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

[Maxperson]

Except when it only has one hit point, putting it to sleep with a mace kills it in the process. (I flat-out refuse to allow any sort of post-hoc "oh, I meant to make it unconscious" declaration; you have to say before you swing whether you're attacking to subdue or to kill)

I agree that the attempt to knock out should be declared in advance. We got rid of that asinine portion of the rule the first time we encountered it. That doesn't change the point, though. I can knock something out with a mace, putting it to sleep. Even if it has 1 hit point.

 

[VHawkwinter]

"conservatism" as in resistance to change.
You see it all the time... It is so mind boggling to me.

True.

D&D is a living game. OF COURSE the new books etc are going to adapt. If you literally won't play a newer version because ... whatever, then it isn't for you. Don't demand it regress to the era you discovered D&D because that is what makes you feel good; play the version you discovered. I don't liek every artistic or design choice either, but it isn't up to me to demand D&D coddle my unchanging preferences. If I want to re-experience BECMI (the edition I grew up with) I can just play that. And so can you.

Also true. I suspect most of the griping you see is from players who want to PLAY (old edition), not run it, and perhaps they are struggling to find groups for the older system.

In my case, I ran / played 5e for ~2.5 years (having dodged it for the first few years for a lack of content and eventually picking it up primarily because of DM's Guild Conversions), and dropped it because I was just not happy with the writing or gameplay at any level.

Not to say I'm satisfied with some existing variety of 3.X (Perhaps Eclipse would be the closest to satisfactory, but it's a bit too fuzzy, and only really covers character building) - If I were satisfied with 3.X I never would have tried 5e to begin with. I want change - I'm just not happy with the direction of the change we got. Which eventually led to me starting building my own system... Which isn't done yet. But progress is progressing. And it's relatively distinct.

But if I ever run a published not-my-own-system Fantasy d20 again - it will almost certainly be Eclipse with a mashup of 3.0 and 3.5 books for the other stuff.

 

[loverdrive]

The relative importance of a character is not a matter of process sim. It might be a matter of genre sim, but honestly I see that as a misnamed concept (or the other one is; either way, they shouldn't IMO both have sim in the common name for the term). Process sim and genre sim are IMO far more different than they are alike.

It's not particularly uncommon to model miscellaneous threats differently from the main one in exercises. I recently was helping my friend organize security training (maybe I finally should take some of the lessons to life, but hey) where blue team was defending against an organized attack from red team and also some random unrelated scammers that were barely modelled at all.

I would also say it's not particularly uncommon for the umpire to force some sort of interesting situation that is actually worth simulating (like on day 2 just telling the most knowledgeable guy on the blue team "a brick fell onto your head" and removing him from play to see how well the team can adapt to sudden loss of leadership) but that's a tangent

 

[Hussar]

Your reading of his post doesn't make any sense. Clearstream doesn't seem to be saying that minions were immune to any other effects or conditions.

Just to clarify - @clearstream is stating that it is impossible to incapacitate minions since any damage "destroys" them. Therefore, @clearstream is pretty clearly stating that minions are immune to a specific condition - incapacitated (at least by dealing damage).

In any case, who cares? @clearstream is full on wrong here. The rules were clarified, and the interpretation was definitively proven to be mistaken. Why the heck are people still banging on about this?

 

[Hussar]

There's been an ongoing argument whether process simulation and genre simulation are even close to the same thing for quite some time.

Heh. I'll freely admit that genre simulation is not something I particularly consider under the rubric of "simulation". To me, that's an entirely different beast. Mostly because any RPG that fits under a particular genre is always trying to evoke that genre in play. D&D is high magic fantasy. Thus, most of the mechanics are centered around the notion of high fantasy. 5e takes this a very large step further by making virtually all PC's casters. Magic is going to feature very centrally in most 5e D&D play.

