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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Water Bob" data-source="post: 5519036" data-attributes="member: 92305">I thought he was quite nice to the two of them being quite rude.  I mean, I open a thread for discussion, and instead of having a thoughtful difference of opinion, they decided to be jerks.  At least, that's the way I read them--then promptly ignored them.   No, not really.  I don't go  into the combats with the intention of making any judgement call.  If I were trying to control the plot with this method, I'd have an agenda to get so-and-so's arm broken, or have so-and-so receive a wound that gets infected, forcing him to meet an NPC healer I want him to meet. Nothing of the sort happens in my game.  As I said above, I simply look for "clues" I gather from the players describing their PC's actions, and then I try to see what the dice "tell" me.  In some fights, nothing out of the ordinary happens.  In others, something does.  It is quite arbitrary and designed to liven up combat and weave a good story.    Story is king in my game, and my players definitely have a large part in the process.  Sometimes, THEY are the ones that come up with the arbitrary ruling.  And, as I said above, I do let them get creative whe things happens to NPCs that they're fighting.      Actually, I do.   I don't always go with what they come up with, but if it makes sense and is not overpowering, why not let the players enjoy contributing to the game like that? "Hey, my character was raised around plains rangers--shouldn't I get a +2 bonus on my Local Customs throw to understand their ways?" Sounds good to me.  Let the player have that +2 circumstance bonus.      Absolutely it does.  Any problem comes from the player not agreeing with the call. In the original OP, the defender had his hit points reduced by A LOT.  What could have caused that?  The character isn't bleeding and dying, so something less than a serious wound must have happened to him in order to lose those points.   And, it is a wound of some sort, becuase it's going to take a lot of time for that wound to fully heal naturally. Since he was blocking, it was natural to think something happened to his hand.  Crushed or bruised fingers makes a lot of sense. Now, if you've got a player, like some of the ones that have posted in this thread, who don't go for this sort of thing, they're not going to trust the DM to implement the rules like this.  They want a chart to look at, before the game even starts.  Or, they don't want this type of wound implementation at all, because that type of interpolation is not mentioned in the game rules (well, it is in older AD&D, first edition, but the game seems to have gotten away from that sort of thing over the years and editions). One of the things I do is to be careful not to always interpret combat calls against the player.  I try to keep it 50/50 in favor/not in favor of the PCs.  Things go the player's way, too.  I do this with morale checks, wounds, all sorts of stuff.   Completely agreed.  I'm the judge and jury.  The buck stops here.  It ain't so unless I say so. My player contribut a lot to the game, and the game is better for it.  But, in the end, I am the Referee.  I say what goes.   Contrary to how it might seem, I actually play pretty close to RAW, too.  I have few house rules. Even what I'm doing here, in combat, is mentioned in the 3.5 rules (look at the discussion about the +2 modifier). What I'm doing isn't out of left field.      I think you take me wrong.  My campaign is a sandbox.  I throw down clues, and if the players bite, we go that direction.  If they don't bite, I may discard or recycle the idea for later. I don't know where my game is going most of the time until we get there.  But, when I say I'm telling a story, I mean that I'm the editor.  I take in the raw data, pluck out the good parts, and spin the tale. My players have a ton of input into what we do.  I try never to railroad them.  They have free will as to where their characters go and what they do.    Why not? First off, I stick very closely to the rules as written.  I have few house rules. In our last campaign, we had a Ranger pick up Two-Weapon fighting (this was an AD&D 2E game) who just learned the combat style when he advanced a level.  We had played out the Rangers life for a long while, and it was jarring to our suspension of disbelief that he could all of a sudden pick up a second weapon and be pretty good with it given that he'd never used a second weapon like that (or even trained in his "off" time). So, what we did was lower the penalties slowly.  He "worked" his way up to having the combat style.  It took a couple of game months--the early part of his new level.  He couldn't automatically jump to the better modifier because it just didn't make sense. There may be people who like that jarring "Hey, I can use Two Weapons Now!" apsect of leveling, but we didn't.  So, we implemented the change and had the character grow into his new skills. What we did there is not so different from what I'm describing about combat at the top of this thread.</blockquote>

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