Treasure Tables is usually pretty upbeat, discussing good stuff and challenging stuff, but rarely bad stuff.
For a change of pace, let’s take a look at seven of the worst ideas in GMing history.
I’ve tried to stay away from personal bias (“ur rpg sux, d00d”), but I’m sure it crept in there anyway.
Random Encounters: Unless you’re a hardcore gamist, random encounters stink.
“Riding through the wilderness, you encounter . . . [the GM rolls] . . . six minotaurs. They charge you, roll for initiative.”
At which point you spend what could be several hours fighting the band of minotaurs, and not doing what you wanted to do, or advancing the story in any way. And you might end up dead.
I’ve often heard the argument that you can just roll again — but in that case, why roll in the first place?
The d100: I love my d100 — just not as a die. As a fun slice of gaming history, it rocks. As a die, it’s terrible.
It’s essentially a ball, so unless you roll it on a perfectly even surface, it takes forever to stop rolling.
And it’s incredibly easy to rig your roll: Just line the seam up with your fingers and let it roll gently off your palm. Since the highest numbers are on the seam, you’ll probably roll high.
Shrinkwrapped RPG Books: If you’ve ever been to a gaming store that shrinkwraps its books, you know why this one makes the list.
As a GM, if I can’t read anything but the front and back covers, what exactly is going to make me buy the book? I can’t check out the rules, I don’t know if my group will like it — hell, I don’t even know if it’s readable.
Shrinkwrapping a boxed set is understandable (although still not desirable), but there’s no excuse when it comes to books.
THAC0: I heart AD&D 2nd Edition, but fewer things about the game were harder to explain to new players than THAC0, amusing acronym notwithstanding.
“Wait, you mean I want this number to be really low? What the hell? I thought higher was better!”
Throughout the rest of the system, high numbers were good — so why make this crucial rules element different?
Attacks of Opportunity: Conceptually, attacks of opportunity are just dandy. They add tactical spice, and they seem fairly realistic.
But sweet baby Jesus is it hard to remember how they work. Which isn’t helped along by the fact that unlike the much more logical “opportunity attacks,” “attacks of opportunity” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.
Along with grappling, AoOs are the d20 System’s answer to THAC0.
Mixed Typefaces: Most RPG books use a couple of different typefaces — headers and body text, for example. Some, unfortunately, go a different route.
Have you ever paged through a Hunter: The Reckoning book? In Hunter-Book: Martyr, many pages feature four different typefaces. After a couple of paragraphs, it’s on to the next one.
I don’t know about you, but I can barely stand reading them at all — and I can’t imagine trying to reference them during play.
Books Without Indexes: With a few exceptions, every RPG book that’s longer than 32 pages should have an index.
The index is where GMs go to find what they need, especially in setting books and longer sourcebooks. I’ll take an index — even a crappy one — over 2-4 pages of extra content any day.
No, they’re not sexy. They can’t have boobs, or cool dragon pictures. But they get a very important job done, and they’re not optional.
What terrible GMing-related ideas have you run across?
THAC0 was one of those things that I just got used to and didn’t think to question how unnecessarily complex it was until I saw the alternative.
And agreed… grappling is equally as bad. I would argue that turning is unnecessarily complex in d20 also.. any action that requires you to consult a table (as opposed to a single number) is not good.
Fun aside: as bad as it obviously was, 2E’s THAC0 was still an improvement over the table system used by the previous two editions (which in the end amounted to the same thing, but with extra steps).
I agree on all of them. Thaco I got used to, but didn’t like. Books without indexes are also a pain. Indexes are a pain to make sometimes, but they are neccessary!
Hand in hand with the THAC0 was old D&D Armor Class. The best AC’s were in the minuses.
Martin, I was about to challenge you’re assertion that Random Encounters suck, but then I realized I hadn’t used one in months.
I put Grappling way above AoOs in the suckage department. I eventually got the general concept behind AoOs because they come up nearly every frickin’ battle. Grapples still confuse and annoy me. I thanked God when my player with the druid that turned into a dire bear switched to a new non-grappling PC.
If you want to see a smoother version of AoO look at the Iron Heroes rules. Much easier to understand how they work.
I find it interesting that two of the seven are system-specific and unique to D&D.
I remember the last time I used a random encounter chart (in Rolemaster). I had to roll on something like four tables to narrow down what they faced…a praying mantis!
