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Are tripping, grappling and other non-damage combat abilities worthless? DISCUSS!

thesheeep

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Grunker Where is the game in that? Just sounds like a group of people meeting to act for the sake of acting.
I mean... you can play with a wooden stick, but that doesn't make the wooden stick a game. No rules = no game.
Or were there at least some rules? Like Werewolf.
 

Prime Junta

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Free-form gaming can be fun. Whether it still counts as gaming rather than, say, a form of improv theatre, is a valid question -- although IMO a pointless one. What difference does it make what you call it?
 

Grunker

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Grunker Where is the game in that? Just sounds like a group of people meeting to act for the sake of acting.

Acting? If anything, it would be playing. But anyways the game is in who walks away with the best position. I was unable to secure the backing of the key boss (my former ally), so I ended up being exposed (I killed Anastasia) and taking a bullet for it. Though in that gamble to take over my part of the business that key boss also lost, because the three other players had secretly formed an alliance to take him down once my backing was lost to him. Their schemes won the day.

So no, no rules. But you'll find if you ever play these games that human interaction and politics provide enough of a framework by themselves.

Have you ever played Bohnanza? It has rules to provide a basic framework but basically 95% of the game hinge on the ruleless negotiation and trading of cards in the trading phase, the minimalist rules are just there to force the players to said negotiation. Another good example from the board game world is Diplomacy.

Such games can work without any formal rules if the players have goals.

But anyway, I digress, because there is no need for win or lose states to have fun with P&P - there just happened to be something approaching that in Men of Honor.

What you're really trying to do here doesn't have anything to do with any discussion of substance of course, you seem to want a "what's an RPG"-style genre discussion about P&P, and well, good luck with that because I sure as fuck ain't participating in that
 
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thesheeep

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Grunker Where is the game in that? Just sounds like a group of people meeting to act for the sake of acting.
But anyways the game is in who walks away with the best position. I was unable to secure the backing of the key boss (my former ally), so I ended up being exposed (I killed Anastasia) and taking a bullet for it. Though in that gamble to take over my part of the business that key boss also lost, because the three other players had secretly formed an alliance to take him down once my backing was lost to him. Their schemes won the day.
Sounds a lot like a game with few but clear rules (goals are rules, too) to me.
So, yeah, pretty much the same category as Werewolf or Bohnanza (I think I played it? Can't really remember...)

What difference does it make what you call it?
I don't know, man.
I think we got derailed :lol:

We are supposed to be talking about why to use additional combat rules if you can just say what you are doing and the GM arbitrarily hands you some bonus.
 

Grampy_Bone

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There is a fundamental misunderstanding of where rules come from. People forget that D&D was inventing the entire genre as it went along.

It's always been expected in tabletop games that the players could perform any action they chose and the DM would "referee" that action based on stats and random chance, as they saw appropriate. The reason there are tables for things like "bending bars" isn't because that was some pre-determined usage of strength, but rather the developers found players needing to make strength checks often for these sorts of challenges (dungeons have a lot of gates and bars). Players wanted rules for bending bars because it was so common, so the developers provided them. Most of the D&D rules are descended from these sorts of traditions.

D&D has a long history of taking ad-hoc systems and making them into official rules, based on player need and popularity. Sometimes players wanted to wrestle, and figuring out how to model wrestling on the fly was hard, hence there are wrestling rules. But the idea "if it's not in the rules you can't do it," is not and has not been a part of any tabletop system pretty much since forever (except maybe 4th Edition D&D, though it's adherents may disagree). The rules are supposed to exist to help you, not to hinder you. I find so-called low-rules or "storytelling" systems highly baffling, because its essentially like playing an unpatched game. The rules aren't there to restrict your actions, they exist to help create a standard and fair system of mechanics. Low-rules games are actually really hard to run, because you constantly have to make up stuff on the spot. Your random ad-hoc rulings are just never going to be as balanced and consistent as something planned out ahead of time and playtested. Players need consistency in order to plan their actions and meaningfully approach the game's challenges. Without consistent rules the game becomes "mother may I?" May I attack, DM? May I cast a spell? May I climb a cliff? May I jump over a pit? Etc.

