DnD system grit

[Henry]

My first response? 3E and 4E D&D variants may not be what you're going to be happiest with; something like Runequest (or its rules, the Runic SRD from Mongoose, available free online at their site) is going to have more grit than any D&D since 1st Edition AD&D.

As for trying to Grit-ify 4E, limiting healing surges would be the most direct way. If, as in Star Wars Saga Edition, everyone got 1 or 2 healing surges per day Maximum, removing the extra healing surge feat, etc. and removing the rule that says you gain all hit points after and extended rest, then healing is taken VERY seriously. The rest of your concerns you're really going to have to take on a case-by-case basis, which would probably generate quite a few pages of "pruning shears" house rules.

 

[Wednesday Boy]

I recommend checking out the Midnight setting for 3.5. It's a very gritty, postapocalyptic setting where the apocalypse is that the forces of the god of Evil broke the forces of the god of Good and now evil has overrun the lands and there are only a few sparse places of resistance. I always think of it as akin to Lord of the Rings if Sauron got the ring.

Magic items are non-existant. Healing classes are very limited and if you remove magical healing completely it'll be even grittier and the limited healing will make traps more potent. Daily life is a challenge since most of the resources are given to the orc hordes that now rule. Weapons are illegal so that piles on to the grittiness and the struggle to survive. Oh and the setting is explicit that civilization and everything good is in an unwinnable, losing battle. They may hold out but they'll never win or turn things around. It bakes in grim and grittiness.

To balance the challenge of encounters due to the lack of magical items, each PC has a life path that gives them bonuses, extra feats, or magic-like powers. Some of the life paths could be too flashy for your tastes but I imagine most wouldn't be. And you can always disallow the flashy ones or disallow them all together (which would make encounters much more challenging).

I certainly can imagine a character in Midnight asking, "Should we try cooking goblin meat?"

 

[ValhallaGH]

Environmental hazards trivialized, light? ...
Non combat traps? ...
Random encounters are removed or weakened or removed entirely allowing players to rest up every fight always being at 100 percent and the less you need to worry about food and water, and light the more you can just take your time and never feel that sense of danger.

The last 2 issues I want to bring up are character power and style.

Power. Gritty characters struggle to survive, more than just in combat,...

Style. Gritty characters rely on swords and skill, not a thousand flashy powers. Some times flashy powers are good, but not in my gritty Conan/lord of the rings/Dragonlance/grey hawk settings.

Ideas?

I think a huge part of this problem is the way you, as the DM, are looking at the game. Sure, there are a few mechanical issues, but most of this stuff is simply how the DM approaches the game.

Darkness as a Threat: (Options) Remove sun rods from the game. Make them more expensive. Have them trigger null magic fields, traps, or alarms, turning them into a standard "kill me" sign. Give an incentive to your players for scrabbling around in the dimly lit and highly dangerous dungeons.
The current design reflects the simple fact that the vast majority of players don't think that stumbling around blind, only to be eaten by a grue, is fun. Finding a group that enjoys that style of game is a real challenge.

Non-Combat Traps: In addition to their innate danger, should be linked to various alarms and scouts. Why? So that the party can't just take five and be better.
The other use of such traps is to consume party resources, especially including Healing Surges. Three traps later, the party can only safely handle 1 fight - but they have to get through at least three before they can get to a place safe enough for an extended rest.

Random Encounters: They're just as viable as they've ever been. They simply aren't as supported as they were in 1980 - this is a function of writer laziness as much as anything else.

Power and Survival: If you want non-combat survival to be a serious threat then make them starve. Sure, they have a million platinum coins - but they can't eat platinum. The complete lack of food, and being on only a pint of water each, means that they are likely going to die of deprivation long before they can turn their wealth into supplies.
Then you can either hand-wave the challenge with a Survival check, or you can make them role play through the problem. Much like any other challenge in the game.

Style: Flashy power cards are just the expert sword-play of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser. The powers come with pre-written flavor text, but you can easily rewrite that to fit the style and tone of the campaign you are running. Splash some mud and blood on them during the fight, mention the ache of their tired knees and the strain in the chest muscles, and you'll do a pretty good job of maintaining that Gritty style with any rule system.



