Quote from: Willie the Duck;1004567In general, I agree. I love TSR-era D&D. I think the game--the one you are intended to play, not necessarily the one published in any book they ever made--is wonderful. But you are right, dodging the criticism that the games were not greatly written by saying that those who do not get it are stupid is a dodge. The games could have been written better. I am thoroughly sympathetic to the argument for the earliest editions that "at the time, almost everyone was taught by a friend who was taught by a friend who was taught by Gary, so it wasn't a high priority," but eventually that excuse runs out

Now, as a counter-example of why you might not want to do so, 3e was supposed to be the well-combed-through, thoroughly well explained edition, and what did people do? Complain that the drowning rules (which move your hp total to 0 after you run out of held breath) didn't make exclusions if you have negative hp. So you kind of are damned if your vague and damned if you are clear.

"Dodging is a dodge"

Quote from: estar;1004558And was it as easy to understand and as fast to resolve as D&D take? There are plenty of RPGs who I like better than D&D when it comes to realism and making sense. GURPS and Harnmaster among them. But it doesn't come free. Combat take longer to resolve, characters take longer to create, and so on.

Would make a difference in handling hit points if I told they stem from the fact that a ordinary warrior took one hit to kill, a Hero (4th level) took 4 hit to kill, and a Super Hero (8th level) took 8 hits to kill? That 1 hit = 1 kill was found to be boring and so was expanded to 1d6 hit points.

The implication being, like the above, is that a 2nd level character can last twice as long on the battlefield than a ordinary warrior. A hero can last four times as long and so on.  In GURPS and Harnmaster this is handled by the most experienced character having more skill thus better at defense and not likely to be hit as often.

I found that if the interplay of the numbers are such (Hit points, to-hit bonus, armor class, etc) that one winds up the pretty much the same as the other in how the fights play out.  Knowing that made all the difference for me in my ability to narrate a D&D fight versus a GURPS fight.

To me, the way D&D plays versus GURPS are very different. Some battles may play out more or less the same, but the details of the situation, and choices taken in GURPS are often more important to determine who wins than how good the fighters' stats are (partly because the stats tend not to vary so much, especially in terms of hitpoints, and the ration of possible damage in one blow to hit points is generally greater than 1:1 but also ways to avoid getting hit (where they stand and face, taking cover, defenses, reaction attacks), so even "mundane" combat can have people suddenly taken out even by a single attack, or managing to survive a whole battle without taking any injuries.

Also, since the action and injuries are all explicit rather than abstract, there is none of the OP's "you hit for a miss" issue. There can be attacks which reduce the defender's ability to fight without hitting him, but there is little question about how to narrate it because the effect has an explicit in-game condition (e.g. you forced them to retreat, they're off balance, their weapon becomes unready, dropped in a specific location, broken in a specific way, etc. - there are specific rules for those things).

Quote from: Dumarest;1004569"Dodging is a dodge"

Well, that wording obviously fails, but maybe that accidentally communicates my intent rather well. As in, "that dodge is blatant and obvious."

Quote from: Willie the Duck;1004567Now, as a counter-example of why you might not want to do so, 3e was supposed to be the well-combed-through, thoroughly well explained edition, and what did people do? Complain that the drowning rules (which move your hp total to 0 after you run out of held breath) didn't make exclusions if you have negative hp. So you kind of are damned if your vague and damned if you are clear.

My solution is a more polite version of "fuck the rules" the point of what being done here is playing a D&D campaign not a D&D game.

A fuller explanation

My view of this has harden over the years but I lay the technical ills of the hobby solely the feet of those trying to play RPGs like a game rather than as their own thing. Which is to pretend to have different abilities or to be someone else while doing fun and interesting things. In the genius of RPGs is Gygax and Arneson is inventing a pen & paper holodeck that people can use in their hobby time. And doing it before Cyberspace, Dream Park, and Star Trek TNG.

It uses a mechanics of a wargame as means to realizing this. It is not however the point in the way the rule of Chess, Go, Blitzkreig, or Third Reich are.