No, not a Giant praying mantis or a swarm of praying manti…1d2 praying mantis, size Tiny, with like 2 Concussion Points each and a +0 OB Tiny pincer attack.
Burn in hell, encounter charts!
I agree with Jeff! Grapples are hard to keep track of, and personally I always forget the mechanics. I believe they slow down the game too much…
And I loved my AD&D GAC0 (that was the translation to spanish of THAC0)! 😉
Right on Borghal, THACOs ruled! For all its goofy quirks (good thacos are low, good ACs are low, good Save rolls are high, good prof. checks are high) I think ADnD 2nd is not nearly as complex as 3.5e/d20.
How was Thaco hard to explain? To hit Armor Class 0. If it has an ac higher than 0 subtract it from the Thaco and that’s what you need on a d20. Pretty simple. And really a simplification of the ADnD 1st ed rules.
Hardly one of the Seven Worst ideas in gaming.
Can I add fumbles to that list?
I know they’re houserules, but far too many DMs seem to like the idea
Personally I don’t see the attraction or the ‘realism’ in hitting yourself 5% of the time.
I have to disagree slightly on random encounters. I admit that I often don’t use them, but I’ve been using them in my current RuneQuest campaign, and I think they’re working well. But that’s in part because my current campaign is featuring a lot of travel in an area with few settlements. Simply put, most of the action is going not going to be site based. Sure, I could chose the encounters instead of rolling, and I’ve done that in the past, but doing that for an extensively wilderness travel campaign can give a feeling of railroading as the GM fits the next encounter into wherever the PCs happen to be at the time.
I also disagree that tables are bad. Cold Iron uses a table lookup for every resolution roll, yet it ran smoothly. What you find with tables that get used constantly is that you start to memorize the most often occurring numbers (that you care about – 90% of the time, 50% or more of the rolls in Cold Iron are an undistinguished miss, so it’s easy to look at your dice and determine you missed and did not fumble [now one might complain about all those
rolls with no effect, but the effect they have is to highlight the importance of tactical maneuvers that set up so those rolls AREN’T misses – if you could just walk up to someone and start slugging it out, and hit most of the time, the tactics would disappear]). But a key is that Cold Iron has a single table. Rune Quest has some tables that are referenced infrequently. It’s a bit of a pain but not too bad. Rolling on the fumble table isn’t bad. Having to look at a table to determine if a roll is a crit or a fumble is a pain (if I were to re-write RQ, I’d consider replacing the d100 with d20, and using die multiplication for crits and fumbles [like d20 – though d20 did NOT invent this]).
Charts are necessary anytime you need non-regular, non-linear, progressions of things. Cold Iron makes incredible use of the normal distribution. I’ve seen tables used to good effect for other weird progressions.
I’m also not so down on AOOs. The rules aren’t that hard to remember (especially once I started using 3.5 facing so that creatures that had a 10′ reach had a 10’x10′ counter to remind me and the players). They serve an important role in making the turn by turn movement work. One of the biggest complaints about The Fantasy Trip was that a reasonably fast opponent could disengage from you, circle around behind you, and attack from the rear with impunity. And your character just stood there looking stupid. Of course if you were fast enough, you could do the same. No Erol Flynn clashing of blades here… You either use a simultaneous movement system (which has it’s own headaches) or you have some system where the non-acting characters can interrupt the acting players. AOO can be handled between players without a referee. Simultaneous movement needs a referee.
Shrink wrapping – yea, that’s a pisser. Thankfully when my FLGS started putting everything in bags, they also posted a sign inviting you to open the bags. They do end up shrinkwrapping some of the larger books that don’t fit the oversized comic bags they use. There are definitely products I don’t own because I can’t look at them (and they don’t even put pictures of the contents on the back like they used to – so those two Mongoose cities for the Conan setting – I don’t own them yet, because I have no idea if their maps will meet my expectations of what a city map should look like).
I know before I got into D&D, you could often open boxed sets. Of course sometimes they were behind a counter. I remember looking through the contents of D&D and Tractics (TSR’s WWII miniatures game). I ended up going home with Tractics because this D&D game looked like some weird paper and pencil and imagination thing, with no miniatures or anything tactile and/or visual.
Frank
The problem with THAC0 is the negative math. Subtraction is harder than addition.
I definitely agree on fumbles. And I’m running the king of fumbles games. I did actually offer to remove fumbles from the game and the players convinced me to keep them. There are actually games where there are combat situations where the best bet to take out your enemy is to declare him to be your bestest buddy…
Frank
My FLGS shrink-wraps game books, and I agree it’s a real pain. I can look at books at the major chain booksellers, but they don’t have anything like the range of material the FLGS has.
