Menu
News
All News
Dungeons & Dragons
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition
Pathfinder
Starfinder
Warhammer
2d20 System
Year Zero Engine
Industry News
Reviews
Dragon Reflections
Columns
Weekly Digests
Weekly News Digest
Freebies, Sales & Bundles
RPG Print News
RPG Crowdfunding News
Game Content
ENterplanetary DimENsions
Mythological Figures
Opinion
Worlds of Design
Peregrine's Next
RPG Evolution
Other Columns
From the Freelancing Frontline
Monster ENcyclopedia
WotC/TSR Alumni Look Back
4 Hours w/RSD (Ryan Dancey)
The Road to 3E (Jonathan Tweet)
Greenwood's Realms (Ed Greenwood)
Drawmij's TSR (Jim Ward)
Community
Forums & Topics
Forum List
Latest Posts
Forum list
*Dungeons & Dragons
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition
D&D Older Editions
*TTRPGs General
*Pathfinder & Starfinder
EN Publishing
*Geek Talk & Media
Search forums
Chat/Discord
Resources
Wiki
Pages
Latest activity
Media
New media
New comments
Search media
Downloads
Latest reviews
Search resources
EN Publishing
Store
EN5ider
Adventures in ZEITGEIST
Awfully Cheerful Engine
What's OLD is NEW
Judge Dredd & The Worlds Of 2000AD
War of the Burning Sky
Level Up: Advanced 5E
Events & Releases
Upcoming Events
Private Events
Featured Events
Socials!
Twitch
YouTube
Facebook (EN Publishing)
Facebook (EN World)
Twitter
Instagram
TikTok
Podcast
Features
Top 5 RPGs Compiled Charts 2004-Present
Adventure Game Industry Market Research Summary (RPGs) V1.0
Ryan Dancey: Acquiring TSR
Q&A With Gary Gygax
D&D Rules FAQs
TSR, WotC, & Paizo: A Comparative History
D&D Pronunciation Guide
Million Dollar TTRPG Kickstarters
Tabletop RPG Podcast Hall of Fame
Eric Noah's Unofficial D&D 3rd Edition News
D&D in the Mainstream
D&D & RPG History
About Morrus
Log in
Register
What's new
Search
Search
Search titles only
By:
Forums & Topics
Forum List
Latest Posts
Forum list
*Dungeons & Dragons
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition
D&D Older Editions
*TTRPGs General
*Pathfinder & Starfinder
EN Publishing
*Geek Talk & Media
Search forums
Chat/Discord
Menu
Log in
Register
Install the app
Install
Community
General Tabletop Discussion
*Dungeons & Dragons
When a rule is clear but leads to illogical efffects
JavaScript is disabled. For a better experience, please enable JavaScript in your browser before proceeding.
You are using an out of date browser. It may not display this or other websites correctly.
You should upgrade or use an
alternative browser
.
Reply to thread
Message
<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7020818" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>Swarms were given more realistic rules in 3e. The result of realism however is that swarms become very difficult for martial combatants to deal with, while being reasonably trivial for arcane spellcasters to deal with. Later editions have wanted to try to balance the game without assumptions about party composition, reduce the number of finicky exceptions to the rules, and as a result the rules for swarms in 5e are clear and balanced but have poor verisimilitude. </p><p></p><p>In 3e for examples, swarms of fine sized creatures ('tiny spiders') were flat out immune to weapon damage. As a result, you couldn't fight them with a sword or a morningstar, much less poison them with one. A rogue swinging a poisoned blade might kill a few dozen or a few score spiders, but doing so would cause no meaningful harm to a swarm since it was assumed to be composed of thousands of individuals. Each 'hit point' of the swarm might represent hundreds or even thousands of individuals. In order to effect a swarm meaningfully, you had to come up with some sort of area of effect attack - such as flaming hands or a hurling a bottle of flaming oil. </p><p></p><p>While it is true that a swarm in 3e is destroyed when it disperses, and so in general, a 'dead' swarm might still have hundreds of living (but no longer swarming) members, this fact doesn't help us with verisimilitude at all. We still are going to have problems of believability with dispersing swarms of 10's of thousands of tiny bugs by patting them with a weapon. The implications of coloring the attacks as believably dispersing the swarm remain absurd and remain disassociated from the mechanism in the fiction. For example, mechanically, a morningstar is more effective as a 'fly swatter' for smashing large numbers of spiders in 5e if it is sharper and pointier. But if you actually imagine this in the fiction, it becomes clear that a sharper and pointer morningstar is the last thing you'd want to use to scrape spiders off of your threatened comrade. Meanwhile, if you tried to devise a more effective tool with the terms of the fiction - say a spatula or a frying pan - mechanically as a tool that does less damage than a Morningstar, it would be less effective at killing spiders and no more likely to accidently harm your comrade.</p><p></p><p>This shows us the inherent problem with trying to solve mechanics disassociated from fiction by coloring the fiction to make them associated. Instead of associating the fiction, we tend to actually just raise more questions. If for example we try to color the poison damage as the thief smearing poison on his clothing, causing the spiders to become poisoned, should not the thief then ask why the poison does not do continuous cumulative damage from round to round? It's not like the spiders would be carefully wiping off all the poison. Could not the thief simply pour the poison himself or on the ground to be even more effective? And is the thief actually now risking poisoning himself with his own poisoned clothing? In short, these sorts of handwaves of the fictional positioning to justify the mechanics are only really effective if you aren't prioritizing the fiction over the rules in the first place. </p><p></p><p>This leads us to an important observation. Using the very same rules set, we expect to find two very different types of tables playing very different games.