Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Thomas Shey" data-source="post: 9855737" data-attributes="member: 7026617">I'll again suggest that barring spells and class abilities, D&D has never much been good at this.  Its probably better now than in the OD&D days, but that's damning with faint praise.  Even games in the D&D sphere I'm more fond of (PF2e and Shadow of the Weird Wizard for example) aren't providing much in the base combat system to give you more than you were getting a half century ago: choice of target and maybe weapon.I'm not sold they have to be situational, and they absolutely don't have to be improvised.  You could provide a list of optional things you can do that cause other penalties, and most of them would be generic within a given skill.  In some cases they might be irrelevant (if you've got all the time in the world you may not care about faster speed, but then, if you're fighting an ooze you don't care about weapon binding or disarming, either).  If none of them are relevant than you don't have much in the way of anything but a generic resolution going on (maybe watching for potential causes of injury), but that's mostly true when fighting that ooze, too.  Its pretty much a truism that with simple opponents, even if a system with a lot of combat nuance, there's not a lot of consideration required.Now it may well be you consider such combat boring and wouldn't normally present them either, and that's fine (I kind of agree they aren't very interesting), but the system can at least still support them while having more options in more complex situations.Its less like generically doing than than using Clocks, and having options when the options are relevant.  And, again, you don't need to do it with every skill (or more accurately, every task since you may be working with something like Athletics which actually covers a lot of different only mildly related skills); there's probably no point in very all-or-nothing situations (jumping comes to mind here).  Again, I've used the four cases I have for a reason.Well, there's a reason in my younger, somewhat snarkier days I characterized the D&D magic system as "having all the charm of a man with a bag of varied hand grenades."  It was clearly set up the way it is because its straightforward, but its not a coincidence you don't see much like that out of the D&D sphere.It absolutely is very gamey, but it does have the virtue it discourages power-hoarding outside dailies (at-wills are obviously a non-concern, and encounter powers you might as well use because they'll be available later again anyway).(The AGE system from Green Ronin has something pretty similar to what you're talking about in some ways; its a 3D6 resolution system, and if any of the dice throw doubles, you've gotten an opportunity to choose one of a number of different options up to the value of the Stunt Die in the 3D6.  Some people love it and some it bothers the heck out of).</blockquote>

Verification