HERESY THREAD: Sacred cows that you think D&D would be better without.

[Daztur]

A lot of the things people mention are some of my favorite bit of D&D, especially the wild swinginess.

I was going to say that my main peeve was the steepness of the power curve, but that's probably more a result of me having played too many games in which PCs leveled every two sessions or so and almost never died without a quick resurrection rather than any deeper problem.

A lot of things that annoy about D&D crop up because people chuck out other rules that are there to keep those very problems from cropping up.

[Arkansan]

"Decide how you would like it to be, and then make it just that way!"  - Gary Gygax, Dungeons & Dragons, Vol. 3 "The Underworld and Wilderness Adventures," page 36.  (TSR, 1974)

I wish the monster and treasure tables had been labeled "SUGGESTED" or "EXAMPLE".  To let people know it was OK to eliminate "Goblins" and put in 'Boggles' instead, for instance.

Right, and that's how I have always treated the game as a toolbox or set of guidelines. It does seem though that some think that if you change certain things or anything even that you aren't playing d&d anymore. Which doesn't make sense to me because if you look at what is said in the original books the default assumption seems to have been that every group would in fact change shit.

[Sacrificial Lamb]

What do I think D&D would be better without?

Most players.

Hello, Lorraine Williams! How are you? We missed you so much...

[Doom]

I'd go with the delineation between cleric and wizard. It really should be possible to just shuffle those two classes together and let the player decide what kind of spellcaster he'll be. Armored wizard? Unarmored healer? Why the heck aren't these convenient options? Granted, either way, you'd have to totally scale back what spellcasting has become (being in melee irrelevant, for example).

Next, I'd go with the delineation between fighter and thief. Almost all the "literature" D&D is based on has heroes that basically blur between fighter and thief, to the point that really I just don't see why the player can't decide if his non-spellcaster can wear heavy armor and have the skills to pick locks, or wear little armor but still be a terror in melee.

[Gronan of Simmerya]

Hello, Lorraine Williams! How are you? We missed you so much...

Do these dice make my butt look big?

[jibbajibba]

I do think classes are key to D&D.

So I don't think you can blur all the classes into 'adventurer'

However I think you can strip classes down and go for more of a kit based model for the sub classes.

I think striping down classes to
Warrior
Rogue
Caster
and giving DMs optiosn to flesh these out to Priest, druid, pirate etc (of course this is how my heartbreaker workds so no suprise)

From playability dumping the stats in favour of a modifer al a True 20 is a great boon (again my heartbreaker does this)

I wouldn't change Vancian magic but I would tinker with the spell progression tables and tie them back to DM choice to build classes.

Of course I don't regard any of these as Sacred Cows or I wouldn't have them up for slaughter.

I think HP, d20, Classes, levels, spell lists with specific effects, Armour and the combat system are the core of D&D you can play with all the stuff on the margins, settings, monsters, races, skills, etc and it would still be D&D.

[TristramEvans]

I dunno, there's so much I'd change that it wouldn't feel like D&D anymore, so instead I just focus on accepting D& D for what it's good at, even of what it's good at isn't 90% of the types of games I like to play. The things that I really don't care for- alignments, levels, skills,feats, the experience system, most of the classes, etc -I think are all things that make the game a good introduction to the hobb and useful for buy-in for new players (except Feats, I wish they'd just go away and die already, especially as they actually IMO hinder new players).

[apparition13]

I'll start us out with a big one: the d20.  I hate rolling the d20 because it has such a wide range of numbers that success or failure is often based on luck rather than your character's ability (a 20 is likely to be a success and a 1 a failure no matter your character's in-game skill).  There's no mechanism in the game to prevent a string of bad rolls, either.  The d20 is wild and swingy, and there's nothing that pushes your roll to the average except rolling a lot.  This often translates to an evening of really awful rolls or really great rolls, which takes some of the fun out of it for me.

I think rolling 3d6 or 2d10 would be a better system.

I like 2d10, it makes bonus and penalty dice (advantage and disadvantage dice in 5 vernacular) less overwhelming, which means it's also easier to add multiple bonus or penalty dice.

There are lots of them, but my top 3 are;

1)  The 6 ability scores.

2)  The entire magic system.

3)  The Cleric class.

I like the six ability scores, but I'd like them to be different, with the non-physical 3 also representing elements of the players that cannot translate into the characters. How strong a player is has no impact on a character lifting a log; how smart the player is can influence how intelligent the character acts (or can act), and I don't care for that (for PCs) anymore. The equivalent of Str, Con, and Dex for magical ability might work, but I'm not sure.  

I'd go with the delineation between cleric and wizard. It really should be possible to just shuffle those two classes together and let the player decide what kind of spellcaster he'll be. Armored wizard? Unarmored healer? Why the heck aren't these convenient options? Granted, either way, you'd have to totally scale back what spellcasting has become (being in melee irrelevant, for example).

Next, I'd go with the delineation between fighter and thief. Almost all the "literature" D&D is based on has heroes that basically blur between fighter and thief, to the point that really I just don't see why the player can't decide if his non-spellcaster can wear heavy armor and have the skills to pick locks, or wear little armor but still be a terror in melee.

My preference as well, just folks who use magic and folks who use weapons. Fold the Cleric spells into MU, and let anyone who wants to do thievery. If you want to play a trad Cleric, multiclass.

[Phillip]

I'll start us out with a big one: the d20.  I hate rolling the d20 because it has such a wide range of numbers that success or failure is often based on luck rather than your character's ability (a 20 is likely to be a success and a 1 a failure no matter your character's in-game skill).  There's no mechanism in the game to prevent a string of bad rolls, either.  The d20 is wild and swingy, and there's nothing that pushes your roll to the average except rolling a lot.  This often translates to an evening of really awful rolls or really great rolls, which takes some of the fun out of it for me.

I think rolling 3d6 or 2d10 would be a better system.

It would make a difference, in regard to the things you mention, only in cases in which the extreme outliers (probabilities of less than 5%) are actually used!

People who offer such rehetoric generally seem to be a bit short of a firm grasp of the facts of probability.

[J Arcane]

"Decide how you would like it to be, and then make it just that way!"  - Gary Gygax, Dungeons & Dragons, Vol. 3 "The Underworld and Wilderness Adventures," page 36.  (TSR, 1974)

I wish the monster and treasure tables had been labeled "SUGGESTED" or "EXAMPLE".  To let people know it was OK to eliminate "Goblins" and put in 'Boggles' instead, for instance.

I actually agree with Old Geezer on something.

In fact, I agree with this so hard that I deliberately make it a point in every page of my books with such tools that they generate but some of many more possible examples.

[vytzka]

Personally, I'm kind of sick and tired of passive AC, clerics that are not white mages and explicitly non-supernatural fighters. But changing those things would probably make it not-D&D so I'm better off playing those games to begin with.

[Melan]

Alignments, and especially how they have become the iron-hard, cosmology-defining things they evolved into in D&D.

[Grymbok]

Mine are Clerics and escalating Hit Points.

I can live with TSR era style escalating hit points, which didn't go up quite as far, but the 3E numbers are just too large for me.

On Clerics, depending on the day I veer between reworking them to be more of a robed Priest type, to better distinguish them from Paladins, or going more down a sword & sorcery route and removing all combat healing (and thus the Cleric class entirely).

[Zachary The First]

I'm not always madly in love with Vancian magic--or rather, JUST Vancian magic being available.

[Kaz]

Vancian casting has long been my least-favorite part of D&D. Since I've picked up the DCC RPG, anytime I run a version of D&D, I just bolt that spellcasting system on to it. That works for me.