack entirely; shields and your DEX stat increase it, but body armor actually decreases it by impeding your mobility. PV is the amount that damage is reduced by if it manages to get through your DV and land a successful hit. (So it's quite possible for a monster to successfully hit you for 0 damage, if their damage roll is lower than your PV.)
If D&D would adopt a similar system, it would be a better game.
I disagree. If you try to make the game too realistic, then it becomes too complicated and overbearing. As it is, a single character turn can easily take 30 seconds or more just to handle what amounts to 6 seconds in game. I've seen sessions where the it took three hours to resolve an encounter that lasted under a minute in game. Adding complexity would only increase that time. That doesn't even consider that it would increase how hard it is for new players to unerstand the game mechanics.
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@abarker Sure, overabundance of complexity can make the game unworkable. But do you really think that adding a second defensive stat would do that?
DV would function exactly as AC does now: the target to determine whether or not an attack "hits". If it hits, then you roll damage, exactly as happens now. The only difference is that you then subtract the target's PV before applying damage. It would quickly become automatic and would not make battles appreciably longer; the biggest effect would be a strategic one, making more thought go into the out-of-combat choices that go into equipment (or spell) selection.
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@abarker said in D&D thread:
@Mason_Wheeler said in D&D thread:
@PleegWat said in D&D thread:
@Gurth Armor works on to-hit instead of damage? I didn't recall that.
Yeah, that's the other major flaw of D&D: there's only one "defense stat." Armor makes you harder to hit. If the hit overcomes your "armor class" and lands successfully, you take full damage, otherwise it misses entirely. Which, of course, is completely absurd from a reality-simulation perspective.
One of the better implementations of armor I've seen comes from the classic roguelike ADOM. It has two defense stats: Defense Value and Protection Value. DV is your chance to evade an attack entirely; shields and your DEX stat increase it, but body armor actually decreases it by impeding your mobility. PV is the amount that damage is reduced by if it manages to get through your DV and land a successful hit. (So it's quite possible for a monster to successfully hit you for 0 damage, if their damage roll is lower than your PV.)
If D&D would adopt a similar system, it would be a better game.
I disagree. If you try to make the game too realistic, then it becomes too complicated and overbearing. As it is, a single character turn can easily take 30 seconds or more just to handle what amounts to 6 seconds in game. I've seen sessions where the it took three hours to resolve an encounter that lasted under a minute in game. Adding complexity would only increase that time. That doesn't even consider that it would increase how hard it is for new players to unerstand the game mechanics.
And even in video games, too much complexity in the damage model just makes it hard to evaluate how effective gear is. Which is probably also realistic but doesn't make good gameplay.
As far as I've seen it's pretty common in video games to have both an evasion mechanic which prevents taking damage entirely, one which reduces how much damage you take if you do get hit, and a third one which increases your health pool. And then additional mechanics (block, parry) on top of that. You flat-out cannot do that in pen and paper because it gets too unwieldy, both in number of rolls and in practical limitation on hitpoint management.
I do imagine you could have a hybrid approach where you have something like a smartphone app purely to handle character status tracking and combat rolls, but that would probably detract from the atmosphere of a pen&paper game.
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@PleegWat said in D&D thread:
and a third one which increases your health pool.
That's a mechanic that always bugs me when games do it. Wearing armor does not make you healthier. (The exercise value may improve your health over the long term, but the act of putting the armor on doesn't make your body itself tougher, nor does the act of removing the armor reduce your health.)
I could kind of see where they're going with it -- you can take more hits with the armor on, and being attacked will damage your armor -- except that all those HP are invariably lumped together into the same pool, such that healing magic repairs your damaged armor.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in D&D thread:
@PleegWat said in D&D thread:
and a third one which increases your health pool.
That's a mechanic that always bugs me when games do it. Wearing armor does not make you healthier. (The exercise value may improve your health over the long term, but the act of putting the armor on doesn't make your body itself tougher, nor does the act of removing the armor reduce your health.)
I could kind of see where they're going with it -- you can take more hits with the armor on, and being attacked will damage your armor -- except that all those HP are invariably lumped together into the same pool, such that healing magic repairs your damaged armor.
That also goes on any game where armour can improve your strength/dexterity/etc. Can generally only be explained through magic.
If extra health points are only earned through level-up mechanics, that's still a defence stat.
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@abarker said in D&D thread:
@Mason_Wheeler said in D&D thread:
@PleegWat said in D&D thread:
@Gurth Armor works on to-hit instead of damage? I didn't recall that.
