D&Disms That Make You Go "Huh?"

[hong]

Bat guano.

 

[Gez]

I don't kow if this is what you are after but:

"muscular action closes the hole".

Yeah. It seems all large predators have evolved to have self-repairing throats/gizzards/stomaches.

That rule is there just so that everyone swallowed whole must cut its own way out, but it's quite dumb.

One of the latest D&D words that a lot of people are using and think is "witty" is badwrongfun.

It's bad, wrong, and retarded for grown men to utter such a lame word.

So you're saying badwrongfun is badwrongfun?

I don't think real dungeons did either. Most prisoners were simply given a bucket if they were given anything at all. But you're probably talking about the broad term "dungeon" as it's used in D&D to refer to any enclosed space with monsters and/or traps.

That, to me, is the quintessential D&Dism. Dungeons are anywhere subterranean. A cave? That's a dungeon! A cellar? That's a dungeon! A prison? Depends, is it underground? No? Then it's not a dungeon!

And how about the sheer bigotry of the idea that one entire race of beings would all be smarter/stronger/more agile than all of the members of another race? Or that an entire race would be inherently good or evil?

If they're all average, yeah. But you can have an elf with 16 Con and a dwarf with 5 Con, despite the generality that dwarves have high Con and elves have low Con.

As for the entire race inherently good or evil, I will refer you to your Monster Manual. It says something about what "always," "usually," and "often" mean. And it's so PC that it says right here that "always" don't really mean always and that you can find demons that aren't chaotic evil.

 

[Maldor]

QFT. It's all about killing things and taking their .

whats "QFT" ?

 

[Rechan]

whats "QFT" ?

Quote for Truth.

 

[Rechan]

I will pipe in - you are doing it wrong.

Sigh.

Perhaps I shouldn't have said "Daily Life", but non-combat spells that are fantastic and more Wizard-like than artillery.

How about a spell that builds a house? A permanent house. Just "I point at the materials, and they animate and build itself." So if you have mud you get a mud hut and if you have bricks you get a little brick house, etc.

 

[GQuail]

whats "QFT" ?

"Quoted for Truth", or "I agree entirely with what this person just said"

] One of the biggest "D&D-isms" that always that makes me says "Huh?" is treating characters as amorphous blobs for the purposes of adjudicating - or healing - damage.

I'm also perplexed by the way armor is handled. How does a non-magical breastplate increase the armor protection on your legs?

I guess that's probably because I came to roleplaying via RuneQuest, which has individual hit points by body part. You can actually buy armor by the piece in that system - and the pieces only increase the armor points of the body part they cover.

There are a few RPGs that work like that: but I don't think it's fair to paint D&D's HP system as somehow "inferior". HP/AC grew out of it's wargame roots where you didn't want too much detail, and continues to operate well as a purposefully vague system: and this gets better when you realise that HP isn't always physical injury.

While there are realisum issues attached with it (just like the "muscluar action closes the hole" or the lack of any stage between "fully healed" and "dead") the principle is that it's quicker to play this way: players have a single figure to track for most of the combat for their armour and damage, and don't have to change anything mid-combat because they've lost arms, are blinded in one eye etc. (3E has the added complexity of flat-footed and touch AC, but I'd argue that's still quicker to deal with in-game than it is to track multiple body parts seperate AC and HP totals.

Still, I'm not going to deny that it isn't very realistic, especially if you describe every hit that makes HP drop as a physical wound!

 

[Lord Zardoz]

And I'm left looking at the upper level spells going, "OKay sure. A wizard can move really fast for a few seconds, and he can do lots of damage within an x spread... but when does he move mountains? Spellcasters = great artillery, but where's the fantastical cosmic earth shatteringness?"

It's like high level spellcasters are good at just, well, killing things on a local scale.

......

Perhaps I shouldn't have said "Daily Life", but non-combat spells that are fantastic and more Wizard-like than artillery.

How about a spell that builds a house? A permanent house. Just "I point at the materials, and they animate and build itself." So if you have mud you get a mud hut and if you have bricks you get a little brick house, etc.

To address the first part, That would be mostly due to the disconnect between fantasy literature and D&D. Fiction authors are free to do whatever helps the story along. Dungeon Masters need to have some sort of game balance, at least among the heroes. In a gaming context, letting a player have artilery works. Letting a player have strategic nukes tends to cause problems.

Addressing the 2nd part, I suspect that the lack of Fantastic but Non Lethal spells is a direct consequence of the game being focused on combat and conflict to a large extent. As a DM, I would probably let a player hand wave such a spell into the game as a 5th or 6th level spell if it were cast as a Standard Action, or a 3rd or 4th level spell if it had a casting time measured in hours. I expect that most other DM's would do the same. Rechans Remarkable Construction is hardly game breaking unless it is used to replace Passwall and Wall spells.

END COMMUNICATION

 

[sniffles]

"Quoted for Truth", or "I agree entirely with what this person just said"



There are a few RPGs that work like that: but I don't think it's fair to paint D&D's HP system as somehow "inferior". HP/AC grew out of it's wargame roots where you didn't want too much detail, and continues to operate well as a purposefully vague system: and this gets better when you realise that HP isn't always physical injury.

I wouldn't characterize D&D's HP/AC system as inferior. It just makes me say "Huh?" sometimes when I think about it too hard.

 

[Tewligan]

whats "QFT" ?

It means "I like to increase my post count."

 

[Psion]

I wouldn't characterize D&D's HP/AC system as inferior. It just makes me say "Huh?" sometimes when I think about it too hard.

I have zero problem with the way armor and hp work. Abstract, but functional. (I do have a few house rules to make things a bit more concrete at low hp, but don't necessarily prescribe that for general consumption.)

The one I try not to think too hard about is the actual HEALING of said HP, especially viz magical healing working different than natural healing as far as scaling goes.