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I prefer the "gritty"ness to exist throughout the game. Not that I want a lot of rules bloat or anything, but I want injury to exist and mater. I want combats to be dangerous and the PCs to do more strategizing then "I swing my sword" or a chipping away at HP slog. For that matter the PCs should never be a HP slog for the NPCs to chip away at either. Danger is important for consequence.

I think in theory I'd agree with you Lance, in practice though I've found the opposite to be true!

In my experience, you build up a group dynamic between your characters when roleplaying, and that becomes really important for sustaining the campaign.
Frequent or multiple character deaths can quick destroy this group dynamic and lead to the campaign fizzling out.
In a RP heavy campaign the combat is there to add context and gravitas to the RP, but if the combat is too deadly then it can have a damaging effect on the RP.

I think there is an effect on player focus too. If the combat is very hard, people have to spend a lot of time focusing on character builds and combat rules.
In a RP heavy campaign, ideally you want people focused on their character's personality right? What they feel, what their goals are etc.
So I think easy combat helps, as character builds can be treated as background noise and safely ignored.

 Kroem wrote:
I think in theory I'd agree with you Lance, in practice though I've found the opposite to be true!

In my experience, you build up a group dynamic between your characters when roleplaying, and that becomes really important for sustaining the campaign.
Frequent or multiple character deaths can quick destroy this group dynamic and lead to the campaign fizzling out.
In a RP heavy campaign the combat is there to add context and gravitas to the RP, but if the combat is too deadly then it can have a damaging effect on the RP.

I think there is an effect on player focus too. If the combat is very hard, people have to spend a lot of time focusing on character builds and combat rules.
In a RP heavy campaign, ideally you want people focused on their character's personality right? What they feel, what their goals are etc.
So I think easy combat helps, as character builds can be treated as background noise and safely ignored.

I agree that several systems have done a bad job of it. BUT, easy injury does not need to mean easy death. Fantasy Flights Starwars games have a small HP pool and hitting 0 doesn't kill you it causes you a critical injury and puts you out of the fight. Some critical injuries CAN lead to death (either by not getting medical treatment or because they ARE death) but that is rare. The game I mentioned, Forbidden Lands does a similar thing. Your Strength is a number from 1-6. That is your HP. When you fight in melee you add your CURRENT strength to your melee roll. So injuries impact the fight as it's happening. When you hit 0 you are "Broken" and can no longer make any skill rolls, can only crawl on the ground, and if conscious/able to talk have to keep it very brief. Being broken also sees you roll on the critical injury table, which could be a cut forehead with no real il effect or something like punctured guts which gives you a disease and needs to be treated quickly or you are at real risk of death. About half the critical injury results CAN be lethal but only the worst result is flat out lethal (decapitation and such).

The end result isn't that combat is feared for it's lethality, it's feared for it's consequence. And instead of the players charging into every room drawing swords, they are more likely to talk it out or look for a second way out or to avoid a fight or to set an ambush to stack that combats effects into their favor.

As to combat builds, DnD gives players almost nothing BUT combat builds. Leveling up in dnd almost universally means improvement in anything but RP tools. A smooth talking character in a game with higher combat consequence is often more powerful then a beat stick. The beat stick puts everyone at risk. The smooth talker keeps everyone safe.

I agree that Combat needs to have stakes.

Sometimes, it is fun to have characters rail through a ton of disposables, but that doesn't mean there are no stakes to the combat.

Just because the enemies are weak, does not mean they are dumb. They can still thwart a heroes goals by delaying them long enough to escape with the McGuffin, distracting them from other threats, or hurting those they care about DESPITE the heroes blasting through them.

Not all stakes are death, as Lance points out. I think of it as the Superman Dilemma. Superman is a very tough and resilient opponent. So, how do you raise the stakes for Superman? You threaten what he values instead of him personally.

When I think of Combat has consequences, I think what makes the stakes of this combat important? If the combat has no value, then I do not have it.

As you can tell, I am not a fan of "random encounters" at all.


