D&D General What Is D&D Generally Bad At That You Wish It Was Better At?

[Lanefan]

To tie in with above - mass combat and ship to ship combat. Now, for mass combat, 7th sea 1ed has solid system. It's based on heroic actions of individuals that shift tides of battle (giving bonuses to friendlies and penalties to enemies).

There's been various attempts at mass combat systems over the years, both in-house and 3rd-party, some of them not bad at all. The one thing that gets in the way is that in order to be "fair" and able to handle different maneuvers etc. any mass combat system is going to be a) complex and b) slow-to-very-slow to play through, making it quite a departure from the usual run of play.

 

[Lanefan]

isn’t the blame that you do have to adjust the rules to get it to work in the first place?

If you need to adjust things then the game is not good at it on its own

Disagree, but then I come at it from the angle that the ruleset as presented is just a framework and isn't intended to be the whole game; the "whole game" appears once the DM has used that framework to build upon.

In other words, to some extent I expect the "adjust things" process to be part of the package.

 

[Lanefan]

I think that's getting forgotten. Just because D&D can be modified to a particular style doesn't mean it was designed for handling that style. The d20 system is absolutely amazing at handling a variety of game styles. Dungeons and Dragons as written in the PHB, is less so.

Keep in mind that in this thread we're looking at all of D&D from 0e to 5.5e as a collective whole. This greatly widens the variety of game styles D&D can handle well - you just have to start with the right edition.

 

[James Gasik]

I'm one of those people. Let me know what you would call a psion (in another thread), and let's build it!

Sure, I'm game. Here it is.

 

[Yaarel]

Other than real life gymnastics, speed and agility requires strength, what in the game does not work?

This appears to be simply not liking the labels on the ability score.

The problem with dividing Strength & Dexterity is because the need for MADness and the redundancy that allows one to dump the other, kills the tropes of agility.

 

[overgeeked]

And general physical attractiveness / repulsiveness; and an informer of roleplay for both the player and the DM.

Disagree - again, they should also be informers of roleplay. If you dropped an 8 into Int you're playing in bad faith if you roleplay the character as a genius.

While a former version of myself agrees in principle, I'm so completely over the notion of policing players' decisions re: roleplaying their character that I can't just be arsed. Just like STR, CON, and DEX, they're all mechanical functions of their in-game avatar. The player is free to RP however they want. If it's so egregious that I need to intervene, they're not coming back to my table. But I'm not going to argue with players about whether their toon is smart enough, wise enough, or attractive enough to X, Y, or Z. Literally zero interest in that.

 

[mamba]

While as former version of myself agrees in principle, I'm so completely over the notion of policing players' decisions re: roleplaying their character that I can't just be arsed.

you don't have to when you use die rolls to determine the outcome

 

[pemerton]

I wish it was better with not requiring certain character archetypes. For example, a party without access to healing magic is going to struggle. In my experience, finding someone who wants to play a cleric is a challenge.
Even in 4E with healing surges, the party couldn't get "up to speed" during a fight. You'd have the ability to heal 25% of your HP once per fight (giving up your action).

Huh? In 4e, there are lots of ways besides second wind to spend healing surges, without needing a cleric,. A warlord is one obvious one.

 

[Lanefan]

you don't have to when you use die rolls to determine the outcome

Or when the player self-polices in good faith by, for example, rolling under Int on a d20 to see if the character thought of the bright idea the player just thought of. Happens fairly often round here.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Sure it does: the language used prevents a group from playing Cowboys & Indians™ or any other way except the way the game's designer(s) intended. That, is a bad game.

Nope! You can absolutely do that. You can change literally every single word of the game if you want (though one might argue that would mean you aren't playing that game anymore).

If my group wants to play Shadowrun using Pathfinder, I'm going to do it, and the game's designer(s) allow it with Rule 0.

The existence or absence of a printed "Rule Zero" does diddly-squat about whether you have the capability of doing this thing. Not one thing. You always have, have always had, and will always have that ability. The designers of the game cannot, even in principle, mind-control you into playing the game only one way.

That is why your position on this is completely ridiculous. Every game that exists--absolutely every single one--can be changed the way you describe. It might be easy, it might be hard. It might be official, it might be unofficial. Doesn't matter. It can be done. Always.