All old D&D grognards, what you hate the most on D&D?

The trouble is separating humans like that. Elves are easy since they're so... empirical.

Humans... you have to decide on where the line is between Good, Usually pretty nice people, Evil, Really just an Asshole, Slightly Dickish, and Just plain Annoying.

There are underground humans that are evil, IIRC. They're kinda all half-insane cavemen tho.

Who said the Shadow Elves are evil? Weird, xenophobic, and kind of scary, but not exactly Evil.

And they're underground because that was the only safe place to hide from the firey holocaust that destroyed the continent above in ages past.

Because he's an old grognard, user. Communication skills, regardless of format, have never been a strength of the average roleplayer.

the undefined rules about class vs profession vs prestige vs kit.

we get variations in all editions.
there was a book or section in 3.5 that offered just 3 classes, and basically hinting at building skill trees with feats, and i wish they wold have went more in that direction for a latter edition.
mind you
i really like 5th ed.

Are you trying to say that Yeenoghu is number 1?

Are you okay? Do you need us to call someone for you?

Probably the fact that they changed a bunch of core concepts to the point where it really isn't D&D anymore.
I get that character builds, narrativism and no fail state is fun sometimes, but there are better systems for that.

>He's trying to make Gnolls a major force in the multiverse, and what does he get from it?

>Weak sacrifices and a disapointment of a race

How do you think Jesus feels about white people?

Spellcasting. It's not that's it's too powerful, it's just that it's the batman option that can do every other characters job, usually better than they can do it themselves. You pretty much have to houserule the shit out of DnD if you happen to get a player that wants to play a wizard that just outshines everyone, rather than a wizard who uses his spells to make the party stronger and better at what they do.

>All old D&D grognards, what you hate the most on D&D?
The forced static class level progression, what a horribly shitty system and why the hell did we suffer through it just because it wa sthe popular shit to play. Still it's stuck with its shitty system mechanics. The open creativity of the epic fantasy is bloody epic and fantastic but it's all held back by its system mechanics.

Some might look at this and get some lewd vibes, but all I'm seeing is
>Blue Wolf Leather, probably Phantom Summoner - scrub and not a threat
>Majestic Robe, Shillien Elder or Storm Screamer - either way priority target
>Tallum Heavy, Noblesse Tiara - probably Spectral Dancer / Destroyer or Spectral Dancer / Destroyer - very dangerous up close but harmless when cripples

Having almost no degree of success mechanics.

Mah nigga.

I love me some Shadow Elves. The rest of the meta-plot, not so much, but I get that it was needed to sell books.

On one hand, I agree with this sentiment. The magic classes could be more neatly divided into different roles, and the wizard shouldn't be able to just do everything. But it also makes the other classes less unique variations of casters and keeps them blocked up in certain schools themselves, instead of having some freedom of customization and feeling unique for their bloodlines or pacts or what have you.

Wizard should just be toned down in overall powerlevel - they can still be a jack of all trades, but they should also be a master of none because they have to dabble in everything.

It's too late, friendo. After all these years, even competent gnolls still make me angry

yes

>white people
>not Jews
Either way, I'd imagine Jesus is proud, since both of 'em rule the world

Indeed, Ed Greenwood is creative man

pastebin.com/eU1aFgyB

for more quality content, check "so saith Ed" archives, and remember, it is all CANON.

candlekeep.com/library/articles/sse/so_saith_ed.htm

I like Shadow Elves - a pity I can't share the pdf on Veeky Forums, since it's pretty big. Too bad they never seemed to do more with it since.

>tfw i'm an exclusive master

>Greenwood himself have stated that Elminster existed before the setting was bought by TSR, and that his primary function the was to be an obscenely overpowered character whose primary purpose was to mock the players when the characters they played got hurt or dead.

Jeez, I knew he was the ur-Whizzard and exemplar of That DM and all, but I didn't know his DMPCs were specifically invented to let him be an asshole to players.
I didn't know my esteem for that guy could go any lower, and yet it just did.

No need, it's up in the OSR General's Trove.

For me it's tomb of horrors. It's fine if you play it mechanically as a dungeon crawl challenge. But too many people have taken the wrong ideas from it. It's not fun if I need to give the DM a 2 paragraph description on how exactly I turn a door knob in an inn.

and fuck everything about making a spot check = death, gygax was a real sadist with that one

>fuck everything about making a spot check = death, gygax was a real sadist with that one

There aren't any spot checks in AD&D, were you playing the 3e rerelease? 'Cause Gygax had nothing to do with that one.

Gygax had a different view of what adventuring and D&D was supposed to be about, I think. Not as much as the roleplaying of today.

