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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kaomera" data-source="post: 5504467" data-attributes="member: 38357">I've got the feeling we may have done things a bit differently than most groups back when I was playing AD&D, but I would expect damage to be the only effect of hitting someone with a table (and it would be "normal damage", ie the same as if you had swung your sword). Knocking someone over is simply a story consideration, although because the fiction mattered more (specifically because we didn't use a battlemat with any precision) it could still make a difference. But I don't remember ever actually applying any specific penalties because someone was knocked down... Well, not penalties to die rolls / stats, at least; "who gets there first" (initiative and movement) tended to be very important, and having to get up off the floor would make a difference...The big difference with old-school D&D, for me (and why I would run a game like that again, although I like the modern stuff too) is that you don't need to apply mechanical effects to every little thing to make it significant. Ideally, you'd throw the table because it was a cool thing to do...(XP comment to the above post)I think that what I've found in my play of modern D&D is that reduced damage + a rider often isn't enough (for most players - I tend to really like riders, myself, and there are others who do as well). Look at how much the 4e PHB1 Warlocks get panned, when they tend (ime) to do more damage than any non-striker (other than perhaps a striker-secondary like a fighter who's optimized out of her main role for more damage) and still get some very attractive riders... The issue is that there are a lot of powers out there that do as much or more damage and still have good riders (they may or may not be as good, but the usefulness of riders tends to be situational), often on classes that can deal really good damage otherwise.This becomes an issue with "stunts" and such because to really be attractive they not only have to be better than a character's normal powers / whatever, but they also have to overcome the investment / attachment that players have made to those powers when they picked them out. I find that many characters have a few dozen mechanically different ways to swing their swords (or shoot lightning bolts out of them, or whatever), but that really out-of-the-box stuff isn't really much more common in my games of 3.X / 4e than it was in 1e AD&D. I know that there are some people who are getting really good results out of stuff like page 42, but for the groups I've DMed, but I think that you really need the players to be specifically and deliberately on-board with the idea that doing off-the-wall stuff really improves the game.</blockquote>

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