D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[pemerton]

Taking damage =/= dodge better.

Wearing heavy armour helps you dodge! Being super-buff like a dragon or T-Rex helps you dodge! it's dodging all the way down.

 

[pemerton]

I never said I didn't like it, so you can turn that particular faucet right off; all the RPGs I play use a similar system, and I quite like them.

Right. The idea that because a poster argues that hp aren't a simulationist mechanic, they don't like them (or are criticising them) is quite bizarre.

 

[Neonchameleon]

If heavy armor didn't prevent people from taking damage nobody would wear it. Try punching someone with your fist in their stomach while they're wearing a breastplate and see how much they care.

Which is why most systems use an armour-as-damage-resistance model. One where punching someone on the breast plate does adjusted no damage - but hitting them with a Warhammer will still hurt even through the DR. Armour doesn't make you better at dodging

 

[Maxperson]

Even then, what specifically they find fun is going to form an agenda, unless they find all things equally fun which would be a bit odd.

But at this point we are getting almost exclusively into the domain of psychology.

I was thinking about that when @TwoSix said casual players don't have an agenda. An agenda implies some sort of conscious choice. A casual player might have preferences that would fall into one of the creative agendas, but that's not enough to be an agenda.

When I go to a game convention, I go with the agenda to play board games that I've never played before. My buddies and I have a lot of games that we play, so I don't want to pay to play the same games. Plus I can learn if there's a new game that we would all enjoy. One of my players goes to conventions with the agenda of winning as many tournaments as he can.

When I first started going to conventions, though, I had no agenda. I just sort of played whatever I fell into, even though I had a preference for roleplaying games and ended up playing those more than board games.

 

[TwoSix]

Wearing heavy armour helps you dodge! Being super-buff like a dragon or T-Rex helps you dodge! it's dodging all the way down.

Always remember the 5 D's of D&D: Dodge, Duck, Dip, Dive, and Dodge!

 

[Thomas Shey]

That sort of conflict can be fairly straightforwardly analysed:
There's a reason that this is a known thing that happens in D&D play - nobody is shocked to read that example of play - whereas it doesn't come up in other RPGs.

Well, not to the same degree. There are games that while they wouldn't leave you deterministically safe in that situation, would make the likelihood of any excessively hazardous result low enough to make the same issue potential. They're usually games with limited but present metacurrency to cover some of the same ground, where if the character still has it in supply and the game doesn't have some sort of rule that prevents its use in that kind of situation it can buffer the risk considerably. Savage Worlds comes to mind here.

The usual difference is many of these games have some beefy critical or degree-of-success rolls that provide at least some real risk even with the metacurrancy available. SW's open ended damage roll being the one at hand in my example.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I can confirm this is accurate. My buddy and I both jumped from the roof of a 5 story building. I landed and shrugged, thanks to my Master’s Degree. He only had an Associate’s and splattered all over the concrete!

Makes sense. People don't realize just how valuable post-grad studies really are.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Which is why most systems use an armour-as-damage-resistance model. One where punching someone on the breast plate does adjusted no damage - but hitting them with a Warhammer will still hurt even through the DR. Armour doesn't make you better at dodging

Yeah, its just not hard for aborbtion/deflection of damage and avoidance being conflated to produce some really odd results sometimes.

 

[TwoSix]

Makes sense. People don't realize just how valuable post-grad studies really are.

You can't spell "Ph.D." without "HP".

 

[Micah Sweet]

I can see this working for something like the WFRP career system, but not for the relatively intransigent D&D class system. The core issue is that real people don't progress linearly, learning exactly the same set of skills in the exact same order.

You can make it work by making each "class" be something like an academic course of progression, whereas there are diegetic "schools" that train wizards, fighters, rangers, etc, in a known cirriculum of skills. But that would track with "crafting your setting to integrate with the system", as I advocated for in previous posts.

I have advocated this. Beyond that, 5e variants like Level Up provide much more choice within the class system, so two characters with the same class and level can be quite different.