One of the employees did explain to me why the boss does it, though, and I do have a (smallish) bit of sympathy for the reasoning: they don’t actually want to put anything sticky on the book itself. Now, I can argue that they don’t need to put a price tag on the books, since they always use the MSRP, but that’s harder for the little security tags they use. Most retailers that use those won’t believe they don’t need them, even if they don’t. That’s a sad statement about people. 🙁
That said, they’ve indicated that they’re always willing to take the plastic off if you want to look at something. I’ve never actually taken them up on it, and I remain wary of buying books I’ve not been able to at least thumb through. On the other hand, that’s a good way to keep expenditures from getting more out of hand. 😀
I would add books without detailed tables of contents. Some publishers are now so afraid of not including an index that they focus on the index and provide a table of contents with only the major chapter headings. Subheadings are useful and including them in the table of contents can help gamers in locating rules and in understanding how the book and rules are organized.
As a counter example, WotC includes detailed tables of contents that are so poorly formated as to be unreadable.
THAC0 doesn’t bother me. I started gaming with AD&D 1st ed. when we had to look up to-hit info on a chart. THAC0 was an improvement over that.
I agree on all of them except AoOs– well, the name is indeed cumbersome, but the mechanics are easy to remember, for me at least, and the mechanism is realistic and brilliant.
Now grappling… you nailed that one.
Random Encounters are not horrible.
Static random encounter tables are.
I love creating random encounter tables specific to the adventure I have written. Setting them in a specific place, with an X% change of encountering Creature A, is fair. As long as the creatures are planned, and appropriate to the adventure, it works to create a variance in a location.
But the table I create for Location A in Adventure B will not necessarily work at Location C. And it sure as hell won’t be right for Adventure D!
Fumbles are awesome! I wouldn’t get as much sadistic DM glee out of my D&D campaign if I didn’t have the Arduin fumble and crit charts lurking in the background. The key is moderation. 5% is too often. 0.25% (2 consecutive rolls of ‘1’ on a d20) is much better. My group all still has a good laugh from the time several sessions ago when Jon’s PC impaled himself on his ranseur.
I dunno. Since the very first day the 3E PHB came out, Neither me nor anyone I gamed with have ever been confused about AoOs. You do something to drop your guard, they get a free attack. Drink a potion? Attack. Cast a spell? Attack. Tie your shoes? Attack. Its pretty simple.
Im always baffled when people say they have trouble with them.
Martin- you think those are the 7 worst? Those are really tame man. More like pet-peeves.
Try this:
1. GM is God (and responsible to FORCE everyone to have fun)
2. Punish the character to teach the player (instead of talking like adults)
3. Tell players, “you can do anything”, while railroading them
4. Lying about GM Fiat. Well, lying to your players at all.
5. “Gotcha!” play- “Oops, you went left, everyone gets hit with a thermonuclear pit trap! Ha-Ha!”
6. Holding back information because players can’t “just have it” (and get the damn game on the road)
7. GM’s Pet NPC to rescue the PCs/Force them into inconvenient and boring prewritten plots.
If the system’s designers don’t build fumbles into it, then they shouldn’t be there. If it had them in there, I would likely take them out. I’m also very wary of “botch” rules (like when you roll all 1s or something to that effect), though it depends on the system and the game (games with more GM/Narrator control and less rules I mind them less in, but I don’t like them in D&D where the GM and the players are on a more even footing).
I have to agree with Martin about THAC0. It wasn’t that hard to figure out, but with that and AC being “smaller is better” whereas saving throws was “higher is better”, it doesn’t make sense–and systems should be internally consistent. All of a system’s mechanics should have the same range of success and failure.
Combat maneuvers in 3.5 (grappling, tripping, etc.) aren’t that difficult once you get used to them, nor are AoOs. They might be a little involved, but they are certainly better than the “roll-hit-rinse-repeat” monotony of the simple attack roll. I’d rather have to take the time to grasp grappling then be resigned to that all the time.
Anyhoo, remember the Punching and Wrestling rules from 2nd Ed AD&D? You roll to see what kind of punch you’re able to deliver. I always thought that was pretty stupid.
I’ll note that not only are indexes a lot of work (if done reasonably well), but that the value is really hard to predict. I manage documentation for a long-lived open source project, and we’ve done a lot of work on building indexes, but it’s never enough.
