Forums of the Cape Union of Adventurers and Wargamers
I noticed on the Dragons Landing website the Margaret Weis Productions, Ltd. and Wizards of The coast Dragonlance agreement is also not going to be renewed. More info here: http://www.dragonlance.com/features/articles/10040.aspx
Wonder who is next ...
It's a sign. Stop playing stupid D20.
What bugs you in terms of D20?
Feats are cool. Lack of wound penalties, wildly varying amounts hit points, levels, and XP amounts with unneeded zeroes tacked on the end are not. Character classes also suck quite a lot, and character classes which restrict the skills a character can take suck even more (I call these kinds of classes cookie cutters). Oddly, Prestige Classes were kind of cool (lots more shapes to choose from and some ability to combine them).
Hitpoints aren't wound levels and beating armor class does not mean hitting someone with your weapon, and damage isn't wounds, because if they were these things, they wouldn't make any sense. The sourcebooks take care to tell you that these are nebulous measurements for how healthy / prepared / whatever you are, how difficult it is to make you less so, and how much less so you have been made.
But translating these nebulous qualities to actual in-character effects is difficult, so most people interpret them as wound levels / armour / wounds anyway, and thus end up making no sense. Because then you have people who can withstand the kind of injuries that kill normal people and not feel them, and feel perfectly fine right up until they're bleeding to death. And armour that makes you harder to hit.
Even if you assume that not all "hits" are hits and not all "damage" is wounds, since you're bleeding to death when you run out of hitpoints, *some* of it must be. So why are there no wound penalties?
The effortless magical healing also sucks, because it makes almost dying meaningless. You can knock back a potion, and you're perfectly fine. (Resurrection also makes *actually* dying meaningless, for that matter.)
Some suggested house rules, just so this isn't a pointless bitch session (I used some of these in my undersea campaign):
* armour reduces damage instead of adding to AC
* let critical hits have interesting special effects instead of doing a gazillion damage -- let people cut the hack'n'slash short by decapitating their foe, stabbing it through the heart, hamstringing it, knocking it out, etc. I think some DMs kind of do this anyway, if the combat is getting boring.
* divide hit points into a few levels, and apply wound penalties (I think I had 4 levels and penalties of 0, -1, -3 and -5 -- but you could be much more harsh. :D )
* make some percentage of lost hitpoints never come back, and give people permanent scars and wounds (man, I wish I had done this!)
* Make people pay through the nose for resurrection (assuming you allow it). In my game, resurrecting someone required sacrificing someone else's life, and they came back with a permanent -3 (I think) to each of their physical stats. It's *death*, dammit; it should be *notable*.
The magic is a whole other kettle of fish; I'd drop the spell levels and preparing of specific spells, and go with a fixed number of fluid slots that you can use to cast any spells you know. I think there are rules for psionics that do just that. If you don't want to nerf the difference between wizards and sorcerers, you can give them some other magic flavour thing in exchange. (Example: sorcerers are spontaneous, so a sorcerer can try to cast a spell he doesn't know, but it requires a skill check, and uses twice the normal number of slots. Wizards are good at structured magic, so a wizard can prepare specific spells in advance (like he would now) and gain some kind of benefit (the spell is more powerful / it goes off faster / it uses fewer slots / etc.))
...this was supposed to be a short post. Somebody take this keyboard away fr
Interesting. As you are mentioning house rules, is it not the DMs responsibility then to prevent "Munchkin" like play from the players? I played/DMed 2nd Ed AD&D and we went through multiple sessions where hack’n slash would get you nowhere other than mutilated you just died.
I've seen people mentioning L5r, though I’m not familiar with the L5r setting other than what is on the publisher’s website, the online character sheet suggests, looking at the wounds table, that this system addresses the missing wounds penalties as mentioned?
Chris
You can put the players in situations where they'll be screwed if they rush blindly into combat instead of trying to solve the problem in a different way, but that's a broad strategy issue. There are still problems with what happens during an actual combat. The rules as they stand encourage players to make choices which realistically make no sense, but which they'd be stupid not to make, because within the system rules they are what makes you more effective in combat.
I'm not talking about elaborate rule-twisting munchkinism. I'm talking about continuing to fight until you fall over (because you feel no ill effects from your injuries), and preferring to be surrounded by enemies (because their piddly flanking bonus is nothing compared to your opportunity to make multiple attacks, attacks of opportunity, and to cleave).
Sure, how system rules are interpreted depends on the DM. But some systems start off with sillier rules, and *need* more fiddling to work without being silly.
Look, I'm not saying D&D is totally useless. It's good for some kinds of games. It's OK not to want gritty realism in everything. However, I have found that if you want to apply D&D to a game which is supposed to be reasonably realistic, you need to make substantial modifications -- or keep ending up with situations which break the mood, because what the system is doing does not match up with what everyone expects to be happening in character.
The L5R handling of wounds is much better. The spread of wound points is much less crazy than the spread of hitpoints in D&D: they're a multiple of your Earth ring (which is linked to stamina and willpower). Some people get bonuses, and thus have many more wound points, but it's on the order of 1.5 times as many or twice as many, not 10 times as many. I think some monsters have more, but they're actually physically bigger (I have no problem with, say, dragons having more wound points). And yes, there are wound penalties.
Also, in L5R, as in most sensible systems, arrows kill people. In D&D, arrows are toothpicks. ;)
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