Edit: I also find that relatively "lethal" combat makes players take other avenues to approach problems rather than simply fight. Even if the party itself has never experienced a player death. They have experienced being taken out of a fight, scrambling to rescue a comrade, or being next to useless due to injury. If they know that fighting is not always the most effective path, they will try to take other paths.

I am a big fan of random encounters, but I use them as scenario seeds rather than "now there is a fight with D6 vipers" or something.

Playing lethal systems can be interesting, but I do find the more "action hero" fights in dungeons and dragons a relaxing diversion. Sometimes I am in the mood for grit, and a hardcore system with injuries and degrading abilities is good, but I think mostly I am comfortable with something less lethal and a fair amount of combat.

The main thing I don't like about DnD combat is how slow it feels as characters level up. The game really just doesn't scale well past 10th level in my opinion.

I actually like the lower levels, where combat can feel a bit more swingy and one bad hit can down a character. I kind of wish a few classes were more front loaded on some aspects. Monks, wizards, and rogues especially don't feel like they get to enjoy their classes until the later half of the level range, at least in terms of class features. Not like Warlocks, Paladins, Barbarians, well every other class. Most of them come online by level 5 and are fully functional. Enough so that I find them engaging and fun across a play through.

Artificers are slow to really click too, but they've got their core stuff by 7, when most module campaigns are entering their last stretch. Monks don't really click to me until like, level 14 or something and by then combat is very slogy and I think Wizards very much did little to no play testing past that level. They've said as such and it shows when you get there how the system just isn't as smooth once you're there.

 LordofHats wrote:
The main thing I don't like about DnD combat is how slow it feels as characters level up. The game really just doesn't scale well past 10th level in my opinion.

I actually like the lower levels, where combat can feel a bit more swingy and one bad hit can down a character. I kind of wish a few classes were more front loaded on some aspects. Monks, wizards, and rogues especially don't feel like they get to enjoy their classes until the later half of the level range, at least in terms of class features. Not like Warlocks, Paladins, Barbarians, well every other class. Most of them come online by level 5 and are fully functional. Enough so that I find them engaging and fun across a play through.

Artificers are slow to really click too, but they've got their core stuff by 7, when most module campaigns are entering their last stretch. Monks don't really click to me until like, level 14 or something and by then combat is very slogy and I think Wizards very much did little to no play testing past that level. They've said as such and it shows when you get there how the system just isn't as smooth once you're there.

Thats actually one of the bigger issues I have with levels in general. A goblin or an ork or a mindflayer isn't REALLY a goblin, ork, or mindflayer. They are an x level threat. And before the players reach them they are these insurmountable monsters that the player cannot hope to deal with and when the players surpass them they fade into fodder to be chewed through. A typical human versus a typical ork is not really a thing because levels can set a individual well beyond any realistic benchmark for ability to dole out punishment and taking it. Equipment does the same thing. A sword isn't REALLY a sword. At level 1 it can kill in a blow or 2 and at level 20 even humans can eat dozens of hits. A creature made purely of flesh and blood with take more sword slashes simply because it's "higher level". That kind of crap pulls me out of the world so fast.

 Lance845 wrote:
A sword isn't REALLY a sword. At level 1 it can kill in a blow or 2 and at level 20 even humans can eat dozens of hits. A creature made purely of flesh and blood with take more sword slashes simply because it's "higher level". That kind of crap pulls me out of the world so fast.

That's one of the things I've found a struggle with. I get that increasing HP is far better and smoother than making players more difficult to hit, but it's always a little odd when a bloody great ogre gets a critical hit and the player is still standing afterwards, with not even half their HP removed.

reminds me of this comic:
https://www.deathbulge.com/comics/148

 some bloke wrote:

 Lance845 wrote:
A sword isn't REALLY a sword. At level 1 it can kill in a blow or 2 and at level 20 even humans can eat dozens of hits. A creature made purely of flesh and blood with take more sword slashes simply because it's "higher level". That kind of crap pulls me out of the world so fast.

