D&D (2024) Rules that annoy you

[Vaalingrade]

Remember, there's no way for a level 1 character to realistically sprint as fast as a real world human can.

Real world humans are bizarre, chaotic monsters that break my immersion.

Just look at those weird superheroes in the Olympics!

 

[GobHag]

But is it realistic in a pseudo-medieval context? Would a medieval-era chirurgeon have been able to stabilize a dying person in under 6 seconds? Regardless of era, is it realistic for the person doing the stabilizing to be able to do it without any medical equipment and regardless of why the person is dying?

Like, how do you save someone who's been poisoned without some sort of antitoxin? How do you save someone who's suffered third-degree burns with nothing but your bare hands? How do you save someone who's been melted by acid without any form of medical equipment? How do you save someone who's been frozen without a thermal blanket at the very least?

My issue with the rules isn't just the time span but the fact that, in 5e at least, you can stop someone from dying, regardless of what put them in that state, without needing to actually do anything within the fiction of the game. A flat DC 10 Medicine check is all that's needed. It's a 100% gamist mechanic with no simulationist backing whatsoever.

The more I think about this issue, the more I'm inclined to house rule non-magical healing. Currently in 5e, you can either make a DC 10 Medicine check to stabilize a dying creature or do so automatically by spending one use of a healer's kit (or by casting spare the dying). I might combine the two - so you need to expend one use of a healer's kit and make a DC 10 Medicine check. I wonder if it should also be like Concentration and be DC 10 or half the damage taken, whichever is higher. So someone who's taken massive damage would be harder to stabilize. But then the harder you make non-magical stabilization, the more players will just gravitate towards magical healing instead. Something to discuss with my players, I think.

For the entire first paragraph; yes to every single one of those questions.

Sure nerf Medicine, it's already a useless skill generally anyways.

 

[Stalker0]

Let me add that I also hate the current six saves format. I mean, ok, most of these make sense- strong characters are harder to push around, agile characters can dodge attacks, things that affect your body use Con, great.

Int saves are head scratchers to me sometime, but what really takes the cake are Charisma saves.

If Charisma let you weasel out of thinks like charm or suggestion, that might make sense, but what in the heck does Charisma have to do with being banished from this plane of existence? It literally feels like Charisma is for saves that literally don't make sense for anything else!

Charisma is the “soul stat”, it actually provides your souls resistance to being moved. That’s why it’s used against possession or magic jar or banishment.

 

[Xeviat]

Charisma is the “soul stat”, it actually provides your souls resistance to being moved. That’s why it’s used against possession or magic jar

It should resist charms and compulsions too. Then the 6 saves would get used a little more evenly.

 

[mamba]

Well, they replied to it and had no problems with it being 1st level characters.

they said nothing whatsoever about 1st level in the reply

Perhaps let them talk for themselves as opposed to you guessing (incorrectly) what their intentions were and then trying to correct someone else based on things that only existed in your head.

I did not stop anyone from talking and they did not confirm the first level part, they simply ignored it

 

[Blue]

they said nothing whatsoever about 1st level in the reply

Exactly - they had no problem with it.

I did not stop anyone from talking and they did not confirm the first level part, they simply ignored it

I never said you stopped anyone from talking, so that's irrelevant. I said you guessed wrongly that they weren't talking about 1st level and then rudely tried to correct me on what you imagined someone else's intent was.

Basically, you are creating drama in a conversation between other people that doesn't actually exist between them. And now you're again going with what you have made up in your head -- that any part of this was stopping someone from talking -- and addressing that strawman.

You are not adding anything constructive, there is no reason to continue this.

 

[pukunui]

For the entire first paragraph; yes to every single one of those questions.

Please elaborate. I am most interested to know how.

 

[Willie the Duck]

Regarding 6 seconds (in all the contexts) -- I don't know if it was the 120' move per 10 minute adventuring turn, or that speeds/ranges got cut in 3 when moving indoors, or maybe it was the AD&D 2e longwinded justification for why a combat round was a minute long. Either way, somewhere in the TSR era I figured out that time and distances (short of overland travel rates) were not taken all that seriously or at least favored game convenience over specific realism.