What’s most surprising, though, is that even once users are made aware of the index, they often don’t really know how to use them: something about what an index is and how to use it is being lost. An index is not a glossary, where each entry contains a link (page reference) to a definition (though hopefully one of the references is to a definition!).
What it comes down to is often that there’s a large range of helpful finding tools (the general term for such things), and picking the most useful can be hard. Within a single publication, a general index and a table of contents are often the most useful, but indexing is generally a thankless act of masochism.
I’m beginning to come around to the conclusion that AoO is one of those things that either clicks or it doesn’t. I agree with Ric; got it on the first read, explained it to my players, and even the mechanically inept in the group never had any trouble with it. I’m truly baffled at the confusion it causes.
THAC0 only had one really big thing going for it–it was a huge space saver over the chart it replaced while remaining mostly compatible with the source material derived from the chart.
Random encounters were always what you made of them. I don’t recall if it was Red Box or 1st ed. AD&D that explicitly said that the GM should make up his own encounter charts, where appropriate, and plan the encounters otherwise. Frank’s example of when to use them is dead on.
A book heavy on mechanics, with a very modest index, might be OK. It shows me that the writers tried. Such a book with no index is invariably organized poorly, which is why they couldn’t even do the modest index (or couldn’t afford to have someone else do it). The minimum organizational thought necessary to produce a modest index is more important than the index itself. (I suppose it’s possible to do the modest index, then cut it for space reasons, and still get most of the benefits.)
What I’ll nominate is probably too abstract to count: The tendency to simply not provide necessary pieces of the game and pawn that responsibility off on the GM/players (through fudge, house rules, whatever). I’m not talking unnecessary underwater gun rules or instances where the GM really does need some discretion, but cases where the designer didn’t have an idea for an obvious hole and simply punted with some text telling you to make it up. The individual instances are fairly niche, but the overall pattern is annoying.
I agree with you about all but Random Encounters.
Random encounters can be useful IF they’re used to reinforce the feel of the world. If you have small walled towns surrounded by forest & field, then there should be something that forces it. Packing everyone in a town when it’d be cheaper and more convenient to live next to your field should have a reason.
Random encounters can be a useful pacing mechanism as well; D&D’s 4 encounters a day is difficult to do if the PCs choose to rest and aren’t pressed. Story forces promoting urgency are OK… but are often overdone.
I’ve been thoroughly enjoying the comments so far. As with all of the more opinionated posts I’ve written on TT, hearing your opinions is the best part. 🙂
A couple of comments and clarifications, in no particular order:
– Not the seven worst, just seven of the worst. My list of the seven worst (period) would look quite different, and I haven’t thought of it yet. 😉
– GMing history, not gaming history. Some of the things on this list could fit into either category, and it’s a stretch to include them here (like the d100). But I’ve tried to consider them from a GMing perspective, sticking to what TT is all about.
– I wrestled with including game-specific items for awhile, but decided to go ahead with it in the case of THAC0 and AoOs.
Why? Because D&D is the 800-lb. gorilla of gaming. When D&D includes wonky, kludgy rules, most gamers (and most GMs) pay some kind of price. 😉
– Grappling in d20 makes me wince. It narrowly avoided the list, but having three D&D items seemed like too many. There’s always room in the sequel…
Releaseing 2nd editions within a year of the first, repeatively
Caveing in and changeing names of demons and devils to blatzus or whatever it was.
Chargeing the money for a hardcover book that fall apart when used as often as gameing books.
Dungeons and dragons, the movie.
Kindred: the Embraced: the series.
Cancelation of DND cartoon.
“My group all still has a good laugh from the time several sessions ago when Jon’s PC impaled himself on his ranseur.”
Out of curiosity, what was ‘fun’ about that? (Or realistic?) Jon might have a different opinion on the matter. 🙂
“Not only do you miss, but you look like a complete idiot, managing to impale yourself on your ranseur. You. Are. Dead.”
Also, how do you impale yourself accidently on a 6′ polearm, BTW?
Fumble charts != realism
“Also, how do you impale yourself accidently on a 6′ polearm, BTW?”
I’m not much for fumble charts because I prefer “heroic” games, but many years some hunter in the real world manages to shoot himself in the chest with a gun that is longer in the barrel than his arm. All it takes is crossing a fence, then yanking on the gun by the barrel. I can imagine a host of plausible ways that a person could set a polearm aside, then manage to get himself in a position to impale himself with it.
