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

[jasper]

Elfs trance equal 8 hours of sleep. Get rid of trance.
Dex not affecting heavy armour.
Having to do accounting for some material components
People who create these threads
People who response to these threads.

 

[Maxperson]

Luckily, all my comments come with a money-back guarantee!

Fine. I want my $0 back, and I'm charging 100% interest daily.

 

[77IM]

Rats should have a climb speed. A rat and a squirrel are basically the same creature (except the squirrel has fashion sense), and we've all seen a squirrel scamper up a tree. Rats are just as adept at scampering, and are certainly more adept than cats, which do have a climb speed. I think this omission must have just been an oversight by someone unfamiliar with rats.

Do you remember the thread about the keelboat and how it made no sense and the designers were probably confusing the riverboat definition with the small sailboat definition? Ugh. The "sailing ship" is a similar problem, as that stat block is apparently meant to cover a vast array of vessels, some of which have substantial differences (substantial = actually matter in game play). It would be like having a single weapon called "sword" and expecting it to cover everything from a dagger up through a zweihänder. This seems like something that a couple of hours on wikipedia could have solved, easily.

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.

 

[jgsugden]

...4. How does Darkvision even work? If there's no light, how do they see at all? This is why I house-rule that all creatures with Darkvision have infravision and infrared bioluminescence...

My house rule for this - Creatures with darkvision emit a special kind of light that only they can see. It comes from their eyes and is absorbed back by the eyes. A creature with darkvision can't see the darkvision 'light' of another creature, but there are (homebrew) spells that allow a spellcaster to see the 'cones' of light emited by a creature with darkvision.

As for my pedantics - none. Because - magic.

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[Charlaquin]

3. Studded Leather Armor. What do the studs even do?

They secure small overlapping metal plates to the inside of the leather (or more often heavy cloth) garment. “Studded Leather” is just one among many examples of Victorian scholars misinterpreting depictions of armor in medieval artwork.

What do the studs do?! You are a simple soul aren't you? The studs look COOL. And adding shiny metal accents to your black leather is what any righteous EMO elf ranger needs, right up there with eye shadow and a tortured back story. What do the studs do, honestly...

Studs aren’t emo, they’re punk. Some forms of goth fashion also employ them, unsurprisingly as goth is an offshoot of punk. Emo is also an offshoot of punk, but studded leather was never really part of emo fashion, except in belts, and even that was mostly a result of burgeoning alt kids getting what ever random accessories from Hot Topic we thought were most likely to make the adults in our lives uncomfortable.

 

[Celebrim]

Studded armor exists.
The system refers to mail as 'chainmail', and plate as 'platemail'.
What's called a bastard sword by the system is actually a longsword.
What's called a longsword by the system is actually an arming sword.
Guns are almost always exotic hard to use weapons rather than simple ones.
3e allowed combatants to leave melee with a 5' step without penalty, which violated the spirit of the rule and almost wrecked the entire edition all on its own.
Druids, Rangers, Paladins, and Barbarians are specific builds of an archetype, not an archetype in and of themselves.
People think psionics aren't magic.
Environmental systems for things like heat exhaustion almost always have non-transferable granularity that make them impractical in play. (Can't be converted easily between say hours and days, resulting in bundles of unnecessary dice rolls. Sometimes they even give granularity in 10 or 1 minute intervals, which is fine unless you want to roll 6 or 60 times an hour.)

 

[Garthanos]

My pedantic complaints are really old and while I can express them I am over the majority of them...

 

[Charlaquin]

The system refers to mail as 'chainmail', and plate as 'platemail'.
What's called a bastard sword by the system is actually a longsword.
What's called a longsword by the system is actually an arming sword.

These have actually been fixed in 5e. Well, it still calls mail “chainmail” but at least the term is just redundant instead of inaccurate. “Platemail” is just plate now, the bastard sword and long sword were appropriately combined into a single weapon called the longsword that can be used in one or two hands. They should call the shortsword an arming sword though.

 

[Blue]

The impossibility of "he and I move while staying together" in combat. Taking out the delay action just made some simple concepts impossible.

How the skill system enforces certain divisions. For instance, mechanically I can't model a character who is good at interacting with high society, from gossip to blackmail to formal dancing to heraldry, but are lousy at the same times of interactions on the streets, in the military, in gnomish culture, or whatever. If I'm stealthy I'm just as good at it while sneaking through a forest or a back ally - sure there's overlap, but practical skills are different. Same for Survival on an arctic mountain or sand-blasted desert plane.

Why the target rolls for some things affecting someone, and the defender rolls for others. Either make it always one or the other, or switch it to something like players always roll.