OTOH, something like Call of Cthulhu is attempting to evoke existential dread. So, the mechanics all revolve around that. If you attempt to play CoC like it was D&D, with violent solutions to every problem (or most problems anyway), the game doesn't really work. Your characters die in very short order. Doctor Who (at least the ancient version of the RPG that I played many years ago) made combat extremely lethal. If you picked a fight, you were very likely going to die. So, you ran away from things a lot. Which, really, is a pretty good evoking of Doctor Who.

And, because genre is so porous, it's an endless rabbit hole to decide whether or not a game is successfully evoking a particular genre.

OTOH (oops, using that again), process simulation, to me, is a far more concrete discussion. Do the mechanics simulate (in some fashion and to some degree) how things are working in the game world. And, sorry to flog the equine here, to me, a process simulation must inform the narrative in such a way that it excludes some narratives. Otherwise, it's not actually simulating anything. It's all post hoc justification, which is not process simulation.

 

[Hussar]

Very curious if anyone plays it this way? I sure don't, and No DMs I've seen do!

Interestingly, this was not addressed at all in the 2024 rules. The spell wording remains the same.

Probably because they realized that overly pedantic, deliberately obtuse readings of the rules result in the offender being pelted by dice and the problem resolves itself.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Heh. I'll freely admit that genre simulation is not something I particularly consider under the rubric of "simulation". To me, that's an entirely different beast. Mostly because any RPG that fits under a particular genre is always trying to evoke that genre in play. D&D is high magic fantasy. Thus, most of the mechanics are centered around the notion of high fantasy. 5e takes this a very large step further by making virtually all PC's casters. Magic is going to feature very centrally in most 5e D&D play.

OTOH, something like Call of Cthulhu is attempting to evoke existential dread. So, the mechanics all revolve around that. If you attempt to play CoC like it was D&D, with violent solutions to every problem (or most problems anyway), the game doesn't really work. Your characters die in very short order. Doctor Who (at least the ancient version of the RPG that I played many years ago) made combat extremely lethal. If you picked a fight, you were very likely going to die. So, you ran away from things a lot. Which, really, is a pretty good evoking of Doctor Who.

And, because genre is so porous, it's an endless rabbit hole to decide whether or not a game is successfully evoking a particular genre.

OTOH (oops, using that again), process simulation, to me, is a far more concrete discussion. Do the mechanics simulate (in some fashion and to some degree) how things are working in the game world. And, sorry to flog the equine here, to me, a process simulation must inform the narrative in such a way that it excludes some narratives. Otherwise, it's not actually simulating anything. It's all post hoc justification, which is not process simulation.

You haven't noted me saying D&D is a good choice for simulation play. I didn't think so a half century ago when I cared a lot more about that.

 

[loverdrive]

You don't have to have that rule; there's nearly always ways to tweak or re-do it such that it does make in-fiction sense, and if that can't be done then it's probably a bad rule to begin with (which playability might demand that you accept anyway, but that doesn't mean you have to like it ).

What if it comes at the cost of greater connection to the fiction when taken holistically?

I gave a grid movement example upthread, where trying to make an individual mechanic "make sense" in-universe lead to experience at large lose any tangible connection in terms of decision making to fencing.

 

[Micah Sweet]

What if it comes at the cost of greater connection to the fiction when taken holistically?

I gave a grid movement example upthread, where trying to make an individual mechanic "make sense" in-universe lead to experience at large lose any tangible connection in terms of decision making to fencing.

I can definitely see your point, and would not to averse to a more granular combat system. I've been looking over Rolemaster recently, and it certainly looks like a more simulationist experience.

 

[loverdrive]

Very curious if anyone plays it this way? I sure don't, and No DMs I've seen do!

Interestingly, this was not addressed at all in the 2024 rules. The spell wording remains the same.

I can see it being played (and even intended) that way: seeing an invisible creature is better than, well, not seeing it, but hitting or defending against Predator-esque shimmering target is still hard.