What do you think D&D is missing?

[Lord Zardoz]

I am not fishing for answers along the lines of 'spell points', or for the many and varied things that people believe to be broken in the current edition that they want to see fixed for the next. What I am curious about is what sort of game mechanics do you think are missing outright and would benefit from being added?

For me, I would say that this game needs a good chase mechanic / way to temporarily increase your movement rate. You cannot take any 2 naked humans with the same movement abilities and have them run one another down. If A always moves away from B at the fastest possible movement rate, B will never catch up, unless one of the following happens.

1) Player A suffers fatigue damage and passes out before B (in which case your foot chase has lasted for a few hours)
2) The DM intervenes and calls for some arbitrary opposed roll that makes sense.

If such a mechanic existed, you could actually have situations where a slower character has a chance (if small) at outrunning a faster character.

I would like to see some ability or skill check made available so that anytime you want to try to increase your movement rate, you can make the check, and the degree of success on the check determines how much further you can move on that round.

So what do you think is missing that ought to be added?

END COMMUNICATION

 

[Doug McCrae]

this game needs a good chase mechanic

I agree.

 

[mmadsen]

What I am curious about is what sort of game mechanics do you think are missing outright and would benefit from being added?

If we look to our source material -- action stories and movies, particularly fantasy ones -- we definitely want to have chase scenes, which you mentioned, and we want to have exciting combats, where swordsmen get beaten back, weapons shatter or get stuck when they hit an anvil or a tree, inept attackers hit each other or lunge off a rooftop when the hero dodges, and where a quick-witted fighter constantly spots opportunities to do something other than hack away at a guy standing in front of him.

 

[DItheringFool]

D&D Not DI

Dragon and Dungeon published by Paizo

 

[Frostmarrow]

D&D needs an interaction system that actually encourages interaction.

 

[Aus_Snow]

D&D needs an interaction system that actually encourages interaction.

Like. . .

?

 

[Hussar]

I would love to see mechanics like Feng Shui where the players can cooperatively create the scene. If you need a window to jump through, then one will be where you need it to be. That level of involvement from the players would be very cool.

 

[Hjorimir]

My first choice is sounds mechanics for larger scale battles.

My second is the ability to create the game you want from D&D from the ground up. Let me expand on that (as I'm sure it doesn't make all that much sense). I want to have guidelines - checklists even - on what you are and are not including in your game with advice to handle some of the exclusions.

D&D is D&D; it doesn't emulate anything other than D&D well, which is probably just fine with at least 99% of its players. But you asked what I wanted. I recently have decided to run a True20 campaign instead of what I traditionally run, which is (of course) D&D. Not so much because I think True20 > D&D, but because it was far easier to do. I found the three little books I have for True20 (the main book, the companion, and True Sorcery*) and I found the flexibility and lack (yes, lack) of books liberating.

I have about a two-foot stack of 3.5 books. If I want to tell you the average cup size of a female drow, I'm sure I got that detailed in there somewhere. But with True20, I'm just creating as I go. I want humans to be the only PC race? Done! Magic spells tossed aside? Done! Yes, you can do these things with D&D, but when you do a lot of unforeseen things can happen. D&D, as it is created, builds upon itself, which isn't something I can logically fault WotC for. But you start pulling out pieces or twisting them sideways and you can start to hear the Jenga chant in the background.

D&D is great, but sometimes I want to play a game based more off of Tolkien, or Howard, or Burroughs, Moorcock, or even (gasp) Norman.

I'm weird that way.


* Which is actually written for d20, but has rules to convert to True20.

 

[DaveMage]

Mechanics wise?

I don't think it's missing much.

I love the ruleset.

All I want now is more time to play it....

 

[hong]

Decent drama point/hero point mechanics.