"Oddities" in fantasy settings - the case against "consistency"

[Campbell]

At least from a D&D perspective one of the sorts of characters I often need to represent are characters who very skilled in one particular area but lack the broad capabilities of D&D adventures. Diplomats, physicians, scholars, ritualists, weaponsmiths, etc. Highly skilled, but also highly vulnerable individuals. D&D leveling typically does a fairly poor job of capturing such characters and for good reason - in a game about adventurers we might to make sure characters have a fairly broad set of skills and are quite capable when it comes to exploration and violence. Expecting the rules for player character creation to account for such characters is not something I think designers of D&D likes should be required to account for.

Outside of the D&D space I also prefer bucket-based character creation like 2d20 and Chronicles of Darkness where player characters have a certain broadness of capability that I do not expect a typical doctor or lawyer to possess.

 

[Maxperson]

Presumably Spartacus was part of his society. Did he "accept" slavery?

(The question isn't straightforward to answer. Particularly if we think about other verbs that might be used - eg was he resigned to slavery?)

It wouldn't matter if he did or didn't. Society doesn't require 100% acceptance in order for it to be accepted by society. I mean, we don't even have 100% acceptance that the Earth is round.

 

[TwoSix]

At least from a D&D perspective one of the sorts of characters I often need to represent are characters who very skilled in one particular area but lack the broad capabilities of D&D adventures. Diplomats, physicians, scholars, ritualists, weaponsmiths, etc. Highly skilled, but also highly vulnerable individuals. D&D leveling typically does a fairly poor job of capturing such characters and for good reason - in a game about adventurers we might to make sure characters have a fairly broad set of skills and are quite capable when it comes to exploration and violence. Expecting the rules for player character creation to account for such characters is not something I think designers of D&D likes should be required to account for.

Outside of the D&D space I also prefer bucket-based character creation like 2d20 and Chronicles of Darkness where player characters have a certain broadness of capability that I do not expect a typical doctor or lawyer to possess.

Exactly this. NPCs need to be able to be non-combat, non-adventuring specialists in their field, and the broad competence that adventuring classes get (and the extreme survivability granted by Hit Points) is actively detrimental to portraying them "realistically".

I should be able to make a professor at a magical university have some 6th and 7th level spells, but not have the spell slot capacity and repertoire of a teen level wizard, and only have 10-12 HP.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I don't know that getting into the Servile wars is going to illuminate the gaming issues we are debating. That probably is something to get its own thread, but given how those sorts of threads tend to go down, probably not a great avenue of discussion

 

[Faolyn]

If I'm charmed I don't know I'm charmed and thus have no reason to try to break said charm. Now if-when the charm wears off, that's a different story; but who knows - I might decide on my own at that point that this ain't so bad, given the alternatives.

...

Do you really think you'd find slavery better than freedom?

What was that quote again? The one about people who prefer safety to freedom deserve neither.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Then that, I'd say, is something that's built into the game. The players are expected to make characters with conflict.

But in (A)D&D, which is what Lanefan is playing, that's not the case.

Except, as I noted, I saw plenty of this with OD&D 40 years ago without automatically breaking games. Your statement I responded to was simply an overgeneralization.

 

[Wolfpack48]

Presumably Spartacus was part of his society. Did he "accept" slavery?

(The question isn't straightforward to answer. Particularly if we think about other verbs that might be used - eg was he resigned to slavery?)

He acknowledged it was a reality but fought within the system to overthrow it.

 

[Baron Opal II]

I think your first step means that you have more than d6 hp.

Yes. And? What context did I miss?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I have a copy of Chainmail, and have read most of it. I've never owned or read Swords & Spells. And I've never fully tried to comprehend the translation of these various elements - HD, and associated combatant/training status - from system to system.

I have a copy of Swords & Spells which I bought way back in the day. Nobody was ever much interested in using it. Chainmail was always basically the defacto mass combat system, and S&S and BattleSystem neither really caught on at all. I don't recall there being any real reason to want to use either of them, as they're clunkier and don't particularly do a better job. I always thought TSR should have just published a very slightly cleaned up Chainmail that maybe at most tweaked some of the fantasy rules a bit to match better with AD&D monsters, not that they don't do that fairly well already...

