Mallus said:
Sure, but a lot of people just ditch alignment-as-written, or treat it as a purely descriptive system, or remove it completely from their games (as done in both my campaings with a minimum of effort or fuss).
I do similar things with alignment myself. But the point here is that there is an implied setting and that, as we move away from the default setting, we have to amend the rules more and more substantially. At some point, a system will cease to meaningfully be D&D.
Second edition Runequest was a system published in 1981 with STR, CON, DEX, INT, POW (power as a substitute for wisdom) and CHA; each character had hit points. Other superficial similarities existed. But there was no question that the game that was being played was no longer D&D; so little question that, as far as I know, no litigation was ever taken up against Chaosium.
Now, I could take any mechanic in D20, alignment, combat actions, hit points/damage, spells and replace it and you could say "Well, that's still D&D." At what point have you replaced enough pieces of the rules that it's not D&D but some other game? For every example I could provide of ways that D&D entails a certain setting, you could respond just as you have on the alignment question.
What do the rules governing publishing materials have to do with the changes a group implements for their weekend game? Again, the groups I've played in had no signifigant problem disentangling the alignment system from the rest of the game.
What we are arguing about is the implied setting of D&D. Some people have argued that there is no limit to the fantasy settings D&D can depict. It seems to me that, in order to argue for or against this proposition, there has to be an operative definition of D&D. The D20 license is the closest thing I can think of to an operative definition. If you want to argue that D&D=anything people declare to be D&D, I'll happily agree that, if you use that definition, D&D can model anything because D&D can be anything. But that doesn't really get us anywhere, nor does it allow us to ask and answer basic questions about the implied setting of the game.
But hamstringing a foe is easy to describe using standand d20 mechanics, even if the offical rules don't provide for it. Are you really saying your group couldn't agree on a way to model it?
If you allow locational damage in this instance, explain to me why you wouldn't need to allow it in some other instance. If you can hamstring someone, what about cutting off an arm? A leg? Why couldn't you aim for an eye in combat?
I suppose a group could produce a big almanac of piecemeal rules for locational damage for each situation that arose or, it could completely rewrite the D&D damage mechanic. In the first instance, you end up with a ratty set of exceptions tacked-on to a system that is antithetical to them; in the second, you end up with a damage mechanic other than D&D.
Using your original example, I'd rule hamstringing a captured foe (outside of combat) would result in said foe having his movement rate reduced to a Crawl (5ft), and suffer a -2 circumstance penalty to any physical activity they could still perform. There... easy-peasy (I can't believe I just typed that...).
That's great. Now make an optional rule for every locational injury. Now come up with the conditions under which they could be inflicted. And presto! A new, non-D&D damage mechanic!
Perhaps we just disgree on what constitutes 'radical alterations to the mechanic'.
It seems to me that the basic spirit of the D20 damage mechanic is that a person can be in three states with respect to combat: 1. able to fight 2. unconscious 3. dead. Now, D&D permits various states of disability but I would note that not a single one involves locational damage, not even deafness or blindness. It seems to me that you have effectively replaced the system if you graft physically located injuries onto this.
And can't some rule modifications be ad-hoc and single-use-only?
Because it's bad GMing and bad world building. A competent GM should be able to make a self-consistent world. For goodness' sake, he can unilaterally write house rules; if he can't manage to represent something using rules of his own design, he doesn't have any business representing it.
I don't think anyone said it could.
Look at the posts to which I was responding.
As to how useful a tool it is to model a wide variety of fantasy worlds, I still think that's best framed as a social issue, a matter of the expectations and agreements between players.
You expect a rules set to provide "the physics of the game world", where I expect them to provide a rough modelling tool.
Fair enough. I just don't see what anybody loses by making a setting that conforms to a set of self-consistent rules. I guess I just don't understand what the downside is.
WayneLigon said:
To me, all fiction (and thus, D&D, especially when using D&D to model a published world) is like superhero comics. If you hew too closely to logical extensions of how things should operate, then you quickly realize things in the book cannot work as they do. Yet they do work that way. The trick is to treat the locgical extensions as the flaws instead of the reality.
This just seems an intellecutally uninteresting way to go. Why not develop a model that explains what is going on? What is the downside of self-consistency if you can pull it off?
That's probably saying things badly. What I'm trying to get across is you need to lock your inner historian in a trunk and not let him out while playing.
While my games are not everybody's cup of tea, I don't know why you would advise me to stop doing the thing that people find attractive about my games. The people who like my games like them because they know there is an underlying coherence to my worlds and figuring out the underlying system that governs them is a big part of the payoff. My players, between them, generate about 10 pages of notes per session; they correspond with eachother between games. They do this because they have faith that when they crack the big code, the phenomena with which their characters have interacted will take on a unity and a meaning.
Gold Roger said:
So, the DMs desires are more important than those of the players, because he has the right to strip out stuff he doesn't like and players don't have the right to include stuff they do like?
When I join a game, I join a game to experience a coherent story and setting fashioned by my GM. I do not show up to design a setting by committee. If you want to game in RPGs where the GM is just one voice among many designing the physical laws and cultures of his world, go buy Sorceror or Burning Wheel.
If I want to design a setting, I'll be the GM. If I'm showing up with a character sheet, that means I'm here to play a setting, a setting based on an internal logic more powerful and coherent than what PrC some munchkin has just found in the latest piece of overpriced WOTC swag.
The short, cryptic answer is that I'd have no trouble with using D&D to model the Church; I'd handle it like Vampire or Mage handled human history.