Of course, fumble charts usually mean while fighting with the weapon. At the very least, such a fumble better imply that the weapon left his grasp or broke in half. 😀
I’m ok with fumble charts, as long as they stick to things such as “Attack is a miss and weapon is dropped.” or “Attack is a miss, and leaves you open to attack. Enemy gets an AoO.” They can add realism, but are usually a pain, as most people don’t design them well, as normally, they are in reality simply covering excuses for DMs to be jerks much of the time. However, I do think they can be great if contained within the right ruleset. Shadowrun was smart by having the “Rule o’ Sixes” and the “Rule o’ Ones” counter-act one another, so that they didn’t actively encourage spending too many dice in one pool action by limiting the bad effects and only keeping the good ones. Instead, crits and fumbles merely accentuate the pre-existing effects, so that you pay for consistency. You can be unreliable and never get hurt too badly from a screwup, or you can be reliable and do horribly badly when you do make mistakes.
I’m also OK with shrinkwrapped books, but only with a caveat: there should always be one of each book left unwrapped as a ‘look and see’ copy; it shouldn’t be sold to customers, or if it is, it should be sold only when new printings come out or when the book is not going to be sold anymore. If a store isn’t likely to sell more than one or two copies of a specific expensive book/boxed set, then they just shouldn’t shrinkwrap that book/boxed set, unless the components are material that you have an opened copy of. This way, they can prevent damage by keeping it off public shelves, but where customers can see it and ask to look through it, should the item appear interesting to them. At that point, the essential problem with shrinkwrapping isn’t an issue, since buyers can almost always thumb through a copy to see if you’ll like it. It makes sure items are in a reasonably pristine condition, but also that you can look through everything available.
AoOs are a mixed bag too. Great idea, and usually reasonable execution. However, they’re still flaky on the rules. Same with grappling, turn undead, and almost every d20 ‘combat maneuver’. 3.5 wasn’t really well designed as far as those go; it suffers a lot from table over-use and alternative rules there. (No, I don’t mean house-rules, I mean exceptions to the main body of the rules)
Other than that, the 7 ideas were sound mechanical rules problems.
eh. Attacks of Opportunity and Grapples both work fairly well for me, although it helps that most of the time in a Grapple you’re just holding onto them and trying to hurt them… and most of the time, by ‘them’, I mean ‘evil wizard’. 🙂
Attacks of opportunity happen when you walk out of a square that’s threatened, or when do you do something that opens yourself up for attack, like casting a spell or, well, trying to grab someone for a grapple.
I don’t agree. Are you sure you are a GM?
1) Random Encounter Tables: In some circumstances, these are absolutely essential to good gaming. You might as well complain about NPC’s because some DM’s misused them. In anything but a dungeon based adventure, it is simply impossible (and probably undesirable) for the DM to prepare absolutely everything ahead of time. You would be hard pressed to do an extensive travel or exploration setting without a deep, well designed set of random encounter tables. PC’s can always ‘go off the path’ in unexpected directions. Even when they aren’t absolutely necessary, random encounter tables are a great benefit to creativity. There will always be circumstances in a city when you need to portray a random crowd or a random street inhabitant, and a good random encounter table goes along way to toward making those encounters have a genuine quality to them. There are always going to be cases where the potential for an encounter should exist and is important to the outcome, but leaving the nature of the encounter up to DM fiat is about as fair as deciding the outcome of ‘to hit’ rolls yourself. Consider the case of a rogue prowling through a large palace which you are creating on the fly to meet the unexpected game need.
There are alot of things you can do wrong when using or creating a random encounter table.
a) You can stuff full of rare encounters creating a false ‘ecosystem’. Not only does this create a non-immersive world, but it tends to make the random encounters at least as important as the ones you intend to be central to your story.
b) You can have every single encounter ‘care’ about the PC’s as if every NPC had nothing to do until the PC’s came along. The worst example of this would be every wandering monster immediately charges the PC’s and fights to the death.
c) You can have every single encounter being lying in ambush just waiting for the PC’s to stumble into them. Combined with ‘b’, this is extremely annoying and unrealistic. “You are ambushed by a herd of Mastadon. Roll for initiative.”
If you had to complain about some random table, you should have complained about random treasure tables. This is one of many cases of KotRT doing a better job of identifying bad game design than you did.
