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

[Enrahim]

One other point regarding the recent discussion of settings. One of my pet peeves is "original settings" that are nothing more than a different map, deities with different names, and then a list of options that have been removed because the GM doesn't like them.

Are some original settings actually engaging and interesting? Sure. Are most? Nope!

Have you tried to look deeper, to see if there are any attempt at improved coherence? For instance the profilering of player spieces has caused at least some people getting into the problem that the settings do not feel credible to them anymore. The problem of what a backwater human dominated community should do when a full circus troupe of psaudo antropomorpic animals, and cereatures of myth enters the local tavern seem widely recognised to not have been aproperiately taken into account in GMing advice.

The last AD&D campaign I played in (more than 20 years ago) had no limitations on character creation, and included a minoteur fighter, a celtic inspired centaur druid, a samurai and a power play buildt psion. It was a complete mess.

Limiting things can be done for more noble causes than "I don't like them".

 

[Deset Gled]

What is the reason for the player to insist on playing dragonborn, that is not similarly a red flag for allowing them into the campaign?

As a player, I expect the GM to allow or disallow PC races based on their world building. There is no reason they have to allow all published options. Character creation guidelines are a critical tool to communicate the baseline feel and direction of the game that will follow.

Another player outright refusing to follow character creation guidelines is one of the biggest, reddest flags I can imagine. It is a good sign that player and I will not game well together. I doubt both of us would continue in that game together after session 0.

 

[Lanefan]

Heh. It's really funny. Wayyyyy back early in the thread, I commented that D&D was a poor system for sandboxing because of the amount of work required to get the game off the ground. Now, here we are, thousands of posts later, and you're talking about needing six MONTHS of work to get a sandbox off the ground using D&D.

For me it'd be six months of work to get any form of D&D off the ground, be it sandbox or railroad or linear or whatever, if I was building a half-decent homebrew setting in which to run it.

That by preference I'd ideally end up using that setting for a sandbox-y game as opposed to another style doesn't change the amount of lead time required to build the setting.

 

[Lanefan]

No.

Now the two of them need to decide if it's worth participating together, when they, or at least one of them, is so bullheaded, they cannot ever work with the other to find an amenable solution.

Personally, I consider it an extremely bad red flag when a GM slams their foot down, "pulls rank", before character creation. That tells me enthusiastic player participation is a low priority to them.

What it tells me is that the DM is simply curating the game's players, within reason, to suit the game he's got prepared and is willing and ready to run. I fail to see how this can be construed as a flaw.

If nobody's interested in playing, then clearly it's back to the drawing board. Fortunately, I haven't had that issue since the late 1990s and that was more because nobody was interested in playing anything except Magic cards. Then, and unrelated to 3e's release but in almost lockstep timing, within the year 1999 I went from almost no players to having to run two parties 'cause they couldn't all fit in here on the same night.

As for bullheaded people, well, I'm used to those.

 

[Lanefan]

Oooor...you can just do the really simple thing of "maximize base damage".

It's not even hard to calculate. 2d6? 12. 4d8? 4x8=24. It's extremely easy to maximize the (rolled) damage.

And, as noted, the average result of "roll XdY twice and add" is X(Y+1). Naturally, you'll miss out on the handful of times you could've gotten an utterly ridiculous crit, e.g. 2XY, but in return you avoid the anemic ones.

Also, doing the above actually can result in some significant problems, because it means static damage bonuses are extremely powerful. Consider someone using a greatsword (2d6) with Great Weapon Master and a +5 Strength bonus. A crit then becomes (2d6+11)·2, or 2·(2d6)+22, which gives a spread of 26-46 inclusive, average 36. At least half the damage from that attack--in almost all cases--comes from the static damage, not the rolled damage. And this is using the 5.5e version, it would be worse with the 5.0 version, a whopping 2·(2d6)+30, so at least 60% of the damage, even if you roll the max value, comes from the static bonus alone.

Yep. And while I'm quite OK with that, I'm not OK with the 5e-style frequency of crits, and so I require a confirm roll that takes the odds of critting from 1 : 20 to (in my system) more like 3 : 200.

That said, we don't have Great Weapon Master. A Fighter with really good "exceptional Strength" (or using a strength device e.g. Ogre Gauntlets or a Girdle of Giant Strength) can get to +5 damage or more just from Strength, then add in a magic weapon and other benefits e.g. Prayer and +9 or +10 isn't unreasonable. Never mind that when two or more multipliers apply, they all stack; thus someone using a Giantslayer sword (double damage vs Giants) who gets a 2x-damage crit is multiplying everything by 4. And our crits go to 4x damage if you're lucky. A high-level Thief backstrike plus crit adds up real fast!

