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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lizard" data-source="post: 4044635" data-attributes="member: 1054">I strongly disagree, as this is a case where 'simplification to speed gameplay' becomes oversimplification to the detriment of play. People WILL want to grapple -- they've been disarmed, they're in barroom brawl, they're trying to keep their mind-controlled friend from marching off a cliff, etc, -- and if there's no rules for it, every DM will 'roll their own', leading to chaos, confusion, dogs and cats sleeping together...and a certain %age of DMs, especially the noobs WOTC fervently hopes exist, will say "There's no rules for it. You can't do it." The real problem is that weapons combat is at a high level of abstraction (no facing, no hit locations, no concern for weapon speed, armor penetration, reach (beyond a few special cases), etc) and grappling is, while not 'realistic', much less abstract. You go from a very abstract, DM-tells-you-the-flavor-text system to a much less abstract one, and I understand that can be jarring. I'm guessing a 4e goal is to keep all systems at the same abstraction level, but i'm not sure how much more abstract you can make grappling and still have it be "believable" and not end up in a lot of arguments over what you can and can't do.Most of the rules for grappling in 3x grew out of endless tabletop fights in AD&D 1 and 2. (Which sometimes served to playtest the grappling rules, if you get my drift...)Only a relatively small %age of player have ever been in a swordfight, even an SCA-style one, but a lot have been involved in brawls and scuffles. Thus, there are higher expectations of "realism" because there's more direct experience. Sort of how my expectation of how computer hacking should work in a modern-era game is different from that of someone who only knows about it from watching bad movies.</blockquote>

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