Anyone else really dislike Ability Damage & Ability Drain?

[Jhaelen]

How many feats do you have that you can't remember what needs a minimum ability? Even a casual gamer would know these things after only a couple months of playing.

I still disagree.

I think your problem is that you just don't know any casual players

Even after six years of playing I have a player that cannot remember that after making a move he cannot make a full attack. He has to be reminded about this in every frigging session!

If I asked him about his feats, he probably wouldn't even be able to find them on his sheet without help, much less remembering anything about what they're for. And you would expect such a player to memorize something as obscure as required minimum abilities? That's hilarious

 

[JamesonCourage]

I still disagree.

I think your problem is that you just don't know any casual players

Even after six years of playing I have a player that cannot remember that after making a move he cannot make a full attack. He has to be reminded about this in every frigging session!

If I asked him about his feats, he probably wouldn't even be able to find them on his sheet without help, much less remembering anything about what they're for. And you would expect such a player to memorize something as obscure as required minimum abilities? That's hilarious

To be fair, you are talking about an incredibly mechanically inept player. I think it's extremely unfair to relate that to casual gamers.

 

[ThatGuyThere]

To be fair, you are talking about an incredibly mechanically inept player. I think it's extremely unfair to relate that to casual gamers.

I think you overestimate the degree to which this is "extreme".

If this player doesn't come to the session to "play a game", but instead to "tell a story", "sit around with his friends", or "eat the chips Bill brought while complaining - amusingly - about Star Wars and Robot Chicken", keeping track of his ability to move and / or full attack may be a very low priority. Besides, he doesn't have to; others keep track of that for him. And that's okay.

And that's setting aside that others in the group might be able to full attack after a charge, or move. Or be able to Spring Attack. Or other details.

Ability damage / drain (and level damage / drain) is the most common system requiring - or at least strongly favoring - system mastery. Keeping track "in your head" of the effects of changed ability scores is a pain in the posterior - even for people who are easily able to list off what each ability does and what related number(s) it modifies.

Replacing it with specific penalties based on what score used to be damaged is probably the best idea, but would probably still be a pain, unless you're willing to be pretty non-specific and unconcerned about weird interactions.

 

[billd91]

To be fair, you are talking about an incredibly mechanically inept player. I think it's extremely unfair to relate that to casual gamers.

I'm not so sure about that. I suspect there are variations in casual players ranging from knowing the rules and the character sheet well enough but not putting in any effort outside of the game and not taking it particularly seriously, to not putting in any effort to even master the rules but enjoying the experience of sitting around the table and slinging dice.

In the 3.5 game I've run over the last several years I have two players I would definitely call casual. One knows his character and the rules pretty well but I never get the impression he does a whit about RPGs outside of game time. He's more into war games. The other one plays quite a few RPGs, has run some before, has played incarnations of D&D since the 1970s, but hasn't really spent any effort on 3.5 and has trouble with the basic mechanics.

Based on my experiences, I don't think it's at all unfair to consider a mechanically inept player a casual player. I believe they're simply an example of a type of casual player - one with a casual-enough approach to not build a proficiency with the rules.

 

[airwalkrr]

I nerf most ability damage and ability drain effects so that they are a minor annoyance, but not absolutely debilitating. I, too, have noticed that ability damage/drain tend to slow combat down quite a bit.

Poison in my campaigns deals damage every round (on a failed save) but deals a much smaller amount. A poison that deals 1d6 Con damage initial and 2d6 Con damage secondary will deal 1 Con damage per round for six rounds and 2 Con damage per round for 6 more rounds. Mathematically this is exactly the same as the RAW if the poison is allowed to run its course. But this gives PCs a chance to deal with poison before it crushes them. Since a Heal check can remove the poison, this is how my PCs usually manage it and it is gone within a round or two.

Monsters that deal ability damage/drain with an attack usually deal a number of points of damage equal to the number of dice they normally roll for the damage/drain. This means a shadow's touch deals only 1 point of Str damage rather than 1d6. It's still nasty, but won't reduce you to 0 on the first round of combat if you get whacked by 2 or 3 shadows (and incorporeal creatures tend to always get surprise).

