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  1. M

    D&D - Mediaval Social, Political & Economical Structure.

    The semi-itinerant people you describe are called knights errant.
  2. M

    Mearls: The core of D&D

    Why is his suggestion of (what amounts to) a critical-hit table for wounds unwieldy without hit points? How do hit points make a look-up table easier to use? How are hit points the one and only way to model someone getting bruised and bloodied without being disabled? He made his save vs...
  3. M

    Salvageable Innovations from 4e for Nonenthusiasts

    The halfling rogue's player was new and didn't realize that the game was about killing monsters in cold blood and taking their stuff.
  4. M

    Mearls: The core of D&D

    I don't know why you'd call a system where combatants are either up or down a wound-tracking system. There's less to track than in a hit-point system. The proposed flavors of disabled aren't progressive, because you're not supposed to accumulate more than one crippling injury. Once the evil...
  5. M

    Mearls: The core of D&D

    We agree that Conan should not be killed outright by any random attack. As a protagonist (PC) he should have plot-protection points. I don't recall anyone claiming that Conan never suffers flesh wounds. You two seem to be assuming that the only alternative to D&D's simple, abstract...
  6. M

    Mearls: The core of D&D

    Can you explain why you think ordinary attacks and wounds should be handled with hit points instead of "special effects"?
  7. M

    Salvageable Innovations from 4e for Nonenthusiasts

    I totally agree with your point about dead levels. In fact, I was a bit surprised that the Fighter didn't get one feat per level in 3E -- and it wasn't really clear to me why all the classes didn't have their special abilities defined as bonus feats to choose from at each level. I think...
  8. M

    Mearls: The core of D&D

    There are multiple subtle issues that intersect here. First, hit points don't break suspension of disbelief too badly in the "sweet spot" around, say, fourth level, but they become jarring as hit dice increase -- unless all the low-damage enemies drift away to be replaced by higher-damage...
  9. M

    Salvageable Innovations from 4e for Nonenthusiasts

    It rubs me the wrong way that one ninja is tough, but dozens of ninjas are wimps. If 4E had been designed so that hit points were luck points that only PCs and important villains had, then I would be totally on board with everyone else having no hit points. Instead, the game has anything and...
  10. M

    Mearls: The core of D&D

    I'm arguing that it shouldn't be hard to provide a generic combat system that works for both Tolkien and Robert E. Howard, even though those two authors wrote in different styles, because adventure-fiction combat hews fairly close to real historical combat -- and where it diverges from reality...
  11. M

    Mearls: The core of D&D

    You think a combat system fit for Tolkien's Lord of the Rings would not work for Robert E. Howard's Conan stories? Oh, c'mon. Arguments about hit points are legendary. No, hit points do push a game toward frequent healing. In earlier editions, the "genre decision" was to make that healing...
  12. M

    From Fabled Lands to 4E (and towards the Holy Grail of D&D)

    I would say that the sample dungeon, sample wilderness area, advice, and procedural tutorials were far more valuable that the rules. Once you "get" D&D, you can lead a group of new players on an adventure with no rules to speak of.
  13. M

    Mearls: The core of D&D

    The degree to which D&D can support varied settings derives from how abstract or generic its mechanics remain -- but we seem to disagree about how well D&D does that. AD&D combat is certainly abstract -- it lacks detail and complexity -- which tends to make things generic, but even a complex...
  14. M

    Overland Travel: a return to Hexploration?

    One day's march.
  15. M

    Mearls: The core of D&D

    We didn't break many rules -- well, not knowingly -- back in the day. Rather, the rules covered such a narrow subset of what went on in the game that the DM had to adjudicate almost everything. In fact, the best parts of the game were the parts the rules did not touch, and most of our problems...
  16. M

    Overland Travel: a return to Hexploration?

    Is all overland travel the same? I would not play the trek to the Keep on the Borderlands the same way I would play the search for the Caves of Chaos. Incidentally, how do most people handle the requisite night attack? It should, after all, spell near-instant death for the bulk of the party...
  17. M

    Mearls: The core of D&D

    If, in the early 1980s, someone had handed me a character sheet that looked like a TSR product, with the D&D logo on it, but with stats for MERP or Rolemaster -- or some other D&D-esque game -- and told me it was the new version of D&D, and we then went on a classic D&D-style adventure, I would...
  18. M

    Salvageable Innovations from 4e for Nonenthusiasts

    That's an excellent answer to the question of what to do while at the table playing the game, but that doesn't address the poor design of the game rules, which are meant to model the situation. If I want to poison someone with a dart, how should I increase my chances, and what might decrease my...
  19. M

    Salvageable Innovations from 4e for Nonenthusiasts

    The 4E designers clearly recognized how disappointing it was that 3E combats involve so little obvious movement -- characters seem to just stand toe to toe, whacking away -- but I agree that they went too far (in the wrong direction) in addressing the problem. It feels like every fighter is...
  20. M

    Any good morale systems for 3.x/Pathfinder?

    Yes, something like that. Years ago, when I first picked up Champions, the superhero game, I came across its version of Charisma, called Presence, which allowed you to make a Presence Attack -- to literally shock & awe criminals by, say, charging through a wall, yelling, "It's clobberin' time!"...
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