That's one of the things I've found a struggle with. I get that increasing HP is far better and smoother than making players more difficult to hit, but it's always a little odd when a bloody great ogre gets a critical hit and the player is still standing afterwards, with not even half their HP removed.

reminds me of this comic:
https://www.deathbulge.com/comics/148

Yeah. A dragon the size of a building just breathed fire all over you and your friends bathing you in heat and flame for maybe a dozen dice of damage that can melt metal and destroy stone. Do you still have more than 1 HP? Don't even worry about it! You suffer no negative impacts and if you take a nap it will be like it never happened!

 some bloke wrote:

 Lance845 wrote:
A sword isn't REALLY a sword. At level 1 it can kill in a blow or 2 and at level 20 even humans can eat dozens of hits. A creature made purely of flesh and blood with take more sword slashes simply because it's "higher level". That kind of crap pulls me out of the world so fast.

That's one of the things I've found a struggle with. I get that increasing HP is far better and smoother than making players more difficult to hit, but it's always a little odd when a bloody great ogre gets a critical hit and the player is still standing afterwards, with not even half their HP removed.

reminds me of this comic:
https://www.deathbulge.com/comics/148

It's just part and parcel of D&D and I don't think it'll ever change. Similar to AC and the main stats, it's iconic to the system and putting in something grittier with survivability that doesn't linearly scale with level will at best be an optional rule added in a skills and powers type book shortly before the edition ends.

I think part of the issue is that HP's name doesn't track with what Wizard's says it is supposed to represent.

They say it's supposed to represent everything from stamina, endurance, health, and so on and so forth. In that context, how HP works in game makes sense. But then I don't know why they don't just call it Fortitude or Endurance or Stamina or any number of other names that better represents what that number is supposed to mean. Maybe they're afraid that would be too abstract for casual players but if a player is so casual they can't track something like that I don't think they'll care.

It certainly makes the fantasy make more sense when you think of it that way. That said, I still think the game runs better if you cut all HP numbers after level 5 or so in half. Things become much less of a slog when there's less health on the board.

I suppose it can also represent your ability to just dodge out of the way, but you expend energy and tire out as you go. So it's not that you got stabbed for D8 damage, it's that they tried to stab you and you just squirmed out of the way, getting a superficial cut and taking D8 of your "squirminess" off, which means when it runs out the last hit actually connects.

Not sure if this is of interest to anyone here but there's a cool new anthology of short stories that were the inspiration for DnD out now and I'm very much enjoying it. Some of it is directly from Gygax's original Appendix N (hence the name) of fiction he suggests to get into the mood (for DnD) and some are additions by the editor from either later editions or obvious omissions by Gygax (like Clark Ashton Smith).

https://strangeattractor.greedbag.com/buy/appendix-n-0/

I think it's available from MIT Press in the US.

 some bloke wrote:
I suppose it can also represent your ability to just dodge out of the way, but you expend energy and tire out as you go. So it's not that you got stabbed for D8 damage, it's that they tried to stab you and you just squirmed out of the way, getting a superficial cut and taking D8 of your "squirminess" off, which means when it runs out the last hit actually connects.

This made more sense back in earlier editions where poison/burns could be saving throws along with a ton of other stuff. But these day... fire and poison and acid deal damage each turn. It's literal damage.

 LordofHats wrote:
The main thing I don't like about DnD combat is how slow it feels as characters level up. The game really just doesn't scale well past 10th level in my opinion.

I actually like the lower levels, where combat can feel a bit more swingy and one bad hit can down a character. I kind of wish a few classes were more front loaded on some aspects. Monks, wizards, and rogues especially don't feel like they get to enjoy their classes until the later half of the level range, at least in terms of class features. Not like Warlocks, Paladins, Barbarians, well every other class. Most of them come online by level 5 and are fully functional. Enough so that I find them engaging and fun across a play through.

Artificers are slow to really click too, but they've got their core stuff by 7, when most module campaigns are entering their last stretch. Monks don't really click to me until like, level 14 or something and by then combat is very slogy and I think Wizards very much did little to no play testing past that level. They've said as such and it shows when you get there how the system just isn't as smooth once you're there.