In regards to the original question, special moves like trip, disarm, feint, etc, are only useful if:

1. They also deal the same damage as a normal attack
2. They make an enemy vulnerable to follow-up damage (a rogue feinting gives up 1d6 weapon damage in order to add 10d6 sneak attack damage)
3. The special move is decisive in some way (instantly defeats the enemy, such as pushing them off a cliff)

The problem with all of these is obvious. If a trip or disarm also does full damage, it feels overpowered (this is where we get cooldowns). Follow-ups are always enemy specific, unless you create a game-wide system for modular attack states, like an MMO (Use attack type X to make attack type Y deal more damage). There's also the issue where most players don't like just being the setup guy for someone else (this is less of an issue in single-player cRPGs). In the final case, unless your battles all take place on bridges over bottomless cliffs or lava, your players will never have as many opportunities to bull rush people into hazards as they will to just stab them.

4th Edition D&D had all of these problems. Too many attacks were just meant to set up other attacks, inflicting wimpy status effects, or just "moved the minis" around the board but did nothing decisive. In the end, most players realized there was no status effect better than "dead" and everyone focused on the 10-20% of the powers that just did damage, ignoring all the others.
 

Grunker

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(goals are rules, too)

see this is why debates over definitions are ultimately a fool's errand because you end up with definitions so wide anything fits

if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck it's probably a p&p game and any nerd walking by 99% of systemless games would be able to point and say "hey those guys are playing p&p" as opposed to thinking they're studying for drama class

We are supposed to be talking about why to use additional combat rules if you can just say what you are doing and the GM arbitrarily hands you some bonus.

because sometimes it's fun to have an arbitrary neutral judge framing your world rather than the human gm who just might favor the guy that brought him pizza and sometimes it's not

i.e.

latest


ad&d is shit whichever style you go for of course :troll:
 

TigerKnee

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What topic was this split off from?

But the idea "if it's not in the rules you can't do it," is not and has not been a part of any tabletop system pretty much since forever (except maybe 4th Edition D&D, though it's adherents may disagree).
4E did have rules for making up combat effects for "Improvised Actions" in the DMG

ucL9Pdm.png
 

thesheeep

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In regards to the original question, special moves like trip, disarm, feint, etc, are only useful if:

1. They also deal the same damage as a normal attack
2. They make an enemy vulnerable to follow-up damage (a rogue feinting gives up 1d6 weapon damage in order to add 10d6 sneak attack damage)
3. The special move is decisive in some way (instantly defeats the enemy, such as pushing them off a cliff)

There a lot more cases than that. What about the case that you know you cannot kill the enemy in one go and you know that whatever he does the next turn(s) will be extremely harmful. In such a case, anything from stunning to disarming to grabbing to dazing to (well... whatever the system offers) is vastly preferable over just doing damage.
Situations like that are for the GM to create. With a good system, the GM has all the tools to create more interesting situations every now and then.

Of course, if all you encounter is your standard enemy no. 876781 the best thing to do is to get it over with. Which is admittedly the case for most things D&D. Especially in video games.
Which is I think what the initiator of this discussion ( mondblut ) was going for with his remark.
And I tend to agree. Take ToEE, for example, without a doubt one of the best implementations of D&D combat we've seen so far. It has a lot of these special moves (and probably more now with Temple+).
And yet, what do you do? In almost all cases, you just deal damage. And your first feat will be Cleave for more damage. *

* Not talking about magic here, there are a lot of non damage spells that are incredibly useful.
 

Grampy_Bone

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What about the case that you know you cannot kill the enemy in one go and you know that whatever he does the next turn(s) will be extremely harmful. In such a case, anything from stunning to disarming to grabbing to dazing to (well... whatever the system offers) is vastly preferable over just doing damage.
Situations like that are for the GM to create. With a good system, the GM has all the tools to create more interesting situations every now and then.

That's a good example, but almost any system will make very dangerous monsters highly resistant or simply immune to such disabling effects. Can't have the players avoiding your big dragon's attack, can you?

