Search results

Dave, simply stating you disagree is not an argument. Is this just your gut feeling? The school I trained at also taught 6' staff and Japanese sword combat. That experience taught me that being outnumbered 2v1 is never good. I have been friends with some boffer combat people, and 2v1 is hard to...

So, here's stuff I think we can agree on: In all D&D variants, low level encounters are more likely to TPK than high level ones In all D&D variants, combining two encounters makes them more likely to cause a TPK PF2 is designed to be more deadly than 5E So, combining these, it seems pretty...

Hmmm. I'm not 100% sure I agree that early gaming was not intended to emulate fiction. Certainly some campaigns were, but I don't think it's even the most common default. Let's look at a quotes about the very first published adventure: “Dave approached me to invent an evil character that would...

It looks like every other fantasy camping I've run or played in, except that players invest more strongly in role-playing their characters at low level. At mid-high level, death in D&D is just an expense, so it really just makes a difference at low level. Instead of players just treating...

obviously, you do what you enjoy, but planning is an essential part of what most people think of as “war”. If you don’t like planning, then just play systems where you don’t need to plan to be be consistently successful — that‘s the “combat as sport” model — the GM always ensures a balanced fun...

I guess it depends on what you want for a “satisfying combat”. I’ve had groups whose idea of a satisfying combat was spending hours of preparation, scouting and building advantages, and then destroying the encounter rapidly because they had done such a good job. They absolutely felt that was...

Pick up a dedication that allows you to use it and you're good!

Yeah, it plays pretty fast. Just finished off with our level 20 characters and maybe 25% slower than at low levels -- maybe? The single reaction is a big plus, especially since "ready" can only be used for single actions (so very few spells can be readied). It just flows very naturally. My...

From my experiences, 5E is generally easier, but there's not much you can do if things go south. Playing a published adventure, a new player made a couple of bad rolls and was dead in the second encounter. No way to stop it, it just happened (I checked the module after and the GM ran it right)...

For the games I'm currently playing/running: D&D (4E and PF2): "Not that anyone will notice, but I'm very slightly better at avoiding serious injury" Call of Cthulhu: "Hey I have slightly less chance of being taken down by a shotgun at medium range. Up close, still toast" Games without hit...

There are two different themes here that interact in interesting ways. The first is "what sort of game do you want to play?" and the other is "do you want players to define the world". The traditional D&D-inspired game is "kill monsters / GM-only design" and it's a ton of fun and probably still...

And this will be my last post in this thread also, as no progress is being made. In Real Life, this is not the difference between a starting fighter and an experienced fighter. In fact it is the exact reverse. I have been both and when I was a young inecxperienced fighter, I could physically...

A bit of an aide, but a few years back I was a competitive martial artist. We had a guy come to our gym who regularly completed Iron Man competitions. Fantastically fit, honestly a bit intimidating. Now clearly he wasn't a trained fighter and we could hit him pretty much at will, but the really...

So ... a commoner has d8 hit points in AD&D. 3 hit points is therefore a very reasonable number to expect to have. If a commoner with three hit points takes an arrow doing 3 hit points they drop unconscious and have about a 50-50 chance of dying if unaided. So clearly 3 hit points of hit points...

Sadly, AD&D is no different from any other edition in being vague about what hit points represent. Gygax even spent a long, Rasputin-laden section describing how the game was not going to tell you what it represented. It starts: It is quite unreasonable to assume that as a character gains...

I think it's a bit extreme to write off all of D&D's combat mechanics as "worthless". D&D has always been cagey on what hit points represent -- presenting them as a mix of luck, physical and magic -- and so it's never been definitive about telling you if an arrow hits you. D&D lets you choose...

No worries. If you personally feel that D&D hit points model reality more accurately than Fate’s conditions, enjoy your game! For me, any rule-heavy system is guaranteed to fail because its rules will always come into conflict with reality. A rules-light system, however, doesn’t have this issue...

Yup, D&D hit points are simply not possible to reconcile with plausibility. If that's a huge sticking point for you, games with wound systems like Savage Worlds, Rolemaster or Fate are probably a better option. But they do make the game fantastically more playable, so I doubt we'll see any...

Aldarc, I picked an independent, object source and used it to create suggested dimensions of similarities. I defined the criteria I used to select from that outside source. I invited you to do something similar and you have declined to do so. I stated that my ratings were subjective and...

I think that's the first time I've had the OP of a thread chide me for thinking too much about their post! Is there badge for that? yeah, it took a set of particularly long and tedious work zoom meetings to go that deep into it. I understand that everyone has different vies of what are key...