You know, it's funny, in our ongoing DnD campaign we had a running joke of the party collecting teenaged NPCs and we wound up making them heavily customized/homebrewed level 2 sheets to play them in goofy one offs, and it is far and away more interesting to play combat as the kids than as our level 5 characters.

mostly to increase variety among the classes that don't get to choose their subclass until level 3, we removed some of the level 1/level 2 class features and added in the first subclass feature.

So our DM is going to soon be putting us through the Mad Mountain.

Is there something as a half-elf Devotion paladin im gonna need to want to purchase before i go down there?

Atm im packing a Devotee's Censure and a Divine talisman +1. I also have adamantine full plate and a +1 shield.

Is that a pretty good start?

 Lance845 wrote:

 some bloke wrote:
I suppose it can also represent your ability to just dodge out of the way, but you expend energy and tire out as you go. So it's not that you got stabbed for D8 damage, it's that they tried to stab you and you just squirmed out of the way, getting a superficial cut and taking D8 of your "squirminess" off, which means when it runs out the last hit actually connects.

This made more sense back in earlier editions where poison/burns could be saving throws along with a ton of other stuff. But these day... fire and poison and acid deal damage each turn. It's literal damage.

Eh, poison still works with the stamina/dodginess/etc. interpretation. As the poison works its way through you are being debilitated. The pain and swelling around the entry point is affecting your movement, the neurotoxin attacking your nervous system is making you spasm and so on. Then if the poison takes off your final HP, it is you succumbing to it as it reaches your heart and causes cardiac arrest, or shuts down your nervous system etc.

Burns and acid can work similarly, with the pain affecting your concentration, necrosis/swelling of the burn limiting movement etc.

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

 Lance845 wrote:

 some bloke wrote:
I suppose it can also represent your ability to just dodge out of the way, but you expend energy and tire out as you go. So it's not that you got stabbed for D8 damage, it's that they tried to stab you and you just squirmed out of the way, getting a superficial cut and taking D8 of your "squirminess" off, which means when it runs out the last hit actually connects.

This made more sense back in earlier editions where poison/burns could be saving throws along with a ton of other stuff. But these day... fire and poison and acid deal damage each turn. It's literal damage.

Eh, poison still works with the stamina/dodginess/etc. interpretation. As the poison works its way through you are being debilitated. The pain and swelling around the entry point is affecting your movement, the neurotoxin attacking your nervous system is making you spasm and so on. Then if the poison takes off your final HP, it is you succumbing to it as it reaches your heart and causes cardiac arrest, or shuts down your nervous system etc.

Burns and acid can work similarly, with the pain affecting your concentration, necrosis/swelling of the burn limiting movement etc.

Right. And then you take a nap and it all goes away.

Yeah, I agree that the more RPGs I play, the more any HP system just feels WRONG to me.

 Lance845 wrote:

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

 Lance845 wrote:

 some bloke wrote:
I suppose it can also represent your ability to just dodge out of the way, but you expend energy and tire out as you go. So it's not that you got stabbed for D8 damage, it's that they tried to stab you and you just squirmed out of the way, getting a superficial cut and taking D8 of your "squirminess" off, which means when it runs out the last hit actually connects.

This made more sense back in earlier editions where poison/burns could be saving throws along with a ton of other stuff. But these day... fire and poison and acid deal damage each turn. It's literal damage.

Eh, poison still works with the stamina/dodginess/etc. interpretation. As the poison works its way through you are being debilitated. The pain and swelling around the entry point is affecting your movement, the neurotoxin attacking your nervous system is making you spasm and so on. Then if the poison takes off your final HP, it is you succumbing to it as it reaches your heart and causes cardiac arrest, or shuts down your nervous system etc.

Burns and acid can work similarly, with the pain affecting your concentration, necrosis/swelling of the burn limiting movement etc.

Right. And then you take a nap and it all goes away.

Yeah that bit doesn't quite work.

