Author Topic: Horrible Ideas You've Seen People Adapt to D&D  (Read 5476 times)

Offline Libertad

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Horrible Ideas You've Seen People Adapt to D&D
« on: March 22, 2015, 02:47:57 AM »
Dungeons & Dragons is pretty much the gateway drug of table-top RPGs.  What it does, it does well.  Fantasy adventure where you go on adventures and kill monsters in dungeons.

Unfortunately, lots of folks have neat ideas which might work well with another rules system, but due to bright-eyed optimism, third party publishers trying to make bank on the D20 cash cow, or a simple unwillingness to learn other rulesets, we get stuff like this.

No-Magic Campaign: Not Low Magic, but NO MAGIC!  The best weapons are masterwork, healing must be done naturally, and what spellcasters do exist have their abilities magnified by the even-wider gap from no magic items.  Game of Thrones has its own RPG by Green Ronin, and Mouse Guard does this quite well, yet this keeps popping up in D&D.  It is our curse to bear.

Like D&D, but better!  The Fantasy Heartbreaker, so many like it, trying to edge in on an existing brand's territory.  The game mechanics are more like house-rules to existing Editions adapted for the sake of familiarity rather than an eye for game design, and its incessant need to try and supersede Dungeons & Dragons means that it can't really stand on its own merits.

It should play just the same way:  A lot of folks who jump from one Edition or retro-clone oftentimes carry things wholesale into a new game.  This isn't much of a problem if it's done with care or an eye for improvement, but a lot of folk assume that the design decisions stayed true throughout the 40 years of history.  I've seen people try to run 3rd Edition as an old-school game with no feats or wealth-by-level, people adapting 2nd Edition wilderness adventures for 4th Edition combat, and people converting old settings to Pathfinder without making changes to how the world will be impacted by the gameplay (that 1976 setting didn't have at-will cantrips or a pantheon full of cleric domains).

Even the 3rd Edition playtesters were guilty of this, missing a lot of design quirks because they played the game just like they did 2nd Edition.

Share your own terrible ideas and stories, either in person or heard from a friend of a friend!

Offline bhu

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Re: Horrible Ideas You've Seen People Adapt to D&D
« Reply #1 on: March 22, 2015, 03:55:37 AM »
My pet peeve would be that every world has a bajillion races and monsters...though god knows i'm guilty of that too....

Offline Unbeliever

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Re: Horrible Ideas You've Seen People Adapt to D&D
« Reply #2 on: March 22, 2015, 11:26:47 AM »
My pet peeve would be that every world has a bajillion races and monsters...though god knows i'm guilty of that too....
This is mine as well, actually.  I find the whole fantasy racism and essentialism -- which a lot of people roll into classes as well, a plague upon most old-school RPGs -- bugs me to no end.  I need to be able to wrap my head around a setting.  If the setting has 65 different races, each with 19 different subraces, I'm going to get bored before it even starts.

The only reason I can kind of tolerate Faerun is I learned all this stuff when I was a kid and had time and patience for it.

In general, the OP points to a failure to use the right tool for the right job.  There is a small place for this, namely if the startup costs of learning a new system for everyone would be a lot to bear and if the fit isn't too bad.  In general, though, it's just a bad idea and I can't quite fathom why it keeps cropping up.  I don't ask FATE to be a tactical wargame.

Offline Libertad

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Re: Horrible Ideas You've Seen People Adapt to D&D
« Reply #3 on: March 22, 2015, 08:29:36 PM »
My pet peeve would be that every world has a bajillion races and monsters...though god knows i'm guilty of that too....

But that's the best part about Forgotten Realms.  It's got over a 100 elven subraces I can fap to.

Also...

Metaplot and uber-powerful NPCs: It wasn't popular when White Wolf did it, but there are some settings which are a stickler for canon and actively prevent the PCs from upstaging things.  On a similar note, a setting which has plenty of powerful good-aligned NPCs requires an explanation for why they're not intervening when the PCs have to save the world.  Or if the NPCs are interventionist types, it kind of begs the question "why aren't the PCs doing this?"

It must be medieval: "Okay, so society is completely like real-world medieval Europe, except there's goblins everywhere, the Roman Catholic Church is full of high-level Clerics, gold is the standard unit of currency, and people hundreds of miles away in different cultures speak your dialect of Common.  In other words, not like the Middle Ages."

Selective Realism: "A Barbarian should not be able to survive a 200 foot fall, so I'm houseruling it as die no-save to be more realistic.  Dragons?  No, they're still capable of flight, this isn't Physics & Dragons here."
« Last Edit: March 22, 2015, 08:46:15 PM by Libertad »

Offline TuggyNE

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Re: Horrible Ideas You've Seen People Adapt to D&D
« Reply #4 on: March 25, 2015, 06:38:34 PM »
My pet peeve would be that every world has a bajillion races and monsters...though god knows i'm guilty of that too....

What's great is how the Talislanta setting makes a big deal about how it doesn't have any elves or dwarves or other lazy clones. But what it has instead are about seventeen hundred and eighty-nine* different races of "basically humans with a couple different hats". I can't remember any of them, and while reading through the PDF I remember thinking several times, "didn't I just see these guys back a few dozen pages?"

*Lies, they never wrote more than 1652 races. At most.
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Offline Libertad

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Re: Horrible Ideas You've Seen People Adapt to D&D
« Reply #5 on: March 25, 2015, 06:41:03 PM »
I'm thinking too much on whether that last +1 was due to my masturbation joke, or being in agreement with the last 3 ideas being a blight upon D&D games.