Yeah, that's the other major flaw of D&D: there's only one "defense stat." Armor makes you harder to hit. If the hit overcomes your "armor class" and lands successfully, you take full damage, otherwise it misses entirely. Which, of course, is completely absurd from a reality-simulation perspective.
One of the better implementations of armor I've seen comes from the classic roguelike ADOM. It has two defense stats: Defense Value and Protection Value. DV is your chance to evade an attack entirely; shields and your DEX stat increase it, but body armor actually decreases it by impeding your mobility. PV is the amount that damage is reduced by if it manages to get through your DV and land a successful hit. (So it's quite possible for a monster to successfully hit you for 0 damage, if their damage roll is lower than your PV.)
If D&D would adopt a similar system, it would be a better game.
I disagree. If you try to make the game too realistic, then it becomes too complicated and overbearing. As it is, a single character turn can easily take 30 seconds or more just to handle what amounts to 6 seconds in game. I've seen sessions where the it took three hours to resolve an encounter that lasted under a minute in game. Adding complexity would only increase that time. That doesn't even consider that it would increase how hard it is for new players to understand the game mechanics.
I'm with @abarker on this one: complicating the combat mechanics makes for a slower, less fun game. And on a side note, in D&D, hit points are explicitly not meat: they represent luck, fatigue, near-misses, superficial wounds, and/or it not being quite your time to die yet. Being "hit" does not necessarily mean that you've taken Real Damage. (Mind you, it's a really-leaky abstraction: you get poisoned on hit. 2E had potential Death By Massive Damage if you took 50hp in one blow, which is ridiculous, because doing 90% of a town guard's HP in a single blow didn't trigger that, but doing 50% of a high-level fighter's HP did. I can only assume that some DMs just saw big numbers and decided that they needed another way to kill the players.)
I've played GURPS, and having multiple rolls for each attack gets tedious after a while. (Attack roll against defense roll.) You need two separate people paying attention at the same time, and that always takes extra time to get done at the table. (Board game tangent: when playing Outpost, or Scepter of Zavandor, it's pretty tedious when someone insists that Production Cards Must Be Taken In Turn Order – with five people taking up to five different currencies, in turn order, there's a lot of time wasted to people not paying sufficient attention to either take their cards or tell you how many cards they need.)
And I'm not alone in liking simpler systems: the System Mastery podcast, which reviews (mostly old and bad) RPGs, regularly pans games that have overly-complicated combat resolution mechanisms.
D&D does fine: if you want to survive longer, get a higher AC, more HP, or dish out damage/lockdowns faster so there are fewer incoming attacks. The most-complicated attacks are spells and poisons, which have the spellcaster rolling damage and the recipients rolling a saving throw. The rest of the attacks only have a single person rolling, for both attack and damage.
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@PotatoEngineer And the "higher resolution" it provides is mostly imaginary. None of it is a good simulation, and adding "depth" doesn't actually increase the player's ability to engage with the system. It's just turning one roll (that can be done in parallel for large groups) into a series of rolls that have to be done in series for groups. Works great for computers, sucks for people.
If you can't tell, I'm not a big simulationist player.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in D&D thread:
@PotatoEngineer And the "higher resolution" it provides is mostly imaginary. None of it is a good simulation, and adding "depth" doesn't actually increase the player's ability to engage with the system. It's just turning one roll (that can be done in parallel for large groups) into a series of rolls that have to be done in series for groups. Works great for computers, sucks for people.
If you can't tell, I'm not a big simulationist player.
Yeah, I've spent some time playing Rifts with some "gosh, this is all so imprecise!" house-rules bolted on. This was while I going to school for engineering, so I had fresh knowledge of how the physics worked. Only the GM and I were interested in these house-rules, and after playing with them for a while, I'm now firmly in favor of "are the rules not-too-bad? Then let's play!"
(For 5E, the one house rule I make is for attacking an opponent that can't see you. By RAW, two archers firing at each other in pitch blackness have just as much of a chance of hitting each other as if they're perfectly lit – you get disadvantage because you can't see your target, but advantage because your target can't see you - and those cancel out. So I add a small tweak: "you get advantage if your target can't see you, and you can see the target.")
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@PotatoEngineer said in D&D thread:
@Benjamin-Hall said in D&D thread:
@PotatoEngineer And the "higher resolution" it provides is mostly imaginary. None of it is a good simulation, and adding "depth" doesn't actually increase the player's ability to engage with the system. It's just turning one roll (that can be done in parallel for large groups) into a series of rolls that have to be done in series for groups. Works great for computers, sucks for people.
If you can't tell, I'm not a big simulationist player.
