Small but annoying things D&D never got right

[Thornir Alekeg]

Intimidate being Charisma based only. Orcs are bad at intimidation?

Caster level having no impact upon spell DCs.

Darkvision

 

[Nebulous]

The fact that every edition of D&D turns punching, kicking or tackling someone a pain in the ass.

Bards.

Clerics, to a degree.

Punch/Kick/Grapple really, really needs to be fixed. They're so freakin' common, it needs a quick and easy system for determining the outcome, while taking into consideration size and skill.

And bards...well, i just never liked the concept of a singing, harp-playing adventurer. Clerics are very cool, but there are too many spells that have no logical reason why a wizard shouldn't be able to cast them too.

Monster Summoning would be much cooler if the magician made a pact with a specific monster and summoned the same one every time.

That's how the Midnight campaign handled it, and i preferred it that way too. And it's funny how druids, lovers of nature and animals, will thoughtlessly toss every dog, cat and bear they can summon heedlessly into the jaws of painful death, wipe their hands and walk away.

 

[DM-Rocco]

- encumbrance rules

- definition of hit points and hence its interaction with rules such as falling damage

Falling damage always pissed me off too. I once had a halfling climb up a well. He got about 160 feet up and a spider attacked him. He thought about it for a moment and asked how high he was, then he grappled the spider.

I said, "okay, you fall since you are not holding onto anything,"

He replied, "fine, just what I want,"

after reviewing the rules he took the 23 points (10d6 max dice) of falling damage, the spider died and he lived.

The other times falling damage got screwy is when a giant would grapple you and through you from a mountain top. You tell me you are only going to take 10d6 damage.

From that point on I made a house rule, you take damage from each 10' section so, 1d6 for 10', 3d6 (1d6 for the first 10' and 2d10 for the second 10') for a 20' section, 6d6 (1d6 for the first 10', 2d6 for the second 10', 3d6 for the third 10') for a 30' section and so on with no damage cap. I also follow it up every time with a fortitude saving throw or die with the DC as the damage. After my sister-in-laws father died from a 5 foot fall from a ladder, it makes sense to me.

Now falling damage can kill you.

 

[Nebulous]

I also follow it up every time with a fortitude saving throw or die with the DC as the damage. After my sister-in-laws father died from a 5 foot fall from a ladder, it makes sense to me.

Now falling damage can kill you.

Redoing the Massive Damage Save is an easy way to put fear into a PC. You just need to strike the right balance between too easy to die and too hard. I always was an advocate of taking your CON and adding Level and other modifiers. Even then, it would just knock you down to Dying status, not necessarily Dead.

 

[Zander]

- encumbrance rules

Yes, that's certainly one that D&D never got right. IMO, they should simplify encumbrance even more than they did in 3.x even at the expense of realism. Perhaps they could have "packages" of equipment so that if you have X type of armour + Y number of weapons + Z standard adventuring equipment, you're encumbered if your strength is lesss than A. The formula makes it seem complicated but it needn't be.

 

[DM-Rocco]

One of my biggest peeves is that clerics have a spell that covers just about anything and the spells that piss my off the most are the ones that make them better fighters than fighters.

So, you want to become one catagory larger, get a +6 to strength, increase your hit ponts and get the same BAB of a fighter all with one spell, sure, no problem, enroll in the cleric academy today.

Might as well do away with fighters, that is what the last group of players did in my campiagn, they went with two clerics a wizard and a sorcerer and they crushed almost everything.

Then they wonder why there is a Christmas Tree effect (although my players called it the Royal with Cheese)

 

[Zander]

Intimidate being Charisma based only. Orcs are bad at intimidation?

I agree: Whenever I DM, I allow Intimidate to be attempted either with Strength (adjusted for size) or Charisma, whichever is higher. There was an optional rule like this in one of the 3.0 splatbooks. I hope they allow either in 4E.

 

[sckeener]

"This inn restricts anyone of Neutral Good alignment from entering it"

That is an interesting use of Forbiddence.

 

[DM-Rocco]

Redoing the Massive Damage Save is an easy way to put fear into a PC. You just need to strike the right balance between too easy to die and too hard. I always was an advocate of taking your CON and adding Level and other modifiers. Even then, it would just knock you down to Dying status, not necessarily Dead.

Well, this might have been a time when I took the rules a bit too far into the realm of being against the player, but it made them fear falling, like you should.

When I annouced the new rules they thought it was actually better than the current rules, to my surprise. I thought I would get a lot of crap for them, but they seemed to think they were okay.

Still, I tend to now make judgements calls. If it is a fall because they were climbing a wall and had a bad die roll I might reduce the damage and DC as opposed to someone jumping off a wall taking a spider along for the ride knowing that he can't die from the fall and bending the rules to his favor.

 

[Patryn of Elvenshae]

I prefer armor as DR but providing an AC penalty.

Ick, no.

The problem with armor as DR is that it is so much more difficult to balance it across a range of potential damages.

Either you make it impossible for someone with a knife to ever hurt someone in plate, or you make it so that the plate doesn't even slow down the dragon, so why bother?

Alternatively, you massively scale down the differences in weapon damage, so that knives and greatswords and T-rexes do similar amounts of damage. Do you really want that?