D&D General What are your Pedantic Complaints about D&D?

Hriston · Jul 15, 2019

Celebrim said:
Oh no. Uh uh.

Reason(s)?

Tony Vargas · Jul 15, 2019

Charlaquin said:
This is entirely possible with the Ready action.

Nope. The readied character would have to either move ahead of the one he was trying to move with, then ready, or take the readied action and move only 30' to the other's 60.
~~To be fair,~~ Delay doesn't do it, either, the other guy moves, /then/ you move right after. ~~It's one of those things you just need to common-sense hand-wave.~~ (sorry, I forgot the point of the thread there for a moment)

dnd4vr said:
Very true. The game could state that a combat round is the length of time needed for all participants to complete their actions, with the caveat that this is generally from 6-10 seconds, but can be longer as needed. But I have a feeling that for some others, this would be too willy-nilly.

So if you were fighting a delaying action, you could filibuster by declaring legal actions that would arguably take the longest possible time to complete.

I used to joke about "just hold 'em off for a few minutes!"

1e: "No Problem!"
RQ: "We'll do our best."
GURPS: "We're so screwed..."

Aebir-Toril said:
1. Why does everything hate Elves and want to eat them? Are Elves delicious or something?

Yes. They're like the veal of humanoids.

In RQII the were vegan. No, as in if you were a vegan Troll, you could eat them.

Laurefindel said:
Falling damage in D&D is linear? I mean come on, I’ve done physics, you’ve done physics, we all know that gravity is quadratic!

The Murphy's Rules examples of falling damage always use high level fighters, and everyone knows Fighters are Linear.

I think it's funny that D&D has too-many/non-existent swords:

Greatsword
Falchion
Bastardsword
Broadsword
Longsword
Shortsword
Scimitar
Rapier

But the proposed solutions include & are probably not limited to:

Zweihander
Longsword
Arming Sword
Back Sword
Smallsword
Gladius
Cinqueda
Xiphos
Saber
...and the Oakshotte taxonomies.

Oh, and katana.

Jer · Jul 15, 2019

Blue said:
If we're already accepted the game assumption that you can be hit several times by a battle axe, roasted by a dragon, and you're still fighting, then the realism of a 40' fall from failing a climb check on a cliff killing you was not in genre.

Oh no - we're now in the pedantic thing about D&D that I hate, which is "arguments about what hit points are".

Not hit points themselves, but the arguments that they spawn...

Xetheral · Jul 15, 2019

77IM said:
Light sources have variable drop-off rates regarding dim light, which isn't how light works. For example, a candle sheds bright light for 5 feet and dim light for an additional 5 feet, while a daylight spell spreads bright light for 60 feet and dim light for an additional 60 feet. But the spread of light follows a simple inverse-square law, so the area of dim light shouldn't "stretch" just because the bright light is brighter. Once the light has dimmed enough to be considered "dim," there should be a consistent span of dim light.

Since we're being pedantic, the rules in the game are actually a correct implementation of the inverse square law. For every light source, doubling the distance will cause the intensity to drop by a factor of 4. If a candle has the same intensity at 5' that Daylight has at 60', then the candle will have 1/4 that intensity at 10', and Daylight will have 1/4 that intensity at 120'.

More explicitly, let "L" be the brightness of a candle at 5'. For Daylight to be just as bright at 60' as a candle is at 5', its brightness at 5' must be: (60'*60')*L/(5'*5')=144*L. The brightness of a candle at 10 feet is (5'*5')*L/(10'*10')=L/4. The distance at which Daylight fades to L/4 is: SQRT((5'*5')(144*L)/(L/4))=SQRT(14400 sqft)=120'.

MNblockhead · Jul 15, 2019

Aebir-Toril said:
Here is one more of mine:

1. Why does everything hate Elves and want to eat them? Are Elves delicious or something? I'm now considering making a homebrew setting where Elves are so delicious that it becomes comical. Oh, wait, there is one, it's called the Forgotten Realms.

Yeah, non-elves either want to eat them or breed with them. Exception being Dwarves, the bitter jealous brothers of the elder races.

Yet, it is humans who actually breed most indiscriminately. Why do all half-breeds tend to be half-human? Looking at the flavor text for Orcs in the MM, I would think that half-orc/half-elf should be as common, if not more so, then half human.

Tony Vargas · Jul 15, 2019

Crossposting.

Ralif Redhammer said:
in some of Tolkien's earlier drafts, the Noldor were referred to as gnomes. Galadriel was of the Noldor, ergo...