2) d100: It’s a tool at worst, and a gimmick at best. If you don’t like it, don’t use it. I also considered it more of a dice fetish than anyone’s attempt to replace the standard d%. As a dice fetish, its wonderful.
3) Shrink wrapped RPG books: Not only have I never had a problem with this, but there is at least one class of RPG books which I greatly prefer to be sold shrink wrapped – adventure modules. Most RPG books are not sold shrink wrapped and never have been. But adventure modules are sold shrink wrapped for the simple expedient that only owners of the module should know the story. This is good for everyone’s fun, players and GMs alike.
4) THAC0: Not a real problem, nor is it really ‘negative math’, nor is it necessarily confusing. The real heart of the problem is closely related, but you are off target.
If you really wanted to complain about confusing things related to 1st edition design, you should have complained about the closely related 1st/2nd edition armor class. This was a real case of ‘lower is better’, it really produced ‘negative math’ in that a +4 suit of armor subtracted 4 from your AC while a -1 cursed shield added one, and was truly confusing to anyone not used to it and seemed truly arbitrary. I never had anyone complain about THAC0, but I did have problem explaining to players than -2 AC was much better than 5 AC. Explaining that made explaining THAC0 straight forward.
5) Attacks of Opportunity: One of the best rule systems to come out of 3rd edition. If you don’t believe me, you didn’t DM much 1st and 2nd edition. It filled a huge hole in the rules. To tell you the truth, I created a cludgier version of the AoO system as early as the late ’80’s to fix the problem of the turn based system allowing characters being able to do things that didn’t involve defending themselves within reach of an enemy intent on killing them. Seeing a cleaner version of my own house rules was one of the things that immediately converted me because it told me that the designers really knew D&D inside and out and knew what its real flaws were.
Mixed Typefaces: Ok, you got one, but I can do you one better. Text appearing on top of graphics, making it nearly unreadable.
Books without Indexes: I guess I just don’t buy enough poor quality gaming books.
As far as system specific rules go, how about Palladiums ‘Mega Damage Points’?
Spleen23: D&D: The Movie was appalling, but in some ways watching Dragon fawn over it for several months beforehand was almost worse. Almost. 😉
I often wonder whether whoever got that thankless job knew they were writing content based on a shitty movie, or genuinely thought it would be good.
Kestral: Good point about some stores leaving “browsing copies” un-shrinkwrapped. My old FLGS in NYC did that, and it worked just fine.
John: For me, the big difference between AoOs and grappling in d20 games is that the former come up constantly, while the latter won’t necessarily come up at all.
Celebrim: It’s not only low-quality RPG books that are without indexes — WotC, for example, regularly produces good books that don’t have indexes.
You mentioned “KotRT” — what is that?
“You mentioned “KotRT†— what is that?”
Arrrggg.. My bad. KotDT = Knights of the Dinner Table. If that doesn’t clarify, its a comic based of the misadventures of a group of generally dysfunctional (but very familiar) gamers.
I feel exactly the same way about my d100. It’s great when it rolls out of the dice bag and everyone goes “Oohh! What’s that?” But the number of times it’s skidded off the table, across the floor, and under the sofa… 😉
But, then, I like the stranger dice (I’ve a d3 (OK, a d6 number 1-3 twice), a d24, and a d30 in my dice bag as well :D)
“My group all still has a good laugh from the time several sessions ago when Jon’s PC impaled himself on his ranseur.â€
Out of curiosity, what was ‘fun’ about that? (Or realistic?) Jon might have a different opinion on the matter.
I’ll ask Jon his exact opinion at his game tonight, but I recall him laughing along with the rest of us. I tend to approach most of my gaming, and D&D in particular, as a combination of cheesy sitcom and splattery action flick. If you can’t have a chuckle over the ridiculous violence of the Black Knight sequence in Monty Python & The Holy Grail, then my campaign might not be a good fit for you.
“Not only do you miss, but you look like a complete idiot, managing to impale yourself on your ranseur. You. Are. Dead.â€
No wait a minute, Don. This quote is not from me! I didn’t call either the PC or a player an idiot, nor was he dead. The result rolled was ‘Critical Hit to Self’. The PC survived that adventure and several others until he was tragically struck down saving his homeland from a wizard attempting to summon an army of devils.
Also, how do you impale yourself accidently on a 6′ polearm, BTW?
You try to tumble past several foes to avoid an AoO in a smoke-filled where you can’t even really see the surface of the floor you are tumbling along, blow the Tumble skill check and then fumble the attack roll.
