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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JDJarvis" data-source="post: 1616745" data-attributes="member: 18640">I guess we really haven't strayed all that far in the points raised. To use the passages quoted and with all respect to thier original authors:Since it is not in the best interests of an adventure game, however, to delve too deeply into cut and thrust, parry and riposte .  The location of a hit or wound, the sort of damage done, sprains, breaks, and dislocations are not the stuff of heroic fantasy.  The reasons for this are manifold and 3e has not done this in any extreme manner.----The mechanics of combat or the details of the injury caused by some horrible weapon are not the key to heroic fantasy and adventure games.  It is the character, how he or she somehow escapes—or fails to escape—the mortal threat which is important to the enjoyment and longevity of the game and has thankfully be preserved in the still abstract nature of wounds within the combat resolution used by 3e.--- Too many rules inflexibly arbitrated do indeed slow down play (taking away from the real adventure) and restrict imagination.  How much fun is it when a character, ready to try an amazing and heroic deed, is told, “You can’t do that because it’s against the rules.” instead of being given the chance to attempt the act with the resolution of the deed being determined by a fairly solid framework of rules.The trick to making combat vivid is to be less concerned with the rules than with what is happening at each instant of play.  If combat is only “I hit.  I miss.  I hit again,” then something is missing.  Combats should be more like, “One orc ducks under the table jabbing at your legs with his sword.  The other tries to make a flying tackle, but misses and sprawls to the floor in the middle of the party!”  This takes description, timing, strategy, humor, and (perhaps most important of all) knowing when to use the rules and when to bend them. The description of such heroic action is  not mandated by the rules but most certainly implied by the very nature of the relationship of player and DM where it is up to the DM to provide the details that make the adventures and campaign setting come alive.--------  A chaotic good ranger may be on the verge of changing alignment—one more cold-blooded deed and over the edge he goes, but he doesn’t know that.  He still thinks he is chaotic good through and through. . . . which is supported by the 3e alignment system where the DM notes the PCs alignment as stated by the player and it is then up to the player to also prove they are of that alignment through the manner in which the PC is played.</blockquote>

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