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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 6175396" data-attributes="member: 5143">Yeah, we tried it once, I believe.  Until someone pointed out that the entire point of having a critical hit was that you hit someone in an important spot.  Of course you were ALWAYS aiming for vital spots.  The enemy is specifically protecting those parts.  Therefore, a crit shows you successfully hit what you were aiming for.  It's the same reason there was no longer any "facing", you faced all directions because you always turned towards wherever it was important to face.We debated it very briefly when the game first came out.  But we all agreed that the point of the system was to make all of this abstract so we didn't need detailed rules for facing and called shots.  There were a number of other system out there that had rules for these things.  If we wanted rules for that, we could simply switch to those systems.I think it might be that I played so many different systems...but our solution was almost never to house rule.  If we didn't like a system, we switched to one we did like.  That's pretty much why we stopped playing Rifts.  It was possible to house rule the system into working correctly.  But house ruling takes so much effort that it wasn't worth it.  We'll just play games that work well.The problem is, trust has to be earned.  I also don't think most people know what their doing.  Everyone THINKS they know what they are doing.  But few people actually do.I saw a test that was done where they showed that nearly every person thinks they are "above average".  It's a concept called "Illusory Superiority".  Basically, in tests people think they are more popular than they are, they think they are smarter than they are, they think they are better than the average person at most tasks.The problem is, that not everyone can be better than average.  Most DMs feel they are, however.  Their rules decisions are better than the ones made by the designers of the game and better than other DMs.  Their house rules are brilliant and the perfect way to solve problems.Which leads people to overconfidence and not noticing the problems that are right in front of them.  It can cause huge amount of bias towards a certain player, a certain class, or a certain playstyle...often at the expense of their players who aren't having any fun.  The irony, of course, is that illusory superiority also applies to bias.  The average person feels they are way more immune to bias than anyone else.  Plus their believe in how much people like them means they often won't notice when their friends aren't having fun.Which all comes down to the fact that it's actually MORE likely that the rules in the book will be better than ones that the DM has invented since the designers have more time and experience working on rules than DMs do.  While the DM will think the opposite.That's not to say that designers have never made a bad rule.  But it's likely that whatever you come up with to replace it is actually worse.That just shows your bias against bards.  I can easily reverse that situation:One guy is playing a powerful magician who, by playing his harp can command people to do his every command, can inspire people to fight long after they should have died, can heal someone near death to completely healthy with but a song, and can cause his enemies to stand still while he kills them or even fight each other.  Meanwhile another guy is playing someone whose really good at fighting with a sword.  I wouldn't expect them to contribute equally.  I'd be pretty insulted as the Bard player if they did.Let's put it another way.  Let's say you were playing a Hockey board game.  One player only has a 1 in 20 chance to get the puck into the goal, he skates a quarter of the speed of another player, and he runs out of stamina after 5 minutes of playing and has to sit down on the ice and catch his breath for 2 minutes.  The other player scores 15 out of 20 times and doesn't have any of the disadvantages of the former player.Now, you can say "Well, the first player is playing a fat, nonathletic guy, so I would expect he'd be worse than the other player."  However, the point then becomes, if the point of the game is a hockey game...why offer "fat, nonathletic guy" as an option?  Hockey games are interesting because nearly every player on both teams are of similar athletic skill.  Having someone on the ice who was REALLY bad in a pro game wouldn't be fun to watch, it wouldn't be fun for the other players on his team, it wouldn't be fun for the players on the other team, and it wouldn't be fun to be the guy who was bad.The same thing works in terms of D&D classes.  Bard could be a class that plays a lute and makes people feel slightly better or it could be an all powerful mind control specialist with healing.  Isn't it better for the game that the bard's powers are designed around what makes them roughly equal in strength with a raging barbarian or a skilled fighter?It CAN matter...the question is, should it?Imagine and urban campaign where the fighter uses his size and strength to push people around to get the answers he wants.  He fights off the ambush of thieves in the ally.  He uses his contacts in the city guard from his time in the army to get favors.  Meanwhile the Druid uses their tracking skills to find the people they are looking for and asks the rats for clues while using his ability to become a cat to spy on their foes.Imagine a wilderness battle where the Rogue stays hidden in the underbrush, climbs trees and strikes out with his bow in complete silence, taking the enemies by surprise.Context doesn't have to make anyone worse than anyone else.  Each class has their own way of solving problems.  Sometimes one method IS slightly better than another.  But it doesn't need to be overwhelmingly better.  No class has to be so bad in any situation that they might as well not be there.That's the problem...what a class "should" be able to do changes dramatically from person to person.  I'd prefer that what a class can do be dictated at least 50% by balance.  After all, a Wizard who can wave his hand and cause everyone in town to obey him for the rest of his life seems like something magic "should" be able to do...but it doesn't make for a fun game for either the other players or the DM.Those things aren't inherently different, however.  