playing D&D

In my campaign if we displayed such arrogance towards our DM we would be in for a poverbial bitch slapping.
I play a life cleric in full plate and after I take a good hit or two my ass get scared.
Held at crossbow point would mean you are going to start rolling death saving throws if your an asshole.

>playing RQ6
>held at crossbow point
>Evade, outmaneuver, run away
>Use mysticism to climb building to safety
>Luck point attack rolls away
"High level" RuneQuest is when your primary skills are inching closer to 150% and your a living legend. That shit gets ridiculous fast.

Just don't fall a few stories, fight a dragon, or get caught in a trap which are death blows you walk away from in D&D.

Coup de Grace is out because you can just die - get your throat cut and die, get hung and die, touch lava and die, rocks fall and die, etc. But yeah, I use massive damage and lingering injuries all day erry day.

Like in the Chris Perkins Curse of Strahd stream when he no save killed a player. It actually happens (again) this edition when you are against a wall.

Because nerds will always confuse the rules of the game for the game itself.

>No one and nothing can die dramatically

I think you mean that it's hard for a character to die SUDDENLY. Dramatic death is more than possible, but sudden death is very difficult to pull off. That's not a bug, that's a feature: D&D posits that it is not fun for characters to die before they have a chance to do anything to defend themselves; or from "boring" or "mundane" ways like falling or getting hit by a cart (or rather, *just* that. Falling off a cliff and dying after an extended battle is just fine - see what I said about the difference between "dramatic" and "sudden").

Honestly I just want to know what people find so appealing about Dungeons and Dragons over GURPS, Runequest, WHFBRPG, 40k RPG's, Degenesis, etc.

DnD actually gets played

1) Accessibility. D&D is easy to find, both content and players.

2) Fantasy Heartbreakers. Every single fantasy RPG on the market - and quite a few non-fantasy RPGs - are defined against D&D and, their strengths and weaknesses expressed in terms of comparison to D&D. Quite a few of them miss no opportunity to even take potshots at D&D (V:tM springs immediately to mind). So one then wonders...why not just play D&D, the thing that everyone is compared to?

3) It's good enough. Related to (2), D&D might not be the best at everything - or even necessarily the best at anything - but it's broadly good enough in every area to make up for its faults, and it's definitely not BAD at anything.

4) Brand loyalty. It's the same reason I drink Coke, not Pepsi.

Falling off a cliff and getting run over will still hurt like fuck.
and with the crossbow, it's not the bolt that kills you but the fight after you tank the bolt.

5) It's better than nearly everything else on the market, because nearly everything else on the market is garbage like GURPS, Runequest, WHFBRPG, 40k RPG's, Degenesis, etc.

But the system seems to be irrevocably tainted with horrible mechanics and just a bad culture in general. IMO it's better to sweep the whole slate clean, start the group with something nobody has any experience with and everybody has to learn while playing. GURPS is good for this (especially homebrews), its only flaw is that it runs into terrible crunch with the cheat sheets being books themselves. My main problem with D&D though is that it always seems to run into the problem of rollplaying versus roleplaying. Players get too wrapped up in what is 'optimized' or not, and while not nearly as bad as the 'lul kill everybody for XP' memes, it still isn't that good and is mostly combat orientated. I've tried running games with it, but I find that I have to houserule it so damn much it practically becomes another system altogether. Better to choose a really complex system with lots of choices like GURPs, or a simple system that I have to tack more onto.

>4) Brand loyalty. It's the same reason I drink Coke, not Pepsi.

What's it like being a drooling stooge?

...

This image actually made me laugh out loud.

>But the system seems to be irrevocably tainted with horrible mechanics

What's horrible about rolling a d20 and adding a modifier to it?

>and just a bad culture in general.

D&D is far too broad to refer to it as a single culture of gamers, except if you broadly include "high fantasy gamers", but that definition is broad enough to include stuff like FantasyCraft, Dungeon World, and so on.

>GURPS is good for this

GURPS is okay for anything but good for nothing. It succeeds at its goal of being generic, but attaining that very goal has come with the cost of it failing to stand out in any way. A few people probably really enjoy it, making the general statement of "GURPS is no one's favorite RPG" is true enough to not be called out.

>rollplaying versus roleplaying

False dichotomy; your ability to optimize your character has nothing to do with your ability to roleplay him or her well.

Constant, dependable, tasty, and easy to find.

I just realized I used "broad" three times in a single sentence. Mea culpa, I'm tired.

