D&D General Things That Bug You

[TwoSix]

I just think it is more interesting and improves my sense of verisimilitude if it is a real thing.

I'll be honest, if time travelling courier imps that Amazon Prime wolves to you damages your verisimilitude more than "summoning spirits from the spirit plane", we're working from very different bases of fantasy tropes.

 

[embee]

"Magic Items for Sale" has always bugged me. The thought of walking down to the nearest market and grabbing a 12-pack of healing potions and a flaming sword off the rack will always stick in my craw. That's something I've come to expect from video games and kid-lit like Harry Potter, but I never liked it in my TTRPGs.

Making it worse, the Zhentarim have blocked any and all attempts at rational magic weapon legislation. Any schmuck with 500gp can just stroll into any magic shoppe and buy a +1 longsword without anyone checking to make sure that he isn't just some murderhobo.

 

[fearsomepirate]

In non-4E versions of the game, it's bizarre how luck is vastly more important than skill. Even a 20th level thief rogue with expertise your roll on the d20 is still more important than your actual skill.

I get what you're saying, but if you're a 20th-level rogue with expertise in a skill for which you have +5 from the relevant ability, your minimum possible roll is 27. You're basically never failing that roll.

 

[Reynard]

I'll be honest, if time travelling courier imps that Amazon Prime wolves to you damages your verisimilitude more than "summoning spirits from the spirit plane", we're working from very different bases of fantasy tropes.

I don't actually use the time traveling Amazon Prime imps -- although I may now -- I just use actual creatures.

Now, there are some potential interesting aspects of these formless spirits that take on shapes based on the will of the caster, and they might introduce some cool bits of world building if extrapolated. If we start asking questions like "are they sentient" and "where are they from" and "how does the magic force them to take form" and "who (divinely speaking) do they belong to" the situation gets a lot more intriguing.

But I also like Just Wolves Sucked in From The Woods.

 

[Greg K]

One since the advent of 3E: turning the thief/rogue into the cuisinart of the group. I mean, why?

Yeah, I prefer the backstabby thief and the light armored armored swordsman (Bard Games in their Compleat Adventurer supplement for AD&D was correct in recognizing that the latter is its own archetype and deserving its own class).

 

[Lanefan]

I think it's mostly to explain how you can summon a wolf in a dungeon, in a tower, on an airship, etc without it breaking what little sense of "realism" or verisimilitude there is in D&D. If it weren't for that spirit rule, you'd see endless arguments about how long it would take the nearest wolf to respond to a summon spell outside their natural habitat.

So in those environments maybe you just can't summon a wolf (though in a dungeon or a tower one could argue you've pulled it in from the surrounding/overlying environment). In an airship maybe you can't summon anything other than birds.

That said, I've always seen summoning spells as teleporting the summonnees to the caster and - if they don't die in the meantime - putting them back afterwards. For simple monster summoning, I've also never had it that the caster has any choice in what appears; I very much prefer the randomness of 1e where you get a variable number of a random-from-a-table monster.

 

[Dausuul]

I'll be honest, if time travelling courier imps that Amazon Prime wolves to you damages your verisimilitude more than "summoning spirits from the spirit plane", we're working from very different bases of fantasy tropes.

I kind of agree with both of you. I don't like that druids summon forth spirits in wolf-shape instead of actual wolves; but it would not make things better to have actual wolves pop out of nowhere. The problem is druids using the "instant summons" model in the first place.

I would rather have druids use a spell that sends out a call, and nearby animals come to your aid. So you cast the spell, and then after some amount of time (10 minutes, say), a bunch of animals arrive. You can't just conjure the animals mid-combat. On the other hand, once they do show up, they don't disappear if you get whacked on the head.

 

[Greg K]

In 5E, it really irks me that all of the summoning spells are described as calling form some spirit that then takes the form of the whatever-you-summoned. That is just DUMB. Why not summon the actual thing? It's magic? If I summon wolves -- I literally drag wolves from someplace in the woods to serve me for a short time and send the survivors back.

Yeah this bugs me and is, in part, to which I was referring when I stated my dislike for WOTC D&D fantasy

 

[Haffrung]

The traditional six attributes are poorly conceived and continue to present design challenges and weird inconsistencies.

The difference between intelligence and wisdom is unintuitive.

Wisdom is a weird thing to have in an RPG in the first place. Functionally, it doesn’t know if it wants to be willpower or perception, and those are two fundamentally different things. You wind up with the bizarre meta where clerics make the best scouts and guards, where perception is a skill you learn (rather than innate), and where willpower is somehow related to how spiritually attuned you are.

Wisdom should not be an attribute.

Charisma should not be an attribute.

Willpower should be an attribute.

Perception should be an attribute.

 

[ART!]

It's a little thing, but I find it annoying that each race write-up lists movement, rather than just mentioning when that race has a movement other than 30.