Yes this means sometimes we see some truly crazy and pretty much insta-kill damage numbers, but not as often as you might think. In over 40 years of play across all our games I've seen 100+ points of damage done maybe twenty times by a PC, and 200+ points done exactly once. The flip side, of course, is that the monsters get to crit as well; I've maybe seen 3 characters eat 100+ points from a single melee attack* and none of them survived.

* - the most damage I've ever seen a PC take from any source happened to one of my own: a wand of lightning broke in a confined space (the inside of a Dragon's mouth) and released all charges at once. My little Hobbit was in that mouth too, and after eating 283 points of damage was reduced to a small crispy pile of slag.......

Maximizing the rolled dice for a critical hit really is a sweet spot of simplicity, impact, and reasonable balance. Heck, one could even argue that it actually hearkens back to an idea from yesteryear--attack matrices, which were just precalculated to-hit tables--and to an idea that 5e actually does use anyway, which is letting players take the rounded-up average result for determining HP by level (which, in my experience, everyone does in fact take that option; I'm sure some people don't, but I've never played with anyone who does.)

Heh - we roll for hit points and always will.

The maximize-dice approach is simple, but also a whole lot less exciting than having the chance of doing something crazy.

I prefer the long-tail approach where once in a while you can get that huge damage number.

 

[Hussar]

For me it'd be six months of work to get any form of D&D off the ground, be it sandbox or railroad or linear or whatever, if I was building a half-decent homebrew setting in which to run it.

That by preference I'd ideally end up using that setting for a sandbox-y game as opposed to another style doesn't change the amount of lead time required to build the setting.

See, that's why I mentioned the alternative.

Me? I'd play 6 months of something like Ironsworn (maybe modify it a bit to make it more D&D fantasty, say). Which means my setting is ready for play in about 20 minutes. I then spend the next six months collaboratively building a detailed, intricate setting with my players, in play, that will result in a compete, living setting that everyone at the table is directly linked into.

Which I can then use to build other campaigns if I so choose.

If D&D (or any RPG for that matter) requires SIX MONTHS of work before it's playable, then RPG'S are dead.

 

[Enrahim]

I guess it's nice of the friends to indulge their GM friend's desire to share their world. Equally, it might be nice of the GM to indulge their friend's desire to play a tiefling.

And I guess it would be nice if you react to being punched in the face by smiling and giving the puncher a hug.

No analogy with the relevant case beyond pointing out that nicety isn't really a valid argument on it's own. To give a good comment on the situation, you need to achieve an understanding of what might cause a person to not go for the nicest possible action imaginable.

 

[Enrahim]

See, that's why I mentioned the alternative.

Me? I'd play 6 months of something like Ironsworn (maybe modify it a bit to make it more D&D fantasty, say). Which means my setting is ready for play in about 20 minutes. I then spend the next six months collaboratively building a detailed, intricate setting with my players, in play, that will result in a compete, living setting that everyone at the table is directly linked into.

Which I can then use to build other campaigns if I so choose.

If D&D (or any RPG for that matter) requires SIX MONTHS of work before it's playable, then RPG'S are dead.

Maybe. But can you imagine the experience might differ between those two ways of doing things? Isn't it great that there is indeed someone out there willing to put in the effort to enable that other experience for those that really know how to value it?

 

[Enrahim]

No. It's doesn't. That's the point. WHY is never, ever explained in D&D. All that you get is the result. The character fell. Why did the character fall? We have no idea. The system is silent. Why did the character miss (or hit)? The system is silent. We have no idea.

That's the point.

A simulationist system will provide some nugget of information about how something happened. You missed because the target dodged. You failed to hurt the baddy because it was too tough and you hit wasn't strong enough. So on and so forth. When the system provides NO information about how something happened, it's not simulating anything.

However it can still support simulation, even if it in itself doesn't have a form that do anything simulative.

 

[Hussar]

Maybe. But can you imagine the experience might differ between those two ways of doing things? Isn't it great that there is indeed someone out there willing to put in the effort to enable that other experience for those that really know how to value it?

See, that's where the problem came in. I ONLY said my way was faster and easier. I in no way, shape or form said it was the only or even superior way. I know it's the way I'll do it in the future, but, again, hey, if you want to walk a thousand miles, go right ahead. I'm certainly not going to stop you. But, I would suggest taking a car instead.