Fumble charts != realism
I never made that claim. I use fumble charts because they are silly and fun and enhance the inherent danger and unpredictability of going into a combat.
I know there are killer DMs out there who get a lot of mileage out of fumble charts, but I’m a little annoyed that you a presuming I’m one of those jerks. I run a quirky game, but it is not player-abusive. If anything, I tend to run a give-away game because I like happy players who are having fun. The ranseur-impalement happened when the party was around 7th level. The group is now pushing 16th and we’ve had one other fumble since then, which was “Bump ally, both lose turn”.
Yes, THAC0 is negative math. If your THAC0 is 14, and you are attacking AC -2, you need a 16 to hit. You subtract the AC from the THAC0 to get the number you need to hit. And it’s definitely true the backwards ACs were a mess, and part of the whole negative math issue.
It was nice that THAC0 got rid of the nasty tables.
Frank
AoOs are conceptually easy but Wizards set themselves up with a whole lot of trouble by not establishing a clear principle of what does and doesn’t provoke an AoO. If I were running a D&D game currently I’d run something along the lines of: All non-attacks provoke AoO (Iron Heroes), but AoOs are made at -5 attack bonus (to reduce the painfulness of making AoOs more common).
The groups I’m in, AoOs aren’t an issue rules-wise. Mind you, a bunch of people (including one DM) are so AoO afraid that they’d rather lose a round here or there then trigger a single extra attack, but that’s just falty perception that it’s always bad instead of weighing risk/reward.
The *concept* of random encounters I find important – there are things out there, you can’t just wander around with no repercussions. It makes travelling feel risky and adds to the whole need risky to feel reward for the players. That said, I haven’t *rolled* for “random” encounters for years. If for pacing, story, or need to introduce/remind an area is risky, then one happens.
Fumbles – over time, fumbles reward monsters. If Monser #24601 fumbles and ends up dying, it’s a little thrill. If PC #2 played for three years does the same because of a bad set of rolls, it’s unfun and takes a player out of a session for a bit at the least. When playing, I’d rather die because I didn’t figure something out, or was stupid, or acting the martyr – dieing to a signle bad roll is anticlimatic. Don’t like save or die spells for the same reason.
Cheers,
=Blue
So I double checked with the player of Ranseur Self-Impalement Lad (first appearance Legion #256). He still chuckles at the memory of that fight, so it’s all good.
But just so I’m completely clear: I’m not proposing everyone adopt fumble rules for every game. Far from it. I just think the near-universal abhorrence for fumble rules is due to a combination of bad fumble mechanics (too frequent and/or too vicious fumbles) and lameass DMs. A reasonable fumble mechanic with the right DM is just another crunchy tool that may enhance some campaigns even though it is completely inproper for many others.
THAC0 beat the hell out of the original 1st edition tables. THat was far worse, especially because 20 repeated on the table several times, not all of which could be hit by modifying up to 20 with appropriate modifiers from a lower number. Try to explain that and realize how much better THAC0 was.
You all think AoOs are bad NOW, try this:
Fighter A has Robilar’s Gambit (PHB II). Fighter B has Robilar’s Gambit and Double hit. (Mini HB, I think.)
Fighter B attacks Fighter A with a Double Hit. What happens?
T
Bill: ah, I thought I had remembered the repeating 20s. That was something THAC0 took away, something that was designed to give at least some chance to hit. Of course by D20, that problem has been resolved with the 20 always hits rule (which had been adopted at least informally much earlier – in fact AD&D may have even pointed it out as an option).
tsuyoshikentsu: I don’t know the details of those feats, but some feats follow a general theme of allowing rules to be broken or overridden. Rules breaking rules are always problematical when you start having sufficient numbers of them around to mix. I seem to remember that was a problem with Cosmic Encounters way back when when folks started using multiple expansions.
Frank
Martin, I found myself nodding with you on all these. They’d certainly find a place in my list too, though I do have a certain nostalgic fondness for THAC0 (D&D Rules Cyclopedia, not that upstart inferior “A” D&D product).
AoO is the single worst rules mechanic in D&D. It’s caused more in-game stumbles, more wasted ink and paper trying to explain it and more burnt brain cells than any other rule to come out of TSR/WOTC, ever. d20 Call of Cthulhu doesn’t have it, and is none the worse for it’s disappearance (and a good 15 pages lighter too!).
Rant coming…..
