D&D General "Hot" take: Aesthetically-pleasing rules are highly overvalued

[MichaelSomething]

A major reason aesthetic rules are valued highly is that they read well.

A good deal of the people who buy the books just read them and not play.

 

[Umbran]

A major reason aesthetic rules are valued highly is that they read well.

A good deal of the people who buy the books just read them and not play.

Perhaps, but I think those are secondary.

How easy is it to learn to play a game if the rules are impenetrable reading? If I can't wade through the reading, I cannot figure out how to play the game. Clarity, "reading well," is important to enable people to play!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

What @Umbran is saying goes back to something I said before, which is that, unless your D&D, you really don't have a lot of luxury in terms of complicated and time-consuming to understand or read rules. You better get to some pretty engaging content pretty fast, because people mostly don't want to read 300pp of 'stuff' so they can play your game.
Some other older games, besides D&D, have enough of a following, BRP, Traveler, a few others, to manage this, and a few are 'classics' with perhaps few players but whom are basically a core group that keep playing and keep the lights turned on. Other than that, you better get to the point and you better make it sweet, or your game will be dust inside of a couple years. I see a lot of pretty good games out there from the past, and you will hear them talked about now and then on EnWorld or RPGnet, or whatever, but the companies that released them are long gone. Heck, SJG barely even bothers with GURPS, and that was a pretty successful game. Yet the demand for it is so minimal that I doubt they ever make money on the few materials they do put out. I suspect they only do something now-and-then for it out of nostalgia and fan service. It is just way too many rules for people to bother with.

 

[Campbell]

Perhaps, but I think those are secondary.

How easy is it to learn to play a game if the rules are impenetrable reading? If I can't wade through the reading, I cannot figure out how to play the game. Clarity, "reading well," is important to enable people to play!

I think there is a fairly substantial difference between reads well in the sense of being instructive and clear sense and reads well in the sense of being either fun to think about or entertaining to read.

I think being evocative and pleasant to read can be important, but certainly less important than actual clarity.

 

[Lanefan]

Oh I see... I've never played with dynamic iniative like that, and I fear you need a very experienced DM to pull it off well. It's not something I expect newbies to seemlessly slip into without some mechanical aid.

It's really easy to do. All it takes is for players to keep track of their casting times. Re-rolling every round helps too, both to better simulate the random 'fog of war' aspect and to make it more difficult to predict when someone's going to act; but re-rolling does take longer than it should when using the d20-with-modifiers system that 3e-4e-5e has. (which is why I don't use that system)

The hard work for a 5e DM - going through all the spells and assigning casting times to each one - would be done up front; but it'd only have to be done once.

A corollary effect of re-rolling is that instead of things lasting until the start or end of someone's turn they instead last until a specific initiative count in the following round, regardless of turn order, and it's on the player to track this. Again, intentionally more random.

Then I guess you have a very rigid vision of what Magic should be used for or what it can do, or what a fight should look like. I mean, why is there spells like Burning Hand and Thunderwave and Acid Spray if it isn't possible to use magic in melee combat? To say nothing of a Paladin's smite style spells and other self buff. Some spells should be just as fast as swinging a weapon.

I see buffing as something done before combat rather than in it.

And some spells as written e.g. Burning Hands are made less useful if one can't cast in melee; I have no problem with this at all.

Some spells, mostly low-level ones, are quite fast. A few one-worders, even in my system, resolve at the same time they're cast (e.g. Command, any Power-Word spell, Featherfall).

In fact, why not do a little bit of reverse and apply the casting time concept to crossbows while we're at it? It takes time to prepare your shot. So in exchange for power you get a slight window of vulnerability compared to a bow that's instantaneous. So you'd have this clear dicothomy where 'acting at range' will usually take longer than 'acting in melee'.

With crossbows I've always assumed you shoot on your initiative and spend the rest of the round reloading. Then again, using a missile weapon in melee is also rather unadvisable: you don't have a shield and (in some editions) provoke a free attack for your melee foe(s).

 

[Umbran]

What @Umbran is saying goes back to something I said before, which is that, unless your D&D, you really don't have a lot of luxury in terms of complicated and time-consuming to understand or read rules.

Example: My copy of Fate Accelerated, in print, is 40 pages, 9" x 6". It is tiny.

We are using the system to play a game in the Space: 1889 setting, and having a blast. Perhaps literally, as we may be blowing up some crap next session.

 

[Lanefan]

Frankly, you make many good points, and this is another of the reasons I'm not REALLY enamoured of 'hodge-podge' systems like AD&D. Just take a gander at this insanity if you really want to see what 1e's combat system consists of (see attached monstrosity).

I'm not sure if anybody anywhere ever played completely true to that flowchart.

And they sure as hell didn't do it twice.

As you point out, MANY spells make absolutely no sense unless wizards and clerics can indeed engage in spell casting in close proximity to the enemy.

Close proximity can still mean standing behind a meat shield front-liner.

What this tells me is that, while Gygax might have initially built up this system where that was impossible, it was quickly abandoned by convention EVEN BY HIM, and the 'common default' of D&D reigned. The common default was that each side rolled initiative (after declaring actions) and then one side did its stuff, and then the other side did its stuff, pure and simple.

