D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[Maxperson]

No, combat is a more complex part of the game because it has more rules.

Combat is more complex, because simple is unsatisfying to a lot of people. I LARPed The World of Darkness for a long time, and while I loved it, it wasn't for the rock, paper, scissors combat resolution.

 

[Desdichado]

Combat is more complex, because simple is unsatisfying to a lot of people. I LARPed The World of Darkness for a long time, and while I loved it, it wasn't for the rock, paper, scissors combat resolution.

There's a lot of space between the false binary of "rock, paper, scissors" and "complex tactical grid-based combat that plays like a skirmish wargame and takes hours for simple combats to be resolved." I mean, I get your point, and to some degree I agree with it, but I strongly dislike the level of combat complexity that 3e and above D&D has cultivated.

 

[LordBP]

This is El Capitan. On average 2-3 people die climbing it every year.
View attachment 405081

There is no way from the base of the cliff that you can tell if there are handholds for any particular route up this from the base. You simply won't be able to see enough detail. The first woman to free climb it in history was in 2020. It is an incredibly difficult climb. There are worse of course, cliffs no one has ever climbed. I mention this one because I've seen it up close and even in my young and stupid days there's no way I would have considered climbing this.

I don't really care though because this is not about the DC I set for this particular cliff. In D&D the default is that the DM decides the DC, the monsters, the NPCs, every tree, bush and blade of grass that is relevant to the game. I set the DC at what makes sense to me. Making accusations and nit-picking things you obviously do not understand does not change that. You may not like the base assumptions of D&D, I do.

One thing I'll add to this, the people that die on El Capitan are people who have studied the routes taken by others. It's not a blind climb by them.

On a long blind free climb, you have to deal with things that you encounter while climbing (falling rock, loose rock, animals, wind gusts, water, snow/ice, etc) that may dramatically affect the difficulty of the climb and you won't know what they are until you encounter them as there is no way to see them from the bottom of the climb.

 

[Hussar]

There's a lot of space between the false binary of "rock, paper, scissors" and "complex tactical grid-based combat that plays like a skirmish wargame and takes hours for simple combats to be resolved." I mean, I get your point, and to some degree I agree with it, but I strongly dislike the level of combat complexity that 3e and above D&D has cultivated.

Never minding that there are a number of systems out there where combat and out of combat resolution use the same mechanics with equal levels of complexity. So, the whole argument that "we need complex combat rules" is fundamentally flawed from the word go. There is absolutely no need for combat rules to be more complex than non-combat rules. We simply accept this because... conservatism in the fandom.

 

[TwoSix]

Combat is more complex, because simple is unsatisfying to a lot of people. I LARPed The World of Darkness for a long time, and while I loved it, it wasn't for the rock, paper, scissors combat resolution.

Realistically, desire for complexity in combat is going to be along a really wide spectrum, and requires multiple game systems to enable everyone to find a game that fits their preference. No one game, not even D&D, should be trying to be all things to all people in that regard.

We should have games with videogame-like levels of tactical complexity and required system mastery, and we should also have games where combat is just another another die roll or coin flip like anything else that gets resolved. But any one game really shouldn't try to be both.

 

[Hussar]

One thing I'll add to this, the people that die on El Capitan are people who have studied the routes taken by others. It's not a blind climb by them.

On a long blind free climb, you have to deal with things that you encounter while climbing (falling rock, loose rock, animals, wind gusts, water, snow/ice, etc) that may dramatically affect the difficulty of the climb and you won't know what they are until you encounter them as there is no way to see them from the bottom of the climb.

I would also point out that 99.99% of the time, the difficulty of climbing something in D&D isn't anywhere near climbing something like El Capitan. But, this little sidebar about climbing does nicely illustrate why D&D has magic rules to bypass these sorts of challenges. I'm going to bet dollars to donuts that any group facing a climb of that difficulty would simply bang out a teleport spell (or something similar) and not worry about it at all.

Go go magic system FTW.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Okay.

Why is combat "unsatisfying and boring" with no mechanics, but other things become "unsatisfying and boring" with mechanics? You've claimed there is not just a divide but a hard divide, where one thing absolutely, desperately needs mechanics in order to not be pretty much awful, while the other needs to have no mechanics at all or it will become awful.

That level of stark difference requires defense. It can't just be asserted, or at least not if you expect people to take you remotely seriously.

Do you disagree? Do you find combat satisfying and interesting without mechanics? If so, I'd love to see an example of such if you're inclined. If not, your agreement with the claim seems to render taking it seriously as an argument moot.

 

[Micah Sweet]

How does one establish that players know this? Or, to phrase that somewhat differently (but IMO equivalently), what steps do player and DM alike need to take in order for this to be, as you say, "explicitly because" they know. It can't be explicit if it isn't spoken/written/etc., but every single person in this conversation has leaned almost exclusively on the implicit, the unspoken, the "social contract", all of the things that are never said and never will be said.

Time, experience, and familiarity.

Precedent, in other words.

 

[Micah Sweet]

OK? So what you're saying is that having 18 STR should make a D&D PC worse at climbing?

There are definitely issues in D&D with how certain attributes interact with certain skills, IMO. A result of what I see as a overly abstracted system.

 

[Thomas Shey]

But wouldn’t this just be the equivalent of when the badass hero shows no signs of fear or concern that the mook can really hurt him? You see it all the time in genre fiction.

The same character usually won't show any fear when he's been beat up, either, but that won't be what happens with that sort of "let's make the decision on the hit points" logic.

I mean, I’m not all that crazy about Hit Points… especially how inflated they’ve become… but if someone doesn’t want genre to dictate how things go, then picking D&D is a really odd choice.

The problem is, I don't think it actually dictates the genre well, either. This doesn't mean I don't play things adjacent, but its pretty clear the sort of thing Pemerton was talking about isn't pretty gross gamist thinking in a way that is actively counter-genre if anything.