This manifested early in the hobby with the advent of D&D Tournaments at Gen Con, Origins, and other Conventions. And got perpetuated because of two factors TSR was bombarded by the 70s version of spam with rules questions, and tournament modules were the easiest thing to convert to a salable product when it was proved that there was a market for adventures.

And we been living with the consequences ever since.

The solution in my view is to emphasize the campaign and the setting over the rules. Teach that if the setting conflict with the rules that the rules are what must bend. That no set of rules is going to cover every possibility that occurs within the campaign. The ultimate fallback is what you defined the setting of the campaign to be.

Which in D&D cases is that unless otherwise specified it operate much like our own history's middle ages with physics operating like in our own world. Among the things specified is that magic in the form of the D&D spell system exists, along with fantastic monsters. Which is why Gronan is spot on with his commentary and criticisms. about proper tactics and the like.

And keep in mind the above is the default. Other RPGs, like Toon, have their own assumptions. And the D&D rules are pretty flexible if you want to run something like fantasy superheroes or make it more gritty. Regardless the driver of such changes should be that the type of campaign you want to run as a referee and that your players want to play in.

There been a couple of recent thread that are pretty much navel gazing about one D&Dism or another. Most are missing the point by doing so. By operating from the assumption that a set of rules are being adopted and trying to fix it what the poster doesn't like about. As opposed to I want to run a campaign with this setting, how can the D&D rules help me run that campaign.

Quote from: estar;1004558And was it as easy to understand and as fast to resolve as D&D take? There are plenty of RPGs who I like better than D&D when it comes to realism and making sense. GURPS and Harnmaster among them. But it doesn't come free. Combat take longer to resolve, characters take longer to create, and so on.

The combat rules seem to be as easy to understand as D&D. I'm looking at them from the wrong side to say that they definitely are as easy but I and others have taught the system to quite a few non-gamers and they pick it up at the same pace. I have a "rules-proof" player who just says what her character is doing and trusts the rest of us to tell her whether it was successful and there is another one back in my old gaming group in the New Haven area.  I don't know if Micki would learn D&D if she tried but I bet she'd be the same. Stimpy, back in New Haven, was rules-proof in D&D, Palladium, Rifts and Unisystem also.

Characters do take longer to create and I wouldn't like that but characters last a long time in a high injury/low fatality campaign and the people in Andy's high-fatality campaign, the only such campaign in these rules that I know of, don't seem to mind creating new characters.

A round of combat takes a bit longer, especially if using the optional targeting and armor avoidance rules. However, in general, combat takes fewer rounds. Ironically, perhaps, that is especially true if using those optional rules.

Quote from: estar;1004558Would make a difference in handling hit points if I told they stem from the fact that a ordinary warrior took one hit to kill, a Hero (4th level) took 4 hit to kill, and a Super Hero (8th level) took 8 hits to kill? That 1 hit = 1 kill was found to be boring and so was expanded to 1d6 hit points.

The implication being, like the above, is that a 2nd level character can last twice as long on the battlefield than a ordinary warrior. A hero can last four times as long and so on.  In GURPS and Harnmaster this is handled by the most experienced character having more skill thus better at defense and not likely to be hit as often.

I found that if the interplay of the numbers are such (Hit points, to-hit bonus, armor class, etc) that one winds up the pretty much the same as the other in how the fights play out.  Knowing that made all the difference for me in my ability to narrate a D&D fight versus a GURPS fight.

When I saw that Gygax explanation of why HP went up, my response was "why not have the character get harder to hit?" Besides various dodge and parry options, that cost an opportunity to attack, the character just flinches away from blows, his or her weapon happens to get in the way of the attack or the defender is just a bit luckier. That has worked for this game since the mid-eighties. What I have never been satisfied with is that fatigue and morale are not really handled in the rules. The GMs who run the game handle them with rulings and it was never a problem but now that I have released the game into the wild, as it were, I would  have liked to have provided some more guidance.

After forty years of questions like

"CHAINMAIL says you can't fire into a melee.  Does that mean that if my unit A is in melee with enemy unit B I can't shoot archers at unit B?" -- not a hypothetical example -- you stop wondering if you could have written things more clearly.

Most people are booger-eating morons.

