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

[Thomas Shey]

No, rolling to see who knows the thing is still bad play. Let the players decide if they know the thing. Or have the GM decide who knows the thing. Or don't even have 'who knows the thing' be a conflict at all.

i have never spontaneously just had information appear in my head.

You're obviously not old enough.

 

[Bill Zebub]

I suppose, but I have a hard time believing you don't think rules for a water voyage aren't practically possible.

Oh I think they are entirely possible! Sort of like The One Ring created a whole sub-system for overland travel.

Which I realized, after playing TOR for a while, was dissatisfying because there were no interesting decisions to be made. You just followed the algorithm, rolled dice, and the only real decision you could make would be whether or not spend Hope in order to win one of the canned, deterministic "hazards".

Which is what I suspect would happen with most generalized sea voyage rules.

That said, as with the example of rock climbing, I think you could develop more interest seagoing rules, but it would be a lot of ink and paper for a subsystem that only gets used for one specific thing. So really I'd rather just improvise "scylla and charybdis" encounters myself as the need arises. Although I guess I wouldn't mind a book with a few hundred ideas to steal from.

 

[Bill Zebub]

Sure, and to be clear it’s rare to hear me say this but the DM doesn’t need to do that. It’s more natural to let the other players interpret it themselves.

You are certainly welcome to prefer/enjoy that, but I wouldn't go as far as calling one way (or the other) "more natural".

 

[Tesral]

Oh I think they are entirely possible! Sort of like The One Ring created a whole sub-system for overland travel.

Which I realized, after playing TOR for a while, was dissatisfying because there were no interesting decisions to be made. You just followed the algorithm, rolled dice, and the only real decision you could make would be whether or not spend Hope in order to win one of the canned, deterministic "hazards".

Which is what I suspect would happen with most generalized sea voyage rules.

That said, as with the example of rock climbing, I think you could develop more interest seagoing rules, but it would be a lot of ink and paper for a subsystem that only gets used for one specific thing. So really I'd rather just improvise "scylla and charybdis" encounters myself as the need arises. Although I guess I wouldn't mind a book with a few hundred ideas to steal from.

Sea voyages follow the old saw of days of tedium followed by moments of terror. You can cross a whole ocean and never encounter anything. A single storm can cause you to question your life choices. It's in coastal waters you find things like pirates and shoals. I'll dismissed 3000 miles of open ocean with ":make a navigation roll, lets see average wind is X, that is 200 miles a day so 15 days and I rolled no storms. You see land approaching." Because outside of pirates a storms it's DULL.

Overland has Lions, and Tigers, and Bears, OH MY! Much more interesting.

 

[Bill Zebub]

Sea voyages follow the old saw of days of tedium followed by moments of terror. You can cross a whole ocean and never encounter anything. A single storm can cause you to question your life choices. It's in coastal waters you find things like pirates and shoals. I'll dismissed 3000 miles of open ocean with ":make a navigation roll, lets see average wind is X, that is 200 miles a day so 15 days and I rolled no storms. You see land approaching." Because outside of pirates a storms it's DULL.

Overland has Lions, and Tigers, and Bears, OH MY! Much more interesting.

I find that (mostly) very in line with the philosophy I'm espousing. Sure, sailing a ship takes knowledge and experience, but most of it is tedium, so I am not interested in modeling that. It's the "moments of terror" that are interesting, and an opportunity to give the players choices of how to solve problems.

The one nit I have is with players making a "navigation roll". In my mind that's sort of like making a Perception check to see if you notice a trap. The player isn't really engaging with the environment and choosing and action that requires a trade off. So it's really just a substitute for the GM rolling on a random encounters table.

It's not terrible, but it's kind of...meh. IMO, of course.

 

[Lanefan]

I find that (mostly) very in line with the philosophy I'm espousing. Sure, sailing a ship takes knowledge and experience, but most of it is tedium, so I am not interested in modeling that. It's the "moments of terror" that are interesting, and an opportunity to give the players choices of how to solve problems.

The one nit I have is with players making a "navigation roll". In my mind that's sort of like making a Perception check to see if you notice a trap. The player isn't really engaging with the environment and choosing and action that requires a trade off. So it's really just a substitute for the GM rolling on a random encounters table.

I do this too, but the roll also builds in things like "did anything major go wrong with the ship itself, or did anything else happen to cause you to detour and-or delay to any significant extent?".

Significant detour and delay can become a big problem if, say, the ship is provisioned for three weeks and the journey ends up taking four.

Nearly all the sea voyages in my game are on a nearly-landlocked sea similar to the Mediterranean in size and traffic, so there's always the possibility of meeting something untoward.