It depends on the action movie, really. I know that James Bond wasn't substantially slowed down by being shot in the arm.
Did he do anything with that arm afterwards?
Because I know that my physique prevents me from climbing a wall - I simply lack the arm strength - and I can't imagine that some battering and bruises would stop a professional athlete in the real world, let alone Conan.
Watch the losing professional boxer come out of the ring after the bout has been stopped.
That losing boxer has not been reduced to 0hp. They didn't reach unconsciousness. They can't necessarily walk in a straight line, however. And you really think black eyes and being battered and bruised doesn't seriously weaken you.
OK, so it probably won't weaken an olympian weight lifter enough that I can arm wrestle them. But it will substantially weaken them.
If that's the goal of a story-game, then the rules utterly fail to allow that. The rules of FATE are written such as to constantly remind the players that these are characters in a story, and that they should do whatever is the most dramatic and "fun" at the table, rather than what the character would actually do in that situation. Seriously, they mention that ad nauseum - it literally made me sick, just reading the book.
Just because you have an irrational gag reaction to the word story doesn't say anything about it. All it says is that due to your irrational aversions you personally were unable to read Fate.
A story is a series of events that happened in a coherent framework. You know what a mark of bad storytelling is?
Characters changing to serve the plot.
You don't need rules to govern psychology and motivations.
Indeed. Freeform RP works. But that's entirely irrelevant because the simple fact is that once you
have rules they are going to govern psychology and motivations. D&D in any edition sets out what those motivations should be by doing things such as deciding the stakes (life or death) and deciding what is rewarding to characters via the XP system.
In short D&D already has
and was designed to have rules to guide psychology and motivation. Any attempt to say that this is a bad thing is a claim that D&D is a bad game. The difference is that D&D sets them for all characters whereas Fate lets you set how each individual character works.
You're supposed to imagine that you're there, and work out what the psychology and motivations would be based on backstory and circumstance and everything else in the setting.
In which case what you are doing is creating things entirely in your brain - in short inventing a story. Rather than feeling things instinctively.
These factors are much more complex than can be expressed with simple language and equations. If you try to codify them, then they're eventually going to conflict with the answers you come up with on your own, and it's no fun to have the rules tell you that you're playing your character incorrectly. You know the motivations of your own character far better than any ruleset can describe.
And all of this is an argument against D&D and its psychological modelling, not Fate and its. The reason is simple. Fate doesn't tell you what the motivations of your character are or say anything about how they are rewarded (unlike D&D). What Fate does is give you a toolkit and language so
you can mechanically represent the motivations of
your character. The character motivations that Fate provides are expressed via the aspects, and aspects are freeform character descriptors written by the player.
Which means your entire objection is irrelevant. Fate doesn't describe your character's motivations. It lets you do so.
But when is this actually useful?
Generally for handling self-destructive behaviour.
When e.g. an alcoholic drinks because they are under pressure they normally know they run the risk of letting their team down. They know it's physically bad for them. They know they run the risk of a hangover the next day. And all these can be or are mechanically represented in a physics engine. Almost all the entirety of a physics based game system represents this and provides a pretty strong negative to drinking. And even if you're playing an alcoholic you are less likely to think of drinking when they are under stress because you have so much else to worry about.
This is because the game and the nature of the game provides psychological incentives to the player to not get drunk - but none to get drunk. And for most people this works. But if we take an alcoholic then to the alcoholic it tastes good, it feels good, and it makes them think (probably erroneously) that they are better able to cope. In Fate gaining a Fate Point feels good and makes you think (possibly erroneously) that you are better able to cope. A player who has set their character up as an alcoholic in Fate is therefore not only feeling things much closer to those their character should because they are getting the high as the low, they are more likely to want to go drinking when their character is under stress because they want that Fate Point which will help them cope. (And if your character
isn't an alcoholic? You choose a different Aspect).
Human beings are perfectly capable of mentally modeling different people already. Rules attempting to govern such a thing can only be counter-productive.
If you believe that and the rest of what you claim to believe then the only place for D&D is in the bin.
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Neonchameleon, you make some good counterpoints.
Thanks
I feel this was both a number-scaling problem and a presentation issue.
5e caps ability scores, why not cap skills too? Maybe cap each skill at +5?
And when you roll "craft porticullis", it shouldn't determine whether you pass or fail. Instead,
like Dwarf Fortress, the roll should determine how fast you make the porticullis and the quantity you make
Casters already get a whole printout of their spells. Why can't fighters get a whole printout filled with skills too ??
Welcome to 4e
First you're assuming the wizard having so many spells is a
good thing. IMO it isn't, especially at the 3.X level.
Second, Craft Portcullis being a different skill from Craft Door means you have an almost unlimited number of skills right down to Weave Basket (underwater). Each skill has a different time/rate to make things. This means that every time you try to use one of those skills you're going to have to consult the rulebook - and it's going to be very hard to keep track of exactly which skills you have. Or to remember them all.
When I run a game I prefer to not consult any rulebooks other than possibly the back of the DM screen and the MM. There's a reason both 4e and 5e have around half as many skills as 3.X. Oddly enough they both have about the number of skills Fate Core has.