Any particularly humorous examples? I'm lazy.

Vancian casting.

this, holy shit this.

>IMO the Wizard Class should just be the Blasty class that focuses on Evocation and MAYBE Abjuration
Yeah, no.

I agree with the sentiment that wizards shouldn't be able to just do fucking anything, but personally, I enjoy the utility magic aspect of being a wizard far more than I enjoy the blaster caster shit.

Personally I think more effort should be put into giving the magic substitute for a mundane method weaknesses that the mundane method doesn't have. Maybe Spider Climb, unlike the climb skill, has a very limited duration and abruptly wears off once that duration is over -- better make sure you don't end up falling to your death. Maybe Knock has a decent chance of destroying the lock unless you are far more skilled at casting the spell than a thief would have to be skilled at lockpicking to cleanly pick the lock. Maybe Disguise Self has some telltale giveaway signs that would be obvious to anyone who has studied magic, making it only useful against people who don't know shit about magic (unless maybe you spend some other resources and take some other measures to mitigate the telltale signs, measures which themselves would leave some hint that something is being covered up, and so on.)

If all of this were accompanied by measures to let nonmagical classes do cool shit (especially in ways that don't involve picking options from the book on level-up) I think it would do a lot to reign casters in as the "do-anything option". There's also always the TSR design decision of making some classes require more EXP to level up than others to help balance things out a bit.

The mechanics that force abstraction that undermine immersion, like ramping hit points, accuracy-reducing armor, minute-long rounds, and so forth.

You asked for it...

>high-coin girls
>ladies of the evening
>bedwarmers
>alley girls

and about sixty more Realmsian names for different kinds of ho's (just like the famous 40 eskimo names for snow)

forum.candlekeep.com/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=8518&whichpage=43

>Ardashir, “festhalls” (Jeff Grubb’s word, substituted for my “brothels” for TSR Code of Ethics reasons) vary in customs, but the more elaborate ones ARE “a cross between a private club, a casino, and a brothel.”
This is due to the fact that many folk in Faerûn can readily couple with someone (on a rooftop or behind a midden in crowded cities, and ‘out in the woods’ or in a nearby thicket or hollow in a distant pasture, in a rural setting) if mere sexual gratification is all they want. What they go to the brothels for (and yes, some of these establishments are private clubs, particularly those specializing in S&M, mate-swapping, or inter-species congress) is for ‘added fun.’

yeah, you read right, fucking on the rooftops is completely normal in the Perverted Realms

forum.candlekeep.com/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=1901&whichpage=73

>It’s important to remember that many of the Realms deities encourage “sex for fun” (or even “sex for religious rapture”) and their priests have magical and pharmaceutical meals of preventing contraception, so “it’s only incest if the female partner gets pregnant.” This, by the way, usually means family members satisfy their curiosity and indulge feelings of mutual affection, and then go looking for less “safe and familiar” but far more exciting partners, elsewhere.

yes, "family fun" is the way in Greenwood's land

forum.candlekeep.com/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=5812&whichpage=58

there is much more, all WORD OF GOD HIMSELF and remember that EG talks about "normal" humans, elves, dwarfs and hobbits, the Drow took several more levels of squick

Fucking hell, how did he get away with half of that?

I'll admit, it's not like I don't find casual sex hot, and I appreciate that he at least put some thought into working his kinks in, but that is straight up magical realm - and we aren't even getting into the kinkier shit that I probably would not enjoy. How the hell did he get away with this? Why have I never heard about any of this?

The fact that players nowadays can't seem to grasp the concept of GMs balancing games to the tastes of the players effectively regardless of rules,and the idea behind circumstantial bonuses awarded for roleplaying and efforts beyond merely "the rules say I get this bonus so it's useless to play this class."

Yeah, I get it, you can do math. The game isnt about math, its about playing the game.

Stupid entitled autistic fucks.

The fact that the d20 mechanic and the balancing of skills and difficulty has created a situation in which virtually all tests are a coin flip with a roughly 50% chance of failure.

You forgot the table user

That and a skill system that basically makes every character an idiot savant who is an expert at picking locks and has memorized every Dynasty of every ancient civilization ever but can't hold a basic conversation or know which end of the horse goes forward

>I enjoy the utility magic aspect of being a wizard far more than I enjoy the blaster caster shit.

I love that t-rex

That's not Greenwood work.

Don't forget the time he made his con players deliver a message to Alustriel by travelling through a mirror that removed all metal. So they get into her palace, with their pants falling down from lack of belt buckle, and are told she's in the bath. Their message is urgent, so they go to find her, only to be confronted with a huge orgy, in which they have to find her.