Yeah, I've spent some time playing Rifts with some "gosh, this is all so imprecise!" house-rules bolted on. This was while I going to school for engineering, so I had fresh knowledge of how the physics worked. Only the GM and I were interested in these house-rules, and after playing with them for a while, I'm now firmly in favor of "are the rules not-too-bad? Then let's play!"
(For 5E, the one house rule I make is for attacking an opponent that can't see you. By RAW, two archers firing at each other in pitch blackness have just as much of a chance of hitting each other as if they're perfectly lit – you get disadvantage because you can't see your target, but advantage because your target can't see you - and those cancel out. So I add a small tweak: "you get advantage if your target can't see you, and you can see the target.")
I'm mostly with you on both points. As a former physicist, I cringe whenever anyone makes appeals to simulation or appeals to realism. Because no. Just no. Stop. You're hurting poor physics so bad when you torture it that way. And no, you're not really any more realistic. Just more obnoxious to use. It's the physics version of the uncanny valley. A little realism is ok, but once you start very far down that road the only place you can end is at real reality. Which isn't very fun to play. Or easy (cleaning up the bodies for one thing).
I generally let the group decide whether they want to play blind vs blind by the book or do it your way.
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As for heavier armor meaning more likely to evade attacks, but not lower incoming damage... TDEMSYR Ya know, you can get too unrealistic too.
DoD uses more straightforward mechanics. 1d20 (+/- modifiers) vs your skill in the weapon to see if a hit. The only way of defending against a hit is to parry, which is automatic if wiedling a shield or must be announced in advance for each round, as parrying with a weapon means losing the ability to attack that round.
Then it's damage inflicted - opponent's armor = damage done. Optionally a hit area die is rolled to see where the attack landed, good if fighting someone without a helmet for example. Or for fun, like if you get a killing blow to see how the enemy died. 2H axe to the belly. Well, that enemy's intestines are now all over the floor.
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@PotatoEngineer said in D&D thread:
2E had potential Death By Massive Damage if you took 50hp in one blow, which is ridiculous, because doing 90% of a town guard's HP in a single blow didn't trigger that, but doing 50% of a high-level fighter's HP did. I can only assume that some DMs just saw big numbers and decided that they needed another way to kill the players.
All of D&D before third edition was basically one big case of, “We have identified an area the rules don’t cover, let us write some up without taking the bigger picture into account.” This particular case is obviously the result of what I talked about earlier: even a level 20 fighter with 100 hp only takes 1–8 damage from a long sword, and probably doesn’t die if breathed on for 10d12 damage by a great big dragon. Couple that with the 1970s/early ’80s attitude of, “The DM’s job is to try and kill the players while staying within the rules,” and you get this kind of massive damage rules.
And I'm not alone in liking simpler systems: the System Mastery podcast, which reviews (mostly old and bad) RPGs, regularly pans games that have overly-complicated combat resolution mechanisms.
I don’t know it, but I’m willing to bet that some or even many of these systems, when they were new, were hailed as great. IOW: expectations and tastes change. I’ve said it before, but I don’t really get along with the modern rules-light RPGs I’ve tried. They never cover the things I think a game needs to cover, favouring the GM to make everything up on the spot instead. Undoubtedly this is great for the storytelling and roleplaying crowds who play RPGs to create fiction or get into character, but not for people like me who aren’t big on those aspects. I want the predictability that comes from a consistent and comprehensive set of game rules, so that it’s not up to the whim of a GM that what I’m doing now is suddenly far more difficult (or easier) than almost the same thing I attempted last month.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in D&D thread:
I cringe whenever anyone makes appeals to simulation or appeals to realism. Because no. Just no. Stop. You're hurting poor physics so bad when you torture it that way.
The way to do it, IMHO, is to have rules that don’t work in an unrealistic manner, and then to make the roll first and explain the outcome in real-world terms based on that roll. Trying to do it the other way around, by trying to write rules that capture all the little nuances, and, worse, players trying to do things in great detail to work to a certain outcome, make things much more difficult.
That is, don’t have players go, “I try to shoot my arrow through the eye slit of his helmet” with the intention of getting a damage bonus for hitting a vulnerable part of the body. Instead, the player just shoots, and if the shot hits and causes a lot of damage, have the GM say, “Your arrow slips through the eye slit of his helmet and causes a terrible wound!”
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@Gurth Yeah. Which is why I like the systems I have played the most in that regard. You do your check for if you hit and then where you hit (if needed). And a damage roll. Then do a narrative based off that. Although my my paladin being very strong with a big 2-handed axe it tended to end with body parts going flying a bit here and there.