In your circle of gamers, perhaps. Not here... We've used individual initiatives since forever - each participant in the combat gets a separate initiative for each thing they're able to do in a round (thus for example if you're a Fighter with 2 attacks per round, each attack gets its own init.). We use (usually unmodified) d6s, and players just leave the dice on the board in front of them until the action represented by that dice has been dealt with. Simultaneity* is not only possible, it's ever-present: when 15 things are trying to happen in a 6-segment round, there's going to be overlap!

* - this bugs me immensely about 3e-4e-5e initiatives, that the strict turn order makes it so things can't happen at the same time.

No counting segments and WSF and any of that fantasmagorical silliness (playing with all those rules would be practically speaking, impossible). If one guy declared to cast a spell, and a bad guy declared to attack him, then assuming the attack was feasible, it was carried out against nothing but basic AC (not much for a wizard unless they had bracers, etc.). If you went to cast some really high level spell that takes a LONG time (and there are some that take several rounds) then you were probably asking for trouble. A quick Sleep, or one of the 'combat spells' like Burning Hands, well, you took SOME risk, but if you were playing that sort of wizard, maybe you better have a high DEX (we did adjust everyone's init die by their DEX, so some people could go first even if their side generally lost). Exact details of what any given DM was likely to include, or not include, was of course hard to say, but the pea soup of AD&D combat, where it isn't even clear that melee combatants HAVE a location on the map, is not even really a rule system. I rarely want to say much about "how it works" because it is really not possible.

IME, and this seems consistent with what others did from what I've read here, Weapon Speed and Weapon-vs-Armour-Type were not commonly used.

If PCs in your games were casting those multi-round high-level spells in the field you lot got to way higher levels than we ever have. That said, most multi-round spells aren't intended for combat use anyway - they're either divinations (e.g. Identify, Augury, etc.), curatives (e.g. Cure Disease), or special-use spells e.g. to banish a demon you've already got restrained.

A lot of spells take a full round to cast, but that's about the longest casting time we ever see in combat.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I think there can also be a difference between complex systems that are coherently put together (in the sense that everything derives from the same basic mechanical bases) and ones that special case you to death. Exception based design works better for some people in that it can be seen as having more richness and flavor, but its hell on people learning and remembering it.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Example: My copy of Fate Accelerated, in print, is 40 pages, 9" x 6". It is tiny.

We are using the system to play a game in the Space: 1889 setting, and having a blast. Perhaps literally, as we may be blowing up some crap next session.

I bought a copy of Space 1889 in a bargain bin someplace WAY back in the day, like 25 years ago (it kinda died hard as a product). Loved that game. It was a bit goofy, but the genre was great. We ended up grafting Traveler rules to it, which made it play a lot better, lol. I can see using FATE.
Sounds like a lot of fun! Remember, the Moons of Jupiter are quite hazardous! LOL. And always shoot first when encountering Red Martians...

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I'm not sure if anybody anywhere ever played completely true to that flowchart.

And they sure as hell didn't do it twice.

Close proximity can still mean standing behind a meat shield front-liner.

In your circle of gamers, perhaps. Not here... We've used individual initiatives since forever - each participant in the combat gets a separate initiative for each thing they're able to do in a round (thus for example if you're a Fighter with 2 attacks per round, each attack gets its own init.). We use (usually unmodified) d6s, and players just leave the dice on the board in front of them until the action represented by that dice has been dealt with. Simultaneity* is not only possible, it's ever-present: when 15 things are trying to happen in a 6-segment round, there's going to be overlap!

* - this bugs me immensely about 3e-4e-5e initiatives, that the strict turn order makes it so things can't happen at the same time.

IME, and this seems consistent with what others did from what I've read here, Weapon Speed and Weapon-vs-Armour-Type were not commonly used.

If PCs in your games were casting those multi-round high-level spells in the field you lot got to way higher levels than we ever have. That said, most multi-round spells aren't intended for combat use anyway - they're either divinations (e.g. Identify, Augury, etc.), curatives (e.g. Cure Disease), or special-use spells e.g. to banish a demon you've already got restrained.

A lot of spells take a full round to cast, but that's about the longest casting time we ever see in combat.

Even using our fairly streamlined version of 1e combat fights could still take a LONG time to resolve. Like when you got into the 12-14th level range it would be HARD to end any non-trivial fight in under 2 hours. Admittedly if you only play at say 1st to 6th levels, things will often go quick, until you get someone doing some fancy tactics. If we had to deal with multiple initiatives per fighter, etc. as you're outlining? Ick!
Yes, it is true that d20-ish combat doesn't really have 'simultaneous actions' (except interrupts in the case of 4e). Still, you can hold your turn and inject actions anywhere in the sequence. I don't think rerolling is a BAD idea, but OTOH I always wanted initiative to reflect something. Like can you get inside the other guy's decision loop? That is the military science definition of initiative, and it is interesting. Not sure how to implement that in an RPG though. It would either be complicated, or subjective...