Mythos Enthusiast
Explorer
How can a model be failed if it's been successfully working/chugging along for almost 50 years?
D&D General How has D&D changed over the decades?
- Thread starter Morrus
- Start date
Thomas Shey
Legend
I never said people don't keep trying to do D&D based supers games and supers-adjacent stuff. Of course they do, D&D is a big enough target market its going to make that attractive. But I don't think its a coincidence that the only one to come out in the post 3e D20 surge that really got anywhere immediately and progressively scraped away most of what most people would consider core D&D elements including hit points, armor class, character classes and levels (at least in the way D&D uses the latter).
Thomas Shey
Legend
Because its not been used a model. Its just been a naked game mechanic to tell you when people fall down and how to patch them up. It doesn't really model anything that can be discerned in the fiction without showing its issues almost immediately.
I just posted the picture because he said Avengers and the issue was just announced.
From the poll we did before on it, it seems like Captain America is within the mundane-enough range for most folks (the poll came out of folks debating what was too super or super-natural for a fighter to have).
D&D General - Poll: How tough should 20th Level Fighters be? (MCU edition)
So, in another thread, the great debate rages between whether the Quadratic Wizard vs. Linear Fighters fault is more Dr. Strange's fault or more Bucky's. Since Strange keeps using his time powers to wipe out attempts to vote about how over-powered he is, lets go to the other side. Where do...
www.enworld.org
Mythos Enthusiast
Explorer
I've never struggled with explaining hit points or its attendant features/implications in my 17 years as a DM.
"I fall 200ft, how much damage do I take?"
"You're dead"
"I stab the sleeping noble in the throat, how much damage does he take?"
"He's dead"
Thomas Shey
Legend
I just posted the picture because he said Avengers and the issue was just announced.
From the poll we did before on it, it seems like Captain America is within the mundane-enough range for most folks (the poll came out of folks debating what was too super or super-natural for a fighter to have).
D&D General - Poll: How tough should 20th Level Fighters be? (MCU edition)
So, in another thread, the great debate rages between whether the Quadratic Wizard vs. Linear Fighters fault is more Dr. Strange's fault or more Bucky's. Since Strange keeps using his time powers to wipe out attempts to vote about how over-powered he is, lets go to the other side. Where do...
As I've noted before, there's an obvious overlap between pulp-adventure heroes and bottom end superheroes, including even a few with what could be called superpowers (though usually pretty low end). The Shadow is probably the poster child here.
This is a problem with all kinds of genre things, honestly; its not hard to point at things on one side or the other and say they're clearly in one bucket and not the other, but there are always going to be fuzzy in-the-middle cases.
Thomas Shey
Legend
Neither did I, but that's because no one usually pressed on it. That didn't mean there weren't clearly cases where it made no damn sense; people just shrugged and moved on.
Lanefan
Victoria Rules
They make longer stories. Longer does not necessarily equal better.
The bigger difference is that in 0e-1e-2e the important story was that of the party as a whole* rather than of any individual character; and some of that story involved changes - forced or otherwise - in party makeup now and then.
The trend where players see their own PC's story as being as or more important than that of the party is not something to be celebrated.
* - or even sometimes the campaign as a whole, if multiple parties were involved.
Lanefan
Victoria Rules
We implemented a homebrew body point/fatigue point system into D&D about 40 years ago that works pretty much like this. Body points always represent real injury and are harder to cure or rest back; most people have between 2-6 b.p. (size of roll is race-dependent rather than class-dependent) and the range of 0 to -9 is also b.p. Fatigue points - the usual h.p. you get from your class and level - go on top of these and represent fatigue, luck, and all that other stuff PLUS nicks and scratches in order to allow poison to work as intended.
BP/FP is a drum I've been banging on ever since.
It's not about longer stories. It's about who was the subject of the story.
The Hungarian definition of a cosign was about a location or setting.
The Blackmoor Campaign
John"s Greyhawk Campaign
Lou Smith's Silver City campaign
John, Mary, Big Jim, and Baseball Jim's Westland Campaign.
Cotton, Stinky, Fatty, and Brooklyn's War of the World Campaign.
The story became about an area or Setting That's why the individual stories of PCd could be stupid, silly, boring, or anticlimactic. They weren't the subject. However it made PCs just be barely more important than NPCs in the story.
Incorrect.
In 0e-2e the story was about the Area or Setting. Sam's often ran multiple parties or formed groups on the fly. That's why it was allowed to be so unfairly lethal and arbitrary.
Yoyr PC didn't have the plot armor. The setting had the plot armor.
I thing it changed with Dragonlance. Then it became about a consistent party. At this point players and DMs wanted to run narrative and story curves like the Hero's Journey and the Fairy Tale.
So then mechanics move toward keeping PCs alive so they could both reach the climax and survive it.
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