>the guard grapples you
>you fail the save
>you forgot to put on your armor so your AC is piss poor
>you get shackled and detained

Ez pz

The 5e DMG literally lists the HP damage you take for being submerged in lava. What about that has to do with luck or stamina?

5E is garbage, what'd you expect? I don't even understand why 4E and 5E are even called as such. They're so mechanically removed from all previous versions of the game.

GURPS legitimately excels at some types of games. It remains one of the best options for modern tactical shooting and many kinds of historical games. It's also got some excellent magical systems, especially for dungeon crawling. The idea that because GURPS is a generic system, that it cannot stand out at anything is ludicrous. The quality of mechanics do not rely on theme or flavor. The way that GURPS actually works makes the whole idea even more silly, as GURPS is not one set of rules that can do literally everything. It is a set of rules that can have large segments of the rules completely removed and replaced with an entirely different system tailored to the kind of game that you want. Often, these systems are just as setting or flavor dependent as the rules for systems made for those settings or flavors. GURPS when used to run a dungeon crawl is a very, very different game from GURPS used to run a modern tactical RPG. They will feel very different and not the same sort of generic system.

This ultimately has little to do with the quality of D&D, or this thread as a whole. I'm just sick and tired of GURPS being dismissed out of hand because people have gotten a warped idea of how it works and plays. If the build your own RPG thing isn't your jam, that's one thing. Misrepresentation of how it plays is another.

>I'm just sick and tired of GURPS being dismissed out of hand because people have gotten a warped idea of how it works and plays

Perhaps the same could be said of all systems talked about on Veeky Forums.

I'm convinced that nobody has actually played any game, and just barely remembers a negative review they read about whatever they're talking about which forms the foundation of their entire opinion. Literally every game, from D&D to GURPS to obscure indie RPG's from a decade ago which were printed in batches of fifty and distributed exclusively in the greater Boise area has the same sort of distortion going on and someone to loudly state their opinion.

Also, fuck you autocorrect for inserting an apostrophe after every possessive s in my writing. You probably have some shit opinions too.

terrible, terrible suggestion.
even if we allow levels 1 to 6... how much mastery in skills can my characters achieve? how many feats can they learn? how many other cool but not overpowered class abilities are locked to them because of this premise?

no, no. your advice amounts to bad shoehorning. can it be done? yes. will it please many people? no.

We know what it says. It's just a shitty rationale for having a simple, unified mechanic, instead of having seperate stats for luck and meat points.

>Being shot in the head at point blank range or falling an incredible distance are likely to be fatal.
Ah, yeah? Why doesn't my luck bail me out here, hmmm?

There's E6, which caps stuff like HP, but still let's you gain feats and the like so that while you do continue to advance, you remain somewhere in the same tier of humanity.

i suggest you start studying games in which the character advancement is focussed on taking pcs from humble beginnings to hero-but-not-superhero status, to understand the deficiencies of a D&D campaign limited to low levels

I suggest you take your head out of your ass.

>5e is mechanically removed from the previous versions

Confirmed for only playing 3.0/5/p

....

Are people really that unconcerned about unneeded damage getting yo them?

Sure, an attack might take 10% of your health and you will.be fine, by being at low HP can randomly get you randomly dead.

But these posts contain an implicit admission that hit points are a bad mechanic that mix completely seperate things: divine favor and toughess. If the D&D system had 2 different stats... say 15 points toughness and 60 points divine luck, it would be very easy for the GM:

Crossbow to your head? Sorry, luck can't help you here, the damage goes straight to toughness points. Oops, you're dead now.

D&D's HP bloat is just a shitty mechanic. Same reason why AC is bad (mixing ability to not get hit with ability to shrug off hits).

D&D is and remains a very mediocre system with legacy mechanics, despite of what its fans claim.

... Given how much 5e inherits from 3.x's understanding of the game, I think you hit it on the head. Knowing more about other games males it easier to see the similarity between D&D additions.

(Despite being 4e loyalist, I can know the implementation of the AC goes up to get get better, as well as a decent narrative round time... which may or may not be in older version of D&D.)

Why is it bad to mix the two?

Having one die roll to determine hit and another to determine damage makes easier to make sure that every hit is meaningful.

Published RPGs are System + Setting. And in some cases just either of those. When we're saying that a game we bought is bad, then we're referring to System/Setting.

Avoiding sudden death is a Gamemastering issue, not a System Design issue.

The brand and the resulting large player base. It's like being a fan of the New York Yankees.

