D&D General Why the resistance to D&D being a game?

[Vaalingrade]

Wait, no. I have the solution to solve all this: Delete the Human from D&D.

Now no one can pretend it's Mundane(ish) Earth.

 

[Manbearcat]

Why again are we trying to kill the dragons (or even lions) 1v1 with bare hands instead of with a party using cool magic stuff?.

(But please, yes, for the dragons, don't make the fighters as burny as they would be in our world!!)

There is no “what we’re trying to do” here. The conversation, as best as I can see, is about how some mechanics, Fighter ones, create a “realism mismatch.”

Yet we have a core one that is ignored; D&D Fighters trivially rolling over lion after lion because levels and HPs and class features. Equipment and party aren’t deciders here. It’s basic Fighter 101. Yet, those same Fighters are magically (?) at parity with earth humans in relevant measurable physical indices. It defies any kind of internal causality litmus test one can fathom, but it gets a pass while we haggle over Damage on a Miss, Come and Get It, and Inspirational Healing.

This isn’t on “us.” This isn’t “what we do.”Core D&D does this. Yet it mysteriously gets a pass (while we, for some unknown reason, focus on other things).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Hang on, so does that mean it's a reasonable criticism of D&D that it allows humans to generate energy from their fingertips completely unrealistically - after all, I've decided (quite reasonably) that there's no such thing as magic, and hence Magic Missile must be describing some process of the sort that physicists study?

What is this difference between a PC ability and a player ability? Where does the D&D rulebook explain what it is.

Here's Gygax on saving throw - so pretty core to the D&D tradition, I'd say (AD&D DMG pp 80-81):

Someone once sharply criticized the concept of the saving throw as ridiculous. Could a man chained to a rock, they asked, save himself from the blast of a red dragon's breath? Why not?, I replied. If you accept fire-breathing dragons, why doubt the chance to reduce the damage sustained from such a creature's attack? Imagine that the figure, at the last moment, of course, manages to drop beneath the licking flames, or finds a crevice in which to shield his or her body, or succeeds in finding a way to be free of the fetters. Why not? The mechanics of combat or the details of the injury caused by some horrible weapon are not the key to heroic fantasy and adventure games. It is the character, how he or she becomes involved in the combat, how he or she somehow escapes - or fails to escape - the mortal threat which is important to the enjoyment and longevity of the game.​

Is he describing a PC ability or a player ability?

Maybe more interestingly, is he advocating for an 'intent based' or 'outcome based' process here where you roll your save and if you succeed you broke the chains, evinced superhuman strength and tossed the rock, said a prayer to Vulcan and got fire immunity for one round. I mean, what exactly HAPPENED there? And is Gygax proposing that it become part of the fiction? If so then he's proposing, in part, a rather radically different sort of game! I mean, you might then ask, is he also proposing that when a fighter starts beating the crud out of a 40' long 8 ton fire-breathing ancient huge red dragon that the explanation for that is magic? I think it would be hard to argue it is otherwise. Certainly the explanation he gives for hit points is also consistent with this.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Ok, so I've lost a thread (mental, not ENWorld one) somewhere.

I know why group A doesn't want super-buffed fighters unless they're supernatural somehow.

And I know that group B wants fighters to be just as gonzo as the wizards.

I've forgotten why either group cares if there is no decent mundane fighter option, and all the good ones are supernatural somehow.

Anyone care to say if they are A or B and if they hate the balanced-with-wizards /gonzo fighters needing to pick a power source like demi-god, ancient mystic heritage, secret inner power source, dipped in Styx, blessed by the gods, etc ..?

I just cannot find a way to rationalize any fighter (or whatever) that fits within the known limits of what is mundane, even at the extremes of human performance, beyond maybe 3rd level, tops (In AD&D, even 1st level 5e characters are borderline gonzo before we even add any explicit magic). So, unless you are wanting to play a completely different game from what D&D is designed to deliver, mundane is plain out the window!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Aftermath is, in some respects, not all that realistic, and I just want to (pro-forma) note your characterization of it does not fit my experience. I thought it was a pretty fine game given what it was trying to cover.

I'd say it is about as close to a realistic RPG as has ever existed and is still (semi) playable. Perhaps you have another suggestion along those lines, I wasn't really concerned with the exact game so much. It was at least an attempt at a game portraying 'mundane humans' in something that purports to be the real world.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

"A sufficiently powerful level of skillfulness is indistinguishable from magic." ?

Right, but now we are all just nitpicking because THIS IS THE DEFINITION OF MAGICAL in my book! Anything that is not natural is SUPERNATURAL and that's 'magic'. Its not indistinguishable from anything, it IS that thing. Skillfulness cannot defend you against the foot stomp of a 10 ton african bull elephant. It just can't. Maybe you can dodge that, but you cannot survive it. You surely can't survive being mauled by a lion or a bear, except by sheer luck. Anyone who's 'skill level' is high enough to beat these 4-5HD animals, is supernatural. Period.

 

[Micah Sweet]

There is no “what we’re trying to do” here. The conversation, as best as I can see, is about how some mechanics, Fighter ones, create a “realism mismatch.”

Yet we have a core one that is ignored; D&D Fighters trivially rolling over lion after lion because levels and HPs and class features. Equipment and party aren’t deciders here. It’s basic Fighter 101. Yet, those same Fighters are magically (?) at parity with earth humans in relevant measurable physical indices. It defies any kind of internal causality litmus test one can fathom, but it gets a pass while we haggle over Damage on a Miss, Come and Get It, and Inspirational Healing.

This isn’t on “us.” This isn’t “what we do.”Core D&D does this. Yet it mysteriously gets a pass (while we, for some unknown reason, focus on other things).

All three of those things are 4e-isms, not representative of all of D&D.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I just cannot find a way to rationalize any fighter (or whatever) that fits within the known limits of what is mundane, even at the extremes of human performance, beyond maybe 3rd level, tops (In AD&D, even 1st level 5e characters are borderline gonzo before we even add any explicit magic). So, unless you are wanting to play a completely different game from what D&D is designed to deliver, mundane is plain out the window!

You are welcome to believe that.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

You are welcome to believe that.

No, it is not arguable! Sorry. The only way you can argue things like this is to utterly tromp any sort of verisimilitude utterly into the dirt. Which is exactly the problem with the whole line of argument! You want to have your cake and eat it too, and you cannot. And that in a nutshell is why I won't play that way.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Right, but now we are all just nitpicking because THIS IS THE DEFINITION OF MAGICAL in my book! Anything that is not natural is SUPERNATURAL and that's 'magic'.

Nope.

Magic can be supernatural, but not everything supernatural is magic.

This is the problem we keep coming to because people think anything fantastic MUST be magical and it doesn't.