D&D General What Is D&D Generally Bad At That You Wish It Was Better At?

[Micah Sweet]

I mean, it's not that there isn't a solution, if you see a problem. It's just that it's confusing to present what seems to be a problem to solve, then immediately hand people the tools to solve it.

It'd be like, I don't know, someone said "ok, so the problem with a bow is you need arrows. Fortunately, here's this ability to give you unlimited arrows by 5th level."*

*I saw something like this in a third party sourcebook, an archer class that had an ability to increase the amount of ammunition they could recover after battle by 10% per level (in 3e, the chance started at 50%) so that by level 5, you recovered 100% of all fired arrows.

I certainly agree that it's a design flaw from my perspective on the part of WotC.

 

[James Gasik]

Has anyone said ‘mounted combat’ yet?

Because, mounted combat.

So I'm helping a friend of mine create his own system (I keep trying to dissuade him, but he's adamant. Ah, youth) and we just had a discussion this point.

Him: I want there to be mounted combat specialists in my game!

Me: That's great, but what happens when you can't have or use your mount?

Him: Uh, well, that's a trade-off, then. Not everyone can use their abilities all the time.

Me: Sure, but, like, the situations where a spellcaster has nothing to do are potentially fewer and farther between than a warrior. And even if a warrior has to sit on his hands during say, a social encounter, if a fight breaks out at a social gala, he's golden, even if he has to improvise a weapon. The cavalryman, however, has the additional problem of not generally being allowed to have a horse while in a dungeon or building.

Him: and? People will know what they are getting into.

Me: if you're fine with that, ok, but I'll tell you right now, anyone who realizes the issues with that kind of specialization might just avoid it entirely, possibly making the whole point of having mounted combat abilities pretty pointless.

Even the times I've seen this solved (summoned mounts for Paladins, scaling mounts for Cavaliers), there are still going to be times when a good portion of your character is disabled. The Wheelman in Spycraft, for example, drives cars really well. So well in fact, that he's about the only one who should be engaging in vehicle chases. But since you're only having to drive like you're in downtown Beirut every so often, they compensate by being the off-tier "combat" class, being closer to the Soldier in effectiveness than anyone else*.

*Going off my admittedly fuzzy memories of Spycraft.

 

[James Gasik]

Riffing off that last point, good aerial combat rules. These seem to fall into two categories in D&D.

1) complex rules that make any DM regret moving into the third dimension about as much as they do grappling.

2) rules that mostly ignore the 3D space (which gets really amusing with spell effects which will say "oh yeah, vines and weeds entangle everything within a 30' cube" and the player going "so...even in the air?").

 

[overgeeked]

So I'm helping a friend of mine create his own system (I keep trying to dissuade him, but he's adamant. Ah, youth) and we just had a discussion this point.

Him: I want there to be mounted combat specialists in my game!

Me: That's great, but what happens when you can't have or use your mount?

Him: Uh, well, that's a trade-off, then. Not everyone can use their abilities all the time.

Me: Sure, but, like, the situations where a spellcaster has nothing to do are potentially fewer and farther between than a warrior. And even if a warrior has to sit on his hands during say, a social encounter, if a fight breaks out at a social gala, he's golden, even if he has to improvise a weapon. The cavalryman, however, has the additional problem of not generally being allowed to have a horse while in a dungeon or building.

Him: and? People will know what they are getting into.

Me: if you're fine with that, ok, but I'll tell you right now, anyone who realizes the issues with that kind of specialization might just avoid it entirely, possibly making the whole point of having mounted combat abilities pretty pointless.

Even the times I've seen this solved (summoned mounts for Paladins, scaling mounts for Cavaliers), there are still going to be times when a good portion of your character is disabled. The Wheelman in Spycraft, for example, drives cars really well. So well in fact, that he's about the only one who should be engaging in vehicle chases. But since you're only having to drive like you're in downtown Beirut every so often, they compensate by being the off-tier "combat" class, being closer to the Soldier in effectiveness than anyone else*.

*Going off my admittedly fuzzy memories of Spycraft.

This is another reason why lighter, free-form character creation works better than rigid class-level design with all kinds of pre-built toys. When doing a 100-word character description that is their stat block it’s far easier to have a throwaway line about being an expert driver or cavalry.

 

[Yaarel]

Riffing off that last point, good aerial combat rules. These seem to fall into two categories in D&D.

1) complex rules that make any DM regret moving into the third dimension about as much as they do grappling.

2) rules that mostly ignore the 3D space (which gets really amusing with spell effects which will say "oh yeah, vines and weeds entangle everything within a 30' cube" and the player going "so...even in the air?").

Maybe 3D combat can be simplified and solved by solid Chase skill checks?

 

[James Gasik]

Maybe 3D combat can be simplified and solved by solid Chase skill checks?

It's not just pursuit though. Rules for how far you can move before you must turn and the like really make it hard to use flying monsters, for example. I remember in 3e, where (going off memory), it was very hard to hover, and staying in the air required you to be able to move. This left a lot of encounters with multi-attacking flying monsters feel more like a Benny Hill skit (cue Yakety Sax).

But you can run into these problems in underwater combat as well, where anything with a swim speed is basically flying.

Keeping track of where a person is in relation to you in 3D space can be a hassle as well. Especially when there aren't rules for what happens if a flying creature falls on someone, lol! I think some VTT's have 3D support though, so maybe this will be less of a problem in the future for people who aren't dinosaurs like me, who believe that face-to-face gaming is the only real way to game.