This is why I like the FATE system. You have your Stress boxes which are your HP equivalent in that when they are all used up you are taken out and which are easier to heal. On top of that you have the Conditions system, which you can use to soak damage in exchange for an aspect being applied to you which can be used by the GM (or indeed other players) to cause bad stuff. And the more extreme a condition (starting from minor then going up to extreme, in steps of increasing soak possibilities), the longer it takes to get rid of. And that top most Extreme condition is permanent and replaces one of your existing aspects.

As an example of this in practice, John Silver is a Swashbuckling Pirate. During a combat scene, he has taken some wounds from gunfire, leaving him with pretty badly damaged. He is caught in a blast of splinters when a cannonball rips through the hull near him. In order to avoid being taken out by this attack, he uses his Extreme condition to absorb 8 points of damage and takes the rest in one of his remaining stress boxes, allowing him to stay up in the fight but at great cost. John Silver chooses to take the condition Mangled Pulp of a Leg to represent this horrific injury. On his turn he manages to crawl to one of the cannons and light the fuse, sending a cannonball crashing into the enemy ship and hitting the magazine, destroying it utterly in a massive blast. He is then seen to by the ships surgeon who amputates the remains of his ruined leg below the knee. This begins the process of healing and the Mangled Pulp of a Leg aspect is changed to Freshly Amputated Leg. It will take until the end of the scenario (basically the leg of a campaign, reaching a major milestone) for the condition to clear, and he cannot take another Extreme consequence until he has cleared the previous one so until that happens he doesn't have that high-cost damage soak option to use, meaning his character is potentially much more fragile, especially as the aspect created by the condition can be invoked by the GM. He also changes his Swashbuckling Pirate aspect to One-Legged Quartermaster to represent the change to his character that this injury has had.

I think my problem with Fate is that the storytelling mechanics break my immersion way more than the hit point mechanics do in a more traditional RPG.

Hit points are pretty flawed, but they are part of a push for simple mechanics that evoke a feel of pulp adventure.

I have used "wound level" mechanics before and they definitely increase immersion, but the style of game they promote is much more survival horror than two fist pulp. And that is fine! But I think it would not work well in Dungeons and Dragons, which has always been about killing monsters and stealing their stuff. Might work well in a more grim and horror focused fantasy game though, and definitely more simulationist for those of us who value immersion heavily (And I count myself in that group, despite not minding HP).

It depends on the kind of pulpy fantasy. You got to remember that the pulpiest of the pulp fantasy is Howard Conan and Fritz Lieber's Lankhmar. I don't think HP does a very good job of representing either of those things. What DnD and HP do best isn't pulp at all imo. It's a zoomed in view of a war game (as it was designed to be) so what it represents best is actually just that. A game. It's Gauntlet and DIablo.

 Lance845 wrote:
It depends on the kind of pulpy fantasy. You got to remember that the pulpiest of the pulp fantasy is Howard Conan and Fritz Lieber's Lankhmar. I don't think HP does a very good job of representing either of those things. What DnD and HP do best isn't pulp at all imo. It's a zoomed in view of a war game (as it was designed to be) so what it represents best is actually just that. A game. It's Gauntlet and DIablo.

Honestly, I'm of two minds on this, and I'm of two minds because DnD is essentially multiple games.

At low levels, HP is completely functional for what DnD's combat is: A fun, simple, fairly quick resolution of combat mechanics that's pretty easy for new players to comprehend and that you can build a narrative around if you want to.

You don't have to constantly answer questions like "what kinds of injuries can magic heal? What kinds of injuries, therefore, do you need to assign to each consequence?" you can just describe the injuries as it feels appropriate, and it just comes down to "about how many small attacks or big attacks should this thing take to bring down?"

Healing is so plentiful in dnd that I don't think it can ever really approach "survival horror game" level, even at level 1 where a weak character goes down in 1 hit and a tough one in 2-3. When your HP is 20, fighting the same at 5hp as you do at 20...eh, it's not so bad. When your HP is 100....it starts getting a bit silly.