>Don't forget the time he made his con players deliver a message to Alustriel by travelling through a mirror that removed all metal. So they get into her palace, with their pants falling down from lack of belt buckle, and are told she's in the bath. Their message is urgent, so they go to find her, only to be confronted with a huge orgy, in which they have to find her.
That just sounds like a funny way to troll your players, user.

>accuracy-reducing armor

Armor as damage reduction, while trendy, is far more unrealistic. Wearing armor doesn't mean you get half a knife stab instead of a whole one, it turns the knife and makes it harder to get an effective hit -- hit reduction, not damage reduction.
If you get a dagger into the chinks of a suit of plate mail (a very difficult strike that generally requires you to grapple him first), the wearer is dead, he doesn't take half a stab, or a quarter stab, and laugh it off. He takes the whole knife, slashing him open and leaving him to bleed out in his armor.

>1% legitimate grievances (caster power creep. Drow)
>99% "I played ADND so everything else is shit"

Just download all the collected EG answers and read them while waiting for Santa.

candlekeep.com/library/articles/sse/so_saith_ed.htm

Immensely detailed, when he describes nearly every NPC of the Realms, he always notes their favorite sexual partners, kinks and fetishes.

>That's not Greenwood work.

No, but it's still hilarious. Old school D&D had so many goofy tables

And they were there solely for the pleasure of randomly adding stuff to your games. Its even suggested you don't roll, just choose.

When it's random people at a con you're doing this to, it's significantly more weird.

It would be great if the arcane classes, instead of being different flavours of generalists, went for specialized spell lists, like the 3.5 war mage, dread necromancer, and beguiler, but the diverse spell lists would take up too much book space... And effort at balancing stuff. That's why we can't have nice things.

First, it plays poorly, because even it's not narrated like a hit/miss thing (which, let's face it, is how it's usually done), it still forces you into weirdly artificial/counterintuitive divisions when it comes to resolving your strike.

With damage-reducing armor:
>1st roll -- Did you hit your target?
>2nd roll -- If you hit your target, how hard/precise/effective was your blow?

That's a logical and intuitive division.

With accuracy-reducing armor:
>1st roll -- Did you hit your target hard/precisely/effectively enough to inflict any damage?
>2nd roll -- If you hit your target hard/precise/effective enough to inflict damage, exactly how hard/precisely/effectively did you hit them within that range?

That's just garbage.

And what about the giant who throws a bolder at you only to have it glance harmlessly off your plate mail? Or the ogre who swings a club the size of a small tree? If he gets a solid hit to your midsection, your mail is not likely to negate the damage, but the gambeson you wear underneath the metal links will give you a little padding, at least. And it's not like it's impossible for a piercing weapon to partially penetrate armor, or for a chopping weapon to inflict impact damage even if it doesn't cut through your armor. And even if you're striking at complete gaps in somebody's armor (and not just points of relative weakness, where some protection still exists), it's going to be harder to land a good, solid blow there. The angle might not be that good and you might not be able to exert the same amount of force that you would if you could strike at any old place. And that gap may not over a particularly vital area, reducing the effect of a wound of the same size.

I've alway ruled that if it hits your base AC of 10+dex+dodge, but not your modified AC with armor, Natural Armor, Deflection, etc, then it's a hit with no damage. If it doesn't hit the base AC+dex+ddge it's a true miss.

Let you throw in descriptive non-damaging hits without alarming the players.

In my campaign, the drow were actually innocent victims to begin with. Basically, there were two types of elves: sun and moon. The first matriarchal, the second patriarchal. They had a sort of joint rule wherein they alternated monarchs, sun queen and moon king. So when the king of the moon elves died, he was replaced by a queen of the sun elves.

But the son of a moon king was power hungry and when his father died, he moved against the sun queen at her coronation, forcibly married her, then ruled in her stead.

A terrible civil war raged for centuries, maybe even millennia, becoming more and more bitter, until it became a war of virtual extermination. The sun elves, always at a disadvantage because they weren't prepared for the conflict, and because they tended to be less militaristic in any case, were ultimately driven from the surface of the planet.

Alone in a strange and wicked land, with most of their population slaughtered, cut off from the sun which was the primary source of their magic, the sun elves had to compromise their morals to survive. As the eons rolled by, they became as heartless and malicious as the other denizens of the subterranean world, and were driven by their desire for revenge.

Meanwhile, the surface elves had long since rewritten their shameful history, claiming that the drow began worshiping dark powers and had to be driven from the surface in what amounted to a holy crusade. And while the drow sank into wickedness, elven society flourished on the surface, becoming truly enlightened.

