D&D needs improvement

[Nightchilde-2]

D&D is not the end-all and be-all of rpgs. You should not treat it as if it is the only place from which one can start.

Quoted for truth.

 

[Teflon Billy]

Ohhh nooss! Are you the Badfun Police?!!? Maybe he likes buying peanut butter and modifying it to his taste at home!

I really am just horsing around.

LOL

 

[Teflon Billy]

Et tu, TB? WFRP is for EVERYONE to love and enjoy.

I both love and enjoy it, but my requirements in a game don't seem to be as stringent as the Original Poster's

Ok ok, maybe not, and from what I've seen of Harnmaster, this TB is right. You will probably find it more appealing than D&D.

Yup, my most "Harn" moment in a Harnmaster campaign was when--after coming through a large melee with barely a scratch--attempted to ride down some fleeing opponents, fell from my horse, got a minor cut from the fall and wound up dying of infection

I also dug the fact that we were mercenaries, we spent a great deal of time fighting while suffering from the effects of starvation, and our pay was largely in the form of food.

 

[Teflon Billy]

Basically, an injury either takes you out of combat, or you don't notice it. Andrenalin takes care of that.

Its weird, but it seems to be how things work. A guy on RPGnet a while back posted some links to studies (which I wish I'd kept).


glass.

I had those as well, but lost them in a computer crash.

The gist was that there are really only three "in Combat" results of a wound...

• Nothing
• Maiming
• Death

Lots of awful stuff happens once the adrenaline wears off, but--amazing stuff that it is--it basically boils real world combat down into that.

 

[Umbran]

That said, studying tools is iteself a job, and studing all of the tools available from a rpg standpoint is a potentially overwhelming task.

First off, yes, it is a daunting prospect. But it isn't like you'd get a solid end-to-end redesign of D&D without it anyway. Anybody can tweak a game. But if anybody could write one, we wouldn't need WotC, or any other publisher.

Secondly, you don't have to study all the tools available. Places like EN World and RPG.net provide great storehouses of knowledge and experience from which anyone can draw, thereby narrowing the search.

Plus, frankly, D&D has a very solid chassis. Which is why so many of the games mentioned herein (True 20, C&C, M&M) have been built out of it. If you know what you want from a game, you ought to be able to modify d20 into it.

Yes, but "solid" isn't the only criteria, now is it? And, if other things have been built out of it, does it not make sense to see if one of those is closer to what you want, rather than redoing what they've already done for you?

Also, I still contend that some of OP's problems are based on fluff rather than crunch. OP asks why things are as they are in several cases; that's a fluff question to me.

Some of the problems would undoubtedly be fluff, yes. Some others can simply be matters of inflexibility on the player's part - there actually is something to be said tor taking some bad if there's lots of other good attached to it. Too many players make perfect the enemy of good.

Marvel Superheroes is a fine example. Lovely game, with horrid character advancement rules. But I've never bothered to rewrite them - if you embrace the fun parts enough, you don't notice the niggling itch. But sure, if you concentrate on the itch, and you have to scratch.

 

[Elephant]

Because there comes a point of diminishing returns. Using, e.g., VP/WP insetad of hit points is one thing... fundamentally changing everything on the OP's list requires designing a new game from the ground up. I don't know about you, but I have no interest in laying out ca$h money for a product that does absolutely nothing I want/need it to do. My time and elbow grease is too precious to me.

EDIT: Honestly, I wish more gamers agreed with this. There seems to be a long-standing tradition in RPG'ing to kit-bash the heck out of systems, bulding on an assumption that most games "need work". I'd much rather see gamers spending money on products that are designed to do what they want, instead of on products that seem to consistently not.

On top of this, the system that the OP is describing between the lines already exists. There are multiple, in fact. Ergo, the OP needs to go play one of them instead of composing trollish posts.

Back in the early days of D&D (and rpgs in general), the only rules available were a loose, crappy set of guidelines that NEEDED a fair amount of kit-bashing to work for a lot of different people. There wasn't anything else available at the time, so people got used to kit-bashing.

Plus, tinkering with rules is a longstanding wargaming tradition, UIAM, so it's not surprising that the tradition would be carried over into RPGs.

 

[Elephant]

Well, if by "do acrobatic" you mean "use the Tumble skill", you can't, really.

TUMBLE (DEX; TRAINED ONLY; ARMOR CHECK PENALTY)
You can’t use this skill if your speed has been reduced by armor.

... unless you're a dwarf.

-Hyp.

Um. "unless you're a dwarf." doesn't fit in there - dwarves never have their speed reduced by armor, UIAM.

 

[Warbringer]

Um. "unless you're a dwarf." doesn't fit in there - dwarves never have their speed reduced by armor, UIAM.

Which, I believe, is his point....

 

[buzz]

Back in the early days of D&D (and rpgs in general), the only rules available were a loose, crappy set of guidelines that NEEDED a fair amount of kit-bashing to work for a lot of different people. There wasn't anything else available at the time, so people got used to kit-bashing.

Plus, tinkering with rules is a longstanding wargaming tradition, UIAM, so it's not surprising that the tradition would be carried over into RPGs.

First off, I have scoured Google for a definition of "UIAM," and I can't find one. Would you mind enlightening me?

Second... I know. My point is, if you keep paying for loose crappy sets of guidelines that need a fair amount of kitbashing, that's what publishers are going to continue to give you.

This isn't to say that there's anything wrong with tweaking systems; I know many gamers enjoy it. I'm just saying I wish the idea that you should expect to have to tweak things by default would go away. With most other products, you're supposed to be able to assume that the thing works and doens't need you to both lay out lots of cash and fix the thing to even get it to work.

 

[Chiaroscuro23]

Yup. This makes a decent troll, especially with the tone of outraged indignation. Seriously - if you dislike it, why play it? Warhammer FRPG might be more fun for you.

I disagree. It would have been a decent troll about 25 years ago. Now it's just old hat. We've heard all these complaints before. It hardly seems worth countering them again.

-C.