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@Atazhaia said in D&D thread:
As for heavier armor meaning more likely to evade attacks, but not lower incoming damage... TDEMSYR Ya know, you can get too unrealistic too
Conceptually, a "miss" (failing to beat the opponent's AC) isn't necessarily a failure to hit. It could be a glancing blow, a hit that's absorbed by your armour, your opponent being intimidated by the dragonborn barbarian wielding an axe at them, etc. Light armour's AC is based on dex, so is more about dodging, and heavy armour is str based so would be more likely to represent a hit denting the breastplate without hurting its occupant
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@Atazhaia said in D&D thread:
As for heavier armor meaning more likely to evade attacks, but not lower incoming damage... TDEMSYR Ya know, you can get too unrealistic too.
Yup, it's a tradeoff between speed-of-play and some flavor of realism. It's better to think of it as "odds of landing an effective hit." D&D's stance is that it's not worth simulating that level of detail, DoD's is that the detail matters. Different games for different folks.
DoD uses more straightforward mechanics. 1d20 (+/- modifiers) vs your skill in the weapon to see if a hit. The only way of defending against a hit is to parry, which is automatic if wiedling a shield or must be announced in advance for each round, as parrying with a weapon means losing the ability to attack that round.
I'll admit that I've never liked the "give up your attack to defend" mechanics of various games. In many games I've played, the enemies outnumber the PCs (and/or are willing to spend limited resources willy-nilly -- like missiles in Rifts), so these defensive options are biased towards the enemies. If the enemies defend, then other enemies can still get in attacks, and if the PCs defend, then the enemies have a field day with unanswered attacks. This mechanism always seems "realistic", but it has a bad effect on gameplay.
Then it's damage inflicted - opponent's armor = damage done. Optionally a hit area die is rolled to see where the attack landed, good if fighting someone without a helmet for example. Or for fun, like if you get a killing blow to see how the enemy died. 2H axe to the belly. Well, that enemy's intestines are now all over the floor.
It sounds like DoD is both faster and slower that D&D: possibly a bit like GURPS: individual attacks are slow to resolve (attack roll, defense roll, location roll, damage roll), but damage is devastating. D&D gets more damage-spongey as you get into higher levels. But then, D&D is explicitly Epic Fantasy: PCs are great heroes who perform grand deeds, and shrug off blows that would fell a lesser
hobbithalfling.There's a set of variant rules for D&D called "E6", where PC levels are capped at 6 (they normally go to 20), so while heroes are fairly heroic, dragons are always a threat. It might be a little closer to DoD's lethality – heroes can shrug off a few blows, but not too many.
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I mentioned it to my DM and he said that the D&D AC/hit system came from a ship combat system called Don't Give up the Ship, also made by Gygax and Arneson and released 2 years before D&D. Which is an interesting bit of history.
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@Jaloopa said in D&D thread:
Conceptually, a "miss" (failing to beat the opponent's AC) isn't necessarily a failure to hit. It could be a glancing blow, a hit that's absorbed by your armour, your opponent being intimidated by the dragonborn barbarian wielding an axe at them, etc. Light armour's AC is based on dex, so is more about dodging, and heavy armour is str based so would be more likely to represent a hit denting the breastplate without hurting its occupant
Yes, but it is a massive simplification to suggest that a blow must either be totally negated by armour, causing no injury significant enough to cost hitpoints, or avoid the armour entirely and land with as much effect as if the opponent was unarmoured.
That said, I think it's far from the most unrealistic thing about D&D combat (at least in the editions which I'm familiar with, which is mainly 5 and a little theoretical knowledge of 4.) It seems a little arbitrary to single out, when someone can fight just as effectively wounded almost to the point of death (1HP) as when they were fresh and fully rested. When you can hit an armed opponent just as easily with a dagger as with a longer weapon. When everyone's turns in a round are resolved as if everyone actually takes turns and you can fully react to what someone did in the same round.
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@CarrieVS I will note that 5e makes no attempt to simulate anything in particular. It's about game and narrative emulation, and the narratives they're emulating are ones where those sorts of things are pretty normal. The nimble rogue with flashing daggers and the hulking barbarian with his greataxe are both valid fictional archetypes, so both have to be viable in game. And abstracting the realism away makes this possible without having a clunky, unwieldy system to drag around (the game portion). Thinking of 5e in terms of realism is always the wrong point of view--it wasn't part of the design at all.
Heck, even in action hero movies you have people fighting on after taking all sorts of brutal hits and then recovering unnaturally fast.
