How is D&D of any edition realistic?

[hong]

Though I hope there is some optional rule presented in the DMG that allows armor to work as DR without completely wrecking the rest of the math.

IIRC that was something they looked at, but ditched, during playtest.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

I've decided that every 'hit' in 4e will be an actual hit in my game.

So if someone has 200 hit points and you hit them for 5, you make contact, sure, but your dagger just grazed their arm. If you hit them for 50, well damn, you just stuck your greataxe into his collarbone, but holy crap, he's still coming!

Though I hope there is some optional rule presented in the DMG that allows armor to work as DR without completely wrecking the rest of the math.

My hopes are slim. The designers said they experimented with Armor as DR, and found the balancing very difficult and eventually not worth the effort.

I have played in a few systems with Armor as DR (Dark Eye and Warhammer Fantasy), and I never really liked the results. There is no way in such games to create good results for a lightly armored or lightly armed warrior. This might be "realistic", but it also means everything is leading up to a single "optimum" build. (or maybe two, if there are also spellcasters in the game.)

 

[Mister Doug]

Can we please ban this word from these boards, along with:

-Hyperbole
-Fallacious
-Ergo
-Verisimilitude

…I used to have no problem with these words, but they seem to be used as insulting crutches on these, and other, boards.

Your strawman argument is filled with fallacious hyperbole, ergo it lacks verisimilitude.

 

[LostSoul]

The example is meant to illustrate the way in which the minion concept may violate, or at least further strain, the posited naive rationalism brought by most players to the table.

The players could ask the DM. If he doesn't want to just tell them without a roll, they can make an Insight check.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Third, this isn't the first time I have seen minion style rules. Feng Shui and 7th Sea used similar rules, and they didn't stretch any players' credulity at tables where I played when they were used to present the right kind of encounter, ones that felt consistent with the scenario, genre, and type of situation faced. Minions are not there to present ultimate threats, but to help show off how tough the heroes are and set up a contrast to how bad the Big Bad is. They are the warmup to the action, but with a small touch of threat.

I just remembered a nice idea that Lizard brought up in his "After Action Report", and a similar idea in Shadowrun.
In Shadowrun, NPCs where often rated with a "professionalism" value. A character with a low professionalism would retreat if he was attacked or at least lightly wounded, while a very professional NPC would fight until he's dead.

Lizards idea was to say that if hit points (especially for minions) are so abstract, you can narrate the result of 0 hps in a lot of ways. If you want, a Minion is beheaded with a single successful strike. Or he just takes a slight injury, breaking his fighting spirit and running away (without attempting to alert other allies or similar stuff - for all intents and purposes he is out of the fight and will no longer be a threat for this encounter or in any related encounters.)

 

[Tervin]

They need not be part of the same encounter, merely present in the same setting. One could conceivably go stomping around the planes for a bit and indulge in some angel slaying, and then go back "home" to see how the old stronghold is running, do some light grocery shopping, get those servants to polish that knick out of your uber blade of flaming dread, and other mundane tasks. While there one of you servants could warn you about said orc chieftain and his minions running amok in your holding near your vineyards... sort of like rabbits in your lettuce patch.

The DM would have to choose that storyline where the epic hero has to go do some orc killing. As those orcs don't make interesting enemies for the heroes, I would say that the example is kind of pointless. My memory isn't perfect, but I did read something about a recommendation to keep enemies at roughly the same level as the heroes...

Of course it is possible to run boring and pointless encounters, but why? And also, nothing stops you from turning the orcs into minions if you really want to run the encounter, just to make sure that they aren't randomly too dangerous somehow.

With any ruleset it is possible to create really bad encounters. 4th Edition will not change that, but I don't think that is really a rules issue.

 

[Rallek]

- Hong


Argumentum ad Hominem is literally, an argument to the man, one in which you attempt to shift the burden of proof from yourself to your interlocutor, or actively refute their claim by attacking not the point raised but a characteristic, belief, or quality of said interlocutor. Perhaps your "typing" me as a certain kind of DM was not an attempt to do this, that's why I chose to interpret it as merely a red herring.


Either way, it was off topic, and non-productive in the context of the argument.

The minion is weaker in the same way that an 8th level warrior is weaker than an 8 HD dragon, despite both having 8 hit dice. Angels live in different areas of the game world to orcs, have different purposes, face different threats, and so on. There is nothing that says a being in the Astral dominions must have more hp than something on the material plane, just the same as in 3E. Githyanki, githzerai, manes, quasits and low-ranked modrons are all lowly planar monsters that can easily be stomped by a sufficiently high-level orc.

One last shot at explanation on the minion matter. The problem isn't that some creatures are stronger than others, the problem is the ambiguity created by one-hit-kill creatures existing across all levels and being, potentially, indistinguishable from non one-hit-kill variates of the same creature. I feel that this damages the naive rationalism that help make the fictional game world more accessible to players, and by extension their characters.

