Aspects of D&D that have made you fed up?

[Li Shenron]

What rules or features of D&D have made you to consider burning your books?

- both designers and gamers treating D&D as a near-exclusively attrition-based combat game

- "character builds" and "class combos"

- the fluff haters "we don't need fluff in books, we can make our own, just give us crunch", then proceed to play their whole campaigns as "I have a bigger damage-per-round-output than yours"

- magic as technology, magic shopping a-la carte

In my group there is a clear consensus against animal companions and familiars. "Oh no, another ******* rat!" is perhaps the best way to summarize our sentiment. The enormous and unfun zoo directed by druids, rangers, sorcerers and wizards has been always been alien to us. Eventually I created a houserule for variant classes which have no critters and this houserule has been the most popular optional houserule I have ever created.

Never had a problem with them since I made the following points clear to my players:

- you're not going to control your pets as you do your PC, the DM will control their actions, you just give them commands

- pets are low-Int but not suicidal: may sacrifice themselves to save your life in a rare case, but normally won't get themselves killed while you stay safe in the back

- pets don't go where animals of their kind don't go... your dire tiger animal companion won't follow you in the city marketsquare (where it will be killed on sight), in the frozen wasteland or the hot desert (where it will suffer every second) and not even in a dungeon if it has good reasons not to (too cramped locales, too narrow ledges, or something that frightenes it too much)

 

[Jhaelen]

What rules or features of D&D have made you to consider burning your books?

Nothing. The books aren't at fault; it's what some players decide to make of them that can annoy me at times.

So, what makes me want to burn a player's character sheet is someone who's decided to create a (hybrid) character that isn't good at anything. Likewise players ignoring the campaign background _everyone agreed with in the beginning_ and creating a character that wouldn't ever fit in.

Rules I don't like get ignored (or banned; e.g. Dragon material) if I'm the DM. My players are encouraged to not optimize the hell out of their characters by reminding them that if they do _I'll_ 'optimize' their encounters to match.

 

[Lwaxy]

My players are encouraged to not optimize the hell out of their characters by reminding them that if they do _I'll_ 'optimize' their encounters to match.

Haha same here. The few times it happened it ended in TPKs or almost TPKs and we started over with real PCs

But I do allow almost all source material.

 

[Derren]

- both designers and gamers treating D&D as a near-exclusively attrition-based combat game

- "character builds" and "class combos"

- the fluff haters "we don't need fluff in books, we can make our own, just give us crunch", then proceed to play their whole campaigns as "I have a bigger damage-per-round-output than yours"

Oh yes. WotC should either decide that they actually want to make a skirmish boardgame and market D&D that way or finally make D&D into a "full" rpg which supports other gameplay than just tactical combat and give it more than 1 page and the advise of "make it up" for everything else.

 

[Orius]

[rant]Dude, you're 15th level. If (a) you need a flank to get combat advantage; and (b) you need combat advantage to hit; you're doing something wrong. And so, in order to get a friggin' +2 bonus to your single attack roll, my wizard will forgo hitting 3 bad guys, doing 60+ points of damage, and imposing some condition on them which means you'll get combat advantage anyway?

I'd say just fire off the spell anyway. With increased hp and spell damage caps they should be able to take it. If they can't take it, well 15th level should be high enough for the party cleric to bring them back from the dead unless you're playing 4e and that edition makes rezzing more inconvenient.

 

[Meatboy]

The page count is one of my biggest peeves. I barely use a quarter of whats in the books yet to play the game, as a DM at least, I need to drag around nearly 1000 pages of material spread over 3 books. :S This also ties into my second peeve which is numbers bloat, or the fact that as levels increase so to do numbers, but only some numbers. This leads to odd discrepencies of all kinds.
Personally I'd rather have flat math or relatively low math. If characters only have 20-30 hp then something like a dragon with say 70-100 hp is, by comparison anyway, quite powerful. It was very disconcerting the first time I made a solo encounter in 4e and the thing ended up having 700 hp. That made for a very long and boring fight.

 

[Razjah]

The page count is one of my biggest peeves. I barely use a quarter of whats in the books yet to play the game, as a DM at least, I need to drag around nearly 1000 pages of material spread over 3 books. :S This also ties into my second peeve which is numbers bloat, or the fact that as levels increase so to do numbers, but only some numbers. This leads to odd discrepencies of all kinds.

I agree, the page count is crazy. 3.5/Pathfinder and 4e are insane with the amount of extra stuff you "need" to play the game.

Oh yes. WotC should either decide that they actually want to make a skirmish boardgame and market D&D that way or finally make D&D into a "full" rpg which supports other gameplay than just tactical combat and give it more than 1 page and the advise of "make it up" for everything else.

I want this too, but I have a strong feeling the game would end up as a skirmishing game. WotC: "Based on some archaic formula known only to our market research people, which we will never give either the formula, raw data, or analyzed date, we have concluded that player do not enjoy role playing- we will no create only rules that support video game style role playing. Namely, no reason to play a character- enjoy your mismatched skills to have the best min-maxed sociopath out there."

 

[Zireael]

- The number of supplements and the fact you couldn't make a reasonably good character without using them - fighters, I'm looking at you.
- HP inflation in 3e.

 

[terrya]

The assumption in this thread that supplements and multi classing lead to characters getting out of control confuses me.

Multi classing in the players hand book comes with a 20% exp penalty for a reason, to stop the bloke with 6 classes. To learn an entire new class should require training, expensive and long training, another way to stop the stupid guy with 5 classes.

Supplements in my opinion was easily solved by just not using them. The small amount of reasonable and sensible editions were just so heavily out weighed by the immense amount of garbage in the books. The core 3.5 (same for 4.0) classes were perfectly balanced on their own. Including fighters who made excellent archers due to their bonus feats.

So that i actually add to the conversation the one thing in the rules that has always made me rage above all else is tactical maps in 3.5 / 4.0. The idea that a person occupies a whole 5ft square infuriates me. It totally undermines some original modules, for example the caves of chaos where you find theres not enough squares for the amount of villans it suggests should be in the room!

 

[fenriswolf456]

Both as a player and a DM, I greatly dislike the idea of Wishlists and fully stocked Magic-Marts(tm).

I don't mind Wishlists as a source of potential inspiration for found treasure, but not as an expectation that all will be received. To me, treasure has always been 'work with what you find', and should be a part of the whole exploring and adventure into the unknown that the characters were doing in the first place.

And tied to that, the magical shops where you can buy whatever you want. It pretty much negates the need to even put treasure other than coin out there. I tolerate it as a player if that's how the game is set up, but my own campaign, the closest to a 'shop' would be more spending time finding someone who can craft the item and commissioning it, taking more time and money to get.