aye, i dont mean to say its a dnd specific failing. More that it would be fun if encounters with monsters were more realistic and dangerous. no one is scared about fighting a couple hill giants if your over lvl3. Well, the 20 foot tall guys should be able to rip you in half as an action, regardless of their cr.
No, DnD should admit that you haven't really hit anything. HP and AC are an abstraction, the PC is not really getting hit. D&D tries to have it both ways, but it doesn't really work. It can still be fun though!
Not really, it is kinda physics and biomechanics. I mean we can do whatever we want, it is fantasy, but a 30 ft tall human would not even be able to walk let alone move 400 ft in 6 seconds. Now, for my fantasy game I do increase giants move rate (I have their base at 50 ft)
No the conceit of D&D is that you are not really hit and taking much physical damage when your HP goes down. Your really only hit hard when you get to 0 HP. Now we have to health tracks in our game so you can actually get hit, but that is for another time!
Its less "expect" and more "hope". It's not that they don't do a good enough job with large creatures, its that they don't really even try to have it make sense, even if you assuredly ignore the square-cube law. I'd love it if more game designers didn't just leap off the diving board into "who cares about logic? Rule of Cool, suckers!" territory past a certain point.
Perhaps the books should be more clear about the, "a hit probably isn't a hit" thing. Changing the nomenclature would help.
I mean, to put my cards on the table, I've long-wanted a fantasy RPG that treated oversized creatures as more like the truly terrifying opponents they should be, requiring special tactics and weapons to defeat, but that RPG simply does not exist, AFAICT. I definitely don't expect D&D to go that way at this point, though I wouldn't have minded if they took a few lessons from Dragon's Dogma.
A nod to what dealing with such things would actually be like, is all I ask.
I don't disagree. We see critical hits and if you are at 0 HP as the only true significant hits in our 5e. We also have bloodied HP for when you do actually strike your target significantly. We haven't changed it in our games yet, but at planning to use PF2 criticals for our next campaign for this reason.
I'm pretty sure you can, actually. Some adherence to reality is better than none.
What I was thinking was D&D could have some rules, really simple ones, where, if you were actually able to climb or hang-on-to a larger creature, or otherwise attack something more vulnerable than its feet (flying, using ranged weapons, etc.), you should probably do extra damage (whilst potentially being hard to attack yourself) - or maybe it should resist damage unless you do, whatever feels best gameplay-wise. And like, some weapons - big ones - should be "anti-large" and do like, double-base-weapon-dice against size L or above creatures (or maybe size H and above), which 1E/2E sorta kinda sorta did but not in a very well-conceived way.