For that reason, I always considered a combat round to be 'the time it takes to a meaningful combat exchange or do something outcome-relevant' and treated that as a situational, unfixed, amount. Certainly knife-fights in tunnels under castles are going to be more fast and furious than mobile skirmishes and wildly faster than cautious formation fights or two entrenched groups behind cover trading potshots as the other sticks their nose out, etc. (yet they probably can all be represented by round-by-round combat).

So do I think some things noted as taking 6 seconds in WotC-era D&D are unrealistically fast? Yes, same as I thought some taking 60 or 600 seconds in TSR-era D&D was unrealistically slow. Usually it doesn't bother me. Honestly, I'm more focused on whether one should be able to do something in combat at all than a specific speed. Like, do we even need to be picking locks in combat? Was that something they thought they needed to give rogues (and did they think it was a major benefit to said rogues)?

as if these titles make any sense, add them to the annoying pile

Hero and Superhero made a lot of sense in Chainmail when it took 4/8 normal soldiers successfully hitting one of them on the same turn for them to drop.

Yeah, all of the golems are kind of weird. Clay golems not only have the power to reduce your max hp with a punch (Mike Mearls once told me it was because of "crippling force"), but they can also magically speed themselves up! Why? Who knows?!
Stone golems can slow people down. Why? This one at least gets an explanation: "Creatures that fight a stone golem can feel the ebb and flow of time slow down around them, almost as though they were made of stone themselves."
Iron golems can breathe poisonous fumes. Why? Who knows?!
I'm sure once upon a time, these abilities had in-game explanations, but you'd have to delve into past editions to find out what they were, since 5e's authors didn't seem to care to tell us.

Iron golems are probably an allusion to Talos, the giant metal* man who guarded the island of Crete in the Jason and the Argonauts myth (and more importantly for early D&D, the 1963 film with classic Ray Harryhausen stop-motion special affects). Talos in the movie didn't breath gas, it was filled with boiling ichor.
*in an iron-age Greece's telling of bronze-age Greece, making his actual composition realism/verisimilitude debate that predates D&D by over 2 millennia.

Them having a breath weapon fit well with flesh golems crashing through wooden structures and being healed by lightning -- undoubtedly Boris Karloff Frankenstein ('s monster) references. Stone golems getting slow effects... I suspect was just making sure each got their own special ability.

Here's another thing that has annoyed me for multiple editions now: the fact that D&D's combat rules always make dealing damage the most optimal choice. Combat will continue to be a boring, repetitive slog as long as players continue to view doing something other than an attack as a waste of their turn. Some editions have tried harder than others to give players interesting options along with dealing damage, but that hasn't always been received well.

I'd say 3e did a pretty good job of making just dealing damage to be the least optimal choice.* Yes, you usually have to eventually do damage and drop the other side to 0 hp to win the day, but it was the SoD/SoS/battlefield control that actually carried the day.*
*Certainly at certain levels and contexts.

Regardless, at a fundamental level, you are correct. Early D&D treated the decision to fight (/keep fighting) to be the fundamentally interesting decision-point of the combat game (with, for the tactically minded, a side-order of arranging to enter the fight with optimal advantage). Spells, magic items, and monster entry special abilities have always been confounding factors, but in general it held true.

Thing is, those spells are pretty big confounding factors. I've been playing bladelock/fighter-bladelocks for 10 years, and while attacking to do damage is still a major part of what they do, spending a round (or action surge) to cast blindness/fear/hold person/hypnotic pattern is almost always part of the combat routine.

I think the place where your criticism holds true is for characters that want to do so with characters themed as wholly non-magical. And there, yeah, they tried a few times with 4e and late 3e (and even early 3e if you count adding in a bunch of feat-gated maneuvers and tanglefoot bags and other stuff), but it hasn't exactly hit universal acclaim. Mind you, interesting combat isn't a universal goal, and short combats seems to be another goal that lots of other people have (and the two, while not inherently opposed, have the capacity to negatively impact each other).

 

[James Gasik]

Charisma is the “soul stat”, it actually provides your souls resistance to being moved. That’s why it’s used against possession or magic jar

A powerful soul makes people convincing? But what about gingers, lawyers, and politicians?

 

[Lanefan]

The other one that annoys me is in monster statblocks when they write out "Recharges after a Short Rest or a Long Rest". Just write "1/Rest" and be done with it!

Or "Recharges after any Rest"?