Let's take it to the Pedantic complaints thread, and get you some XP to go with that laugh.

Hey, and that explains why Gimli was so into her. Well, makes it at tad less creepy.

…

Oh, also hey, that reminds me:

Dwarven Women's Beards!!

How could we forget that most classic of all pedantic D&D debates? "Gimli's girlfriend who was 'near as fair as Galadriel' just had a really nice, very blonde beard..."

(Oh, right, because it was 40 years ago, and would probably be fraught in today's gender climate.)

Laurefindel · Jul 15, 2019

Blue said:
If we're already accepted the game assumption that you can be hit several times by a battle axe, roasted by a dragon, and you're still fighting, then the realism of a 40' fall from failing a climb check on a cliff killing you was not in genre.

Nonsense! How dare you question my pedantry!!!

On a more serious note, one of my actual pedantic qualms is that fantasy cities never seem to have the rural populations to support them with credibility. Oftentimes, it's wilderness, wilderness, wilderness, and BOOM! big city of 50,000. That, and the apparent lack of actual kings and feudal structure in a feudalistic-inspired game setting(s).

ccs · Jul 15, 2019

MNblockhead said:
Yeah, non-elves either want to eat them or breed with them. Exception being Dwarves, the bitter jealous brothers of the elder races.

Yet, it is humans who actually breed most indiscriminately. Why do all half-breeds tend to be half-human? Looking at the flavor text for Orcs in the MM, I would think that half-orc/half-elf should be as common, if not more so, then half human.

I suspect that the orcs penchant for eating the elves dramatically reduces the odds of this crossbreed mix.

Charlaquin · Jul 15, 2019

Celebrim said:
A short sword is a very different class of weapon than an arming sword.

Short sword refers to a weapon look more like a Cinquedea or a Xiphos than an arming sword. Basically, any over large dagger primarily employed as a stabbing weapon and which has the advantage of being wieldy in very close quarters.

I'm not going to really get into the fact that there are several styles of sword that do not neatly fit into either the traditional short or long categories.

The problem is, D&D 5e’s weapon system isn’t granular enough to cover all the variations on medieval and Renaissance swords as separate weapons. I personally would lump gladii, Cinquedas, rondels, and other close-quarters thrusting sidearms in with daggers and group Viking swords, knightly swords, side swords, and other one-handed double-edged cut and thrust swords into an “arming sword” category, for which short sword stats are probably the best mechanical representation. That category being Light and Finesse may seem a bit odd, until you consider that the equally poorly-named Scimitar, which seems to represent falxes, seaxes, falchions, messers, shamishir, actual scimitars, backswords (which IMO should be the weapon’s name), sabres, and all manner of other single-edged, one-handed cutting swords is also Light and Finesse.

Basically, I’d break swords down by blade type and handedness.
one-handed:
- Optimized for thrusting = dagger
- Optimized for cutting = backsword or long-knife
- Cut and thrust = Arming sword

Versatile
Optimized for thrusting = Estoc
Optimized for cutting = long backsword or war knife
Cut and thrust = longsword

Two-handed only
Pretty much just Greatsword or Two-hander

Lanefan · Jul 15, 2019

MNblockhead said:
Yeah, non-elves either want to eat them or breed with them. Exception being Dwarves, the bitter jealous brothers of the elder races.

Yet, it is humans who actually breed most indiscriminately. Why do all half-breeds tend to be half-human? Looking at the flavor text for Orcs in the MM, I would think that half-orc/half-elf should be as common, if not more so, then half human.

This leads into a whole other field of study, should one be so inclined, and that's to go through the Monster Manual, find all the cross-breed races (e.g. Tabaxi is part human, part cat), and then from there figure out what can in theory breed with what and-or have what in its bloodlines. Can, for example, a half-orc breed with a half-elf and produce an offspring that is genetically 1/4 elf, 1/4 orc, and the rest human?

I did this a long time ago using 1e's MM, FF, and MMII; and the results were rather staggering: a chart on a big piece of paper with lines connecting inter-breedable races that ended up looking like a plate of spaghetti. And that's before throwing in things like shape-shifting deities (consider the myths of deities like Zeus and Loki impregnating humans), demons, devils, and the like.

Ever since then, every character rolled up in my games gets a roll during char-gen to determine if there's anything unexpected in its bloodline - are you, for example, a distant descedant of a deity...or a devil, or an orc, or a cat...

So, back to topic: peeved that nobody, either in official D&D or a 3rd-party, has ever published anything like this even as a magazine article.