Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
ShortQuests -- individual adventure modules! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed to plug in to your game.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pamphylian" data-source="post: 9885331" data-attributes="member: 7053769">In terms of an explicitly written constitution that guided design or something, I have no idea. I guess I'm more interested in the design "philosophy" that is implied by the rules and mechanics - i.e. what might they say about how the designers imagined things playing out at the table, about the relationship between mechanics and imagination, etc. GG definitely does spend some time in the 1e PHB and DMG talking about his broader vision of the game in comparison to ODnD and other role playing games, why certain choices were made, etc - afaict much more than the 5e equivalents. I don't remember him talking explicitly about the things I've mentioned here (maybe they only make sense in comparison to later evolutions in the ttrpg genre), and I don't really have much insight into the thought behind the scenes of either 1e or 5e.But yes, streamlining such effects does minimize bespoke rules and DM ad hoc adjudication, but (at least for me), that isn't an unalloyed good. As I mentioned in the post I am not some limb severing freak haha. I am not particularly interested in players losing a limb every other session. It is mainly a handy example of an effect that is both impactful beyond hp loss and very "in world" oriented, vs., say, gain a point of Exhaustion. But yes, it's definitely not as self contained, with all the advantages and disadvantages that go with that.As far as I know, 1e didn't specify any particular effects of losing a limb  - I'd assume it is a big change for most characters but not necessarily totally catastrophic (once the acute trauma is resolved, you can use one handed weapons, but not two handed, maybe some penalty if you are forced to use your off hand - I'm picturing Jaime Lannister), and presumably you can pay a cleric a pretty penny for Restoration if you aren't high enough level.5e's Sword of Sharpness does say "effects up to DM", but to 5e's credit, it also gives some guidelines in the "Lingering Injuries" part of the DMG:[ATTACH=full]433090[/ATTACH]Presumably you could think of more things to tack on to that that are circumstantial (losing an arm probably makes it harder to climb a rope), but I think it is reasonable to ask a DM to deal with such things on a case by case basis - in a ttrpg inevitably you have to adjudicate things that aren't fully spelled out, I think that's an advantage of the medium. Fair enough! I'm glad to have someone making the case for the 5e style here better than I did. Interesting take that the abstraction gives the item more open-endedness for the DM to fill details things in - definitely true. While my own preference is to have the concrete flavour given and improvise the mechanics where needed, vs. have the mechanics and need to figure out what that means in world, I can definitely understand preferences for the latter.  Thanks a lot for contributing these! And they do seem to be a sort of evolutionary middle ground, more mechanically impactful than the 5e versions while removing toward the more abstract style of 5e. 3e does seem to like ability score damage more than any other edition - I think 5e could use more. On the one hand, because it has knock on effects elsewhere on the character sheet, doing it too often is a hassle, but on the other, given the commonality of VTTs these days these are very easy to calculate automatically (not sure I want VTTs to be a big driver of game design, but they do have their perks).</blockquote>

Verification