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I don't want to spoil anyone. But in the last episode of Dungeons & Daddies, the DM took an enormous risk and in this week's episode, it paid off in the most amazing way. One of my favorite D&D podcast episodes I've ever heard. There's been a lot of talk in this thread about randomness, but dice (and players) can tell an amazing story.
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@heterodox said in D&D thread:
I don't want to spoil anyone. But in the last episode of Dungeons & Daddies, the DM took an enormous risk and in this week's episode, it paid off in the most amazing way. One of my favorite D&D podcast episodes I've ever heard. There's been a lot of talk in this thread about randomness, but dice (and players) can tell an amazing story.
Honestly, my experience has been that the dice have a sense of dramatic irony. When I'm not sure and just let it happen if they roll really well (or roll really poorly), it's generally worked out for the best. Once you filter off the "why in the world are you rolling for that at all" cases, the randomness actually works pretty well.
The issue is that people somehow believe that the dice are needed for everything. So they roll checks for things that shouldn't have substantial randomness in them. And then get mad because there was random randomness.
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@CarrieVS said in D&D thread:
when someone can fight just as effectively wounded almost to the point of death (1HP) as when they were fresh and fully rested
This is one thing I am toying with in a concept for my RPG system, having HP as the limiter on how much combined damage/fatigue one can take before it starts affecting them in combat, meaning ending up on negative HP wont be an automatic faint/death but the risk is always there as well as making actions harder to perform while in that state.
Same thing with MP. You can continue using magic going into the negative, but doing it is generally a bad idea.
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@Atazhaia said in D&D thread:
As for heavier armor meaning more likely to evade attacks, but not lower incoming damage... TDEMSYR Ya know, you can get too unrealistic too.
DoD uses more straightforward mechanics. 1d20 (+/- modifiers) vs your skill in the weapon to see if a hit. The only way of defending against a hit is to parry, which is automatic if wiedling a shield or must be announced in advance for each round, as parrying with a weapon means losing the ability to attack that round.
Then it's damage inflicted - opponent's armor = damage done. Optionally a hit area die is rolled to see where the attack landed, good if fighting someone without a helmet for example. Or for fun, like if you get a killing blow to see how the enemy died. 2H axe to the belly. Well, that enemy's intestines are now all over the floor.
DoD also had two different types of damage, crushing or cutting. Crushing generally was better for putting a heavily armoured combattant out of the fight, cutting killed faster.
So even if you were fighting tanks, you could do damage.
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@Carnage Unfortunately, pain is only used in the advanced combat rules (which we are not running), meaning crushing damage is kinda weaksauce for us. Although, for the full shebang there's always Eon for trauma, pain, blood loss and bleeding!
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@Atazhaia said in D&D thread:
This is one thing I am toying with in a concept for my RPG system, having HP as the limiter on how much combined damage/fatigue one can take before it starts affecting them in combat
This is from Shadowrun (first/second/third editions): though it’s represented as a bar of ten boxes, characters essentially have two sets of ten hit points, one for Stun (top bar) and one for Physical (second bar) damage. The more boxes are crossed off, the worse your target number and initiative modifiers become. (The line running from the right of the Stun bar to the left of the Physical bar indicates that if you take more than ten boxes of Stun, you mark off the excess on the Physical bar instead.)
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Forgot to give the report from the first part of adventure of the fluffballs. (Werewolf The Apocalypse, Rite of Passage).
So our young recently awakened werewolves were called to New York for the rite of passage. After spending a few days getting bored in an abandoned warehouse (methinks my fluffer is a badass at skateboard now) we finally started. Got to go into the spirit realm to meet the tribe to gives us our rite. But something bad happened, and as far as I understand it the rites is some kind of exchange student program, but our exchangees got murdered and therefore we were kicked out despite having nothing to do with it or even knowing about it. My fluffer tried his best to find out what was going on, while his companions were trying to drag him away as they knew it would end badly. It did end badly, as one of the other werewolves went into full warrior form to throw my fluffball (still in human form) across a rope bridge to get us out. Then we ended up in a northern wilderness, based off the fact it was now all snowy and cold. So to not freeze to death we shifted into full wolf form and started trying to find our way back to civilization. Encountered an undead bear, which we ended. My character can do an absolutely silly amount of damage too, when in full warrior form (15 dies + 2, so up to 17) thanks to incredible strength and skill and a big silver sword.
And then we ended the first part.
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@CarrieVS said in D&D thread:
It seems a little arbitrary to single out, when someone can fight just as effectively wounded almost to the point of death (1HP) as when they were fresh and fully rested.