I do know that AD&D presents multiple options/frameworks, without explaining how to choose between them. Many of the "Men" in the Monster Manual have 1d6 hp, which is statistically close to Goblins' 1d8-1 (average 3.5 vs 3.635). Halflings also have 1d6 hp. Presumably these are the 0-level characters the DM refers to: but whether they attack on the 0-level column or the less than 1-1 HD column doesn't matter, as those two columns are the same. But "Men" or Halflings vs Goblins have a hard time of it: while Goblins have nearly identical average hp, they have a +1 to attack (due to attacking on the 1-1 HD column, which is the same as the 1st level fighter column).

(In Moldvay Basic Halflings, like Goblins, have 1-1 HD. And in Expert the "Men" have 1 HD. I remember being struck at the time, when moving from B/X to AD&D, that the "Men" were debuffed in the latter system.)

Are the hit dice in B/X d8? I thought monster hit dice in that system were d6s like they are in the original game and Holmes Basic.

Then there's the p 88 table in the DMG, which gives sex-based hp. An active but not labouring male peasant has 1d4+1 hp, which has the same average as 1d6. A male labourer has 1d6+1 (the same average as 1 HD) but gets stuck on the 0-level attack chart.

Then there is the DMG information about mercenary soldiers and man-at-arms. According to p 30 of the DMG, a man-at-arms has 4-7 (1d4 +3) hp, which is the same average as 1d10; but attacks as 0-level rather than as a 1st level fighter. A 1st level sergeant, on the other hand, has the same average hp though a wider spread, and a better attack bonus. The chart on p 100 of the DMG notes that a man-at-arms has +1 to STR and +3 to CON, although whether that means they get CON modifiers to their hp is left quite ambiguous. But it does say that they have a minimum of 4 hp, though what die is supposed to be rolled is left unstated on that particular page. (For completeness, the p 100 chart gives labourers a +1 to +3 to STR.)

At no point is AD&D clear as to what happens when a STR score/attack bonus is mentioned as part of the stats or description of a monster or NPC, is that assumed to need to be added onto the basic to-hit? Or is it just factored in? Or is it a case-by-case basis? This is especially a nice question to ask about giants! IMHO it is like all of AD&D, it totally depends on the situation and is pretty much up to the GM to decide. Why in that case anyone bothered mentioning such numbers is beyond me...

It's also not really clear why men-at-arms are around 1.5 times as resilient as bandits, brigands, buccaneers and pirates, but have the same chance to hit. Nor why they are similarly more robust than Goblins, but have a lesser chance to hit. Nor why Goblins have the same chance to hit as sergeants, although they are slightly easier to cut down with a single blow.

Don't stare too closely into the DMG or it will eat your brain...

There are other points of arbitrariness as well. The monster attack chart in the DMG says that "Any plus [to HD] above +3 equals another hit die, ie 6+6 equals 7 hit dice". There is a similar, though not identical, note beneath the saving throw table that says that, for monsters,

Further die levels are added for each increment of four additional points. Therefore, for the purpose of determining saving throw levels, 1+1 though 1+4 hit dice becomes 2, 1+5 through 1+8 becomes 3, 2+1 through 2+4 also becomes 3, 2+5 through 2+8 becomes 4, etc.​

So a 6+6 HD Troll is considered 7 HD for attack purposes (making no difference, as there is a single column for 6-7+) and 8 HD/levels for saving throw purposes. A 7+7 HD Type V demon is considered 8 HD for attack purposes (stepping up one column), and 9 HD/levels for saving throw purposes. And a 8+8 Type VI demon is considered 9 HD for attack purposes (making no difference, as there is a single column for 8-9+) and 10 HD/levels for saving throw purposes.

Having the Troll as either 7 or 8 HD, the Type V demon as 9 HD, and the Type V demon as 10 HD would make almost no difference to the game, but eliminate the confusion of pluses to hit dice, and make those table footnotes redundant. The 1+1 category seems rather arbitrary (and Swords & Spells apparently eliminates it, grouping Hobgoblins with Gnolls if I've read @Hriston's post correctly). And things like black, brown and cave bears as 3+3, 5+5 and 6+6 rather than just 4, 6 and 7 or 8 are arbitrary. Or making a basilisk 6+1 HD - what is the point of that extra +1 except to create confusion as to which saving throw numbers to use?

