The Genius of D&D

[Rashak Mani]

Careful guys... Monte isnt saying Dungeons, Levels and HPs are the best rules/way in RPGing. He is saying their simplicity and ease of use made D&D the long term and big game it is. They might not be great stuff... but they work.

A good analogy could be Windows from what Monte said... its not great... but everyone uses it... everyone can use it... and it helps more than it hinders. Combination that makes for a good system in most cases. Of course the veterans can opt for Linux... but the majority stay safe with Windows/D&D.

What Monte might have mistaken as imprudent criticism from most Veterans is the fact that eventually experienced roleplayers will yearn for certain things... and D&D isnt too well equipped for this kind of expectation... so criticism to the "basics" is all too normal and in fact legitimate.

Proverb I love... "The simple may not be always the best, but the best is always simple."

 

[Victim]

AC scales with level pretty much the same way ability scores do. It doesn't increase directly with level but instead goes up as a higher level tends to give access to better boosting spells or more powerful armor. AC with no magic is going to hit the low 20s and stop no matter the character level.

A lucky crit from a longbow will probably do around a quarter of 10th level character's HP. That's pretty significant to me. And getting nickel and dimed to negative ten is still a pretty crummy way to die. Attrition is still a danger as long as PCs don't have some kind of damage reduction. And, in many cases, the DR will evaporate if it takes too much damage (like stonesking and prot arrows).

If you change the AC, HP, spells, etc to achieve exactly the same effect except for the minor case of a bunch of losers attacking really powerful characters, then why bother? Is all the exact work and the chance that one change is doesn't done properly - thus allowing cheesy kills like Harm - worth the relatively minor gain?

Finally, if you do change everything so that losers with crossbows can threaten high level characters, not much will change. It will just swing things a bit more toward offense. Characters who don't want to get pasted by guards will take a wand of fireballs and blow the crap out of them before they can point their weapons at them instead of ignoring them, or doing slightly riskier things like disarming them and capturing them.

 

[mmadsen]

Based on my own experiences, I think Monte missed a big part of D&D's appeal, which is the sheer quantity, quality and novelty of monsters, magic items and spells that D&D offers (in that order of importance, IMO).

Very good point, rounser. A big part of D&D as a kid was "oohing" and "aaahing" over the monsters and magic items. As an amalgam of anything and everything from all sorts of fantasy influences, D&D may not come with a built-in style (Tolkien or Robert E. Howard or Morte D'Arthur), but it gives you a huge menu of choices for building your own game. I think most of us threw in everything, and that was great fun at the time (and it still can be).

Many "better" systems restrict their focus or provide flavorless mechanics, expecting the gamemaster to inject his personal taste.

 

[mmadsen]

A lucky crit from a longbow will probably do around a quarter of 10th level character's HP. That's pretty significant to me.

A lucky crit from a longbow is a 1-in-400 event (if our hero has a high AC). It does 2d8 damage, averaging 9 points of damage. Against a 10th-level Fighter with 79 Hit Points, well, I'm not impressed.

A lucky crit that then does max damage (16) would be even more freakishly unlikely (1/400 x 1/64 = 1-in-25600) -- and it would still hurt no more than two points of damage against a 10-hp Fighter.

If you change the AC, HP, spells, etc to achieve exactly the same effect except for the minor case of a bunch of losers attacking really powerful characters, then why bother?

First, the main point is that vastly increased Hit Points aren't the one and only way to make characters more powerful. It's equally easy to increase AC.

Second, a horde of warriors is not a "minor case of a bunch of losers"; it's a staple case that doesn't work the way people'd like under the current rules.

Third, many, many people have complained about how Hit Points play out:

"How can my Fighter take a dozen sword blows?"
"Oh, well, he's not actually hit just because he's, er, 'hit'"
"Huh?"
"Well, those hit points represent the fatigue of dodging blows and the minor scratches he takes as he rolls with attacks that would've skewered a 4-hit-point Commoner."
"Then why does he have to heal these hit points over days and weeks? And why doesn't a healing potion heal those little scratches? Or a healing spell?"
"Why don't you just play GURPS and leave us alone!"

With higher-AC and lower-hp, hits are hits, and misses are misses. The game mechanics match the visual people want, there's no healing conundrum, players can't meta-game away things that should be major threats, we don't need special-case rules, etc.

Monte's point was that Hit Points made D&D popular and that people who complain about Hit Points want a complicated system that's more "realistic". My point is that we've got a false dichotomy here: simple, unrealistic, heroic system vs. complex, realistic, gritty system. We can just as easily have a simple, realistic, heroic system (where "realistic" means "makes sense") by increasing AC a lot and compressing hp progression a bit.

 

[rounser]

Many "better" systems restrict their focus or provide flavorless mechanics, expecting the gamemaster to inject his personal taste.

Inject, certainly, but I find that many DMs refine and remove in order to get to their personal taste.

An analogy: In programming a synthesizer, you can either start with a complicated noisy waveform with many harmonics and carve away at it until it sounds like what you want (subtractive synthesis), or you can take a very simple waveform with no harmonics and build up the harmonics until it sounds good (FM synthesis). Most people find subtractive synthesis a lot easier, a lot more intuitive and less complex than FM synthesis.