DnD combat is like one of those games where the enemy's health and stats just increase along with yours, but you have to manually roll all the dice and track all the numbers so it quickly becomes tedious. After about 9 months of playing, my group has basically lost any and all interest in continuing to level up our characters. We're staying at the level we're at in perpetuity, and changing up and tweaking our abilities and skills if we get bored, because combat resolution outside of the dedicated level 2 one-shot characters has become something of a slog, and usually with our main characters we play extremely unconvential combat encounters anyway.

See, thats just it. All the ways you describe dnd combat rolls back around to a video games. I think DnD works great as a video game. Mechanically it's already doing it.

 Lance845 wrote:
See, thats just it. All the ways you describe dnd combat rolls back around to a video games. I think DnD works great as a video game. Mechanically it's already doing it.

....I mean, it works great as a video game that's based off of a D20 system, like Knights of the Old Republic or Baldur's Gate, which is what I was describing.

But sure. Let's say "DnD is like a video game." I know that when you say that, what you mean is "DnD bad." But on the other hand, video game style mechanics is something people are intimately familiar with. Your character having 'hit points' is something your basic everyday person is absolutely going to immediately understand.

If your goal is a situation where you hit combat and then for 30-ish minutes every player starts playing an intensely tactical, decision-rich skirmish level miniature wargame, or if your goal is a situation where there's no separation between the combat section and the roleplay section and you resolve both in essentially the same way, nope, DnD ain't it.

But I play with a bunch of folks who are phenomenal roleplayers, somewhat into 'general nerd culture' but who are NOT wargamers in any sense of the word. But they do play a ton of video games, and specifically got drawn into roleplaying by the IDEA of dnd. They want to roll the funny dice, they want to have the stat numbers, they want to have the classes and the races to help them construct a cool character concept they enjoy. Would the game probably run slightly smoother if I could convince everyone to abandon that thing they're all comfortable with and come over here and do a game where your character sheet is six sentences and 10 numbers and you only roll square dice with plusses and minuses?

Yeah, probably. But in my experience that is one of the best ways to reliably nuke a gaming group - "this (edition, game, system, whatever) that we all play has problems, guys! Everybody come over HERE, throw out all the stuff you've invested into, and play MY thing instead!"

the_scotsman wrote:

 Lance845 wrote:
See, thats just it. All the ways you describe dnd combat rolls back around to a video games. I think DnD works great as a video game. Mechanically it's already doing it.

....I mean, it works great as a video game that's based off of a D20 system, like Knights of the Old Republic or Baldur's Gate, which is what I was describing.

But sure. Let's say "DnD is like a video game." I know that when you say that, what you mean is "DnD bad."

It's not really what I am saying though. DnD Bad is a blanket statement that I don't agree with. DnD is GOOD as a video game. It's BAD as a TTRPG that has any kind of focus on story telling instead of that Munchkin style kick down the door, kill the monsters, take the loot. It's GREAT as a loose dungeon crawl. Set up some kind of mega dungeon and have the players explore it? DnD excels. None of that is great for immersion. And arguably because videogames just do all the math for you they are the correct medium for it. But DnD does THAT pretty great even at the table. Daggerfall and the rest of the Elder Scrolls games are basically DnD doing what it does best. Explore some gak. Kill some gak. Take their gak.

But on the other hand, video game style mechanics is something people are intimately familiar with. Your character having 'hit points' is something your basic everyday person is absolutely going to immediately understand.

If your goal is a situation where you hit combat and then for 30-ish minutes every player starts playing an intensely tactical, decision-rich skirmish level miniature wargame, or if your goal is a situation where there's no separation between the combat section and the roleplay section and you resolve both in essentially the same way, nope, DnD ain't it.

I would argue that DnD IS that tactical wargame. The game is built from the ground up to incorporate battle maps and miniatures. The rules are written so that theater of the mind CAN happen but it's more cumbersome because of the 5ft square grid that everything is written around. It's easier to just have the grid on the table.

