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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4481094" data-attributes="member: 42582">Who is whining at the table? Last time I checked this is a messageboard thread discussing the merits and demerits, for various styles of play, of various rules mechanics.I think the point of the orc-with-greataxe example is to generate an intuition that a game which is meant to evoke certain responses in play, via a combination of (i) the player identifying with a particular ingame element (the PC), (ii) the player making meaningful choices with respect to that ingame element (playing the PC) and (iii) having combat be a significant portion of the ingame activity (as evidenced by its dominant place in the game rules), is not well-served by having an excess of instant-death rules.It seems that the designers of AD&D shared that intuition to a significant extent, by making instant death upon entering combat more-or-less impossible for any melee combatant PC of higher than 1st level facing a typical threat for their level.3E increased the danger posed to PCs by low-level humanoids by (i) increasing the damage dice of many melee weapons, (ii) letting low-level humanoids add STR bonuses to damage, (iii) giving low-level humanoids fairly good STR bonuses, (iv) increasing the STR damage bonus from two-handed weapons, (v) arming many low-level humanoids with two-handed weapons and (vi) introducing critical hit rules which greatly increase the maximum damage possible from some of those weapons.As far as D&D is concerned, the orc-with-greataxe is a phenomenon unique to 3E.The question is, does the introduction into the game of this phenomenon improve or undermine the quality of the play experience? Purely abstract discussion of whether or not risk of PC death is important to the play experience doesn't answer that question, because such abstract discussion doesn't get to the details of the different phenomena that result from the differences of mechanics between AD&D and 3E (and 4e, which more closely resembles AD&D than 3E in this respect). And telling people not to whine is irrelevant also. People may play D&D for many reasons. It doesn't follow that, by choosing to play it, they are precluded from expressing the view that the game would be better if the 3E orc-with-greataxe phenomenon were not part of the game.</blockquote>

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