Likewise, when creating your world, you can take the big lump of clay that is D&D and carve it into a pleasing form by leaving magic and monsters, rules and mythological elements you don't like out, or you can take something like Fudge and build those elements up from scratch. Most people find the former much less time-consuming, and a lot more inspiring and convenient. A lot of other FRPG systems lack the amount of clay that D&D sports, and so define the game style by what is already there - removing elements is less of an option because often there isn't much there to begin with.

This principle goes for setting, too. If fantasy games don't explicitly define the setting (e.g. Runequest) they tend to suggest a certain style of setting through rules artifacts (e.g. Rolemaster). Although D&D does definitely taint the flavour of a world and introduce artifacts (just look at the Forgotten Realms, which began as a non-D&D fantasy world and picked up a lot of D&D artifacts - from Vancian magic to liches - retrospectively) it's smorgasbord of content and plasticity of ruleset allows the style of game to be refined by excluding that which doesn't fit, which compensates somewhat for the style footprint it carries of defining by what must be included (clerics are annoying to remove if they don't fit your world, for instance).

I think that this is homing in on the basis of my problems with the 3E Monster Manual. Once I carve away the creatures I don't like, I'm not left with much. Bring on MM2 and the Fiend Folio!

 

[LostSoul]

One thing to consider about D&D's hit points, at high levels, making characters immune to low-level warriors is that it imposes certain restrictions on campaign world development.

Without either injecting hordes of high-level monsters or characters for the PCs to face as they rise in level, you can't challenge the PCs. Not all DMs want to create worlds in that fashion while still allowing the PCs to gain in ability.

 

[LostSoul]

This brings up two points. First, higher Hit Points aren't the only way to address more attacks doing more damage. D&D characters could just as easily have even higher ACs than they currently do.

I think the main thing hit points have going for them is that they are fun. It's more fun to do an insignificant hit (for 8 points of damage, say, against a 83 hit point fighter) than it is to miss.

 

[rounser]

Another "genius of D&D" (which I'm beginning to think should be retitled "Synergistic Genius of D&D") point related to Monte's points:

Compared to many other RPGs, character generation is quick and stat blocks are small, meaning that character generation and writing out stats didn't take away time and focus from creating adventures. Who wants to create an adventure for a system with stat blocks that go on for over a page, and can take over half an hour to create a single NPC?

I suspect that this is a reason why many RPGs are read and not played - character generation overhead hurts. Another compelling one was touched upon by Monte (and earlier on the GamingReport boards by Mike Mearls) - many RPGs don't present a model of play to latch onto, and the "dungeon" provides one as far as D&D goes.

Note that compared to earlier editions, 3E courts this problem with it's bigger stat blocks and more intensive character creation decisions, but the payoff is worth it - former editions of the game were perhaps skewed too far in the other direction. It does make Jamis Buck's NPC generator invaluable, however!

I think the 3E designers recognised this - thus the "generic NPC of level X" tables in the DMG.

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

The argument you just scale up the opposition is a straw man. If you are always scaling up the the opposition to maintain precise balance with the characters new abilities then what is the point of "progress" at all? You are just DMing like a boring computer game.

I gain +10% HPs; all the monsters do +10% damage. Yawn.

The real point of levelling up is to allow a greater range and variety of threats. That keeps you on your toes and allows the DM to surprise you.

I am afraid to break the news to you all, but the last 3 editions of D&D just are not very simple. There always have been simpler and more complex competitors, gritty or epic style, quick and slow "levelling", at least for 20 years.

I buy into the first into market owns the market argument. Look at Magic: The Gathering. It became immediately obvious the market would never embrace a copycat game that was half as difficult to learn as Magic. Every game that followed Magic was judged by completely different standards than the original. I do not even bother to try and teach Magic to new gamers; it is too tortuously difficult.

It is obvious to me the same is true about RPGs. I see it among my friends. It is not that they won't try other games, but new games must meet much more stringent standards to compete with D&D for their playing time.

 

[Jordan]

One thing to consider about D&D's hit points, at high levels, making characters immune to low-level warriors is that it imposes certain restrictions on campaign world development.

Without either injecting hordes of high-level monsters or characters for the PCs to face as they rise in level, you can't challenge the PCs. Not all DMs want to create worlds in that fashion while still allowing the PCs to gain in ability.

I'll ask again: If the PCs always have to worry about being killed by any schlep with a weapon in his hand, what's the point of levelling up? How much fun will it be for a player triumphantly returning from an epic adventure against a clan of giants to be killed by a ragtag band of 1st level bandits who ambush him on the road?

And anyway, there don't have to be hordes of high-level monsters out there in your world. They can be pretty rare, but it won't matter, because your high-level PCs will seek them out. I don't think most campaign worlds are overrun with giants, but most DMs don't seem to have any problem putting together an adventure with giants when they feel like it. The same is true for any monster. If the PCs want to hunt trolls, you don't have to put trolls behind every bush. They'll go to where the trolls are.

If you really don't want to run high-level monsters against the PCs, then I'd suggest you simply have your players retire their characters when they hit 10th level and start new ones. Problem solved, and without a lot of rules tweaking.

And here's something else to consider. If a high-level PC isn't significantly more powerful than your average Joe, where's the impetus for adventures? Why should a village be afraid of a giant attack when their guards can kill the giants just as easily as the PCs can? What's left for PCs to do in a world like that?

A lot of the fun of playing a high-level character is that you get to kick ass, at least sometimes. Take that away, and you make the game a lot less fun for the players of high-level characters.