D&D 5E 2024 D&D is 2014 D&D with 4E sprinkled on top

[Micah Sweet]

Yes. Any time you narrate an action based on the dice, you are making something up. If a PC has an 18 AC and the enemy rolls a 12, how do you describe? The blow deflects off its arrmor? Hits the PCs shield? Maybe the PC dodges the blow. Maybe the opponent swings wild and hits a tree. Maybe the PC parries the blow with his weapon. All of those are equally viable ways of explaining the miss, but the dice doesn't determine which is correct. The DM is making up the fiction to explain why a 12 doesn't hit an 18.

I seriously am beginning to wonder if you improve anything in your game...

That last bit requires explanation please.

Also, knocking someone to 0 hp on a missed attack roll is non-intuitive. Narrating a failure to beat a target's AC that results in no damage is decidedly not.

 

[Remathilis]

Also, knocking someone to 0 hp on a missed attack roll is non-intuitive. Narrating a failure to beat a target's AC that results in no damage is decidedly not.

Only to you. I can do it just fine.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

But Fireball!

Yes, that is why Fireballs and other area of effect spells are terrifying. If you know that the bad guy can cast Fireball you are in trouble. Unless you have evasion, then it can "miss" or more accurately you can dodge the effect. Or you have immunity to fire. Or he is out of Fireball spells, since it is a limited resource (greatsword swings are infinite). Or some other way of avoiding the damage, like spreading out so not everyone is in the area.

Why does magic get to be terrifying in a way that non-magic does not?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Only to you. I can do it just fine.

Likewise. I see nothing particularly difficult about it. Examples:

"Sure, the bandit managed to parry every one of your swings, but your utterly relentless assault exhausts what little strength she had left. She crumples to the floor, unconscious."

"You quickly realize that your thrusts aren't going to break armor of this quality; this knight clearly paid for good, hard metal. Unfortunately for them, by the second swing that bounced, ringing, both you and they realize that this armor resonates like a bell when struck, rather than damping, and despite drawing no blood, the reverberation is enough to sap their remaining strength."

"You might not have hit him, but you hit his blade hard enough to fling it from his hands. He knows all hope is lost, and falls to his knees in surrender, begging mercy."

"It's a grueling battle and you're determined to finish it, but the wizard's charmed monster keeps hopping back and forth, bleeding but unwilling to quit the field. Instead of continuing to chase it, however, you intentionally swing wide, and it jumps--into a nearby spear from a fallen comrade. It dies, having paid too much attention to you and not enough to the things around you."

I could probably come up with more, many will depend on the specific details of the combat in question, what other hazards there are. But "you tire them out" and "you strike their armor which still hurts/stuns/saps strength/etc." are easy, ready-to-go answers if nothing else obviously arises from the fiction.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

How does that jive with missing the attack?

Oh, many possible options!

1: The pixie overexerted itself flying so hard and so fast, it did in fact have a heart attack!
2: To dodge so deftly without any injury, the pixie had to drain too much of its strength, and fell to the ground, functionally dying unless aided by someone else. Fatigue is very literally how prehistoric humans did hunting, it's called "persistence hunting."
3: You missed with the edge of the blade, which is what does the real damage, but you still hit with the flat of the blade--and a MAYBE one-pound pixie being slapped with the flat of a sword will still feel quite a bit of hurt. Given it was (presumably) already heavily injured, that slap is enough to end it.
4: It cannot actually die from such automatic damage. It's simply unconscious at 0, as when using the optional rules for dealing nonlethal damage (which only apply to melee attacks, not ranged attacks nor ranged spells).
5: It isn't the sword that put it into a "dying" state. It was the fall to the ground after dodging the sword.

You can "strongly dislike" doing this all you like. It is the method for working with rules that are not and cannot be 100% perfectly intuitive. Because, as I have so often said, the map is not the territory, it is simply, flatly not possible to have rules that always put out perfectly intuitive results all of the time. Hell, it's extremely difficult to even make rules that produce intuitive results even a solid majority of the time. There is always, necessarily, some amount of needing to expand or advance the fiction in order to explain a particular result. Ideally, the vast majority of that effort should be maximally naturalistic. It will always involve at least a little of inventing something new--and sometimes you will need to exercise creativity to explain it. That isn't a problem. It's the nature of playing a game with abstract rules, which the rules always will be because we aren't LARPing.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

That... was amazing.

Also, I get not wanting guns in your medieval fantasy pastiche (industrial fantasy is another story), but a LOT of the standard equipment listed in the PHB was created well after the discovery of gunpowder.

Yes. This is one of the biggest examples of the inherently schizotech nature of the quote-unquote "standard" fantasy setting.

