Charlaquin
Goblin Queen (She/Her/Hers)
Or I failed my reading comprehension check. Either way.
D&D 5E What are your biggest immersion breakers, rules wise?
Tony Vargas
Legend
My player's dice are cold, tonight.
They still feel kinda tacked-on, though less in 5e, where they finally scale like everything else.
What is this "Perception Roll" of which you speak, in the 1980s? Have we shifted suddenly to playing Hero System or BRP? Or have we advanced 20 years to 3.0?
(The rationale I remember from back in the day, now that I think of it, was that part of what the saving throw represented /was/ noticing the poison before it was too late, anyway.)
Sure. But, many were. Many crossed the line into that, now and then, but were mostly reasonable, most of the time.
Play varied a lot back in the day...
...but it didn't often vary all the way over to a formal, action-declaration-based mode of information gathering, like we're seeing some folks do, now, with the play-loop. It did often seem to lean in the "20 questions" direction, IMX/AIR(BIO).
Nope, at least I did not play that way. It was (preferably a rogue) character declaring to search for traps and if so he would make his (percentile) find traps roll. Depending on the outcome he either noticed a trap if there was one, or he was convinced that there is none, no matter if there was one or not.
For the parties which did not have a rogue the trap frequency and severeness was toned down, eventually you would require an int check with some bonus or malus for unskilled PCs to notice something irregular. Non Rogue chars would have no chance of disarming a trap professionally , even if they notice it. But in the example of the contact poison, they would be allowed to use gloves which would save them and of course they could put a wooden panel on top of a pit to cross it etc.
Charlaquin
Goblin Queen (She/Her/Hers)
It would seem to me that the play patterns Tony Vargas described were common enough “back in the day” that everyone these days has their own strategy for avoiding it. One of these strategies is to have players ask as many questions as they wish, then when they are satisfied, declare a skill they wish to use or goal they wish to accomplish, a roll is made, and the results are used to retroactively determine what the character did to achieve the results the dice indicate. That was pretty much standard practice during 3e and 4e, and it certainly works to avoid the awful play patterns created by Gygaxian adjudication. Those of us who use this “formal” style of action adjudication are also doing so to avoid those undesirable play patterns, we’re just going about it in a different way.
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Garthanos
Arcadian Knight
Interestingly enough ... this occured in RuneQuest which was released virtually in reaction to 0eD&D. Realizing how long it takes for things to become part of that lifecycle is sometimes boggling.
Garthanos
Arcadian Knight
How much awesome they can achieve has to be represented by a really narrow range of numbers when they do not have advancing oomph like hit points and performance speed being progressed... so no they do not "scale" like everything else "that" has yet to be achieved.
Oofta
Legend
Contact poison? Why does it always have to be contact poison!
Anyway "back in the day" I had two types of DMs. Ones that gave you a fair shot and didn't play "gotcha", an the other that thought it was fun to kill off players in "clever" ways that were virtually unavoidable.
The latter were never given a chance to run a second game. Problem solved.
Anyway "back in the day" I had two types of DMs. Ones that gave you a fair shot and didn't play "gotcha", an the other that thought it was fun to kill off players in "clever" ways that were virtually unavoidable.
The latter were never given a chance to run a second game. Problem solved.
Tony Vargas
Legend
Scale like all other checks is what I meant. Starting in 3e, everything standardized on the d20. But, attacks scales with BAB which ranged from 1/1 to 1/2, save DCs scaled with spell level (approximately 1/2), while save bonuses scaled either good (~1/2) or bad (1/3), but skills scaled at 3+1/1, and acquiring additional attack bonuses was expensive and topped out at 5 weapons, while magic items adding to skill bonuses were cheap and could go to several times that. The upshot was that skill bonuses were lower-valued, so could be optimized much higher than others. In 4e, proficiency in a weapon gave you a +2 or 3, while training with a skill was +5, and while you didn't usually get enhancement bonuses to skills, you often got item bonuses that could be a bit larger & more easily obtained.
In 5e, attacks, save DCs, good save bonuses and skills all scale with proficiency.
Garthanos
Arcadian Knight
Too narrow its only step one, its good but not done without more complete scaling.
Perhaps your diplomacy can affect 1 mob or strong minded individualist per point of proficiency (and/or expertise). Or have it able to affect N hp worth of adversaries. In 4e this would allow minions to be affected easily even if they werent part of a swarm.
Tony Vargas
Legend
In this case so the player could claim he'd been wearing gloves.
Hey, at least there was a save.
Heh. Because there were just /so many/ DMs back in the day, we could totally pick & choose. It was a golden age...
… er, no, I mean, kids theses days! times were tough, up-hill in the snow - both ways!