>One thing that you need to drill into a player's head, there are always people who came before you who are stronger than you.
Why aren't they saving the world and going on adventures?

If a player is bound and weakened to the point that they could simply have a crossbow held to their temple, surely they weren't at full HP.
They had to have been somehow incapacitated before that point, taking minor injury, exhaustion, and plot armor damage, and thus being reduced to "low enough exp" that the crossbow could finish them.

>GURPS legitimately excels at some types of games. It remains one of the best options for modern tactical shooting and many kinds of historical games. It's also got some excellent magical systems, especially for dungeon crawling.

I am honestly NOT a GURPS fan but it does excel at a modern hacking (see GURPS Cyberpunk) subsystem as well. So, yeah, GURPS has its place.

>Avoiding sudden death is a Gamemastering issue, not a System Design issue. #

The game should have tools to support this.

Generous knocked out but not dead yet rules.

Jesus, this shoehorning to defend a bad mechanic makes me cringe.

Why can't you just admit that D&D is neither realistic nor in conformance with 98% of heroic tales out there in this regard and just move on?

D&D hit points are a very inaccurate reflection of mythical heroes, much less real life people of legends.

Just admit that and that other systems provide a more accurate reflection and we're good.

Let's take 40K Roleplay as an example. (And let us ignore that it isn't entirely realistic either because a starting PC does survive a bullet to the head. I admit that but that is beside my point.)

If your character takes a fatal wound to the head, you can burn a Fate Point (of which you have 1 to 5), to get "knocked out but not dead yet". Your wound points are at 0, you have received critical damage points but you're still alive, albeit knocked out.

This seperation of toughness and luck gives a GM far better control over play than D&D's hitpoints. Not only that, the players themselves have better feedback on whether their characters are so survivable because of their toughness (20 Wound Points, 1 Fate Point) or their extraordinary luck (8 Wound Points, 5 Fate Points). It gives the PCs (and NPCs) better definition.

Cap hitdie at 10, all other levels grant no benefit to HP

I'd rather attack rolls worked like initiative, so it's not IF you hit, it's WHEN you hit

Honestly, it's for dramatic purpose. Or you end with situations where characters can survive a point blank crossbow bolt to the head just because they have enough HP to get away with it. You either lean on narrative or simulation side.

A fighter with 16 con would need to be around level 7 to have 75 hit points. Level 7 surpasses anything humans can do and is essentially a superhuman level which in this context means it makes perfect sense one crossbow bolt or one bad fall wouldn't kill you, because your character at this level is the equivalent to Hercules or Conan.

There's a great article called 'Calibrating your Expectations' on The Alexandrian which goes into detail with this and shows how examples like the crossbow fail to take into account that the game is designed for 1-5 to be the human levels with 5 being the maximum any human has ever achieved, with characters like Aragorn and Boromir being level 5. Note at these early levels especially a harsh fall or a crossbow is deadly, players tend to just skip past these levels fast because they're 'boring' and then complain when the game doesn't make sense as somehow they should be high level but low level threats should still be deadly?

Beyond that you're into super heroic levels and beyond that you're essentially demigod then god like. Hence why you can fight dragons which no normal person could.

>this meme again
Reminder that meat points are the most logical and consistent interpretation of the rules. See and the like. (falling, poison blades, lava, etc.) Anything else is pure headcanon. You have to bend over backwards to explain things away when the luck and stamina argument gets repeatedly BTFO.

The problem with burning a fate point is that it literally makes your character worse to do so.

A lucky character will be a burned out husk of a man after a few unlucky events.

Also, NPC will never burn fate points, because the cases in which it could matter (NPCs regains control of the area) it doesn't matter (party is wiped)

That's pretty much what ye olde AD&D did. Stop getting HD at level 9, beyond that you just get a flat bonus (usually +2/level)

Please, tell me a system in which that is done.

... And isn't just INT tests with guanteed damage.

And recognize that the simulation of HP assumes that all characters are in a condition to fight, and that coup de grace moves suggest that you should just throw out hp when a character is completely in control of a situation.

ORE.

This got me thinking of how a DM can get around these.
> player gets held at crossbowpoint by guards
> "lol I have 75 hit points"
>They are backed up by more guards with man-catchers. Start making STR checks

> character falls off of a cliff
> "lol I have 75 hit points"
>You also broke several bones. Disadvantage/fixed numerical penalty/can't use some limbs until they've healed

> character gets his head run over by a cart
> "lol I have 75 hit points"
>You also have a fractured skull and a concussion. Disadvantage/fixed numerical penalty until you've recovered

No rocket surgery or brain science.

okay, let's /thread/ this

The DnD critics have one this thread, see you next friday for a rematch.