I once had a player in a 3E game who wanted to play a Fighter based around sundering opponent's weapons. He took all the sunder-related feats, his weapon was a great hammer, and he even worked out a homebrew prestige class which gave him even more sundering abilities. I thought it was a cool idea, so I let him do it. I even put in specific monsters and challenges that would allow him to showcase his sunder skill, such as animated armor enemies who were very resistant to all damage, but would die if their swords were broken.

Guess what happened? Over the course of an entire campaign, from levels 1-20, over a year of playing with dozens of sessions, he never made a sunder attempt once. Not one single time. His reasoning was obvious: "Don't want to destroy potential loot." I even warned him that he may be breaking valuable items when he made the character; he said it was an interesting trade-off. But when actual battle was drawn and he needed to choose tactics, just bashing the enemies was always preferable to sundering. Go figure.
 

thesheeep

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I once had a player in a 3E game who wanted to play a Fighter based around sundering opponent's weapons. He took all the sunder-related feats, his weapon was a great hammer, and he even worked out a homebrew prestige class which gave him even more sundering abilities. I thought it was a cool idea, so I let him do it. I even put in specific monsters and challenges that would allow him to showcase his sunder skill, such as animated armor enemies who were very resistant to all damage, but would die if their swords were broken.

Guess what happened? Over the course of an entire campaign, from levels 1-20, over a year of playing with dozens of sessions, he never made a sunder attempt once. Not one single time. His reasoning was obvious: "Don't want to destroy potential loot." I even warned him that he may be breaking valuable items when he made the character; he said it was an interesting trade-off. But when actual battle was drawn and he needed to choose tactics, just bashing the enemies was always preferable to sundering. Go figure.
:lol:
That's a bit of a shitty situation.

But seriously, why tie loot to what the enemy had equipped so strongly? There are many other ways to do that.
Or why not just make items repairable? There would have been many ways to resolve this.
Of course, if a player is that loot centric, there really isn't much you can do about it...

But this also shows how bad DnD is, even outside of pure combat rules. In systems like Shadowrun or DSA/ROA you either don't get your main loot from enemies (but from whoever paid you) or your enemies' stuff is just as crappy as yours (or worse), so sunder away.
Or systems like Mutants & Masterminds which don't have loot at all (well, not really anyway).
Eh...

Curious, this is how most DnD discussions end. "Well, that sucks. But is MUCH better in this system, and this, and this..." :lol:

Not only do these need to go, but AOE spells should be banned.
It is a possibility. In DSA/RoA mages are more of a support class than anything else.
I played a tribesman shaman once. By the end, I could conjure some absolutely devastating stuff or make really strong buff potions. But those were pretty much quests themselves. Not actions during combat.

However, such a thing is very hard to pull off right in a computer game.
In a computer game, such a mage would be a worse archer at best.
 
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Grampy_Bone

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It's not that every enemy was carrying around some super valuable sword--far from it--he just found the prospect that he might be destroying a 50k GP +5 item too great to ever risk it.

Items are repairable but the cost is half the item's value, which is also the default sale price. So the destruction wipes out the profit.

D&D typically has loot come from secret stashes, trapped vaults, and monster hordes. When fighting enemy NPC groups, their treasure is typically their gear; valuable weapons, armor, and accessories. And since those are pretty much the only times you're going to be sundering, you risk the only loot those encounters really offer.

Against all other monsters though, sundering is straight-up useless.
 

Grampy_Bone

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Curious, this is how most DnD discussions end. "Well, that sucks. But is MUCH better in this system, and this, and this..." :lol:

That's entirely possible. I look at it as a more historical sort of thing. People don't realize that looting *was* the goal of playing D&D. It was always assumed the players were on a dungeon crawl for the purpose of acquiring loot, to fund their later war campaigns and raising armies. That's why all the older rules rewarded XP for treasure. There wasn't anything to actually buy with it. It was more like a generic "score." The game changed and evolved over time as the developers found people didn't want to go on to war games, they wanted to keep exploring dungeons. So other mechanics like quest and story XP had to be developed.

