D&D General If you could put D&D into any other non middle ages genre, what would it be?

[Paul Farquhar]

Now you're contorting yourselves just for the sake of argument.

Any "one hit kill" reality, where a gun doing 10% of your hit points is "mockery", is one where you need to look elsewhere than D&D. Yes, it really is that simple.

The point is, hp are stupid irrespective of if you are fighting with a gun or a hat pin. What matters is where the hit happens, not the nature of the weapon.

People of have gotten used to the idea of hp with traditional D&D weapons through playing D&D and knock-off video games, but that doesn't make it any less unrealistic than using hp for firearms or sci fi weapons.

 

[Oofta]

You can't seriously expect people to abandon their genre expectations.

Plus, for every person you show survived dozens of bullets, I'll show you dozens of people who were killed or out after just one.

Try justifying that by explaining who's level one and who's level twelve...

Most people are level 1 commoners with 4 HP. How many hits with any D&D weapon do you expect them to survive? As far as who's level 12, well obviously they're the protagonists of an action movie that have Hollywood magical plot armor. Or you justify it exactly the same way you justify getting hit in the face with a club by an hill giant a dozen times and walking away. You don't.

Any system that uses HP is fundamentally flawed and doesn't make a lot of sense if you think about it. I don't care if it's D&D or the vast majority of video games I've ever played. But how many times in action movies or TV do the heroes get shot but it's "just a flesh wound" that they bandage up and ignore 5 minute later.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Good examples of movies with guns where the heroes clearly have a ridiculous number of hp are the Indiana Jones and Die Hard movies.

 

[Oofta]

The point is, hp are stupid irrespective of if you are fighting with a gun or a hat pin. What matters is where the hit happens, not the nature of the weapon.

People of have gotten used to the idea of hp with traditional D&D weapons through playing D&D and knock-off video games, but that doesn't make it any less unrealistic than using hp for firearms or sci fi weapons.

I could list a dozen video games off the top of my head (hmm...do individual games in a series count?) set in current or sci-fi settings that use HP where you're perfectly fine until you hit zero and then die. It's a really, really common trope of fiction no matter what weapons are used.

 

[Jacob Lewis]

Good examples of movies with guns where the heroes clearly have a ridiculous number of hp are the Indiana Jones and Die Hard movies.

I hear today's actors receive a script and a character sheet for their roles, which tells them their level, abilities, and of course, how many hit points they have at the start of a scene.

Also, some directors stopped yelling "action!" or "cut!". Now they call for initiative and saving throws.

 

[Fanaelialae]

Now you're contorting yourselves just for the sake of argument.

Any "one hit kill" reality, where a gun doing 10% of your hit points is "mockery", is one where you need to look elsewhere than D&D. Yes, it really is that simple.

I think you're conflating gritty with Western. Yes, many Westerns are gritty, but you can have all varieties of Western. Blazing Saddles is a comedic Western, for example. Admittedly, I can't really point out a good example of a heroic Western, as I haven't watched a great many Westerns. Trigun could arguably suffice. It's been a long time since I watched it, but maybe Maverick?

While 5e can be modified to be grittier than its default, it isn't the grittiest game out there. However, as long as you're running a heroic Western, D&D is fine. I played in a Western themed D&D game (I admit guns did not exist, but if they had I'm certain it wouldn't have changed a thing) and it was a blast!

Perhaps gritty is the default assumed tone for a Western, but my point is that as long as one establishes that that's not the intended tone of the campaign, there's no issue.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

There where a whole bunch of heroic Western serials made for TV in the 50s, and for cinema serials before TV. See anything staring Alan Ladd for example.

The Lone Ranger is best remembered, and most recently remade badly.

 

[Fenris-77]

To call D&D or any game that uses HP "fundamentally flawed" is to expose a certain level of ignorance about game design and furthermore to impose personal taste on the public in the guise of critique. HPs do what they do, and reflect the nature of combat and damage exactly as the designers intended them to. If you personally don't like it, great, don't play. But don't pretend that your tastes in different damage systems somehow have a monopoly on what is 'correct' for RPGs generally.

 

[Sacrosanct]

Oh joy. I am gone for the weekend and come back to see my thread has turned into the same discussion about reality of bullet wounds vs melee weapons. Nice to see some people still trotting out the double standard no matter how many times in other threads it's pointed out how it's a double standard. And the same old myths keep getting repeated as well.

The idea that gunshots are exponentially more fatal than something like a sword or axe is a myth. People have this weird idea (I don't know why, maybe from movies where good guys take out all the bad guys with one shot and they immediately die) that a single gun shot should be fatal in most cases, and dismiss the game part of the equation because "reality". Well, the reality is that a single gun shot is rarely fatal. Even multiple gun shot wound victims don't have a fatality rate all that high. A recent study by the Boston PD over a 4 year period has the numbers as 27% of single gun shot victims died, and 65% of multiple gunshot victims died. In game terms, these are commoners, not PCs or heroes.

I did medivac for a bit when I was a Black Hawk crewchief in the Army, and we have something called the "golden hour". That means if we get the victim to a hospital within an hour, the chances of them surviving goes way up. If you have access to near instant magical healing in a game, the survival rate would be almost 100%. So this idea that guns need to be extremely lethal to be realistic is just wrong. It would make them less realistic by doing so.

Additionally, PCs are supposed to be representative of the heroes and the exceptional small % of the population. In real life, the equivalent would be people like Blackbeard, Rasputin, Audie Murphy, Simo Häyhä, Fazal Din, Lachhiman Gurung, Carton de Wiart, and about a thousand others. People who took severe punishment and kept on fighting.

So can we please, please stop with this "guns need to be way more lethal than swords or it's not realistic" nonsense? The mechanics of D&D are just fine for emulating a heroic wild west genre. To argue otherwise is to hold a double standard of lethality for swords vs guns, and to ironically ignore what you're claiming you need to have: reality

 

[Oofta]

To call D&D or any game that uses HP "fundamentally flawed" is to expose a certain level of ignorance about game design and furthermore to impose personal taste on the public in the guise of critique. HPs do what they do, and reflect the nature of combat and damage exactly as the designers intended them to. If you personally don't like it, great, don't play. But don't pretend that your tastes in different damage systems somehow have a monopoly on what is 'correct' for RPGs generally.

Instead of "fundamentally flawed" how about "fundamentally over-simplifies damage" or "fundamentally unrealistic". I'm perfectly okay with HP in whatever game I'm playing as long as it's appropriate. Games have to make all sorts of compromises for the sake of fun and ease of play.