Can DnD ever approximate the heroic literature?

[mmadsen]

My group's current view is that SAGA and BESM foster high heroics more than either of the D&D editions we've used, and for that reason, we've decided to finish the campaign as a BESM campaign.

Could you expand on this a bit? What about those systems contributed to high-heroic play?

 

[mmadsen]

The ganging up effect is rarely realistic or heroic. It is only effective because of gross simplifications of the mechanics.

I don't understand. Obviously ganging up isn't heroic, but it's certainly effective in real life.

Storminator makes a very good point. If encounters were not carefully balanced by the DM, tactics would not be so critical.

Absolutely. There are a whole host of "Red Queen" issues that come with challenges always being just difficult enough to challenge the party, and that's one of them.

And I think you would get PC mortality in keeping with the tradition of the Iliad or Mort D'Arthur. (Keep those d6's handy!)

High mortality in the Iliad and Mort D'Arthur?

Playing that way can be very heroic. In my experience, CoC is more heroic than D&D because you have no expectation of survival. I find it opens up roleplaying to knowing playing your PC true to character is more important than worrying about if he lives.

Actually, it's quite liberating to shift the challenge level in either direction, higher or lower. In either case, the players can focus on something other than min-maxing mechanical combat performance. On the other hand, this is a game we're discussing, and what keeps it interesting as a game is an appropriate challenge level. Ideally, I suppose, we need to mix encounters of various challenge levels into a plausible story-line with plenty of opportunities to display character.

 

[mmadsen]

Dragons have to be sneaky because DMs balance encounters to their PCs. This makes for an even match, and then tactics are extremely important.

Storminator makes a good point (as Ridley's Cohort already pointed out). One of the reasons a superhero can remain superheroic is that he outclasses his opponents. If you're Superman, you can subdue common thieves without hurting them. If you're a normal guy getting mugged, you have to fight for your life, break bones, pull hair, etc.

If you want dragons that can burn and slay without thinking, just use a dragon 8-10 CRs above your party level. It'll never have to get tricky, just swoop in, Power Attack at +50 damage, pulverize that poor fighter, and continue its Flyby Attack. Repeat as needed.

Or, as another option, use dragons that don't have sneaky powers. A T-Rex with flaming breath fits the classic dragon much better, and it doesn't have as much to gain by fighting sneaky.

 

[beta-ray]

Maybe it's just the POV of the person reading the material? I don't see what the original poster sees... I still view dragons as big and scary and not something to be taken lightly.

As for the heroics issue... I think there is a difference between 'heroic' and 'cinematic'. While D&D is not really cinematic I do think it encourages 'heroic'.

Also... what is wrong with "ganging up"? Perhaps 5 10th level barbarians ganging up on a civilian halfling might not be heroic, but ganging up against a powerful villian could be considered heroic. The Jedi have done it... and the Avengers and JLA do it every month.

*shrug*

 

[Jackcarter]

I would agree with those who have stated that heroism is possible in D&D, but I would also maintain that D&D, as published, is not an optimal system for high heroics.

Bravo! My sentiments exactly.

Dragons have to be sneaky because DMs balance encounters to their PCs. This makes for an even match, and then tactics are extremely important.

If you want dragons that can burn and slay without thinking, just use a dragon 8-10 CRs above your party level. It'll never have to get tricky, just swoop in, Power Attack at +50 damage, pulverize that poor fighter, and continue its Flyby Attack. Repeat as needed.

But it shouldn't have to be that way. Or rather, it shouldn't have to be a zero-sum choice between tactico supremo and plain ungodly a**kicking. In an epic (figuratively) or heroic game, the final battle should last longer than few seconds without unbalancing the encounter. An EL 12 party should be able to fight a CR14 dragon toe-to-toe without having to resort to cowardly tricks. In other words, the party and the dragon slug it for rounds until one side loses or flees (successfully, I might add).

Current rules aren't optimal for the above scenerio, though. One Harm, the dragon could be a toast. A Ftr12 would be dead in couple rounds unless the fight ended earlier. If you believe that you should make the optimal uses of rules available, as many people do--as evidenced in the popularity of threads about smackdowns and min/maxings--about this topic, then combat between the evenly matched become necessarily quick and decisive. Unless there were some horrendous/lucky die rolls, of course. My pcs, EL10 now, will take out most CR10 opponents in one round+partial action. With surprise and initiative, few opponents of their CR will even have a chance to draw their weapons.

A d20 game that kept fast paced, heroic gameplay in mind, where foolish heroism is rewarded, would be cool. And I think it's do-able.

Doable, yes, but somewhat self-defeating. I have, on occassion, done things that have kept things more heroic. DR has proven admirable in forcing the combat to last longer and more grueling; a bump in DR has negated the advantages of surprise and initiative without overly powering up the baddie. So has blindsight, both SQ and the spell. None of these, though, can be used often without becoming cliches, i.e., "oh no, another DR, screw my boots of elvenkind, I'm getting me some boots of striding and jumping!" As for the spell Blindsight, bah, a standard tactical doctrine with my pcs is for the shu to cast dispel magic as his first action...

