What's so Hard About Grappling?

[Storminator]

Utter bilge!

http://watermark.drivethrustuff.com/pdf_previews/584-sample.pdf

(See page 3.)

We played this game in *High School*. That's my standard of "complex", and why grappling rules in 3x don't scare me.

That was a riot.

PS

 

[Wormwood]

We played this game in *High School*. That's my standard of "complex", and why grappling rules in 3x don't scare me.

Aftermath? Wow, I remember being really curious about that game from their Dragon Magazine ads back in the day.

I'll admit to some nostalgia about early 80's RPG design in all its glory (as someone who played and *loved* the Morrow Project as a freshman in high school). But my tastes have changed considerably since then.

I guess I'm just more willing to accept the vagaries which can accompany simple rules.

edit: I'm going to print out that sheet and pass it around this Friday. I'm honestly curious what the reaction will be.

 

[Steely Dan]

Grappling isn't complicated; it's just a bit clunky.

What is complicated is certain situations with Improved Grab and the taking -20 option…

 

[Hussar]

To be fair, I used the grapple rules without too many problems. Probably used them wrong, but, I did use them.

But, I played a LOT of combat in the couple of years I ran the World's Largest Dungeon, so, I had to learn the rules. If you have a group that doesn't do a lot of combat, it can grind things to a screeching halt if everyone's not on the ball wrt the rules.

 

[Midknightsun]

Personally, at its core I don't find grappling to be that difficult. It is more complicated than I think it needs to be, and I'm also pretty peeved about how big creatures basically own in grappling. I could see the halfing not being able to pin the Hill Giant, but shouldn't the little guy have a pretty decent chance defensively?.

Some of the other complications that posters brought up have also come up in my games. the whole "roll for your random sneak attack" makes me cringe.

I'm not in favor of removing grappling, however and I certainly hope 4e doesn't go this route. There is, IMHO, plenty of room for improvement though.

 

[Mark Hope]

And finally, I think there should be a good rule for how to hack off tentacles. It's a standard fantasy element that can't really be replicated with the rules. (My own house rule I may try tonight is -- anything with improved grab and tentacle attacks can have its tentacles hacked off -- give the tentacle some hardness and hit points and voila).

There is a rule for that: you treat an attack on a tentacle as a Sunder attempt. A limb has a certain amount of hit points and severing it deals half that amount of hit points in damage to the creature (so a giant squid's tentacles have 10 hit points and severing one deals 5 point of damage to the giant squid.) 3e fails in its presentation by not having this rule in its own section anywhere, but see the entries for Giant Octopus, Giant Squid and Kraken for examples of it in action. It might be the case that other large tentacly creatures don't include this rule in their writeups, but that's not a failure of the system as much as it is a failure of designers not doing their homework.

(Or perhaps I have become too intimately acquanited with all manner of tentacled goodness doing the 3e versions of the sharg, squark and varied types of silt horror )

Oh, and the grapple rules have never phased me too much (due in part to the coolness that is the Battlebox.) They could probably do with losing a step or exception here or there, but they are far from the panic-inducing rules nightmare that their staunchest detractors would have you believe that they are. It's an area where the 4e marketing has succumbed to a touch of group-think silliness imho. Oh well. Worse things happen at sea ...

 

[EricNoah]

This has never come up in my games,

For me, these two situations come up all the time. Someone gets grappled -- and the rest of the party either wants to hit the grappler, or wants to help the grapplee escape.

3rd party attacking the grappler: What I generally do is make judgement call -- if the grapplers are roughly the same size, I give them both a cover bonus -- if not, the larger creature is usually the bad guy and I just let them hack at it as normal.

Help escape: I just use the "aid another" rules to allow the PCs to help their companion on their next grapple attempt.

 

[Daniel D. Fox]

The issue really isn't that it is hard, so much as that it is a useless combat option. Invoking AoO, casting multiple die rolls and a lot of "back of the book" sort of rules for adjudicating the grapple neccessitates a revision.

 

[Steely Dan]

The issue really isn't that it is hard, so much as that it is a useless combat option.

I wouldn't say that, when I threw my vile drow chaos monks against my party, they sure as hell did not think grappling was a useless combat option (certainly not on the monk's end).

 

[Elder-Basilisk]

The complaints about grapple being "too hard" always struck me as pretty lame too. At the base, they're a pretty elegant system.

Now there are some complications--mostly caused by the FAQ (just like Protection from Evil and Evard's Black Tentacles were better before they were FAQed up). Grapple being a strange not attack roll, not strength check, gives it the odd distinction that you can power attack without reducing your grapple roll but increase your grapple damage (as per an unarmed strike). Likewise, if you have seven negative levels, that's a -7 on strength checks AND attack rolls, but according to the FAQ it has no impact on your grapple check. Likewise, the rules for attacking with natural weapons in a grapple are buried in the rake entry of the monster manual (hardly the first place someone would look) and the rules for Improved Grab vary from extremely to ridiculously harsh depending on interpretation. (So, I hit you with the improved grab monster, I deal damage from the attack, I win the grapple check, according to some interpretations, I get to deal damage as per the attack that started the grapple again for winning the grapple check, and if the monster has constrict, since it won the grapple check, it gets to deal constrict damage. That adds up REALLY fast).

Now, if you ask me, makng grapple an attack roll subject to all the normal bonuses and penalties, clarifying natural weapon attacks, and making constrict a special attack that deals damage when you pin an opponent (rather than any time you win a grapple check for any reason) would be plenty of simplification and would leave an elegant and streamlined rules subsystem.