There can be separation between combat mechanics and other parts of the game. That is not what is being said. DnD is built as a combat engine first and foremost. DnDs principle player rewards are exp and loot. And the principle ways to get that is combat. And when you advance 9 out of 10 rewards for doing so is being better at combat. It just is.

But I play with a bunch of folks who are phenomenal roleplayers, somewhat into 'general nerd culture' but who are NOT wargamers in any sense of the word. But they do play a ton of video games, and specifically got drawn into roleplaying by the IDEA of dnd. They want to roll the funny dice, they want to have the stat numbers, they want to have the classes and the races to help them construct a cool character concept they enjoy. Would the game probably run slightly smoother if I could convince everyone to abandon that thing they're all comfortable with and come over here and do a game where your character sheet is six sentences and 10 numbers and you only roll square dice with plusses and minuses?

Yeah, probably. But in my experience that is one of the best ways to reliably nuke a gaming group - "this (edition, game, system, whatever) that we all play has problems, guys! Everybody come over HERE, throw out all the stuff you've invested into, and play MY thing instead!"

I am glad you have a group that is having a good time. I just don't know what relevance it has when discussing that DnDs mechanics can be immersion breaking and/or where they actually thrive.

To summarize then:

Although you can say that many of dnd's mechanics can be immersion-breaking from a roleplaying standpoint because they are video-gamey, the fact that they are video-gamey can also be a point of comfort for people less familiar with TTRPGs and more familiar with video game mechanics.

In a theoretical world where everyone is familiar and comfortable with RPGs I would pick many systems before DnD. In the real world, where the people I actually want to sit down at a table with and interact with for multiple hours on end are usually NOT the people familiar and comfortable with RPGs, DnD works great.

I'd much rather play a flawed game with socially functional adults than a mechanically perfect game with people with zero social understanding.

the_scotsman wrote:
T
I'd much rather play a flawed game with socially functional adults than a mechanically perfect game with people with zero social understanding.

Why is that the 2 options? lol. You are seriously implying (or flat out stating) that socially functional adults cannot play a RPG without it being dumbed down for them?

I accept that D&D has some gamey elements and it is to me definitely close to it's wargame roots. I like that about it. I think Conan is pretty OTT in the books, often shrugging off damage like a mighty superman in a very unrealistic way. But I think yeah, hit points come from wargames (from naval wargames, I believe) and have transfered from RPGs into video games and now from video games back into RPGs in a kind of continual exchange.

Like I said, no problem with more realistic damage systems, but they do alter the tone a bit and I quite like that kick down the door and kick some ass style of megadungeon play, I guess it is probably my favourite style of play. Sometimes I want something grittier, and then I think certainly wound levels work better. Really not a fan of Fate though, which is the most popular game using that sort of system because I like the narrative element to be played down in favour of simulation in my games (I don't like having narrative control as a player and as a DM I prefer to focus on simulation rather than putting a narrative in front of my players as I think it actually produces a more unique experience that you can only get from a game with a human DM).

 Lance845 wrote:

the_scotsman wrote:
T
I'd much rather play a flawed game with socially functional adults than a mechanically perfect game with people with zero social understanding.

Why is that the 2 options? lol. You are seriously implying (or flat out stating) that socially functional adults cannot play a RPG without it being dumbed down for them?

I have had absolutely miserable luck over the years finding anyone already into RPGs that I could stand being in the same room with for four hours in an RPG setting. I tried all the different tricks to get around constant metagaming, murder-hoboing, antisocial BS and for a while just gave up and decided RPGs weren't all they were cracked up to be. It's truly amazing just how much the common "DM advice" and "help with a problem player!" forums and posts are filled with behavior from presumably grown ass adults that makes you amazed they were able to make it out of 5th grade.

It's only when I took a group of people who were my friends first, a couple of whom were interested in trying out an RPG, that I actually realized what a good time RPGs could be.

And yeah, I'm guessing if I took this group and tried to cram the more intense wargame mechanics of 4th edition down their throats it'd probably overwhelm them and the campaign would have just petered out.