So tabletop games evolved and expanded over time beyond the pure scope of looting and acquiring wealth. Other games developed different reward/incentive systems to replace looting. That's fine.

3rd Edition D&D was the first to introduce any actual economy for magic items. In all previous editions, magic items were assumed to be simply too precious to sell. 3E was controversial for this reason and led to a commodification of magic items in 4E, which was roundly hated by pretty much everyone. So I believe in 5E they are back to being too precious to buy/sell again. Go figure.

D&D has always been a loot game. That's just the way it is. Nothing wrong with using some other method, as long as your game has a way for players to advance and a reward mechanic to incentivize accomplishing goals.
 
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Serus

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people who want trip, sunder, grapple, bull rush, charge, disarm, overrun, feint, aid another, or anything I can't remember right off-hand

Someone actually uses this crap? :roll:

There are only two kinds of attacks: those that hit more often but deal less damage, and those that hit less often but deal more damage. Anything else is just a pointless bloat only useful to fill out the USP bullet lists. Grapple and feint, oh my god.
Well, split shield works well enough in some situations in Battle Brothers. I also remember disarm working in some wizardry clones i think... can't remember the exact title now. In TOME4 some of special attacks are useful (but they also usually do damage at the same time so that's makes it easier to make them useful).
 

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AD&D (3.5th, not the mmo-on-paper shit that came after) did have mechanics for these kinds of things - or am I the only one who remembers bugbears in TOEE that would beeline to your caster using the broken tumble skill, trip him and then murder him with attacks of opportunity? :D

So as long as the game has mechanics to support it, these attacks are worthwhile. Bullrushing and enemy one square may not sound like a big deal until you use it to push the boss of a cliff. Or at least force him to take 3 AoOs from your fighters. Or grapple an enemy to make him helpless and make him eat a few sneak attacks from other characters. Or disarm someone of that annoying artifact weapon. Or...

I think Pathfinder took it a bit further, called it combat maneuvers or whatnot.
 

Alkarl

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I'm working on a system that implements a lot of stuff like this. Basically, it's somewhere between Fallout and X-com, where you get a pool of AP per round to spend, however, if you don't spend them in that round you can access "response" abilities (think Attacks of Opportunity) when faced with different attacks/scenarios (have a melee fighter leap out of range of a mages fireball, for instance) such as counters, etc. Enemies are capable of this too, and since the system operates on low health potential (Constitution +/* modifier; no level system so no gains per level) it may be advantageous to feint/bait enemies into wasting reserved AP, or hamstring/trip/grapple to reduce their AP roll the next round.
 

Lhynn

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And that in a game! Unacceptable!
In Pnp? it kind of is, goes against the spirit of the game. The rules are there to give context to your actions, not to dictate them. The more the rules constrain your actions, the more gamey it feels.

I wonder what you think about Rolemaster :lol:
The same as virtually every other being in the entire world, meaning, i dont think anything of it, at all. Not even when brought up. If you like tables, knock yourself out.

Of course a GM may at any time adjust rules, grant bonuses, introduce new checks, etc. if it fits (in his mind).
It's just that if that happens all the time, a wrong system was picked.
Not really, its just the DM doing its job. If the base system is fun, then thats all that matters.

So if you want special actions during combat, pick a system that has special actions during combat.
Or just pick the system you think channels the most positive gaming experience and make up for whatever isnt written. Rules are like big metal bars, you need a few to keep the building standing straight, but the more you have, the more it starts to feel like a prison.

Again, if you want to eliminate the need to roll the dice, don't use a rule system.
Because im not vying for an extreme, i look the sweet spot between larping and rule lawyering hell. AD&D hits that spot.

You have to pick a system that everyone in the group is comfortable with. Doesn't matter if that means a shitload of rules or barely any rules.
It does when said rules are toxic, and when most people pick the system because they believe rule complexity or playing the latest system = fun.

But picking some and then trying to "avoid" it sounds more than just a little absurd. Should've just used another system instead.
There is no perfect system. So you adjust your expectations to reality and play the system which offers the best experience for what you are trying to do.