 

[MuhVerisimilitude]

I disagree. I think courtly intrigue works best with a very light social system and D&D supports that perfectly. I've been in a courtly intrigue campaign.

It doesn't surprise me that "social combat" rules didn't work. I wouldn't expect them to. I would expect that it's very hard to do courtly intrigue without players mentally capable of intrigue and subtlety. A game system can't make a player an expert tactician, and that's true whether we are talking about physical combat or social combat.

D&D like any turn-based system is historically bad at chase scenes, and you have to hack it with a system of relative time and relative distance to get it to work. Really, anything that involves simultaneous action is hard within D&D or any turn-based game, though (ironically) BECMI with its phases and simultaneous declaration gets closest, and would allow you with some hacking to for example run a game of football (any form thereof) in D&D.

D&D is pretty bad at intrigue because you need more than a minimalist ruleset for it.

It doesn't need social combat rules, but it needs some kind of system that lets you concretely influence organisations without being in direct contact them. Blades in the Dark can do this, as can Wicked Ones and Lancer. You want clocks and ideally "downtime actions".

If there are no rules there is nothing concrete to interact with. D&D is imo a worse system for intrigue than something designed for that purpose.

 

[Yaarel]

It's not just pursuit though. Rules for how far you can move before you must turn and the like really make it hard to use flying monsters, for example. I remember in 3e, where (going off memory), it was very hard to hover, and staying in the air required you to be able to move. This left a lot of encounters with multi-attacking flying monsters feel more like a Benny Hill skit (cue Yakety Sax).

My thinking is, the DM can handwaive movement outofcombat. Combat is trickier, where Chase rules kick in. There is more to chasing than Speed. If anything, the one with higher speed merely has an advantage on checks. Then the rest is narrative.

But you can run into these problems in underwater combat as well, where anything with a swim speed is basically flying.

The rules would apply to underwater, astral sea, and any other groundless environment. Even horseback combat might resolve with solid Chase rules.

Keeping track of where a person is in relation to you in 3D space can be a hassle as well.

I do theater of the mind. The few times I used figurines we put them on stacks of poker chips, where each chip signified a height.

(I remember a debate about counting cubes diagonally, versus using a string length. But generally, theater of the mind is best. And Chase rules resolve the awkward stuff.)

Especially when there aren't rules for what happens if a flying creature falls on someone, lol!

Generally we have each take half.

I think some VTT's have 3D support though, so maybe this will be less of a problem in the future for people who aren't dinosaurs like me, who believe that face-to-face gaming is the only real way to game.

I havent used VTT 3D, cant say if it works well.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Back on topic:

Encounters and The Challenge Rating System

Back with old-school D&D there was no CR system. DMs were told,
"Most wandering monsters are the same level as the level of the dungeon (in other words, they have a number of hit dice equal to the number of the dungeon level)" - Basic rules, 1981

Look at that. Eezy-Peezy! No calculator required. Even with AD&D, a DM could throw a huge (but very young) dragon at a low-level party as an engaging, but not overwhelming, challenge.

But, the Rules Cyclopedia (1991) introduced optional Challenge Rating rules for some reason. With the release of D&D 3.0, a default CR system was unloaded upon unsuspecting GMs.

It was, and remains, a trap. It is a failed construct that has plagued D&D for the last 25 years and one needs only to look at online discussions of D&D 5e's CR rules to see how terrible the system is. 5e isn't a bad system, but the Challenge Rating rules need simplification.

This, of course, only if you use the CR system.

4e's Experience Budget system--which assigned levels to monsters, not CRs--was highly effective and worked in the vast, vast majority of situations. The only major "holes" were if you use the digital monster builder program to scale a high-level monster down to very low level or vice-versa, because monster design shifts over 4e's level-range in ways that numbers do not directly address (e.g. nasty, debilitating conditions are much more common among higher-level monsters, which low-level characters probably can't do much about.)

As with a lot of things in D&D, 4e is the game's equivalent of Mongols, blowing holes in any otherwise-reliable theories of how things do or should work.

 

[James Gasik]

My thinking is, the DM can handwaive movement outofcombat. Combat is trickier, where Chase rules kick in. There is more to chasing than Speed. If anything, the one with higher speed merely has an advantage on checks. Then the rest is narrative.


The rules would apply to underwater, astral sea, and any other groundless environment. Even horseback combat might resolve with solid Chase rules.


I do theater of the mind. The few times I used figurines we put them on stacks of poker chips, where each chip signified a height.

(I remember a debate about counting cubes diagonally, versus using a string length. But generally, theater of the mind is best. And Chase rules resolve the awkward stuff.)


Generally we have each take half.


I havent used VTT 3D, cant say if it works well.

I stopped using ToM myself when 3e came out. My AD&D days were full of debates about "wait, where was that wolf? How many wolves did you say there were? No, my character was by the door, not the treasure chest!" that stopped being a thing once I started using maps and minis.

It also let me more easily use difficult and blocking terrain, as well as show people where things they could interact with were. That's not saying it's the greatest thing ever, and if movement and positioning really don't matter, then I don't bother with the map, but it's worked well for me.

Especially since we got a projector that can just slap whatever map we need on the table, and are pretty easy to modify, so I don't have to have reams of map paper anymore (mats start looking pretty shabby after awhile).

Plus, if there's a gamer out there that doesn't love minis, I've yet to meet them (I'm sure they exist, but the visceral reaction I get from my players when I drop a huge hideous chunk of colored plastic on the table, like my Pathfinder Rune Giant, is something I'll never get tired of- "We have to fight THAT??!!").

The downside of course, as you've noted is, that pesky third dimension, lol.