Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Crimson Binome" data-source="post: 7726767" data-attributes="member: 6775031">If you look at the rules as though they're trying to reflect something about the game world, then it does make a good amount of sense, within the context from which the rules were designed to address. The art of RPG design is about isolating relevant factors in order to simplify processes so that you can run them at the table. The main difference between a small rock and a club is that rocks are harder to hit someone with - you have better reach if the rock is on a stick, and nobody really trains or practices fighting with a rock in their hand - so that's represented by a penalty on the attack roll. I don't remember the part about not getting your Strength bonus, but if that's actually a rule, then it could have been implemented in order to represent other improvised weapons; a stick, for example, can't transmit that extra force because it's too flexible, or it will break in half if you swing it too hard (depending on its composition).One of the common pitfalls that shows up in D&D heartbreakers is that they try to account for too many variables, when many of those variables would have a much smaller effect on the outcome than can be represented by the size of the die. The difference between a club made of stone and wood, and a solid iron mace, is not necessarily significant enough to warrant modeling at a mechanical level.The best part of an impartial style of DMing - which might be considered Combat-as-War, by default, since there's no guarantee that any fight will be fair - is that nothing is predetermined. Whatever happens is just the result of the players making decisions for their characters in a world that doesn't really care about them. The only concession to the likelihood that the PCs will prevail is that the DM not design a world which is so incredibly lethal that anyone could die for no reason. Whether they succeed or fail at whatever they're trying to do, that's up to them.Combat-as-Sport does seem pretty pointless to me, unless you really like using your powers to move people around on a grid, since the DM has pretty much decided that you're going to win anyway. And even if you do fail, due to some fluke of the dice or just poor planning, the DM is probably going to shoulder the blame for overestimating you. Once the DM has decided to meta-game, the players lose any agency they may have had in determining what happens. Where that model does excel is if you do like using your powers to move people around on a grid, since the game basically turns into a hyper-advanced chess match between the players and the DM. There's nothing wrong with liking a good miniatures tactics game, of course. I just don't really see the point of attaching it to an RPG.</blockquote>

Verification