Only game I've seen that took any care to simulate this was Betrayal at Krondor. The lower your HP goes, the worse you fight. It adds a new dimension to the combat system.
This game did so many things right, particularly given that it came out waaaaaaay back in 1993. To this day it remains the only game I'd consider a truly good video game adaptation of a fantasy novel. I'd love to see it remade in a modern engine!
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@Mason_Wheeler Eon also does this. The more accumulated damage, the harder it gets to do anything. It does this by tiers of damage, and going up a tier adds one difficulty to all rolls until healed. Also increases the chance of fainting/dying for every tier.
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@Atazhaia said in D&D thread:
@Mason_Wheeler Eon also does this. The more accumulated damage, the harder it gets to do anything. It does this by tiers of damage, and going up a tier adds one difficulty to all rolls until healed. Also increases the chance of fainting/dying for every tier.
The advanced combat roles for dod also gives negative modifiers for damage taken. Makes it more relevant to aim for arms for instance.
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@Carnage said in D&D thread:
Makes it more relevant to aim for arms for instance.
"Who needs arms with legs like these?" dances
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Dungeons & Dragons Publisher Faces Lawsuit From Dragonlance Co-Creators
Dungeons & Dragons publisher Wizards of the Coast is facing a lawsuit from Dragonlance co-creat...
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@Mason_Wheeler said in D&D thread:
Dungeons & Dragons Publisher Faces Lawsuit From Dragonlance Co-Creators
Dungeons & Dragons publisher Wizards of the Coast is facing a lawsuit from Dragonlance co-creat...
Anyone have any idea of what that other brouhaha WOTC was involved in was about and why it would impact Dragonlance? Or is that Garage material?
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@Mason_Wheeler said in D&D thread:
Only game I've seen that took any care to simulate this was Betrayal at Krondor. The lower your HP goes, the worse you fight. It adds a new dimension to the combat system.
There’s plenty of others: Shadowrun, like I already showed above, is one. In Deadlands, you also take damage in levels of severity, which cause target number penalties that get worse with the level of wound. In Earthdawn, you basically have hit points and die when they run out, but also a wound threshold, meaning that if you take that amount or more of damage in one attack, you suffer a wound; those wounds then cause penalties to your dice rolls. In the (original) World of Darkness games you have wound levels that you can reach, reducing the number of dice you get to roll for tests.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in D&D thread:
@CarrieVS said in D&D thread:
It seems a little arbitrary to single out, when someone can fight just as effectively wounded almost to the point of death (1HP) as when they were fresh and fully rested.
Only game I've seen that took any care to simulate this was Betrayal at Krondor. The lower your HP goes, the worse you fight. It adds a new dimension to the combat system.
CP 2020 had a pretty sensible wound tracking mechanic: you'd go from light (flesh) wounds, through serious, critical, and mortal wounds. Anything more serious than a light wound (which you got four points of) would degrade your combat (and other) abilities and by the time you got to mortal (13+ points of damage), you'd likely be out of the fight, even if not quite dead yet. Going deeper into mortal wound territory would degrade your Stun/Death saves as well (with Stun saves getting more difficult from serious wounds up).
You got a tracker on your character sheet, so it didn't require a whole lot of book-keeping either.
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@GOG said in D&D thread:
@Mason_Wheeler said in D&D thread:
Dungeons & Dragons Publisher Faces Lawsuit From Dragonlance Co-Creators
Dungeons & Dragons publisher Wizards of the Coast is facing a lawsuit from Dragonlance co-creat...
Anyone have any idea of what that other brouhaha WOTC was involved in was about and why it would impact Dragonlance? Or is that Garage material?
Supposedly they contracted with Weis/Hickman for some new novels, subject to draft approval. They'd been approving drafts for a while, then said "yeah, we're not going to read any more drafts." Which is a contract cancellation without actually going through that project. Except without actually cancelling it--just putting it on indefinite hold. So likely not making the expected payments.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in D&D thread:
@GOG said in D&D thread:
@Mason_Wheeler said in D&D thread:
Dungeons & Dragons Publisher Faces Lawsuit From Dragonlance Co-Creators
Dungeons & Dragons publisher Wizards of the Coast is facing a lawsuit from Dragonlance co-creat...
Anyone have any idea of what that other brouhaha WOTC was involved in was about and why it would impact Dragonlance? Or is that Garage material?
Supposedly they contracted with Weis/Hickman for some new novels, subject to draft approval. They'd been approving drafts for a while, then said "yeah, we're not going to read any more drafts." Which is a contract cancellation without actually going through that project. Except without actually cancelling it--just putting it on indefinite hold. So likely not making the expected payments.