Best of luck.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I don't think the issue is his approach as a GM, it is simply that his preferences don't really line up well with 3E or 4E. He could certainly do many of the things you suggest but I believe there are a lot of deep systemic issues here (which isn't to attack either edition, since they both pretty much do what they set out to do). The powers, even if you reskin them, still have an impact on the feel of the game.

He is much better off finding a game that was designed with grit in mind (and there are plenty out there both old and new). People sometimes get locked into the "it has to be D&D" mentality. Dungeons and Dragons is a great game, but the two most recent editions have a much more focused approach than 1e or 2e. But even the first editions, while more general, don't do a great job of grit (IMO).

Another one that is great: Harn Master (for the setting alone). Hear good things about Dark Heresy (but haven't played it so don't know if it fits the bill). MERP was also a pretty lethal and gritty one (I think it used rolemaster but can't recall owned the book but only played it a couple of times many years ago---seem to remember it had those crazy critical hit charts). A few years ago a friend of mine ran a GURPS fantasy campaign and that felt pretty gritty to me.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

I wanted to get opinions about something that I see as a barrier between me and newer editions of the game. Every new edition and expansion moves farther from a gritty dungeon delve game to more flashy action. I am not here to make an edition war so I will be specific. I want to be able to use things like pathfinder or 4th edition but when I try I hit speed bumps and I wanted your input.

1. Environmental hazards trivialized, light? In basic, and first it's a real concern torches weight a pound each, light a small space, burn out quickly and mages on lower levels will usually not wet their 1 spell pick on a light spell. 3.5 pathfinder introduce sunrods, tiny, light, cheap, bright and last for hours, lights no longer a problem. 4th mages can cast light forever. Literally.

It's a fun issue. Stumbling in the dark isn't fun. This was especially true in 3.x, where rules for darkness and blindness were confusing and not following the "core mechanic". (That's why Improved Invisibility was broken IMO. Unlike casting most other spells, you had to dig into the combat chapter to figure out how to spot an invisible character.)

Non combat traps? 3.5 is moderately susceptible to traps but I find they are oddly leveled, a pit trap that is 20 feet deep that you can avoid outright and only affects one character seems to be roughly the same challenge rating as 4 orcs. but even if my players hit a trap the reduced random encounters, and increased spell casting makes it easy to recover with out running out of resources.
4th has a larger problem, even if I put a trap that does 30 damage to the group on level 1 they will simply spend five minutes healing, and depending on who their healer is may only use 1 healing surge for it. Getting hit, ignoring it heroically.

Dis. Agree.

The problem is using traps to sap resources. A pit trap, standing off in a hallway by itself, isn't fun. As you've identified, someone loses a healing surge, and 5 minutes later they've already forgotten it.

You can make that trap fun by putting a soundmaker on the bottom though, along with nearby guards who can hear that. Now somebody falls down the pit, and maybe they only lost a healing surge's worth of hit points, but they're still stuck in a pit, and now the guards are rushing in! Maybe they're carrying oil to pour on whoever is stuck in the pit. The PC party is missing a member, and has to either spend actions pulling that person out, or fight with an important PC missing. (It sucks when the cleric is down there. Or fighter. Or rogue. Or...)

Late 3.x and later traps give PCs other than the rogue something to do. The rogue usually has to spend several actions disabling the trap, which means they aren't stabbing things to death... or they can choose to stab things to death, in which case the trap is dishing out damage every round. No matter what the rogue is doing, the trap is having some kind of effect. In addition, other PCs can now work on traps. Wizards can use Arcana to disable magic traps. Clerics can dismantle piles of undead that use the trap rules. Fighters can smash turrets. The entire party could spend a round taking out a trap using their various techniques, but that's a full round that the monsters who built the trap have, dishing out the hurt.

I think previous editions of D&D did very badly when it came to traps, and I'm sad to see this negative legacy persisting.

D&D is not the only game system that has done traps badly. I'm sure there's a trope for this on TVTropes. Resident Evil was a game that did traps badly; the traps would realistically unleash on mooks! Can you imagine if, every day at work, in order to go to the lunchroom, you had to do a puzzle that would kill you if you failed? Some D&D adventures had traps like that. "Non-combat traps" don't really make sense.