EDIT: And this wouldn't even slow down combat.99% of skills aren't used in combat.
No. It would just slow down your character.
You are right that we are all afraid of GURPS, and we don't want mechanic overload in our D&D. I agree, but I am disappointed by lack of roleplay items in the PHB. There is a middle ground, and I feel 5e is not close to the middle ground. Simple things are missing, like: "The monk must visit his monestary occasionally, usually near the solstice. Failure to do so can result in a loss of 1d4 wisdom" or "The wizard must return to his tower once a year. Otherwise he risks losing 1d6 Intelligence".
I emphatically do not consider those roleplay items. I consider them obnoxious pieces of mandatory fluff that narrow the game down. It's the word "Must" and a major penalty that feels like strongarming me into playing the One True Way. A gentle benefit on the other hand (if the Monk undertakes a purification ritual at a monastry at the equinox they gain Advantage against level draining attacks) would be a much better way of doing things
Right now, the only reason a cleric prays is because "spells"...
Yours, possibly. The last time I played a cleric he used to try and lead services whenever passing through a place because it made massive social inroads. And then there was my Malediction Invoker who didn't so much pray to her God as swear at her for putting her through all this crap.
But if there was forced devotion and prayer I couldn't have played that character in anything like the same way.
It sounds like you are saying "it can be abstracted" which is my main point. The PHB could stick to the middle ground, and add one-liners like "If a character spends the night resting at his home, he gains 5 temporary hp for the next battle" or "PCs without nightvision sometimes have trouble taking an extended rest during the day. Up to 10% of such rests can fail" or "On any given day, severe weather affects 2% of the world. You should be prepared". These simple lines use words "might", "maybe", "could" which DMs can easily ignore, but would encourage a lot more roleplaying imagination in the PHB.
That's not the middle ground. That's hard line rules heavy mechanics heavy. The middle ground is what we have - and the other extreme is letting the player make all their devotions up themsleves as in Fate and generally in Dungeon World.
Right now murder-hoboism holds all the flare in the PHB.
And your solution isn't one. You'll just create murder hobos with more ways to min-max. If you actually want to deal with murder-hoboism you simply need one tweak to the rules.
No XP for killing monsters. Moving it from the best way to gain XP to the worst. Time consuming and dangerous. And XP is the important driver of anything.
Behave like a class stereotype? This is a class based game, and has been since 1e. It's what Gygax built. The fighter is not "everyman". The cleric shouldn't be practicing his Eldricth Blast. If you don't like the classes, then WotC should release more classes which is something I say a lot. I'm sure that someone, somewhere on the internet, is trying build a Druid into a swordsage. Where is the in-world consequnce for this?
Gygax and Arneson designed the game for Murderhoboism as well - but oddly enough under their design combat was something to be avoided. You gained 1XP for 1GP of loot you recovered - and that outweighed your other XP sources by about 3:1. You also wanted to stay moving because you might meet wandering monsters and they didn't carry loot. oD&D was designed as a class based game with the goal of collecting loot. 2e took the XP for GP rule (that discouraged murdering) out of the default rules package and instead added something a bit more counterproductive back leaving murderhoboism as the main way the whole party gained XP together. But 2e also gave XP for the thief for stealing gold (which meant that the thief was encouraged to steal from the rest of the party).
Edit: I thought I'd quote [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] from another comment he just posted because it speaks to why I really don't want what you are asking for.
I'm also reminded of this passage from
Chris Kubasik's "Interactive Toolkit":
Characters drive the narrative of all stories. However, many people mistake character for characterization.
Characterization is the look of a character, the description of his voice, the quirks of habit. Characterization creates the concrete detail of a character through the use of sensory detail and exposition. By "seeing" how a character looks, how he picks up his wine glass, by knowing he has a love of fine tobacco, the character becomes concrete to our imagination, even while remaining nothing more than black ink upon a white page.
But a person thus described is not a character. A character must do.
Character is action. . . . This means that the best way to reveal your character is not through on an esoteric monologue about pipe and tobacco delivered by your character, but through your character's actions.
But what actions? Not every action is true to a character; it is not enough to haphazardly do things in the name of action. Instead, actions must grow from the roots of Goals. A characterization imbued with a Goal that leads to action is a character.
Characterisation of a PC, as set out by Kubasik, is
passive. It doesn't involve the player actually impacting the fiction. But until we actually see the player establishing and acting on a goal for his/her PC - not just lamenting the death of his/her father, but actively pursuing it - we won't have a dramatic arc. And this requires the tools to
act within, and upon, the fiction.
Things like "The Monk must go to their temple on the solstice or risk losing 1d4 wisdom" is almost never character - what it is is enforced characterisation (and enforcing characterisation kinda defeats the point of characterisation in the first place unless you want to look like a stereotype).
I say almost always because there is a single exception - and that's when there's an exceptionally strong reason to
not go to the temple on the solstice. It's only character for the monk if they don't want to leave their party short handed because there's a chance that someone's going to attack on the solstice (or they decide to leave their party). And it's simply annoying if the DM forgets about that monk rule and has a demon summoning. Character is about action and about choice, not about trivialities.