There are also world building issues clustered around the existence of minions, especially if they exist in significant numbers, but that is a separate debate. As stated before, these are simply my opinions disagree at your leisure.

So where do you stand on the kobold armor debate?


Happy Gaming



EDIT:


- Mister Doug


No, not every classed orc has songs sung about him, it was merely an illustration of a way to avoid the "unfair surprise" problem within the existing paradigm. But since we're on the subject, if PCs are showing up to off this shaman and his minion buddies, then I would imagine that they probably didn't get lost on the way to the privy and wind up at an orc hold. More likely they went there specifically to murder the shaman. This raises the question of how they knew he was there. Odds are the orcs are causing trouble for someone, and that someone would like the trouble resolved. From what I understand of D&D orcs causing trouble is usually of the burn/pillage/slaughter variety, and one would think if that was the sort of trouble afoot, survivors may just talk about the orc bringing it. So yes, I think it is reasonable that a powerful orc who happens to dwell in a place the PCs are likely to go might have a story or two going around about his exploits locally.


The same is not true of Orc Warlord number 16 dwelling with his clan 1000 miles from nowhere, but the PCs didn't show up to share murder time with him, did they? Let him start some trouble that the locals can't handle, then word can get out, and then PCs are more likely to go there, what with rewards and/or macguffins and all.


But all of this is beside the point, as I stated up front 4e isn't looking tempting to me, and 3.x isn't my system of choice either, (though I am coming to like the heavily house-ruled E6 variant I'm currently running) I was just sharing some thoughts on minions, kobold armor, naive rationalism and gaming.


So what do you think about the kobold armor debate?


Happy Gaming

 

[hong]

One last shot at explanation on the minion matter. The problem isn't that some creatures are stronger than others, the problem is the ambiguity created by one-hit-kill creatures existing across all levels and being, potentially, indistinguishable from non one-hit-kill variates of the same creature.

One-hit-kill creatures at all levels is irrelevant ingame, because level is a metagame construct. This applies even more so in 4E than 3E, because you don't even have hit dice anymore.

I feel that this damages the naive rationalism that help make the fictional game world more accessible to players, and by extension their characters.

You feel wrong. Or to be more precise, if you feel that way, then it's because you have constructed your ingame narrative to be insufficiently flexible to admit the presence of minions. This can be addressed by the stratagem of not thinking too hard about fantasy.

There are also world building issues clustered around the existence of minions, especially if they exist in significant numbers, but that is a separate debate. As stated before, these are simply my opinions disagree at your leisure.

See above. Everyone is a minion, except for the (un)lucky few.

 

[Rallek]

You feel wrong. Or to be more precise, if you feel that way, then it's because you have constructed your ingame narrative to be insufficiently flexible to admit the presence of minions. This can be addressed by the stratagem of not thinking too hard about fantasy.

Then again, perhaps minions are simply not useful in my narrative. I would probably be in a better position than you to judge that, what with it being my narrative and all.

As far as not thinking to hard about fantasy I agree, I just think that we may have differing definitions of "too hard".


My group has a taste for lower powered games, we tend more towards WFRP than D&D to get our fantasy fix, though E6 did get me to run d20 again, and so far it's been good, though we threw a small stack of house-rules on that too.

If you like to wade through armies of opponents who drop like flies as prep for the "real" fight, more power to you. If you like more action movie in your D&D that's fine too. I'm not saying it's terrible for everyone every time, I'm saying that I don't like it, and it doesn't work for my group.


And we still don't know what you think about the kobold armor issue.



Happy Gaming

 

[Mister Doug]

So what do you think about the kobold armor debate?


Happy Gaming

There was a debate about this?

I think it's reasonable for a character to take kobold armor and try to make use of it. Of course, the realistic thing to do is to point out that melting down scrap metal in a village blacksmith shop isn't very likely without very hot heat (more appropriate to industrial age society), but that he could hammer out some stuff or the like from the armor.

But I would just play it out more or less like the player wants because it is narratively more interesting. =)

For what it's worth, I am value neutral on 4th edition. My struggles right now are getting together a group of 30-something gamers on a regular basis with us having moved further apart, having busy schedules, and having gone back to graduate school at the age of 40. The way that advancement and character development works in any version of D&D works against pickup games IMHO, so I'm not so excited about any new edition of D&D right now. I just think the discussion of "realism" in any version of D&D seems strange to me, since when I was in college and it was "cool" among geeks to reject AD&D, the first criticism leveled at it was its lack of realism. And I don't think many of those issues every got changed much, though a new layer of consistency was added to 3e, which may be what people see as "realistic". But even 3.x seems less consistent and predictable a mechanical model than other RPGs I have played.

Oh, well. To each their own.