I would say most DMs don't hink ahead when they put their bad guys in situations against the party. A smart bad guy is going to monitor the situation at hand. If a fight breaks out he is going to weight the rsisk versus the rewards. If there is too much risk, he needs to take off and the DM needs to make sure he has a logical (by the rules) way of escaping

I have nothing against having smart villains; what I don't like is the excessive emphasis in the Rainbow Six type action to be successful in the game. I think there's a happy medium between foolhardy charging into the unknown and sending in animated animal skeleton with echo skull spell atop it to scout ahead, the party staying apart 30' each to minimize area spells while still able to come to aid, the rogue going ahead and checking every darn brick for traps and using hand signals to alert the party of any developments, always hiding while moving (taking hits in movement), invisibility to animals on constantly to foil animal spies, pass without trace, sweeping areas constantly with detect magic, ad nauseum.

I've always longed for a more Rainbow Sixish campaign. A campaign where more than one character knows how to move silently and climb walls.

Let's swap players. My pcs would make the Rangers and Seals very proud.

P.S. I don't mind my players' style of play, as I knew that would be what I'd be getting when I started dming. I may be a dm but I'm not a tyrant like many other dms are; I'm more like the British prime minister--I dm because I have the consent of the others. Before we started, we laid out a ground rule to have as mechanically canon game as possible. What my pcs are doing make perfect sense; in fact, I've been guilty of breaking our rule by surreptously burmping up the DR a few times.

The game play within my game has been, quite frankly, fostered and encouraged by the current rules. I've made the optimum use of the rules, and so have they. Nothing to begrudge on either side.

It's just unheroic.

 

[hong]

Storminator makes a good point (as Ridley's Cohort already pointed out). One of the reasons a superhero can remain superheroic is that he outclasses his opponents. If you're Superman, you can subdue common thieves without hurting them. If you're a normal guy getting mugged, you have to fight for your life, break bones, pull hair, etc.

Exactly. As I said, if you play dragons stupid, there's no need for the players to get sneaky.

 

[hong]

Before we started, we laid out a ground rule to have as mechanically canon game as possible.

First, harm is well-known to be broken. Adhering to known broken rules is foolish.

Second, a mechanically canon game doesn't have to mean a game that concentrates on mechanics to the exclusion of everything else.

Third, if you don't like "unheroic", change your style. What Geoff W said makes perfect sense: NPCs and monsters can be played in all sorts of different ways. How you run the adventure will have an impact on what the PCs do. However, I wouldn't try to change the tone of the campaign now that you've been playing for months and are 10th level. It would be better to start again, and this time put more emphasis on free-flowing action.

 

[Jackcarter]

Exalted: Heroic Fantasy, Epic Fantasy, Chinese Martial Arts Flicks, the best of mystic style Anime (Kenshin, Hakenden, Lodoss, etc), and some dang cool mythology all rolled up into one nice little roleplaying package. I'm hooked.

A little quibbling: Kenshin isn't a mystic anime, though you could plausibly argue that the sword styles are, at least until the end of Kyoto arc...

Exalted looks cool, but the potential number of dice scares me. WW's modus operandi seems to be, "more the merrier."

So all we need now is a d20 Exalted

I think that any system would be better for cinematic combat than WW's dice bucket mechanics.

However, I do give credit to WW for cleaning up the mechanics as well as they did. Still, I think Exalted is the end of the line for d10 unless WW does a major overhaul like 3e did. Buckets just gotta go!

All that anime and martial arts stuff is what turned me off from it. I guess White Wolf needed to create a fantasy game with an edge, but that's not the edge I was looking for

That's too bad; guess not a fan of anime or Honkong flicks, eh? I wonder about what would happen to Exalted after the anime/martial arts fad dies down. Would it be like Vampire and have staying power, or end up at arthaus?

 

[Tsyr]

I've always considered kenshin a bit "mystic"... Sure, it's based off history, but lets face it... even in the OAVs, the most realistic of the Kenshin stuff, Kenshin and his foes do things no human could ever hope to. Cutting people clean in half (Head to groin) with one katana swipe, for example. The OAVs are, though, MORE realistic. The series IS mystic, I'm sorry. For gods sake... There are SPELLCASTERS in it, although they don't call them that (The master of shinnin-ipo in like episode 7, for example).

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

I don't understand. Obviously ganging up isn't heroic, but it's certainly effective in real life.

...

High mortality in the Iliad and Mort D'Arthur?

I was insufficiently clear.

In D&D there is a peculiar incentive to throw all your party's attacks at a single target until it drops, and then repeat until you win. Basically it is because of the HP mechanics. I find that it both unheroic and unrealistic. If you were to try those tactics in real life, you would certainly lose.


The Iliad has line after line of introducing brave and noble men, Greek and Trojan, telling us about the beauty of their lands--perhaps one whose family fields produce particularly sweet wine, and then one warrior tosses a javelin through the other dude's throat. Repeat.

Mort D'Arther has a very mortality for those who do not happen to be Arthur or Lancelot or Gawain. Edit out Arthur on second thought. We meet more than a couple brave knights who bravely get killed.

There is a story of a brave knight who aids a beautiful enchantress carrying a sword. He asks for the sword as a reward. She attempts to dissuade him, saying he may have the sword, but if he takes it he will have great adventures and die by his brother's hand. The knight gamely responds, "Sign me up!" When he is dying by wounds inflicted by his own brother, he is sad but just doesn't get philosophical about it. Dying is the expected price to pay for memorable adventures.

The Disney version of these two books makes them both about Lancelot and Odysseus. They are really more about Hector, Achilles, Arthur, and other brave warriors, named and unnamed, dying bravely than any particular soldier living to go home.


If you played in that style, your average PC would live maybe 2 adventures. And none of that sissy coming back from the dead.

Can you see why I find CoC more heroic than D&D? The mortality is a generally closer to my expectations.

As I said before, YMMV.