@
Bluenose - there you go again with your
outrageous suggestions that there are non-magical ways for people to become dazed, blinded, crippled or maimed in warfare. Where's the verisimilitude in that!
I actually have no problem with fighters poking out people's eyes or damaging them in ways that cause certain status conditions. So long as they have to succeed on the attack roll and don't get the effect as a consolidation prize I am okay with things like what @
Bluenose describes.
There was an excellent thread on the WotC forums about this - about the ways that DoaM doesn't interact with the rules - but at the moment I can't find it. However off the top of my head, (mis?)remembering common complaints from that thread and from my past ones; poison, high-dodging/dex characters (pixies), high natural armored characters (dragons), 4e style minion rules/low HP creature rules (some seem to think it doesn't/shouldn't *kill* them, ever, but as written it does no problem), damage resistance (a big one here), resistance of extra damage that can be applied (precision, energy, superiority), interactions with the advantage/disadvantage mechanic (doesn't matter since you can no longer fail to kill creatures with this ability). I'm sure there are others I'm forgetting, we discussed this thing for weeks and kept coming up with new issues where it didn't match. Now some of these can be handwaved away but most require a new ruling from the DM since the mechanic is VERY unwritten about the interaction.
If it had a good explanation on how it works would you change your mind?
I would have to see that explanation. It is possible. At this point though I probably feel a little gunshy about the whole idea. I also fundamentally disagree with the concept. I don't get why the closest mechanic that this one relates to is an entirely different type of "attack," that is an explosion, a splash, or magic in general. I'll go back to my car/bat example. I have problems when the character can "hit" the ball all the way to Delaware from San Diego. It doesn't matter (to me) that cars exist, but the idea that a simple baseball player could ever manage to do something like that just irks me.
People don't want to play the game because DoaM is Toxic. DoaM is toxic because people don't want to play the game. When did D&D become Paranoia?
Yeah, I don't know what that line has to do with Paranoia, I only learned of that game's existence a few days ago. If any mechanic makes hordes of real life people significantly less interested in the game, I would say it is a bad mechanic from WotC's standpoint since those are customers they are driving away with something easily corrected. It could be a matter of echo chambers, or squeaky wheels, or even "only people with a problem come out and complain." I don't know. WotC has done a lot of polls and surveys and general research on the subject. However, from my limited scope all I do see is that DoaM got its own subforum here when no other 5e mechanics have (so far
), that for a while it was almost ALL the threads on the WotC site because people hated it so much, and that WotC even had to start blocking threads because it had gotten so "echoey." To me that seems toxic, doesn't matter what the actual rule says. Having something that displeases so many people on such a scale is a bad thing in my mind.
How is this idea going to spread to other areas? It can't be just because you feel it is a poorly thought out rule. D&D has had poorly thought out rules for 40 years.
How does it spread? Go look at the new thread Bluenose created about non-magical ideas for non-magical fighters. I haven't gotten too far into it but the first few suggestions were to plunder ideas from the Bestiary. I agree with that statement since many of them will be non-magical and could apply to fighters. But when something like this, something seemingly magical or at least not non-magical, slips through then it will do the same. It will appear in further splatbooks, other Bestiary/Monster Manuals. Once an idea gets through it will expand out.
So the fact that DnD has had bad ideas for 40 years doesn't matter much. But having a toxic (per above) rule spread all over the place can make it even more toxic. Every instance of it is another instance people have to avoid. And I know that the common thought is that there will be something people will have to cut and this is just another example, but such reasoning assumes that it is a personal preference like any other system or that by in large almost everyone is okay with the mechanic. This isn't true, having a sub-forum for it proves it isn't just personal taste, it breaks verisimilitude and people's enjoyment of the game, and it isn't just one person rebelling against the whole it is large swaths of people all disliking it for many reasons. (Mine is the kobolds.)
A very large chunk has problems with HP and AC too - which is why I think WotC could still do better by giving us more options here, but I've been told they'll all be in the DMG. The problem with this mechanic (as I said before) is that it directly points at these two contested bits, stands firmly in a place and says how it works. All the time people don't play it that way. To many/most I've seen HP are meat. Not ALL meat mind you but certainly some. That is why poison works, we are told. At the end of a fight the fighter is full of bruises and nicks and cuts and bleeding. Except this mechanic points out that however we are playing with HP and AC we are doing it wrong because it knows better. Only it doesn't know better because there are no other similar mechanics that support it - except for magic and explosions, which aren't the fighter's bread and butter last I checked.