Ugh, sifting through all this boring shit for the good parts is terrible.

>How do you think Jesus feels about white people?
>Jesus, the "king" of the Jews
> Not any "White Gods"
>Can't name a single "white" god
> Stupid goyim worship a Jew, think that this cucking thing is new

Probably nothing, motherfucker, Jesus cant feel anything, he's dead

user, your problem is with HP and not AC.

The giant boulder/tree-as-club isn't a question of armor saving you, it's a question of why a character lives while losing 1/5 their HP and fights with no restrictions still.

what about high five sliver?

It's not how Jesus feels about white people or Jews, it's how Jesus feels about Christians. But even then I think he knows that the Kingdom isn't coming until the King returns.

>because even it's not narrated like a hit/miss thing

That's a narration problem, not a mechanics problem.

>the giant who throws a bolder at you

Is not a conventional combatant by any stretch. Treat it as an area of effect like a dragon's breath, and do a saving throw, not an attack roll.

Don't troglodytes(?) fulfill that role? I haven't played a game in the underdark, so I assumed thoae were the human variety.

Troglodytes are, IIRC, lizards. There are quaggoths, more humanlike savage evil underworld inhabitants, but they do not have the sexy appeal of drow, for obvious reasons

Do you even yiff, bro?

Don't answer that.

You. I like you. You can be our whizzard, any day of the week.

One thing it's important to keep in mind is the origins of the HP and AC mechanics. In TSR's wargame Chainmail, most units went down in a single hit. Rolling a "hit" wasn't meant to represent physically landing a blow, even a non-glancing blow, it was meant to represent scoring a casualty. Beneath the abstraction, a "hit" could represent a single lucky shot, or it could represent the end result of an exchange of several blows. For OD&D, where players only got one guy, HP was invented to give people a few mulligans. After all, it wouldn't be very fun if your hero went down in one hit, would it? This is why Holmes Basic used a D6 damage die for every weapon -- the killing power of the weapon was represented by its to-"hit", not by how much HP it took away. AD&D, as well as later versions of Basic, gave different weapons different damage ratings for balance purposes.

With all this in mind, you could try treating HP like an extension of AC. HP was never supposed to be blood points, or meat points, or anything like that -- it's an abstraction of the ability to keep fighting. Maybe a character could be physically unscathed by a blow beneath the abstraction, but still lose HP because it was a close call that stressed or fatigued the character, bringing him closer to incapacitation. If a low-level thief wielding a dagger lands a hit on an unarmored but battle-hardened, high-HP fighter, maybe it only deals D4 damage because the skilled fighter quickly defended himself from the attack, causing only a nick on his arm. If the low-HP thief got hit with the same dagger, that D4 of damage might represent something much worse than a simple flesh wound. If you're still concerned about the implications of such interpretations (wouldn't the nick on his arm make it harder for him to fight with that arm?) you could houserule it, or you could
>try not playing D&D
and switch to something more simulationist, like GURPS (which is also more customizeable).

Why the hell do you think there aren't?

my DM does this anyway. if he gets close to our AC but not passing it he'll describe it as a glancing blow off your armor, or you parried, or you raised your shield in time

Grimlocks are evil underground humans

forgottenrealms.wikia.com/wiki/Grimlock

That's how you're supposed to do it, IMO.

bear in mind, he was a young adult in the '60s. he lived the free love lifestyle, and it obviously stuck with him. judging by today's standards makes it worse. but at the time, it was only a little to the outside. the '70s were still pretty loose (disco), but headed back towards the more "restricted" values of the '50s.

Does hating younger players whinging about Thac0 count?

Learn to math you ignorant retards. Shit.

That and WoTC. And Realms. And oversized weapons and armor (fuck you Paizo).

if the mechanics create a binary condition of hit or miss, the narrative matches. either the weapon "hits" and deals damage, or the weapon "misses" and does not deal damage.

a narrative hit is "he stabs you in a weak spot, he clubs you hard enough, you don't sidestep quickly enough." take x damage.
a narrative miss is "you dodged, he swings and misses you, your armor shed his blow, you take the blow on your shield." no damage taken.

personally, i feel damage reducing armor is less intuitive. if the attack "hits" it defeated the armor this time. but damage reduction says no matter what the armor is never overcome or defeated, and as such does not a weak points or chinks.

What do I hate the most about D&D? There's so much to D&D that it's hard to choose, but I guess I'll say something easy:

Skill & Powers. Not only was it the testbed for 3e, but it completely wrecked 2e to the point where you could make a Cleric capable of casting divine magic, arcane magic, in full armor, and have weapon specialization to boot, rendering three classes completely moot. Four if you count arcane magic making Thieves irrelevant.

