D&D General When Was it Decided Fighters Should Suck at Everything but Combat?

[soviet]

As a complete tangent, I kind of want to make a statblock for "quantum ogres".

are you sure you haven't already done it?

 

[TwoSix]

are you sure you haven't already done it?

Well, I know how fast the ogres are going, but not where they are.

 

[Willie the Duck]

are you sure you haven't already done it?

He did, but then he hid it in a box with a live cat (at least it might have been alive).

 

[Thomas Shey]

I understand that everything varied considerably in those days.

Well, true.

Though I also remember being struck by an early article on languages and their use on OD&D which I first read in Best of Dragon vol. 1.

There were a lot of languages, and if they let you negotiate with monsters you otherwise couldn't do so with, that's pretty handy.

Yeah, but you usually could offload that on the MUs (who did have a use for Int) or later, bards. Wasn't particularly uncommon to have large parties back in those days, and there was no reason that needed to be up to the fighters.

Yeah, but it's a mechanic.

True enough. But in terms of decision making, it wasn't one many people were paying particular attention to IME. I have to wonder if a lot of people even realized it was a rule (there were a number of things I found when rereading the OD&D rules a couple years back that I never realized were technically there, such as the fact technically the DM was supposed to generate the attributes. I don't think I ever saw signs of that one in the wild)>

I've certainly encountered DMs who wanted to limit player choices based on character Int. A better way to go, IMO, is to reward the high-Int characters with hints on puzzles and such, which I've also seen.

I've seen that one too back in the day, but I still suspect that was intended to penalize Int dump-statiting, since it was otherwise pretty pointless outside of MUs a a couple latter-day classes. I don't recall whether Wisdom had a similar problem, but I do recall the three physical stats and Charisma at least potentially being useful for everybody, especially post-Greyhawk.

Greyhawk did add a bunch more mechanics to ability scores in 1975, for sure.

And by the time I got into the hobby, I can't say I ever hit anyone who wasn't using it (though I did hit a few who used it and complained about it).

 

[Thomas Shey]

The problem with that is getting a group of more than five players (including the GM) together to play on the regular. Five is hard enough. Six or seven is mythical.

You're assuming larger parties include larger groups of players. There's nothing stopping people from playing more than one character each. Its more of a challenge in the modern game(s), but its not undoable.

 

[Thomas Shey]

'Make an INT check' was surely a more common thing than in the post 3e world, and being a d20 roll under meant that having a few points more than someone else made a genuine difference to the odds.

It was, however, a houserule when used; it wasn't baked into the system. And you could always question how much the fighter in the group was going to need to do that when the higher INT MU could do it too. Unlike a lot of physical actions which are individualized by nature, a lot of mental ones were ones you just wanted someone in the group to do. If it had, say, been used for perception rolls this might have been different, but early on the equivlenet of that was offloaded into D6 rolls and was controlled by race, not attributes.

 

[Thomas Shey]

If "difficulty" also means "risk" then I'm all for it. That could mean just the difficulty, if you have to give up your action to use it. (Increased chance of wasted turn.). But if it's, say, something you just add on to your regular attack, then increasing the difficulty isn't really much of a trade-off.

In general I think a red flag signaling potentially poor design is if players say, "Sure, why not try? Can't hurt?" (For example, "Can I roll, too?")

You only tend to see that when the risk of making things worse is higher than the chance of making them better really. I.e. fumbles where the fumble will drag the situation down and has a relatively large chance of happening. And if its too high it just discourages wanting to do it at all.

 

[Tesral]

N.B.: the other factor I forgot to mention that I think is critical to making combat fun is some form of action economy: you get to do something on your turn, but you'd better make a good choice because then the environment gets to take its own turn. And the environment does not like you.

Man vs. nature. The form of drama RPG often forget.

 

[Bill Zebub]

As a complete tangent, I kind of want to make a statblock for "quantum ogres".

It's the entangled pairs you have to watch out for.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Right, it's damning with faint praise. So I don't think it's a worthwhile objective to try to make skills be as exciting as combat was in OD&D.

I'll be upfront here: "combat" and "as exciting as in OD&D" are two phrases that don't go together IME. Its one reason I bailed out of it early. I've noted before that, barring the GM doing largely ad-hoc rewarding, non-spellcasters had two meaningful choices in OD&D most of the time: what weapon you used, and your target, and barring use of some weapon-vs-armor chart, the former added up to "what does the most damage". I'm not sure I've ever seen an RPG that had less interesting combat for fighting types.

And it really doesn't take much to make it feel like your choices matter in combat. Some basic movement and position, cover, a couple different choices other than "I swing my sword" and it can be pretty fun. (One of the many reasons I tired of The One Ring is that combat was just too repetitive.)

It doesn't, but OD&D did virtually none of those, at least as a default in the system. At best you could use a chokepoint sometimes. But only sometimes.

You keep saying it can be done ("it" being to design a general purpose skill system that is like a halfway decent combat system, where player choices matter). So...where is it? Who has done it?

I didn't say general purpose. I think it can be done for individual kinds of tasks, and I've seen that in multiple games (heck, I know of at least one game that had a process for custom building such systems if you were willing to do the lifting to do it; I used it for a comple of frequent events in the one campaign I used it for). As I noted, some skill usage isn't going to be engaging, because it is almost always all-or-nothing things that are pretty much one-off (I've mentioned jumping before here). But those aren't everything.

The question ends up being, are you willing to deal with the overhead having a more elaborate system for swimming or climbing or building fortifications will be in such a system? The reason you don't see it often is the answer is usually "no". But then people bemoan that non-combat things aren't as interesting.