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

[pemerton]

How different does it have to be to not be D&D anymore by yours and @Imaro 's judgement? How much homebrew is too much homebrew to be allowed to be called "actual" D&D in this discussion?

Well, I'm following @Imaro in talking about the game as presented.

Hit points - as level-relative skill, luck, puissance, divine grace etc - have been a core mechanic from the outset. Likewise saving throws.

Disease has always been peripheral in comparison; and the rules didn't even touch on thirst and starvation for around their first decade of publication.

As you've often seen me post, RPGs like RM and RQ are direct reactions to the core mechanics of D&D. Asserting that D&D would be more like itself if it was in fact more like these other RPGs that reacted against it seems silly to me.

As to whether it is worth trying to drift D&D in that more simulationist direction - I did a lot of that work in the late 80s, building on proficiency systems found in published AD&D books and fan systems in magazines. I wrote up spell lists (fire spells, enchantment spells, travel spells, etc) and worked out a proficiency-based approach to spell list specialisation. As soon as I was introduced to Rolemaster I dropped all the work I'd done - someone had already done it, and it seemed more sensible and straightforward to take the benefit of their work.

 

[Reynard]

As you've often seen me post, RPGs like RM and RQ are direct reactions to the core mechanics of D&D. Asserting that D&D would be more like itself if it was in fact more like these other RPGs that reacted against it seems silly to me.

RM in particular began as a system of rules ("Laws") to lay on top of D&D to "fix" it. If I recall, it only became a complete and distinct game once TSR started gunning for 3PPs in the AD&D days.

 

[Micah Sweet]

RM in particular began as a system of rules ("Laws") to lay on top of D&D to "fix" it. If I recall, it only became a complete and distinct game once TSR started gunning for 3PPs in the AD&D days.

I really need to get my hands on this game.

 

[Imaro]

If official D&D doesn't work for you in this area (and it seems to me to be the case that this is true for some here) than ways to houserule the game to better suit you and your group absolutely seems relevant to me. Conversely, if the discussion is supposed to exclusively concern itself only with official rules, and houserule suggestions and comments are unwelcome, I think that should be clarified.

You addressed and quoted me... I believe some posters have asked about houserules or solutions...but that wasn't the discussion I was having.

 

[Lanefan]

@Lanefan’s setting.

What did my setting do this time?

 

[Lanefan]

The technical design issue here seems obvious to me: classic D&D adopted a level-relative mechanic for handling the threat posed by combat (namely, hit points based on HD-per-level); and likewise adopted a level -relative mechanic for avoiding/surviving various categories of other threats, like poison, dragons' fiery breath, death spells, etc (namely, saving throws); but did not generalise this mechanical approach to other threats (like, say, disease) which are resolved in a level-independent fashion (in AD&D, via a percentage chance to contract on, and via stat loss in a context where stats do not go up with level). And some threats - like the threat of starvation and thirst - are not even dealt with in the original system, but over the years have likewise often been dealt with in a non-level-relative way (eg via skill checks that are not level-based).

This is an astute and well-put defining of the root issue. Thanks for it.

The survival stuff being discussed in this part of this thread is likewise not about in-fiction or genre logic, but simply about this issues of inconsistent application of levelling to the overcoming of threats.

And the question then becomes what and how much of what a PC does should be tied to level vs how much should be level-agnostic.

I rather suspect the preferences along that scale will largely mirror people's realism-vs-gamism* preferences, with the gamist types wanting more to be level-tied and the realists wanting less.

For me, the rain falls on king and peasant all the same. Thus, the rain also falls on 12th-level character or 0th-level commoner all the same.

* - small-g, not Forgespeak capital G.

 

[pemerton]

Fair. But considering the thread topic, I was working on the assumption that people would be presenting ideas that were more hypothetical.

Well, here are @Imaro's original posts, responding to @James Gasik asking "what does it say when the game has rules for exhaustion, starvation, and exposure to elements, like these are meant to be big hurdles, then gives the players abilities that lets them laugh these things off by level 5 at the latest?"

That by 5th level characters are competent adventurers that are steps above normal people and should not be getting majorly sidelined by mundane challenges that inflict these things but instead should be dealing with magical hazards & supernatural dangers that can inflict these same effects...

i have the personal physical or magical power to protect a city or kingdom... but I'm felled by strong rain or not being able to catch a rabbit to eat? That makes sense to you?

So the answer to the question "what does it say" is that the game tells us that heroes able to defend cities and kingdoms via their personal power are not the sorts of people likely to be set back, let alone thwarted, by such mundane things as finding food and water in the wilderness.

If someone wishes that the game said something else, cool! (And of course there are plenty of FRPGs, old and new, that do say something else.) But that doesn't mean that it's not clear what the game actually says.

 

[Reynard]

I really need to get my hands on this game.

I don't know if the original books are available anywhere legally. I think DTRPG only goes as far back as Rolemaster Classic.

 

[TwoSix]

If someone wishes that the game said something else, cool! (And of course there are plenty of FRPGs, old and new, that do say something else.) But that doesn't mean that it's not clear what the game actually says.

Fair. This is the type of thread where statements of “this is what the game does”, “this is what the game could do (with small tweaks and house rules)”, and “this is what I wish the game did” get easily conflated.

 

[Lanefan]

We are discussing official D&D and whether play of it should or shouldn't include mundane threats being major obstacles for 5th level or higher characters.

Which, put more broadly, means we're discussing the game's power curve. And for this we do have to note which edition we're talking about, as the game's power curve has changed dramatically over the editions.

The early editions were (relatively) flat in their power curves on initial release; both 1e's and (more so) 2e's power curves steepened with each new add-on release.

3e's power curve was, by comparison, hella steep. 4e's was flatter than 3e in an odd way: there was a huge jump between commoner and 1st level but each new level after 1st didn't move the needle as much.

5e has, or seems to have, the flattest power curve of the WotC editions; intentionally so, as the whole bounded-accuracy thing was intended to design this feature in.

Two quick ways to roughly eyeball an edition's power curve:

1. Pick a random monster from the MM. That monster will wipe out PCs of some levels, be wiped out by PCs of other levels, and present a viable threat to some levels in the middle. The wider that third band is, the flatter the power curve.
2. Look at how well the game handles different-level PCs in the same party. A flatter power curve supports variable-level groups far better than does a steep power curve.

Having environmental threats (storms, disease, starvation, etc.) not be level-dependent is a very easy way of flattening the power curve a bit.