They are both adventuring classes that want to accomplish adventures.  How effective they are at finishing the adventure CAN be compared.Combat is easy: Damage dealt vs damage taken is an easy number to compare for any class.  It's not necessary easy math to do....but it can be compared.How easy it is to solve certain common problems in a D&D game is fairly easy compared as well.The problem is that when most of these comparisons are done, they show that certain classes are absurdly more powerful than other classes.  When this is pointed out to some people, they go into defensive mode and say things like "I don't care what your numbers say, I like Wizards just the way they are" or "That may be the case, but if you lower Wizard's power down to what you are proposing they will be no fun to play anymore and the game won't be D&D to me anymore."Tell that to my players the first time a PC dies and then after the battle found out that the DM miscalculated the enemy's AC by 1 point when we missed by 1 four times.Then people stop thinking that the game experience is pretty robust and people start demanding the DM calculate things correctly in the future...in addition to bringing the PC back to life.See above about illusory superiority.I agree that tone is something each group has to decide on their own.  But tone is so often ingrained into the system itself that changing the tone requires rewriting the entire ruleset.  If you are rewriting the entire rule set then you are no longer saving the time it requires to write your own rules.  I'm seeing a reoccurring theme: "I'm better than other people, especially game designers who are stupider than me and know less about game design"I'm of the opposite opinion.  Which is why I follow the rules so closely.  Anyone who has the time to spend 8 hours a day doing nothing but testing, thinking about, and writing rules knows infinitely more about the subject than I do.  They've considered, tested, and thrown out all my ideas for reasons that will never occur to me long before I even had them.That's one of those corner cases.  I'm certain I wouldn't allow more than one attack in that situation either.  It doesn't cover every situation, that's for sure.The problem is that the vast majority of players don't come on message boards.  ENWorld in particular is filled with people who love to tinker.  There's a reason that the vast majority of people I know aren't members here.  Most of them feel that the type of people who come to ENWorld think about the game too much.I have one player in particular who started reading threads here and his brain nearly exploded.  He told me "It's easy, you just follow the rules in the book, I don't understand why there is all this debate about what Bards should or shouldn't do or how healing works or what the tone of their game is or what house rules they should have....you just play the game.  Why think about it so much?"When I go to conventions and talk to random people about D&D, almost no one mentions house rules they have.  In fact, the vast majority of conversations about D&D with random people are about the power level of certain spells or class features as they are written in the book.That's a lot of weight to put on a campaign setting.  Setting is just a tool.  I don't play D&D to self express.  I play D&D to have a fun time killing monsters, taking their stuff, and ruining the bad guy's plots.  If an adventure has a cool bad guy or an interesting story, I'm in.  In the same way that if a book has an interesting story I'm in.  It's cool that I get to modify the story slightly with my decisions but I'm there to be entertained.Just like when I DM I'm there to entertain the players.  My ideas and plots are often not that entertaining.  So, I steal from people who are more creative than I am.  Thus, campaign settings and purchased adventures.That way my players can fight their way through the Temple of Elemental Evil and fight cool battles against interesting opponents instead of playing Temple of Blandness with 100 battles against generic Orcs, which is likely what I'd write.This is no more true than if I put a copy of Final Fantasy 1 into my NES and played it without hacking in to make Fire1 do 1000 points of damage.  Or played a game of Monopoly using the rules as written.It's a game.  We're all playing it.  Even the DM.  Games have rules to make sure no one has an advantage over the other players.  Even the DM.Besides, the DMs job is way more complicated than that.  If D&D was a movie, the DM has to serve as the Writer, Director, Producer, a bunch of Actors, Lighting, Special Effects, Camera Operator, Sound, Prop Wrangler, The Laws Of Physics, and often Caterer.The Laws of Physics in a movie are sometimes changed...but rarely.  People fall at the same rate they do in real life,  people can see just as far, etc.  The Laws of Physics are pretty much the rules in a game.  They determine what happens.  Yes, sometimes the writers change the laws of physics so their story works better.  But most of the time they are left unchanged.  I view rules the same way.  Why change them if you don't have to?  As a DM you already have to worry about ALL those other things.I guess I still don't understand how someone can play a game but choose not to use the rules.  To me, house rules are exactly the same as sitting down at a table to play Scrabble and have the first player play "WIN" and say "The game's over, I win!" and when you attempt to argue that that's not the way the game is played that they say "I'm the owner of the game, that gives me the ability to change the rules to whatever I want, I say that you immediately win if you play 'WIN'".It sounds super arrogant and bossy that one player gets to decide for everyone else what the rules are unless all the players have agreed to play that game instead.After all, if you are playing Hockey with the house rules that it isn't on ice, there's no puck, no one has sticks, there's a ball and you need to carry it down a large field to a scoring area....well, you're playing Football now, not Hockey.So, when I sit down to play D&D...I kind of expect to play D&D.  The rules are part of that.</blockquote>

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