Interesting Links for 12-12-2011
Dec. 12th, 2011 11:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewducker- First Private Spaceship Flight to the ISS now has a date.
- Motorola secures Europe-wide sales ban on iPhone, iPad - oh for goodness sake.
- This Banana Alien Might Have Ascorbic Acid for Blood
- The Evolution of Fictional Characters
- If Tarot Cards Actually Predicted the Future
- D&D;: More accurate than you think
- Problems with anti-Mormons and anti-Adulterers - will the demographics hurt the Republicans?
- 57% of people thought that David Cameron was right to use the veto, with 14% disagreeing and 29% don’t know.
- Alternative Engineering - the future of architecture!
- Why Spotify can never be profitable: The secret demands of record labels
- AdBlock Plus to allow "acceptable" ads by default soon. I'm actually in favour of this.
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D&D;: More accurate than you think
Date: 2011-12-12 12:51 pm (UTC)I thought it was a good point that for many purposes DnD 3.5 worked pretty well, and that people are silly to complain about things that look ridiculous but changing them would be impossible without making the game an impossibly detailed simulation, or unfun. But I thought he was waaaay too optimistic to think that it _usually_ worked like that.
I think he's right that for many fantasy epics and myths, the "larger than life, characters" or even "demigod characters" are best mapped as levbel 4/5. Enough to be superhuman by usual standards, but not enough to reshape the world with their mind. That's one big misconception.
And I'm sure that many every day tasks work with the stats given in the rules. And many more do if you take the rules with a pinch of common sense.
But I still think the system as written will end up having at least as many common tasks which _don't_ match the real world, partly because there's a limit to how much effort the designers could do, and partly because the basic assumption of the rules that everything fits into "a feat that lets you do it automatically" or a "take 10" or "a skill based on skill ranks and a stat with a normal distribution" isn't true in the real world, so there will always be cases where an appropriate DC for one character just doesn't work for another, and the DM won't be able to automatically improvise a non-problematic alternative.
Which isn't a knock to DnD: many game systems are better for many things, but for what DnD does, it's very good at it, and people should just enjoy what it does, without expecting it to model "housecat vs average human fight" or "falling" realistically. So it's better than many people think, but not, I think, as good as that article hoped :)
Re: D&D;: More accurate than you think
Date: 2011-12-13 12:29 pm (UTC)I think this article might have been partly responsible for inspiring E6, a mod for D&D 3e where you cap out at level 6, although you still gain access to feats as you gain XP. It's pretty popular, and aims to keep 3e in the sweet spot where the balance lines up, the complexity isn't too great, and characters are still within the realms of reality.
Note that the housecat vs commoner fight is a consequence of course granularity and assuming the baseline very close to one. Also, falling is not well handled by HP (which are really only a resource to use as a pacing mechanism), and would be much better solved with a Fort save (or save vs breath weapon in earlier editions -- probably, there is some logic which is totally obvious provided someone spends a lot of time explaining it to you :P )
Re: D&D;: More accurate than you think
Date: 2011-12-13 12:47 pm (UTC)Re: D&D;: More accurate than you think
Date: 2011-12-13 12:53 pm (UTC)