Never Made Sense

[Grumpy RPG Reviews]

What are some things you feel are lacking about the "world" of D&D, or tropes common to all the D&D worlds which never made much sense to you? What would you change about the "worlds" of D&D if you could?

 

[Lwaxy]

I do change what I don't like or consider silly.

Vancian magic (worst thing ever to me)
The way magic flows in general. I tend to add mana points and ley lines to worlds
Icons like Elminster getting too much attention
The way races are done (in Birthright for example or the Drow)

That's the most important stuff I guess.

 

[Umbran]

Vancian magic (worst thing ever to me)
The way magic flows in general. I tend to add mana points and ley lines to worlds

One of the big things that doesn't make sense to me is a meta-thing: How big a thing magic "not making sense" is. Even moreso when that sits right beside how magic is supposed to be "mysterious".

 

[Cor Azer]

Sort of a meta thing - us humans are generally notorious with a sense of scale. Consider this - Rome fell how long ago? That means an elf living today possibly had a parent alive then, and very likely a grandparent. How likely is it that so many ancient temples, castles, and even kingdoms get lost with that sort of "at-hand" knowledge.

Related to that - the pace of progress. How much has our world changed since the early Renaissance? That's one elf's lifetime.

 

[Umbran]

Related to that - the pace of progress. How much has our world changed since the early Renaissance? That's one elf's lifetime.

Yes, but much of that change has been due to changing technology.

The implication is, then, that for most settings folks pretty much know what there is to know about how the Universe works, and/or discovery is random, haphazard, and generally not subject to rational processes.

Basically, if theorizing doesn't help discover the next magical law like it does help us discover the next physical law, then change will be slow.

 

[delericho]

Sort of a meta thing - us humans are generally notorious with a sense of scale. Consider this - Rome fell how long ago? That means an elf living today possibly had a parent alive then, and very likely a grandparent. How likely is it that so many ancient temples, castles, and even kingdoms get lost with that sort of "at-hand" knowledge.

Related to that - the pace of progress. How much has our world changed since the early Renaissance? That's one elf's lifetime.

Well, evidently elves typically pay about as much attention to trends in human civilisation as real-world adults pay to the details of children's TV, and for much the same reasons - it changes too quickly to follow, and it's largely meaningless noise anyway.

 

[Desdichado]

What are some things you feel are lacking about the "world" of D&D, or tropes common to all the D&D worlds which never made much sense to you? What would you change about the "worlds" of D&D if you could?

The second question isn't necessarily the same as the first. I don't know that the assumed setting assumptions of D&D don't always "make sense", the things I'd want to change are more around what I don't like rather than what I think make sense.

I don't really like D&D magic, for instance. And I think that there's too much of it, and it's too readily available per the rules to really give a logical setting that I like. Most of the PC classes had some kind of spell progression in the d20 era. Really only the barbarian, rogue and fighter didn't. The monk too, but he had other weird supernatural abilities.

Same thing with the races. If you add "monster" races to the PC races, you've got way too many anthropomorphic guys running around than I like, or that make sense. Plus, I don't actually like a lot of the standard D&D races too much. Elves and dwarves, for instance, both get the ax from my settings.

I've made my peace with hit points over time, but I never really did with levels. I don't think the disparity between capabilities of low and high level characters makes sense. The entire genre changes as a character goes up in level. I ever only enjoy playing with a much smaller subset of the total levels available.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

The entire genre changes as a character goes up in level.

I hear what you're saying, and I can't say you're wrong, either.

To combat this, you might consider this: run a D&D style game in HERO or some other "toolbox" system. IME, the way advancement is handled in those games is FAR more incremental, so that the PCs change with time, but not so much that they, as you say, change genres.

It's not that hard to do, really, and best of all, it lets you pick & choose from your favorite aspects of the various editions. I've run D&D HERO with 1Ed through 3.5Ed style PCs in the same party...and adding a 4Ed style AEDU PC would be a piece of cake.

 

[Desdichado]

Oh, sure, I could play a different system (Savage Worlds would probably be a great fit for my tastes), but for a variety of reasons, I actually want to make d20/D&D work. Not least being that it's easy to find players, to get my current group to play that system, and because I have so much material that I can use with that system if I stick with it.

I used to just keep my campaigns within a certain level range and then end them before they were at risk to go out of that range. I've also changed the XP required to level chart to make it much slower, so that higher levels come up about as frequently as they used to in older editions of D&D. But by and large, I think E6 is the solution that's the most elegant, flexible and workable for me.

 

[amerigoV]

Chewbacca living on Endor - it doesn't make sense.

That, and gnomes (well, Underpants Gnomes make sense, but not the D&D ones).

And one serious one: Monsters - they are not monsters anymore. They are all adversaries. Even at low levels, if you fight giant frogs, a giant tick, a giant snake, bandits, gnolls, zombies, ghouls, an ogre, and an evil priest all in one relatively short adventure, then there is little in the way of the adventure experiencing "the dark things that go bump in the night."