D&D General Let's list/complain about things we don't like

[Alzrius]

Another thing which annoys me: when the fiction in D&D-media doesn't match the mechanics. Yes, I know you were impressed by Doric's wildshaping in Honor Among Thieves, but your druid character is still going to have to abide by the limits in the rulebooks.

Seriously, I get that different media has different requirements from tabletop play in terms of being entertaining, but if you can't find a way to make the fiction agree with the rules, then I reserve my right to be cynical about the end result.

 

[Pedantic]

Another thing which annoys me: when the fiction in D&D-media doesn't match the mechanics. Yes, I know you were impressed by Doric's wildshaping in Honor Among Thieves, but your druid character is still going to have to abide by the limits in the rulebooks.

Seriously, I get that different media has different requirements from tabletop play in terms of being entertaining, but if you can't find a way to make the fiction agree with the rules, then I reserve my right to be cynical about the end result.

To be fair, I would be totally cool if we went the other way and shifted some hoary mechanics to match more modern fiction. Druids that shapeshift a lot more and cast a lot less spells would be fine.

 

[Micah Sweet]

To be fair, I would be totally cool if we went the other way and shifted some hoary mechanics to match more modern fiction. Druids that shapeshift a lot more and cast a lot less spells would be fine.

I actually think that concept would be great as its own class.

 

[Queer Venger]

whoring & pimping are no longer listed as viable NPC or PC professions.
Really disappointed in that.

...and still waiting for a new animated D&D cartoon.

 

[Alzrius]

I actually think that concept would be great as its own class.

I don't disagree, but every time someone mentions that I get flashbacks to how badly Paizo bungled the PF1 shifter class. It was quite a time to be on their messageboards...

 

[Distracted DM]

I'm still not over Drow as pcs. Also their seeming ubiquity. Drow should be scary monsters known only in legends and spoken of only in whispers.

I did this with gnomes. They're terrible creatures that live underground inside mushrooms, crawl out from under your bed to eat your toes and steal your gold. They love gold.

Gnomes are not a PC option in my games

 

[Thomas Shey]

I was there when monsters used the same rules as players. When you had to account for their math with feats (which were forgotten or had to be looked up) and crappy +1 items to make their math work. I am absolutely ok with NPCs working on their own math if it means never having to make dozens of PC level monsters again...

Yeah, I'm not a big fan of treating NPCs/monsters as mechanically different from PCs either, but at least after running moderate high level D&D 3e I understand it. I just will claim its at least partly an artifact of other elements of D&D that its necessary, since I know other games that don't need to do that.

 

[Thomas Shey]

To torture that analogy further, if my whole business is tightening different pipes with a monkey wrench, I'm not going to care that someone wishes I was doing carpentry.

You can't accuse someone of misusing a wrench as a hammer when at no point do they ever have any nails in need of pounding.

But your argument was about using the D&D structure as a universal system. If you're doing that, you're absolutely going to have nails in need of pounding at some point.

 

[Thomas Shey]

That's such a solvable problem, and more an issue of feat design than anything else. Creating a simple set of feats by role for monsters/NPCs would have dealt with most of it. Plus we live in a modern age of digital tools.

It wasn't just feats the moment you had spellcasting opponents though. A big issue was simply that the number of moving parts you'd find on a PC that was the only thing one human was running was too difficult to keep track of if you were running a half dozen of them, and no automation short of an AI assistant GM with decision making capability was going to help there.

 

[R_J_K75]

I love Kender.

I played a Kender once...Wavy Gravy...He died by Ethereal Vortex