Stupidity is widely distributed across space and time.  Even people that are otherwise reasonably smart will all have their moments where they say something really stupid.  Now admittedly, it was a little more difficult when you had to type up your stupidity in a letter, somehow manage to address it and stamp it, and then remember to get it to the post office.  That took dedication for a person having a stupid moment.  But people are resilient in the face of such challenges.

That specific example sounds more like, 'I am fishing for you to bring up some alternate, exception, or course of action I haven't thought of, to get me out of this situation,' more than actually asking if this thing that they just quoted almost verbatim means exactly what they just said.

Quote from: estar;1000015My rule of thumb in narrating combat are

1) If the roll miss and it is greater or equal to 10 + Target's Dex bonus then it is a hit but doesn't penetrate armor. Since 5e has stats for monsters it easy to figure out what the Dex bonus is. For classic D&D I wing it based on the monster description.

2) If less than 10 + Target's Dex it is a complete miss, dodge, etc.

3) When an actual hit is scored I look the ratio of damage to the max hit points. The greater the proportion the more "severe" the hit.

4) At low hit points I start describing exhaustion, fatigue, etc.

5) Below 12 or so hit points, I start using the lower total the max hit point for figuring out the ration. So when fighting a 100 point opponents 5 points hits would be described as minor stabs, and cuts. Until around 12 or 10 hit points then I up the description of the severity of the wounds.

I do this because it add a bit of dramatic flair that the players enjoy.

I can't speak to D&D, of course, but this is certainly the correct interpretation of what is going on in an ACKS combat.
The upcoming Heroic Fantasy Handbook makes this more explicit by having healing be proportional to hit points.

I would add that it's helpful to understand D&D hp by re-framing the system somewhat. Assume D&D hp are static with a range of about 4-10hp per character. Then assume each character can cut damage by a certain factor by "rolling from the blow". A 2nd level fighter takes 1/2 damage from rolling with the blow, a 5th level fighter takes 1/5 damage from rolling with the blow, a 9th level fighter takes 1/9 damage from rolling with the blow. A 9th level cleric takes (3.5/4.5 x 9) 1/7 damage from rolling with the blow.

So for instance, imagine a 5th level fighter with 8 [static] hp who can roll with the blow for 1/5 damage. He gets hit by an ogre (1d12 damage, roll of 6) for 5 points. The fighter takes (6/5) 1.2 points of damage, rounded to 1. A 2nd level fighter with 8 [static] hp can roll with the blow for 1/2 damage. The same blow from the ogre would yield (6/2) 3 points. So the 2nd level fighter has been hit three times as hard.

Since most players don't like math, especially division, which yields lots of fractions and too little granularity, D&D "inflates" hp rather than divide damage. But the effect is the same and should be narrated the same...

That's an interesting way of looking at it. I think it's probably unnecessary to overthink it, but interesting nevertheless.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1004862That's an interesting way of looking at it. I think it's probably unnecessary to overthink it, but interesting nevertheless.

"Overthinking" is a good way to put it.  I don't WANT that much time to be taken up by combat.  I've played Fantasy Hero, which is a damn complicated system... and at the end of the day, it really is no better than OD&D.

"And then the EARS, I get the IDEA, get ON with it."

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1004939"And then the EARS, I get the IDEA, get ON with it."

Wrong! Your ears you keep and I'll tell you why. So you can hear every shriek when a sword stabs you in the leg. Listen to the sounds of moaning from unconscious combatants lying about the field. My narration shall echo in your perfect ears.

Quote from: estar;1004950Wrong! Your ears you keep and I'll tell you why. So you can hear every shriek when a sword stabs you in the leg. Listen to the sounds of moaning from unconscious combatants lying about the field. My narration shall echo in your perfect ears.

Okay that was a good reply.

Quote from: estar;1004950Wrong! Your ears you keep and I'll tell you why. So you can hear every shriek when a sword stabs you in the leg. Listen to the sounds of moaning from unconscious combatants lying about the field. My narration shall echo in your perfect ears.

* Orson Welles slow clap *

Part of the benefit of the RPG tabletop experience is the theatre of the mind. I trust my Players enough to have the creativity to imagine a cooler scene to them, in their own heads, than what I would describe with an excess of detail.