Random encounters are removed or weakened or removed entirely allowing players to rest up every fight always being at 100 percent and the less you need to worry about food and water, and light the more you can just take your time and never feel that sense of danger.

As newer editions avoided random encounters, DMs (especially newer ones) have either lost the skill in using them or have never learned them in the first place. This is unfortunate. Random encounters don't need to "wander a dungeon" though; the new emphasis on dungeons that make sense tend to eliminate this. Instead, random encounters are used to punish the 15 minute adventuring day you just described.

One DM somewhere on this forum said his PCs (in 4e) always face 3 or 4 encounters a day. If they take an early rest, they'll face the skipped encounters all at once that day, probably while asleep and without armor or some dailies.

If you're trained on a previous rule system, it's not easy to switch. WotC has not done a good job of teaching DMs how to make this switch.

 

[amerigoV]

And in all the settings I named the core person in the world was a warrior, clerics fought in melee not spell slinging. Healing rare, resurrection impossible, and in all of the settings save grey hawk magic is cursed and spell casters are either shunned, pay a physical toll every time they cast a spell, or both.

So the image you get in mind is a band of people relying on wits not spells, items, having to struggle every day.

My players are so frustrated asking me to make the game harder, but it's difficult when the system is made to be very forgiving to the players.

On the surface, D&D is a toolset. However, many of us have played what I would call standard D&D for so long (whatever is in the PHB is always ok, plus whatever splats the DM allows) that D&D is as much a genre as it is a toolset. Say D&D and most players have the expectation of elves, wizards, gnomes, and all the other high fanasty elements. The standard D&D has become so deep in the crunch that supports the implied genre that it really is hard to separate the two.

So, if you ask me if I want to play in Hyboria or in Lankhar using D&D, my answer as player (and as a DM) is no. Restricting everyone to humans, low magic, and martial classes is too much work -- either the DM has to fix the fact that magic is "in the numbers" and you are missing things like a good healer and crowd control (I am talking more 3e than 4e here - you might be able to get away with it there) or the game will just not last long as things will eventuall fall apart.

If you want to run something other than current D&D, best bet is to go older versions that might fit (but Lankhmar under 1e was not any good in this regard either), try a clone, or just another system altogether. This is why I love Savage Worlds -- the toolset in the mind of my players is still separate from the genre - I ask them if they are interested in Deadlands, Weird War II, Espionage, or Space 1889 and I do not encounter "its not Savage Worlds" mindset like I run into with D&D.

So your fustration is understandable, but D&D probably is not going to fix the problem.

 

[Dice4Hire]

I sometimes get the itch to play older gaming styles, instead of the 3.5 and 4E that I typically play.

I find Labyrinth Lord to be good for that itch and the game I am playing with it is going fine.

 

[Argyle King]

Have you considered something other than D&D?

While the newer incarnations of D&D may not support gritty play very well, there are other systems which are a near perfect match for some of what the original post expresses that you want. You also said you don't want to be the guy clinging to one book who is afraid of change, so you sound willing to try something new. I'd recommend trying a different game to see if maybe your interests are better served by a different system.

Some of the ones I have in mind (such as the new edition of GURPS) are toolkit systems as well, so you'd be free to take ideas from other books (the ones you have, D&D 3rd Edition, Pathfinder, D&D 4th Edition; etc) and mix all of that content together after a little bit of work rebuilding the ideas you want within the bounds of the feel you want.

 

[Layander]

I appreciate all of the input and especially the understanding in the room that there is just more than one way to have fun. I own osric, gurps 3 and 4, DnD O, basic, 1, 2, 3, and 4. But never tried runequest or some of the other systems you brought up. I will look at them and see what I think.

I appreciate all of the help. I was hoping someone had the magic wand to turn 4th or pathfinder into 1st, but I guess that's like asking you to turn pudding into steak.

Thanks again for all of the ideas expressed and taking your time here.

 

[Wiseblood]

Yum. Gamse. Nom, nom.