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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5877820" data-attributes="member: 82106">At which point you have a gritty game where the PCs are going to have a lot of trouble defeating most monsters, just like they'll have a lot of trouble defeating most groups of 12 crossbowmen. That's just the way it is. You can add a lot of complexity to the game and deal with some of that, but with something like poison either it is always deadly and if it gets used much then PCs will probably die a lot and you'll have a sort of gritty type game, or it will simply not be that deadly to higher level PCs. Even OLD D&D took this later route. The problem is fundamental. Reality isn't very heroic. An arrow or some poison are deadly a high percentage of the time. There are no such things as heroes in the D&D sense. If dragons existed they would either be not a big problem to a group with the right equipment or they would be magically immune to all that and all us actual real-world type people would be helpless against them. You just can't have both in one system. IMHO my experience with game design tells me that dropping a radically different feel on top of an existing core system with a module is going to be real ugly at best. Going from gritty survivalist mode to superhero mode is going to change practically every aspect of the game. The ramifications will be deep and will upset pretty much any other part of the rules in ways that you're going to have to deal with. AT BEST it won't be some simply swap. At worst the game will work badly in one, the other, or both modes. I think 5e needs to pick the basic core play style it wants to support and then consider some limited alternatives. You can do something along the lines of say 2e and be able to shade down into considerably grittier or up to maybe near 4e level heroicness. You can't do both at once and at each extreme you'll be pushing things and maybe not doing it as well as systems built for that.</blockquote>

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