I've been playing with GMs that are complete rule nazis (which is absurd and just disrupts the flow of the game, especially in fringe cases) and GMs that try to avoid rolling dice and stats wherever they can (which just makes the players unhappy who want to play by the rules, as they either feel like they are cheating or feel like they have been cheated).
Yeah, and there are DMs that play your character for you. Whats your point? that extremes are bad?

Personally, I don't like giving bonuses for "good roleplaying" other than maybe some more XP at the end of the day. It's just too arbitrary. That's what rules are for - to prevent such arbitrariness.
You are just a spineless twit that rather hide behind a book than promote a good roleplaying environment.
 

Lhynn

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Well, thank the stars for having Lhynn tell us what fun is :lol:
We are codexers, that is literally all we do. That and trying to define RPGs.
But be my guest, try to come up with an argument as to why im wrong.

Also Grampy_Bone DnD isnt just about loot. Almost every campaign i played or have seen anyone wanting to DM has been low fantasy/low magic, and 3E wasnt made with low magic in mind. Half the classes fall horribly behind in a system with little magical items, the other half can literally take over the world with level 1 spells. And yet people still Dmed and played those, which tells me something about your proposition isnt right.
My theory is that the normalization of magical items isnt desirable. First because it takes the magic out of magical items, second because it kills a big part of the lure of exploration.

And thats what i believe, D&D became about exploration first the moment exploration became a thing. Loot was certainly an incentive, but it was about the adventure, with loot becoming a tool to further it. A magical sword is only cool if you got it through exploration and it has a reason to be. If you got it at a discount in the item shop and its just there to bloat your inventory it has no value.
 

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Also Grampy_Bone DnD isnt just about loot. Almost every campaign i played or have seen anyone wanting to DM has been low fantasy/low magic, and 3E wasnt made with low magic in mind. Half the classes fall horribly behind in a system with little magical items, the other half can literally take over the world with level 1 spells. And yet people still Dmed and played those, which tells me something about your proposition isnt right.
My theory is that the normalization of magical items isnt desirable. First because it takes the magic out of magical items, second because it kills a big part of the lure of exploration.

And thats what i believe, D&D became about exploration first the moment exploration became a thing. Loot was certainly an incentive, but it was about the adventure, with loot becoming a tool to further it. A magical sword is only cool if you got it through exploration and it has a reason to be. If you got it at a discount in the item shop and its just there to bloat your inventory it has no value.

What am I wrong about? D&D revolving around looting? That's just an objective fact. To whit, I don't think D&D is primary about looting anymore, but it certainly began as one and it's still a primary component of the game. You even point out correctly that the 3E challenge curve flounders horribly when the game is played with little to no loot. That shows that acquiring magic items and treasure is a core part of the game, and players who wanted a "low magic" setting should have gone to a different system.

D&D began as a simple game about venturing into a dungeon in order to find treasure. Exploration was part of it, sure, but not the main goal. Exploring was just how the players found the treasure. Players entered the dungeon, collected as much treasure as possible (whether by solving puzzles, finding secrets, bypassing traps, or defeating monsters), and tried to exit alive. Then the treasure was tallied up and they were awarded points based on how much they acquired. They leveled up and descended deeper into the dungeon in search of greater treasures. So the game progressed.

The assumption was always that players would eventually retire with their acquired riches to buy lands and field armies for other wargames. That's why every edition up to 3E had rules for acquiring strongholds and followers, which very few games ever actually bothered with.

The explanation for why some 3E players and DMs demanded "low magic" games after playing 2nd Edition is a long and somewhat complicated one. It has to do with an unintentional "bug" in the rules, and how the game of D&D is usually passed along through a sort of "oral tradition." Very few players actually read the rulebooks cover to cover.
 

Lhynn

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I dont think D&D revolves around loot. I think it revolves around exploration, and that itemization is merely one more tool that makes the whole thing enjoyable. Systems vampire or cthulhu dont depend on loot. Yet DnD, Vampire and Cthulhu all depend on fun encounters and world interaction to be enjoyable.

Im not debating that at some point it was about the loot, but i am claiming that the game evolved pretty quickly the moment exploration and world interaction became a thing.
 

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