Can you give me more detail than a common acronym?

The rules very clearly lay out that the penalty for falling is just damage. You can add houserules all you want but that doesn't make the system not shit.

Honestly, stapling riders on to more events is a way to fix the issue, while not having the (you gotta go to zero hp) event

One Roll Engine. The thing that runs Godlike & Wild Talents.

You roll your pool and look for matches. Height (number on the die) controls hit location, Width (number of dice in the match) controls damage, the two of them together control initiative (resolve widest to narrowest, with height breaking ties).

This is a matter of implementation. My point was that a separation of luck and toughness is superior. The same way a separation of the ability to avoid hits and the ability to shrug off hits is superior to D&D's AC.

Both hit points as well as armor class are simply legacy mechanics from the days of early roleplaying. Not that it matters for people who play D&D because of the brand and size of the community.

Have you tried playing D&D at levels where being held at crossbowpoint is deadly?

Because here's how you sound:
>playing high level D&D
>characters have become demigods who walk the earth
>"why do they not feel intimidated by crossbows?"

True, but it puts a curb on turds who think they can "win" with numbers.
House rules and homebrew content are the heart of D&D, even Gygax and his friends made house rules all the time. Look up AD&D Unearthed Arcana

I like how Ryuutama explicitly points out how HP also represent stamina and endurance, having situations like using a Minstrel's Music ability, or using a weapon you are untrained in costs 1 HP to use every time.
Just today, I was in a situation where my character's shiv broke in battle against a pirate, so I kept attacking him with any improvised weapons laying around. I knocked myself out from the exertion. I had 5 hp left at first, and over the course of five turns I kept swinging and missing him.

... Friggin' dice pools.

Static Defenses as default is the least annoying way to resolve combat.

>Are people really that unconcerned about unneeded damage getting to them?

>Sure, an attack might take 10% of your health and you will.be fine, by being at low HP can randomly get you randomly dead.

You know what happens when random damage might kill you? Characters start behaving like people and the world starts making more sense.

I totally get the appeal of playing superheroes in gory hack and slash sessions, but I think that pen and paper role-playing games are seriously the worst method of doing that. The only edge role-playing games have over other types of games are immersion, escapism and customization, it's retarded to use them to play skyrim without graphics.

>if I ignore the rules of the game I can beat my players

Even without getting into stuff like immersion and suspension of disbelief you run smack into the issue of how limiting it is to play low-level characters in D&D.

There are games that are FUN where you still have to think about whether or not it's worth the risk to get into a fight, rather than just crunching the numbers and realizing that you have a big enough HP pool to take on anything.

OP is a faggot for playing D&D if he want a game where the characters act in a way that's even remotely human, but this thread is also full of butthurt fanboys who insist that D&D can be used for everything imaginable as long as you stick to the right level, when everyone with half a brain knows that it's shit for anything except fantasy superheroes.

>I must adhere to the rules as DM because they are set in stone

Also, I never said I was trying to "beat" my players. These house rules make the game more challenging so that the problems in OP's post don't bog the game down. D&D is not competitive unless one or more of the players has issues with narcissism.

Every system has wiggle room for GMs to adjust the system all they want, nothing is perfect out of the box. If you actually played a game you'd know that.

I'm not a fan of havng a dedicate stat that represents the times you can get knocked out of a combat before you die, which seems to be what you are advocating.

(That 40k role play ties rerolls to not spending those resources just makes it worse)

And given I'd played game in which the check for damage is separate from the check for meaningful contact from the weapon, and felt extremely pissed off whenever I made contact and my attack did nothing, and there was no work around... It seems like you are just advocating more dice rolls for the no effect, or are trying to make armored character suck (because the drawback from getting hit are so bad, and they have no way to avoid getting hit).

>> player gets held at crossbowpoint by guards
A player at that level should not fear guards, he's basically a heroic badass who could kill them by the dozen.
>> character falls off of a cliff
Even 75 hit points would not let 20d6 (average 70) feel very good. Death is quite possible, severe injury is certain.
>> character gets his head run over by a cart
Again, heroic badass. How many fantasy heroes do you see die to being run over by a cart? Probably has a helmet too.

deendeefags also seem to not understand that just curbing on pc hitpoints isnt enough. once you start messing with pc stats on such a magnitude, you need to adapt the stats of every npc and every monster too because they are geared to superhero style. otherwise you cant stand a crossbow bolt to the head but THEY can.

really, if you dont want something other than fantasy superheroes, your best bet is playing something other than d&d.