So yeah. WotC has always been full of idiots who wouldn't recognize balance if it bit them in the ass, and Paizo is just following their grand tradition.

Not that 2e was ever balanced - but there's a difference between "not really balanced" and "here's a toybox that completely ruins any semblance of balance".

Fuck off back to Tumblr, racist Millennial scum.

wut

Any evil underground hobbits in D&D?

Gygax intentionally made tomb of horrors a terrible experience because it was meant to be something played at conventions that if you managed to beat it you got a prize.

>The concept (underground dwellers bacame black), the society, the religion, the lore, nothing makes sense.
>saved by legendary hero Ah'nold D' Rambo wielding twin submachine guns
OP...

Ironic horseshoeing is becoming the new big thing.

>SUPER boring
But what if you suppliment with artifacts? I'm.. asking for a friend.

Alignment

It worked back then because PCs weren't designed to last more than the dungeon they started in but nowadays, it's a huge cancer that impedes impedes roleplay and breeds THAT GUYS to boot.

I maintain a stance that a character cannot have depth while adhering to one alignment. Even Bugs Bunny has more depth than the average D&D character, and that's just sad.

Any person that isn't Neutral is insane anyway.

Please, Neutral just not!Evil in the way that people play it anyways.

>"Hey Chad, you can't be LE in muh campaign.
>"Fine, I'll be CN instead xD"

I've yet to see anyone play Neutral anything effectively without just going full edge with "it's what muh character would do" being brayed from the rooftops if you dared to raise an issue with it.

What I hate most about D&D is Veeky Forums

Why do I come here?

CN still insane. It's actually the archetypal for madmen anyway, but

Those are failures of the players involved as much as of the system in conveying meaning.
And I meant Neutral as in central square generally unaligned Neutral, not the schizophrenic True Neutral or the mindless Unaligned. It's supposed to just be people being people, but bad roleplayers have a bad grasp of people, go figure.

I've played a couple actually greyscale characters, but I still absolutely despise the alignment system and most of 3e's legacy, so.
Yeah.

For the 40k fanwank, obviously.

True Neutral's entire schtick is "meh."

>"We have to save the orphans!"
>"Meh."

>"The people are rioting!"
>"Meh"

>"Come join the dark side!"
>"Meh."

>"It's a boy!"
>"Meh."

The only way to play it properly is basically to go, "meh" anytime an interesting plot hook is thrown at you, and that's because the average citizen doesn't give a fuck about the state of good and evil when their only frame of reference is their own little mud huts in the middle of nowhere.

True Neutral is an obsession with balance, you misread gibbon.
Or have the subsequent editions rewritten the entire spectrum, again.

"Jerren" from Book of Vile Darkness are evil halflings. Not underground.

alcyius.com/dndtools/races/book-of-vile-darkness--37/jerren--36/index.html

True Neutral is basically "I have no strong inclinations one way or the other, so meh."

d20srd.org/srd/description.htm

Neutral =/= True Neutral
The difference between the philosophers and the ambivalents is mentioned in that second paragraph, and expounded upon in later sources,
You're just being an asshole if you think "does what seems best at the time" and "acts naturally without prejudice or compulsion" as being fully reducible to "meh."

For the pics of sexy orc girls?

If you cared one way or another then you obviously wouldn't be Neutral now would you?

Ergo, "meh"

Those don't even get posted anymore, board police idiots go all "muh traditional games!" and shit.

>"We have to save the orphans!"
>"OK, this kind of charity should give me great tax relief, plus some good deity favor, possibly."

>"The people are rioting!"
>"What's their political goal? Can I and party get some benefit fron this situation?"

>"Come join the dark side!"
>"There are too many psychos in your ranks guys. But if order will be kept, your political (phylosophical, religious etc., depending on situation) program is reasonable and you have enough cookies..."

>"It's a boy!"
>"The usurper is surrounded by idiots. If we will help to the true king to take the throne, it will greatly raise our social status."

Neutral characters IMHO just doesn't try to turn the natural flow of events for good or evil. It doesn't mean they have no ambitions or goals , but this goals are not greatly altruistic or noble, so they are not good aligned, and at the same time they are not evil aligned, since they understand value of being part of the society. Same with the law: they don't like chaos, since it bring turbulence and can destroy their plans, however, if they could find loopholes in the law or guard's flaw and use it for their good, they would do it. Yes, in case of average citizens, it means that they will just "Meh" in most situations, but heroes and adventurers are much more capable.

Because everywhere else sucks, and you can't escape the taint now that it's corrupted you.