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What makes us care about combat balance in D&D?
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<blockquote data-quote="innerdude" data-source="post: 6665497" data-attributes="member: 85870"><p>What continues to surprise me is that so many D&D fans keep clamoring to make D&D conform exactly to their vision, rather than branching out to find something that better meets their needs. Asking for a "bigger, better mousetrap" (i.e., D&D) is kind of pointless when what you really need is a fishing pole.</p><p></p><p>Anyone who's a purist for realistic combat is going to quickly abandon D&D in favor of Runequest, GURPS, Rolemaster, and the like. It's my understanding that Runequest was pretty much a direct response to D&D/AD&D combat being completely dissatisfactory to Steve Perrin and Greg Stafford.</p><p></p><p>That said, to a point I understand why people don't peek behind the D&D tree to look around at the rest of the RPG forest. Heck, if you'd come to me in 2005, in the height of my eight-year run with 3e and 3.5, and said I'd be much happier with a different RPG system, I'd have told you that you were crazy. Out of the six or seven regulars that were in our group over that period of time, exactly one had played anything other than D&D in his or her lifetime (GURPS). I'd dabbled in Top Secret S.I. as a teenager, but had never actually run or played it with a group.</p><p></p><p>In a sense I'm actually entirely grateful for 4e, even though I never played it nor had any desire to---it taught me that I didn't just want a better D&D, I didn't want D&D at all. I actually get somewhat miffed when people decry the "Edition Wars" as this universally badwrong thing that had no merit, and should never be allowed to occur ever again. The Edition Wars ultimately became an incredibly valuable thing for me, as a way to be more critical in my analysis of what I wanted from my roleplaying experience, and how a system could enhance or detract from what I was looking for. </p><p></p><p>On the issue of combat abstraction: The longer I'm in this hobby, the more it becomes brutally obvious to me that Armor Class and Hit Points are conceptual carryovers from wargaming. In a nutshell they're shorthand for, "How much longer will this unit remain effective?" (hit points), and "How hard is it to reduce this unit's effectiveness?" (armor class). </p><p></p><p>Those are incredibly abstract concepts. On a "10,000 foot" view of a battlefield involving multiple units it kind of / sort of makes sense. On an individual human capacity and health level, it gets a bit trickier. The fact that D&D has survived as long as it has with AC and hit points being two of its defining characteristics must say something important about what those two deeply abstract concepts are modeling. </p><p></p><p>I guess the short answer is, for D&D's brand of "heroic" fantasy, we care about plot protection for our "heroes" more than we care about "realistic" combat.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="innerdude, post: 6665497, member: 85870"] What continues to surprise me is that so many D&D fans keep clamoring to make D&D conform exactly to their vision, rather than branching out to find something that better meets their needs. Asking for a "bigger, better mousetrap" (i.e., D&D) is kind of pointless when what you really need is a fishing pole. Anyone who's a purist for realistic combat is going to quickly abandon D&D in favor of Runequest, GURPS, Rolemaster, and the like. It's my understanding that Runequest was pretty much a direct response to D&D/AD&D combat being completely dissatisfactory to Steve Perrin and Greg Stafford. That said, to a point I understand why people don't peek behind the D&D tree to look around at the rest of the RPG forest. Heck, if you'd come to me in 2005, in the height of my eight-year run with 3e and 3.5, and said I'd be much happier with a different RPG system, I'd have told you that you were crazy. Out of the six or seven regulars that were in our group over that period of time, exactly one had played anything other than D&D in his or her lifetime (GURPS). I'd dabbled in Top Secret S.I. as a teenager, but had never actually run or played it with a group. In a sense I'm actually entirely grateful for 4e, even though I never played it nor had any desire to---it taught me that I didn't just want a better D&D, I didn't want D&D at all. I actually get somewhat miffed when people decry the "Edition Wars" as this universally badwrong thing that had no merit, and should never be allowed to occur ever again. The Edition Wars ultimately became an incredibly valuable thing for me, as a way to be more critical in my analysis of what I wanted from my roleplaying experience, and how a system could enhance or detract from what I was looking for. On the issue of combat abstraction: The longer I'm in this hobby, the more it becomes brutally obvious to me that Armor Class and Hit Points are conceptual carryovers from wargaming. In a nutshell they're shorthand for, "How much longer will this unit remain effective?" (hit points), and "How hard is it to reduce this unit's effectiveness?" (armor class). Those are incredibly abstract concepts. On a "10,000 foot" view of a battlefield involving multiple units it kind of / sort of makes sense. On an individual human capacity and health level, it gets a bit trickier. The fact that D&D has survived as long as it has with AC and hit points being two of its defining characteristics must say something important about what those two deeply abstract concepts are modeling. I guess the short answer is, for D&D's brand of "heroic" fantasy, we care about plot protection for our "heroes" more than we care about "realistic" combat. [/QUOTE]
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