To be honest, it's all a bit of a mess. It's hard to take seriously that any of this minutiae is a "simulation" of anything: the differences in hp and to hit numbers of these various peasants, man-at-arms, bandits, sergeants, Goblins, etc all seem rather arbitrary, and to reflect various pathways out of Chainmail and into the AD&D framework, none of which was every fully thought out and some of which (like the p 88 "Typical Inhabitants" chart) reflect a growing concern with "simulationism" that has not been integrated into other elements of the system.

Eh, too late...

AD&D is just a maze of design madness, there is neither rhyme nor reason to any of this, and over time it simply got worse. The addition of UA, Tome of Magic, DSG/WSG, and OA (not even to mention the various rules that are established in D&DG or the various MMs) finally brought it to a level of chaos which helped motivate the development of 2e, which DOES at first at least clean house, though without actually fixing any of the underlying issue (a fundamental lack of good design of the core rules and their consistent application). 2e then launches off immediately into even greater madness, culminating in monstrosities like the Complete Book of Elves and Player Options, which are, from a rules perspective, complete dreck.

Amusingingly then 3e comes along and executes a perfect engineer's solution to a mess created by artists. It puts all of the 'numbers parts' of D&D on a firm and rational footing, but at the expense of even thinking about the overall game and experience! This results in a much different but equally catastrophic disaster, which eventually leads the developers to conclude that a total ground-up rewrite is required, again. lol.

Well, see above for the basis for my view.

In the end, all we have is that NPCs and monsters, like PCs, have attack numbers and saving throws determined on a chart, and have a certain number of HD (of some or other size) rolled to determine hit points. There is some loose correlation between attack numbers, saving throws and HD but it is not precise and in some cases is not even straightforward to work out for that particular NPC or creature.

You are pointing to a rule, here, that is in very close contact with the fiction: dark vision to 60 feet is an in-fiction property of Elves. This is quite different from things like HD, hp, saving throw numbers, classes, levels etc.

But even in this sort of case, there is precedent for non-uniformity. For instance, while Drow have the in-fiction property of being resistant to magic, PC Drow lose that ability (with a bit of patter to explain why - they are no longer exposed to the "strange radiations" of their under-earth homelands). If we wanted to, some similar sort of story could be told to explain why PC Elves don't have dark vision as typical Elves do.

(EDIT: @AbdulAlhazred beat me to this point.)

On this, I agree with @Bedrockgames: it produces weird or constraining outcomes, such as no one being able to work miracles unless they are also a mighty warrior.

This relates back to @AbdulAlhazred's comment about whether or not the pirate MU can wield a cutlass: AD&D most strikingly, but many other versions of D&D too, simply don't tell us which parts of the PC build rules represent in-fiction "lifepath-y" stuff (eg no one can wield the magic of raising the dead, before they have first learned the simpler art of curing light wounds) and which are meta-game constraints intended to secure game balance, variation and niche-protection among PC options, etc.

Right, and 2e nor 3e (nor 5e either) address this at all. 4e seems to come down pretty hard on the side of "chargen is just there to make the game playable and fun" BUT you can even counterargue there, as they did provide a complete system of class templates intended to at least give 'classiness' to monsters. DMG1 and DMG2 contain a complete set for PHB1 and PHB2, though I don't think any other classes (of which there are a lot) ever got templates. I also failed to ever witness anyone, WotC or otherwise, actually using one. So I guess it was just one of those odd 4e-isms where WotC could not resist wasting a bit of page count to pay obeisance to outdated ideas. In some ways I feel like D&D held 4e back a lot, lol.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

It seems to me that if such characters exist in the fiction of the setting, but the character creation rules do not allow us to make them as playable characters, then this might be a wrong rule system to use with this setting.

So, there's only one possible approach that is 'good', and if it doesn't work you need to throw away the entire game instead of just using the other obvious approach that is already presented as a fully valid idea (IE just making up 'new monsters' that are whatever you need).