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

[EzekielRaiden]

I always (mis)read this as the fighter getting up to one attack against each opponent in these cases, which put a limit on it based on how many foes the fighter could reach. Thus, a 10th-level fighter surrounded by 6 commoners would only get 6 attacks, one per foe.

Then again, this is one of those rules that rarely if ever saw the light of day mostly because we usually just forgot it existed, and we quietly scrapped it over the years.

Which is one of the things that makes discussions with conservative, long-entrenched D&D fans so tedious.

They turn off and on rules at their leisure, without really thinking about it much. They heed rules they like and reject rules they don't with a casualness that borders on whim.

And then they treat other systems as being absolute monoliths to be exactingly applied to the atom, every stitch picked over with a fine-toothed comb, without even just...applying the rules in a creative or adaptive way, to say nothing of evaluating whether or not one proceeds. They treat the fact that things get called out--so they can be seen and thought about in advance!--as though it were a binding straightjacket, because apparently ignorance about what the mechanics do, or what they were designed for, is somehow superior to knowledge.

It's part of why I continually check out of threads like this, as I have recently done. The double standard is so strong, it's impossible to have a meaningful discussion.