Full plate armor is newer than hand-held gunpowder weaponry. Cannons are centuries older than rapiers. Certain engineering technology that we associate with the Renaissance actually long predates it. Meanwhile, the societal development is entirely jumbled, with things all the way from late-Antiquity/early-Medieval all the way up to late-Renaissance/early-Industrial stuff. Jewelcraft and goldsmithing/silversmithing, for example, are incredibly advanced, bordering on Industrial era, while chemistry (which is needed in order to do that advanced goldsmithing...) isn't even 12th century. Political borders and trade agreements verge on Westphalian, but monarchs and dynasties are very High Medieval (e.g. no splitting of kingdoms between your children), while the wars are openly Early Medieval.

Reality is Unrealistic: the late-Medieval, early-Renaissance period was significantly more advanced than most "fantasy" fans think. And then of course there's the whole enormous issue with the objectively false Dung Ages trope, where the Medieval Period is painted as being a time of horrible drab drudgery where 99.999% of people never even leave town (objectively false, proven repeatedly, yet still a widely-held belief), literally have no idea that other skin colors exist (again, objectively false, otherwise English would not have needed words like "Blackamoor" to describe North African Muslim peoples they encountered and traded with), and die before the age of 40 (the average life expectancy was dragged down horrendously by infant mortality; most people who lived to adulthood still lived to see 50-60).

The sheer mountain of utterly false, non-realistic claims, all defended with claims of "realism" or "verisimilitude", is profoundly frustrating.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I'm concerned more with what makes setting sense than exactly how the rules work and who is "favored".

And I think that that is openly saying: "I would rather have a game with pretty scenery, than a game that respects all of its players equally."

 

[Zardnaar]

Yes. This is one of the biggest examples of the inherently schizotech nature of the quote-unquote "standard" fantasy setting.

Full plate armor is newer than hand-held gunpowder weaponry. Cannons are centuries older than rapiers. Certain engineering technology that we associate with the Renaissance actually long predates it. Meanwhile, the societal development is entirely jumbled, with things all the way from late-Antiquity/early-Medieval all the way up to late-Renaissance/early-Industrial stuff. Jewelcraft and goldsmithing/silversmithing, for example, are incredibly advanced, bordering on Industrial era, while chemistry (which is needed in order to do that advanced goldsmithing...) isn't even 12th century. Political borders and trade agreements verge on Westphalian, but monarchs and dynasties are very High Medieval (e.g. no splitting of kingdoms between your children), while the wars are openly Early Medieval.

Reality is Unrealistic: the late-Medieval, early-Renaissance period was significantly more advanced than most "fantasy" fans think. And then of course there's the whole enormous issue with the objectively false Dung Ages trope, where the Medieval Period is painted as being a time of horrible drab drudgery where 99.999% of people never even leave town (objectively false, proven repeatedly, yet still a widely-held belief), literally have no idea that other skin colors exist (again, objectively false, otherwise English would not have needed words like "Blackamoor" to describe North African Muslim peoples they encountered and traded with), and die before the age of 40 (the average life expectancy was dragged down horrendously by infant mortality; most people who lived to adulthood still lived to see 50-60).

The sheer mountain of utterly false, non-realistic claims, all defended with claims of "realism" or "verisimilitude", is profoundly frustrating.

Tbf D&D didn't have full plate armor or rapiers in it when it came out.

It's since become Renaissance Faire.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Oh, many possible options!

1: The pixie overexerted itself flying so hard and so fast, it did in fact have a heart attack!
2: To dodge so deftly without any injury, the pixie had to drain too much of its strength, and fell to the ground, functionally dying unless aided by someone else. Fatigue is very literally how prehistoric humans did hunting, it's called "persistence hunting."
3: You missed with the edge of the blade, which is what does the real damage, but you still hit with the flat of the blade--and a MAYBE one-pound pixie being slapped with the flat of a sword will still feel quite a bit of hurt. Given it was (presumably) already heavily injured, that slap is enough to end it.
4: It cannot actually die from such automatic damage. It's simply unconscious at 0, as when using the optional rules for dealing nonlethal damage (which only apply to melee attacks, not ranged attacks nor ranged spells).
5: It isn't the sword that put it into a "dying" state. It was the fall to the ground after dodging the sword.

You can "strongly dislike" doing this all you like. It is the method for working with rules that are not and cannot be 100% perfectly intuitive. Because, as I have so often said, the map is not the territory, it is simply, flatly not possible to have rules that always put out perfectly intuitive results all of the time. Hell, it's extremely difficult to even make rules that produce intuitive results even a solid majority of the time. There is always, necessarily, some amount of needing to expand or advance the fiction in order to explain a particular result. Ideally, the vast majority of that effort should be maximally naturalistic. It will always involve at least a little of inventing something new--and sometimes you will need to exercise creativity to explain it. That isn't a problem. It's the nature of playing a game with abstract rules, which the rules always will be because we aren't LARPing.

I agree in principle, but in this case, automatic damage simply isn't a necessary nod to abstraction, whether you can justify it at your table at the moment or not.

 

[Micah Sweet]

And I think that that is openly saying: "I would rather have a game with pretty scenery, than a game that respects all of its players equally."

A little judgemental, don't you think?