I’m a gamer. I game. I don’t restrict my imagination by using miniatures. I don’t want to look at a board and move little pieces of plastic around. I don’t want five foot steps.
I want games where my players swing down from the balcony. I want games where the swing bridge rotates while one character holds on as an ogre charges toward him. I want to be able to describe what’s happening and wave my arms in the aim without risking toppling over a bendy paladin (that doesn’t even /look/ like the character!) and wrecking the entire combat layout.
And I definitely don’t want to steenking Attacks of Opportunity. I’m GM. If I want the kobold barbarian to take a swipe at you as you charge past, he does. I don’t need rules + FAQ + Errata + Forums to tell me whether it’s ok or not.
I’ve revised my opinion. The single worst Idea in gaming was bringing back miniatures. AoO stems from that points. It was 100% profit driven at the expense of restricting imaginitive play, and has nothing to role-playing at all.
There. Rant over. I feel better now.
I totally disagree about the miniatures stuff. D&D has always been grounded in miniatures (ok, so I never played any AD&D 2e stuff). My experience with games that went for all that descriptive stuff, and dispensed with the miniatures (and strict turn order type of stuff) was that a player could easily be disenfranchised. Combats would go the way the GM visualised them, with perhaps a bit of popularity contest (i.e. if the GM grooved on your idea, it would probably work well, if the GM wasn’t grooving real good on you, well you would just get ground into the muck).
Of course there are other ways to enfranchise the player. Dogs in the Vinyard was pretty cool. But it uses hard cold dice to guarantee you have a say, even if the GM isn’t really grooving on what you’re saying. The GM can’t just brush of your 16 raise, though he could call for a better description, but it’s also the whole table’s responsibility to help you get to that better description.
Frank
One thing that I find interesting is that AoOs are such a divisive rules element — it seems like most folks either love them or hate them, with not too many people in between. 😉
Is the Iron Heroes version of AoOs OGC, and perhaps publicly available somewhere outside of the IH rulebook?
The real divisive thing seems to be the miniatures style play, though AOO seems to be a big part of that.
But I think it’s false divisiveness. People are wanting D&D to be something it’s not. Far better to play the right game in the first place, and not wish for the D&D title to be applied to the game you want to play. D&D has always been a derivative of a miniatures wargame. That people used the D&D books to play something else is not the fault of D&D. It’s the fault of players unwilling to consider playing a different game. I mean it’s like wanting to introduce dice to chess or something…
Frank
AoO actually come from chess. “En passant”, a pawn attacks a passing pawn. When playing with miniatures, AoO are great. I don’t like the things that they arbitrarily apply or don’t apply to, but as others have said here, just use common sense. Does your action leave you open for a second?
I’m a long time GM. I make up the encounters that the players are going to face. They travel between two settlements in a forest where gnolls are common. Well, they’re going to meet some gnolls. Sometimes, a griffon is seen hunting the area. This particular trip, it tries to steal the party’s lightly-armored mage. I’ll probably come up with a number of inhabitants for the forest, and make up the details. Those notes won’t just sit unused in my notebook. As the party crosses the woods, they run into the baddies or signs of the baddies’ passage. It’s not a plot-based encounter, but it isn’t random. Random encounters take time away from the flow of the game. If a GM is good, he plans that flow, including “side-quests” and incidental encounters.
THAC0 is actually quite easy. Sure, it is a bit backwards, but it is very easy and works just the same as the 3.x version of calculating what you need to hit. The only really “hard” part is keeping track of what your actual THAC0 was, and unless you’re going up multiple levels in a single adventure it is easy to keep track of (just look it up and write it down on your character sheet).
To determine what you need to hit, simply subtract the AC of your target from your THAC0. For example: if your THAC0 is a 20 and your opponent has an AC of 5 you need a 15 to hit (20-5=15). If your THAC0 is 15 and your target has an AC of -5 you need a 20 to hit (15-(-5)=20).
If you don’t know the AC of your opponent it is still easy. If your THAC0 is a 10 and you roll an 8 you hit an AC of 2 or better (10-8=2). If your THAC0 is a 15 and you roll a 20 you hit AC -5 (15-20= -5).
As you see it is quite easy to calculate what you need to hit a specific AC or to calculate what AC you hit. I do agree that calculating the THAC0 could get annoying (never difficult because looking up a number on a chart is an easy task), but once you’ve written it down on your character sheet it is very easy. That is, of course, unless you have trouble dealing in negative numbers.