clearstream
(He, Him)
Rest is crucial for human performance. It makes in-fiction sense that rest should be needed. Accepted that it is more difficult to write good rules for. And that it has entanglements with the meta-game.I agree, but those constraints should where possible also make logical sense.
Needing a certain Strength in order to use heavy armour makes sense from both in-fiction and meta-game perspectives.
Tying variable lengths of rest to recovery of various different abilities by various different classes is sometimes fine from the meta-game perspective but doesn't always make much sense in-fiction.
Source?Er...the present d20 to-hit mechanic, or an extremely close variant, predates THAC0 by quite a bit.
But also, think of the crux of my argument. Retaining mechanics that worked, and cutting or revising those that did not, is the kind of advancement that I am arguing has been happening.
True, and I am certainly not suggesting that the tipping point will be in the same place for every table. What I am - firmly - suggesting is that contemporary game designers have been able to enhance their game mechanics based on decades of innovation and testing.Streamlining and realism/simulation tend to work at cross purposes, and for each table there's a tipping point where streamlining comes at too great a cost of realism.
People are going to be as divided on this as they were when Nine Swords first came out, so we need to break out the arguments a bit.And, in contrast to your earlier point about making things easier for players, adding all those mechanics also made (most) martials much more difficult to play than they were in the 1e-2e era. In this instance I see this as a step backwards.
On the one hand, we have available some hard-won mechanics that do a good job of giving martials more options... if you want those options! These are mainly found in battle master, and come from Nine Swords via 4th edition. (And Mearls' Iron Heroes, I believe.) If you look at the unifying ideas and the specific mechanical instancing, you can see the evolution of the design space. All of the relevant artifacts and even some of the discussion are preserved for us.
So my point there is that here is a set of game mechanics that became available at a certain point in time and were visibly refined right up to today. Probably they were based on predecessors (most game mechanics turn out to be based on inklings somewhere) but those are more obscure. They have opened up space for a certain kind of play. Not to everyone's taste.
That is where we have your criticism, which is tangential to my argument. I'm not saying martial rules are good for you or what you want, I am saying they are an example of mechanics that once did not exist, and do now, and do now in a refined form over earlier versions. Evidencing evolution. The fact that you want your martials to be simpler, does not impinge that.