Offline bhu

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Re: Horrible Ideas You've Seen People Adapt to D&D
« Reply #6 on: March 25, 2015, 08:54:35 PM »
My pet peeve would be that every world has a bajillion races and monsters...though god knows i'm guilty of that too....

What's great is how the Talislanta setting makes a big deal about how it doesn't have any elves or dwarves or other lazy clones. But what it has instead are about seventeen hundred and eighty-nine* different races of "basically humans with a couple different hats". I can't remember any of them, and while reading through the PDF I remember thinking several times, "didn't I just see these guys back a few dozen pages?"

*Lies, they never wrote more than 1652 races. At most.


You should see Powers and Perils

Roll to see what race you are
roll to see if you are a subrace, if yes roll to see what subrace, and then roll to see if you are a subrace of that subrace
roll to see if you are a hybrid, if yes repeat the previous steps


Annoying thingie #2: Humans can fuck anything regardless of size, species or composition (i.e your proposed lover doesn't need to be flesh).  Human beings could probably ejaculate into a bush in dnd and spontaneously spawn a half-bush subrace...  I understand there are real life hybrids, but keep it within reason

Offline Raineh Daze

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Re: Horrible Ideas You've Seen People Adapt to D&D
« Reply #7 on: March 25, 2015, 08:57:40 PM »
My pet peeve would be that every world has a bajillion races and monsters...though god knows i'm guilty of that too....

What's great is how the Talislanta setting makes a big deal about how it doesn't have any elves or dwarves or other lazy clones. But what it has instead are about seventeen hundred and eighty-nine* different races of "basically humans with a couple different hats". I can't remember any of them, and while reading through the PDF I remember thinking several times, "didn't I just see these guys back a few dozen pages?"

*Lies, they never wrote more than 1652 races. At most.


You should see Powers and Perils

Roll to see what race you are
roll to see if you are a subrace, if yes roll to see what subrace, and then roll to see if you are a subrace of that subrace
roll to see if you are a hybrid, if yes repeat the previous steps


Annoying thingie #2: Humans can fuck anything regardless of size, species or composition (i.e your proposed lover doesn't need to be flesh).  Human beings could probably ejaculate into a bush in dnd and spontaneously spawn a half-bush subrace...  I understand there are real life hybrids, but keep it within reason

Humans have nothing on Dragons.

Offline bhu

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Re: Horrible Ideas You've Seen People Adapt to D&D
« Reply #8 on: March 26, 2015, 03:01:40 AM »
Dragons are at least magical.  It's a flimsy excuse at best, but I'd love to know how a human being can have half elemental children.  Apparently fire damages everything except our genitalia, which is perfectly comfortable (and nigh well invulnerable).  I mean, think about it.  We can literally fuck fire,  with no magical precautions (or draconic energy resistance).  And given the many half undead templates we can also hump the dead with no health repercussions.  And yet there are no half man half animal templates because people think that would somehow be more messed up.

Offline SolEiji

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Re: Horrible Ideas You've Seen People Adapt to D&D
« Reply #9 on: March 26, 2015, 04:39:21 AM »
Dragons are at least magical.  It's a flimsy excuse at best, but I'd love to know how a human being can have half elemental children.  Apparently fire damages everything except our genitalia, which is perfectly comfortable (and nigh well invulnerable).  I mean, think about it.  We can literally fuck fire,  with no magical precautions (or draconic energy resistance).  And given the many half undead templates we can also hump the dead with no health repercussions.  And yet there are no half man half animal templates because people think that would somehow be more messed up.

In the beginning, the gods made various races.  Orcs became the strongest, dwarves the toughest, halflings the most brave, and so on and so forth.  Each god was convinced they would dominate the world with the gifts they gave to their people.  All was well until the god of humans gave humanity their gift.

Fecundity.

The humans got to work, boning each other, other races, even the rocks, the trees, the air, even concepts themselves.  Elementals, animal-people, and many many more beings appeared in a short amount of time.  Horrified as humanity dominated the world with all sorts of aberrant and alien life, the gods hit the reset switch and said "never again".  However starting completely over was a real pain the butt, so they applied a patch note to suppress humanity's abilities largely to that of humanoid shape.  Half-things were still rampant, but under control.  The other races with their old memories recall the time of fecundity and still harbor latent distrust of their half-kin, resulting in the typical fantasy racism of the half-orc and half-elf.

Humanity has so far been unaware of their previous status as nature's breeders, though it may explain their overall obsession with sex and violence, the ancient urges of domination through filthy dirty sexy times.

tl;dr Everything has human blood from an ancient error gone wrong.  A great many of them remain compatible.
« Last Edit: March 26, 2015, 04:41:15 AM by SolEiji »
Mudada.

Offline bhu

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Re: Horrible Ideas You've Seen People Adapt to D&D
« Reply #10 on: March 26, 2015, 05:48:11 PM »
At least that idea makes sense. 

Offline Solo

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Re: Horrible Ideas You've Seen People Adapt to D&D
« Reply #11 on: March 27, 2015, 01:16:58 AM »
Anything involving sex.
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Offline awaken_D_M_golem

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Re: Horrible Ideas You've Seen People Adapt to D&D
« Reply #13 on: April 12, 2015, 02:40:52 PM »
Cantrip ... No Sex Please , We're British

Subject gets -2 penalty on all Charisma check for an entire evening, involving attempts toward sex only.
V :  "Hey baby ..."
S : (watch those hands boys)
M : alcohol

(click to show/hide)
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