 

[Scurvy_Platypus]

Even a casual gamer would know these things after only a couple months of playing.

Actually, no. And I've already covered this. Now, your definition of "casual" may be different than mine... but I've known plenty of "casual gamers" that didn't and they didn't care to either.

It really isn't hard and there isn't a lot to remember, d20 is actually an extremely easy system. It was designed to be easy and they succeeded.

No. I don't want to threadjack this thread, so if you wanna discuss this I'm willing to post further in a different thread, but... you're wrong; it wasn't designed to be "easy". It was redesigned to unify mechanics that previously had multiple different subsystems, but it wasn't designed to be "easy". It was designed to be more unified.

In fact, d20 was explicitly designed to force system mastery. Monte even says so (although he calls it "rewarding" instead of "forcing"):
Ivory Tower Game Design

The d20 system is actually quite complex. It has a relatively unified mechanic, but the whole game is based around exceptions to the rules (sharing similarities to Magic:TG); that's the function of most of the Feats out there. You start messing with things and you've got multiple cascades of things happening.

Often times a unified mechanic makes things easier, but it doesn't actually make something easy. Heck, that's a fundamental part of what this thread is _about_ in the first place: there's a unified mechanic (Ability Damage/Drain) but the application of it is a pain in the rear.

Look at airwalkrr's post: He's got a fairly unified mechanic that simplifies the degree of Damage/Drain that occurs; but he's still hitting ability scores. Which means that the severity of the effect might be reduced, but there's still going to be recalculations required. In fact, if a group is unlucky, his approach might mean a character has a higher survivability and it's simpler/faster for the GM to inflict the damage, but a player might actually waste _more_ time, having to refigure things more frequently; yeah, their character lived, and instead of being reduced to 0 in a couple of hits, the combat is dragging out and that means more instances of refiguring things.

Simplification/unification/streamlining does not automatically equal "easy", though it can mean easier in specific situations.

Note: I'm not saying airwalkrr's approach is "bad" or "wrong" or whatever. I'm simply pointing out that his approach may address some issues that some people have, but in and of itself it doesn't actually address what people like myself don't like about the current way that Ability Damage/Drain functions.

My previous example of a generic stacking penalty [-2 to all dice rolls], possibly combined with a Hit Point kicker [5 HP damage] is a much "easier" solution that doesn't require refiguring everything and is still "unified" as well.

Of course, combat is still going to slow down because part of combat length is dependent on character capability; so as you reduce the character's capability, you increase the amount of time it takes for them to be effective. In other words, if you reduce a character's capability by half, it's going to take them twice as long to create the same effect as if they were unaffected. That's an additional effect of this whole thing that we're just not actually talking about.

 

[JamesonCourage]

I'm not so sure about that. I suspect there are variations in casual players ranging from knowing the rules and the character sheet well enough but not putting in any effort outside of the game and not taking it particularly seriously, to not putting in any effort to even master the rules but enjoying the experience of sitting around the table and slinging dice.

In the 3.5 game I've run over the last several years I have two players I would definitely call casual. One knows his character and the rules pretty well but I never get the impression he does a whit about RPGs outside of game time. He's more into war games. The other one plays quite a few RPGs, has run some before, has played incarnations of D&D since the 1970s, but hasn't really spent any effort on 3.5 and has trouble with the basic mechanics.

Based on my experiences, I don't think it's at all unfair to consider a mechanically inept player a casual player. I believe they're simply an example of a type of casual player - one with a casual-enough approach to not build a proficiency with the rules.

I don't really disagree, but if you note in the example I quoted, the "casual gamer" couldn't find the feats on his character sheet. To me, that is a far cry from someone who isn't into system mastery, and it's very, very different from the stereotypical casual gamer.

Of course, YMMV, and all that. I know I've had very different experiences from others (and hearing stories always makes me love my players all the more)

 

[NaturalFn20]

What's really annoying is when you get criticaled on the ability drain. I've lost 18 strength to a roper like that. Has happened on many occasions now that I think about it.