>The rules very clearly lay out that the penalty for falling is just damage. You can add houserules
Permanent injury from severe damage is an alternate rule in the DMG, not a houserule.

Please tell me the diff between decreasing hitpoints versus decreasing a luck stat (like fate points)?

>playing any Warhammer RPG
>player does wildly suicidal thing for the third time
>"lol I have 5 fate points"

spotted the first pc to die in the 10-adventures-spanning campaign

Hit points represent your ability to remain in the fight.

Not your ability to not die when violently removed from it

>>OP

Probably, but that's still a whole lot of tension lost to the get of jail free card. At least I can threaten that guy with 75 hit points

"Luck points" do not necessarily have to just mean avoiding death, that is a matter of implementation, fate points are just one incarnation.

Let's not get sidetracked here: my original assertion was that seperating luck (in whatever form) and toughness is superior to combining both in hit points.

Underscores my point nicely.

I have played both and they are equally not-tense. Both have the premise that the PCs are the heroes that should have a high degree of survivability.

Plus, when I ran a Deathwatch game, I had a PC lose 3 Fate Points within 5 hours. 2 of them because the group's psyker accidentally summoned a Daemon Prince. Shit happens.

he just marked off 48 of his 59 hit points and continued fighting unaffected

Not at all. Boromir had ti be hit with multiple arrows any one of which would have killed an ordinary man to finally fell him. He is a legendary hero which is exactly what D&D emulates at higher levels.

>coup de grace moves suggest that you
Still uses HP. Explicitly still uses HP. Grants you a bigass bonus to damage, but never once says you should just throw out HP.

I originally saw that thumbnail as a skeleton in a wheelchair.

I now want that as a thing in an RPG.

Sadly more truth to this than people will ever acknowledge. My group loved Dogs in the Vineyard and Microscope and are contemplating MonsterHearts and Cat at some point, but right now it's 5e because to them 5e is "Better Pathfinder" and everything else just looked like pointless change for its own sake.

I can't imagine we're alone.

>what does surviving a fall or poison have to do with luck?
I don't think you know what luck is...

I've always wandered why some GMs throw a hissy fit over the idea that there's a lvl 1 spell that can stitch up actual damage when there's a lvl 2 spell that can regrow eyes, a lvl 7 spell that can re-attach severed limbs, and a lvl 9 spell that can "fix" not just death but a completely destroyed body.

My group is a-ok with PC's being badasses with a ton of meat points and Cure Wounds actually, you know, curing wounds.

I've never heard of a GM complaining that Cure Light Wounds doesn't make sense.

I think far more have an issue with any character being able to essentially cast it on themselves relative to their Hit Dice by expending a healing surge/HD or just curing everything after one sleep.

Yeah if you want to play a fantasy RPG then D&D is where it's at. Most other systems are just fantasy heartbreakers.

Obviously if you want to play in any other setting then all the other options becone viable.

I'm actually okay not solving 2 and 3. My players are supposed to be badasses who walk into dragonfire for a living. Their all highly-trained in their fields or inheritors to spiritual legacies that give them access to the miraculous, why should they worry about wagon carts?

1 is more my style, though. The problem with taking on a group of soldiers is that you'll never actually "win." Either you'll lose the fight and get charged with 15 counts of everything in the book or you'll win the fight and they'll just send more soldiers. The bigger a nail you make yourself the bigger a hammer they're going to swing.

This

LG Lich who was involuntarily converted because he was useful to the BBEG of old, who used dark magic to hide his phylactery. The combination of the unwilling res, the lack of phylactery access,and the incompatibility of lichdom and his natural inclinations towards law and goodness left him a physical cripple but his mind intact.

He's now the parties primary patron in their battle against the descendants of the original BBEG, now a wide-spread organization. Primarily he's out to seem them defeated and the realm free of their malignancy, but if anyone could find and destroy the phylactery so that he could return to Mount Celestia he would also appreciate that greatly. He misses his wife.

>>player gets held at crossbowpoint by guards
Depends on the number of guards, but if the guy has 75 Hit Points and he doesn't worry about damage he also probably has enough AC to laugh at their attacks and dodge them even when he's being held at point blank, so HPs are not so much the problem

>>character falls off of a cliff
Max 20d6, average those are 70 damage on average, I'd worry, also massive damage rules

>>character gets his head run over by a cart
Dunno how many damage is that, can't form an opinion