</p><p></p><p>Table #1 sees the fiction has having priority, and tries to use the rules to adjudicate what happens next based on the fictional positioning and the players proposition. This table considers the fiction to be firm but the rules to be flexible. Propositions are given in terms of what the player sees his character doing, and the rule that best fits that proposition is chosen as the means of resolution.</p><p></p><p>Table #2 sees the rules as having priority, and tries to use the ambiguity of fictional positioning to justify what happens next. This table considers the rules to be firm, but the fiction to be flexible. Propositions are given in terms of the rules, and then the fiction that best fits the rules is chosen as the means of resolution.</p><p></p><p>I consider this proof of Celebrim's Second Law of Roleplaying, "How you prepare to play the game and how you think about the game is more important than the rules."</p><p></p><p>The question then is, how do you choose to respond to edge cases like this?</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 7020818, member: 4937"] Swarms were given more realistic rules in 3e. The result of realism however is that swarms become very difficult for martial combatants to deal with, while being reasonably trivial for arcane spellcasters to deal with. Later editions have wanted to try to balance the game without assumptions about party composition, reduce the number of finicky exceptions to the rules, and as a result the rules for swarms in 5e are clear and balanced but have poor verisimilitude. In 3e for examples, swarms of fine sized creatures ('tiny spiders') were flat out immune to weapon damage. As a result, you couldn't fight them with a sword or a morningstar, much less poison them with one. A rogue swinging a poisoned blade might kill a few dozen or a few score spiders, but doing so would cause no meaningful harm to a swarm since it was assumed to be composed of thousands of individuals. Each 'hit point' of the swarm might represent hundreds or even thousands of individuals. In order to effect a swarm meaningfully, you had to come up with some sort of area of effect attack - such as flaming hands or a hurling a bottle of flaming oil. While it is true that a swarm in 3e is destroyed when it disperses, and so in general, a 'dead' swarm might still have hundreds of living (but no longer swarming) members, this fact doesn't help us with verisimilitude at all. We still are going to have problems of believability with dispersing swarms of 10's of thousands of tiny bugs by patting them with a weapon. The implications of coloring the attacks as believably dispersing the swarm remain absurd and remain disassociated from the mechanism in the fiction. For example, mechanically, a morningstar is more effective as a 'fly swatter' for smashing large numbers of spiders in 5e if it is sharper and pointier. But if you actually imagine this in the fiction, it becomes clear that a sharper and pointer morningstar is the last thing you'd want to use to scrape spiders off of your threatened comrade. Meanwhile, if you tried to devise a more effective tool with the terms of the fiction - say a spatula or a frying pan - mechanically as a tool that does less damage than a Morningstar, it would be less effective at killing spiders and no more likely to accidently harm your comrade. This shows us the inherent problem with trying to solve mechanics disassociated from fiction by coloring the fiction to make them associated. Instead of associating the fiction, we tend to actually just raise more questions. If for example we try to color the poison damage as the thief smearing poison on his clothing, causing the spiders to become poisoned, should not the thief then ask why the poison does not do continuous cumulative damage from round to round? It's not like the spiders would be carefully wiping off all the poison. Could not the thief simply pour the poison himself or on the ground to be even more effective? And is the thief actually now risking poisoning himself with his own poisoned clothing? In short, these sorts of handwaves of the fictional positioning to justify the mechanics are only really effective if you aren't prioritizing the fiction over the rules in the first place. This leads us to an important observation. Using the very same rules set, we expect to find two very different types of tables playing very different games. Table #1 sees the fiction has having priority, and tries to use the rules to adjudicate what happens next based on the fictional positioning and the players proposition. This table considers the fiction to be firm but the rules to be flexible. Propositions are given in terms of what the player sees his character doing, and the rule that best fits that proposition is chosen as the means of resolution. Table #2 sees the rules as having priority, and tries to use the ambiguity of fictional positioning to justify what happens next. This table considers the rules to be firm, but the fiction to be flexible. Propositions are given in terms of the rules, and then the fiction that best fits the rules is chosen as the means of resolution. I consider this proof of Celebrim's Second Law of Roleplaying, "How you prepare to play the game and how you think about the game is more important than the rules." The question then is, how do you choose to respond to edge cases like this? [/QUOTE]
Insert quotes…
Verification
Post reply
Community
General Tabletop Discussion
*Dungeons & Dragons
When a rule is clear but leads to illogical efffects
Top