WotC WotC needs an Elon Musk

[Micah Sweet]

It doesn't really, not if you start thinking about it. Poisons in real life are incapacitating, if you are poisoned with enough of a dose to affect your performance you are not going to be dancing about sword fighting. Gary was absolutely correct in that one, they are save or suck and you die with out pretty specific treatments or you just die outright with out some immediate and particular intervention.
However, none of that is much fun in a game sense, so WoTC replaced those effects with hit point damage and the poisoned condition.
Hit points are a gamest structure to make fights fun. It is a form of plot protection.

I mean, what is Armor Class? In the real world you are not harder to hit if you are wearing full plate as against stark naked. You are about the same difficulty to hit but the hit is vastly less likely to do damage if you are armoured.
There is a one to one correspondence between a defence value against an enemy attack roll for a wargame unit and AC vs the hit roll in D&D as there is a one to one correspondence between figures lost from the unit (in a minis battle) and hit points.

DR makes far more sense than AC, that is true.

 

[Gradine]

Serious talk, but as much as Star Wars D20 was derided, and rightfully so, VP/WP and Class Defense vs Armor DR was a far more satisfying system than traditional D&D has ever done with HP/AC. But sacred cows and slaying thereof, etc. etc.

 

[Cordwainer Fish]

Physics 101/102 is taught without assuming the student knows calculus (because they are typically taking Calculus 101/102 in that same semester).

Where I went, there were at least three first year physics tracks taught by the School of Physics and Astronomy: the one for BA students looking for core curriculum, which probably got lots of students taking it alongside remedial algebra; the one for most BS students, and finally the one for physics and astrophysics students, which assumed you had two semesters of calculus in high school.
(Probably the College of Engineering had its own class, which never taught calculus as math but rather as "here's how you use that section of the CRC Tables".)

 

[Ulorian - Agent of Chaos]

Serious talk, but as much as Star Wars D20 was derided, and rightfully so, VP/WP and Class Defense vs Armor DR was a far more satisfying system than traditional D&D has ever done with HP/AC. But sacred cows and slaying thereof, etc. etc.

There you go. Serious talk instead of passive aggressive posts and emojis... much better.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

DR makes far more sense than AC, that is true.

Yup but that ship sailed almost 50 year ago and here we are. We have, to varying extents internalised a lot of weirdness to make D&D work narratively and I am willing to bet that on close examination very little of it matches up. I am content to let those dogs lie where they are.

 

[Ulorian - Agent of Chaos]

Yup but that ship sailed almost 50 year ago and here we are. We have, to varying extents internalised a lot of weirdness to make D&D work narratively and I am willing to bet that on close examination very little of it matches up. I am content to let those dogs lie where they are.

Yeah... you have to dance with the girl you brung. I've always been happy to internalise the oddities that @Micah Sweet has brought up for example. It would be nice if that didn't have to be the case...

 

[cbwjm]

I don't know if bloodied meant physical injury necessarily.

I have a vague memory of 4e mentioning somewhere that your bloodied value was when you actually started to show injury, hence the term bloodied, but you'd need to look it up to be certain. Might have even been mentioned in the old dnd podcast.

 

[Cadence]

Yup but that ship sailed almost 50 year ago and here we are. We have, to varying extents internalised a lot of weirdness to make D&D work narratively and I am willing to bet that on close examination very little of it matches up. I am content to let those dogs lie where they are.

Wait, wait, was that a call to the past about D&D a long time ago!?! Does that mean it's time to bring out quotes from the OG sources?

No? Darn it. Too late.

;-)

 

[Azzy]

I'm not so sure about that. If done well and in enough detail, a worldbuilding guide would guide new players/DMs through the whole process while still containing useful information for even the most experienced world designers.

Oh, sure. I do think that a book aimed at beginners could potentially be useful to experienced players—there's bound to be information that we didn't think of or material and tools for designing worlds that could also be useful or save time. I'd probably buy such a book, myself. However, I think a book on the subject needs to focus on and cater to those who are new to world building—those who haven't built up the tools and experiences of over a decade. DMs new to world building are going to need more hand-holding, guidance, and examples so there's going to be—out of necessity—quite a bit of material that experienced world builders like you and I are probably going to find superfluous and tedious . IMO, 5e D&D needs more products to guide and on-ramp inexperienced DMs into the various different aspects of their role—the starter sets and DMG just don't cut it in this regard. And that's an absolute shame.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Yup but that ship sailed almost 50 year ago and here we are. We have, to varying extents internalised a lot of weirdness to make D&D work narratively and I am willing to bet that on close examination very little of it matches up. I am content to let those dogs lie where they are.

And that is your right. But I want a system that makes more sense to me, so I'm going to keep fiddling around until I find something I like.