This much I know. However, they mentioned some racism/sexism issues that WOTC was allegedly going through at the time and I wanted to know what those were.
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@GOG said in D&D thread:
@Benjamin-Hall said in D&D thread:
@GOG said in D&D thread:
@Mason_Wheeler said in D&D thread:
Dungeons & Dragons Publisher Faces Lawsuit From Dragonlance Co-Creators
Dungeons & Dragons publisher Wizards of the Coast is facing a lawsuit from Dragonlance co-creat...
Anyone have any idea of what that other brouhaha WOTC was involved in was about and why it would impact Dragonlance? Or is that Garage material?
Supposedly they contracted with Weis/Hickman for some new novels, subject to draft approval. They'd been approving drafts for a while, then said "yeah, we're not going to read any more drafts." Which is a contract cancellation without actually going through that project. Except without actually cancelling it--just putting it on indefinite hold. So likely not making the expected payments.
This much I know. However, they mentioned some racism/sexism issues that WOTC was allegedly going through at the time and I wanted to know what those were.
Ah. I'm pretty sure that's about the whole "orcs are evil?" thing. And Dragonlance is full of questionable (from modern woke perspective) decisions regarding race. Gully dwarves. Klepto-hobbits. Etc.
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@GOG said in D&D thread:
CP 2020 had a pretty sensible wound tracking mechanic
Except those wounds don’t affect your rolls at all, other than for stun and death saves. Assuming you can make those, if you’re at three boxes into Mortal 6 you’re still just as effective as when you’re unwounded — but take one more box and you’ll contribute to tonight’s Body Lotto.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in D&D thread:
Dragonlance is full of questionable (from modern woke perspective) decisions
Like using steel as a valuable metal that high-value coins are minted of, rather than gold. Any common knife contains more steel by weight than the weight of its value in steel pieces, never mind something like full plate armour.
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@Gurth said in D&D thread:
@GOG said in D&D thread:
CP 2020 had a pretty sensible wound tracking mechanic
Except those wounds don’t affect your rolls at all, other than for stun and death saves. Assuming you can make those, if you’re at three boxes into Mortal 6 you’re still just as effective as when you’re unwounded — but take one more box and you’ll contribute to tonight’s Body Lotto.
Sure they do. Having a serious wound meant -2 to REF rolls (all combat, essentially), a critical wound would reduce your REF, INT and CL by half and a mortal wound would bring those three to 1/3 (provided you're still ambulatory). The stun and death save modifiers are just icing on the cake.
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Short meeting today. After wandering around in a blizzard for a week we figured this was most unnatural. Smelt the smell of smoke, meaning something was nearby. Was finally saved by a werebear who took us in and let us warm up and get well fed. Found out there was a mining town nearby, where they may have dug up something unpleasant causing the unnatural storm. Decided to go investigate. On the way was attacked by the tribe who kicked us out. Our healer got knocked out, I repeatedly knocked out their biggest warrior by oneshotting him with my sword, only to have him recover through sheer rage. Werebear came and helped and drove the other werewolves away and healed us up. Next meeting gonna be mining town funtimes methinks.
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@GOG said in D&D thread:
Sure they do. Having a serious wound meant -2 to REF rolls (all combat, essentially), a critical wound would reduce your REF, INT and CL by half and a mortal wound would bring those three to 1/3 (provided you're still ambulatory). The stun and death save modifiers are just icing on the cake.
Oh yeah, you’re right … forgot about that bit :( (I looked through the CP2020 rules yesterday and couldn’t find it, even though I thought I remembered something like that. Turns out now I was looking at the wrong page of the rulebook.)
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The battle for the town started with them sending a few goblins to various points to distract everyone, then Glass-staff walked right into the middle of town with a handful of thugs to confront us. He believed, or at least appeared to believe, the lie we had told his underlings about being agents of The Spider, and complained that he had an understanding with The Spider where this town was supposed to be his territory.
I sauntered right up to him and said, "I have a message from The Spider: 'I am altering our deal. Pray I do not alter it any further.'"
He didn't seem to care much for this, and decided to attack. I rolled a natural 20 on my Initiative, so seeing the violence in his demeanor, I said The Spider had three more words for him: "ola de truenos!" I blasted him with the spell and ran, taking a minor AOO as the battle commenced.
We spent a few rounds fighting thugs, then Luratio closed, getting right up in Glass-Staff's face with his axe, and Zeppo shot him with an arrow. So he suddenly decided to go all Final Fantasy boss on us: with his HP low, he transformed into his true form, and suddenly we're facing down a wyrmling Green Dragon!
He opened with his breath attack against Luratio, and I rolled high enough on Arcana to realize that he can't use it again immediately, so I called out to everyone to charge him now while he's weak. A few hits from axes, bows, and Shatter spells later, the dragon fell. Next session we'll figure out what to do with the body, and with the glass staff, which turns out to be a Staff of Defense. That's a pretty nice haul!
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@Benjamin-Hall said in D&D thread:
Honestly, my experience has been that the dice have a sense of dramatic irony.
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@boomzilla That's not a failure. That's a much better success than whatever you thought you wanted.
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@HardwareGeek Not if you're facing down a dragon, it's not!
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@Benjamin-Hall said in D&D thread:
@GOG said in D&D thread:
@Benjamin-Hall said in D&D thread:
@GOG said in D&D thread:
@Mason_Wheeler said in D&D thread:
Dungeons & Dragons Publisher Faces Lawsuit From Dragonlance Co-Creators
Dungeons & Dragons publisher Wizards of the Coast is facing a lawsuit from Dragonlance co-creat...
Anyone have any idea of what that other brouhaha WOTC was involved in was about and why it would impact Dragonlance? Or is that Garage material?
Supposedly they contracted with Weis/Hickman for some new novels, subject to draft approval. They'd been approving drafts for a while, then said "yeah, we're not going to read any more drafts." Which is a contract cancellation without actually going through that project. Except without actually cancelling it--just putting it on indefinite hold. So likely not making the expected payments.
This much I know. However, they mentioned some racism/sexism issues that WOTC was allegedly going through at the time and I wanted to know what those were.
Ah. I'm pretty sure that's about the whole "orcs are evil?" thing. And Dragonlance is full of questionable (from modern woke perspective) decisions regarding race. Gully dwarves. Klepto-hobbits. Etc.
That's D&D in a nutshell, really. Orcs are evil, gnolls are worse, demons are somehow worse than that, and devils are demons with law degrees. As much as WOTC is working on the "every Orc can be Drizzt if they want to," there's just plain fun in having Designated Villains who completely lack moral ambiguity.
I have absolutely enjoyed games where some orcs were regular folk, and I have absolutely enjoyed getting myself killed in Gygax-inspired dungeons. There's room for fun of both types, as long as you don't draw any parallels between fantasy worlds and this world.
Dragonlance's gully dwarves are a bit worse than, say, kobolds, but not by terribly much (is it worse to be stupid, or evil?). And frankly, they're better than the derro. The kender are, as far as I'm concerned, vaguely like the tinker gnomes: they have "a thing", and they play it to the hilt. I haven't noticed any parallels between gully dwarves, kender, tinker gnomes, and any real-life people, but I suppose someone will be happy to draw a line for me. ("Sure, People X don't have traits A, B, or C from kender, but they do have D and E, and therefore racist." I suppose I can link kender to the Roma people if I try hard enough, but I'd have to work at it.)
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@CarrieVS said in D&D thread:
someone can fight just as effectively wounded almost to the point of death (1HP) as when they were fresh and fully rested.
This is about Rules Supporting Story: D&D is epic fantasy, where heroes do great deeds against terrible odds, shrugging off blows that would fell a lesser catperson. There are plenty of Schwarzenegger movies where the badly-wounded hero manages to land a telling blow while grimacing all manly-like. If you have Death Spiral mechanics in your RPG, it's much less likely that you'll be able to tell that kind of story.
(It's also, conveniently, easier on the math!)
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@PotatoEngineer said in D&D thread:
@CarrieVS said in D&D thread:
someone can fight just as effectively wounded almost to the point of death (1HP) as when they were fresh and fully rested.
This is about Rules Supporting Story: D&D is epic fantasy, where heroes do great deeds against terrible odds, shrugging off blows that would fell a lesser catperson. There are plenty of Schwarzenegger movies where the badly-wounded hero manages to land a telling blow while grimacing all manly-like. If you have Death Spiral mechanics in your RPG, it's much less likely that you'll be able to tell that kind of story.
(It's also, conveniently, easier on the math!)
Yeah. Death spirals make combat something to be avoided wherever possible and when you do, go brutal and hard. Basically, alpha strikes win the day (aka rocket tag). Which is fine, but it's not a style that fits epic fantasy very well at all. Heck, it doesn't even fit action hero movies well, and that's the closest analogue most of the time, with some superhero action thrown in as well.
