YOU are in charge of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 3e...

[PhoneLobster]

Look this is why you don't try and do the whole book/movie thing.

While it is painfully obvious to the point that anyone disputing it is a spectacular fucktard that at the very least a vast majority of players envisage their potential D&D adventures through the lense of movies and books (predominantly action adventure ones at that) and that just about none of them envisage their potential D&D adventures to include managing, manually calculating and tracking individual unit food supply, harvest, and storage as just part of their giant kingdom administration spread sheet for what will rapidly eat up about 2/3rds of their play time.

...when you start talking about books and movies it just becomes a increasingly irrelevant distraction of pointless minutia shit fighting with assholes about which specific books and movies are allowed to count and which specific parts of them are allowed to count and how you are allowed to interpret those parts. And fuck it they will cherry pick the fictional source, the part of that source, and the crazy as fuck interpretation of that part as they see fit.

You don't need to go there. The idea that D&D players want to start calculating individual kobold monthly work hours for luxury goods export manufacturing industry rather than have fun action adventures is enough of a non starter in its own right to just point at it and laugh without letting internet idiots drag you into a pointless and distracting internet shit fight about the excessive details of some specific novel series or other.

Which is what happens whenever your say the trigger phrases "Books and Movies" or "Source Material" to a forum full of obsessive compulsive D&D nerds.

[Blade]

You have to be careful when you say "players want this". Different players enjoy different things. Some love to spend hours on micro-management while others want the big picture.

[Lokey]

Some of us want more out of DnD than just murder-hobo, so not all we talk about will be relevant to you. Why is this such a bad thing?

[hyzmarca]

What players want is a perfect simulation of physics and psychology such that they can interact with the world in any way that they would be able to if the setting existed in real life and they had access to magic and/or martial superpowers.

Or, baring that, for the rules to tell the DM to MTP in their favor instead of screwing them.

[virgil]

You don't need to go there. The idea that D&D players want to start calculating individual kobold monthly work hours for luxury goods export manufacturing industry rather than have fun action adventures is enough of a non starter in its own right to just point at it and laugh

You're wrong, at least as far as absolute statements go. Some people actively enjoy logistics with their dragons, so coming in and saying that they don't exist or discourage such people from even trying to do anything else is YOU being a douchenozzle; and a number of us would like you to shut the fvck up.

[deaddmwalking]

PhoneLobster is right to challenge our willingness to 'push the envelope'. Making adjustments to play 3.x isn't too difficult, at least through upper-mid levels. A slightly modified version of 3.x is certainly playable, which is why so many of us have exactly that already.

But if you were in charge of D&D, you could *potentially* do anything with it. You are not required to be constrained by the solutions in 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th or 5th edition.

As far as what I would want if I were building it up from the ground-up, here are some ideas in no particular order.

1) XP (advancement) isn't tied to monster slaying. I don't want to add extra incentive to the murder-hobo lifestyle, and killing monsters already provides treasure. In 3.x, extra treasure makes the PCs 'extra strong' which means challenges aren't that challenging, but if you increase the challenges to compensate, the PCs get EVEN MORE XP - it's a self-feeding cycle that gets out of hand.

2) Reasonable morale rules. Half of the opposition should flee before they get killed. When you read a Paizo adventure, they provide 'justification' why every creature fights to the death ALL THE TIME. Sometimes it would be nice if a show of force (or a clever illusion) actually caused your opponents to run away and that adjudicating this allowed a rule call rather than simple DM fiat every time.

3) Vehicle Combat Rules. PCs should be able to take a pirate ship and have a ship to ship combat that is easy, intuitive, and makes sense. Players may take actions to crew the ship and successes may make their vehicle 'better' than the standard rating (faster movement, better defense, better offense) but it needs to be abstract enough that it doesn't take significantly longer than one-to-one combat.

4) Mass-Combat Rules. Like vehicle rules, they need to be easy, intuitive and make sense. Like vehicle rules, the players should be able to take actions that interact with these rules natively (ie, without a clunky add-on system that nobody uses).

5) Leadership and/or Domain rules. While not every player should be forced to take an army of little men, they should have that option. This is one of those things like 'cloak color' that some people aren't going to care about and others will spend hours figuring out what type of food their kennel master eats on Tuesdays. The system needs to quickly generate 'default options' that will work for most players, and if some players want to tinker with it and optimize outputs, they can.

6) I'd like to see Combat with 'boss monsters' involve more tactical options. One thought I've had is that (like a video game) a monster might have hit point totals for different 'areas'. Attacking the dragon's wings might take away the ability to fly; etc. I'm not sure how I'd implement it, but it's on my wish list.

7) I'd like to see PCs have more options in combat - ie, do more interesting things than spam their 'best attack' every round. I'm intrigued by options such as allowing a free maneuver when you succeed by a certain threshold. AoO for attempting a disarm or trip are right out; I might retain them for FAILING on your special attack.

8) I like 'magical traditions' and I'm cool with having a bunch of them. Ultimately, I'd like to get to 'theme wizards' like 'Pyromancer' that are a complete concept (attack/defense/other) but don't completely overshadow every other class concept.

9) Magic can justify just about anything. At high levels, everybody CAN learn magic relatively easy. It's not going to be unusual for a rogue type character to learn invisibility or a fighter type character to cast smash gate even if magic isn't a big part of their schtick.

10) Interaction rules that set reasonable limits on what risks a stranger will take for the party but still allow Diplomacy to be a viable strategy.

Also, in general, I'd prefer general rules that apply to a bunch of situations. Possession by a ghost will work like possession by a fiend (for example). As much as possible, the various systems that I've laid out will share an anatomy so it isn't hard to figure out how we got to our final results.

[OgreBattle]

6) I'd like to see Combat with 'boss monsters' involve more tactical options. One thought I've had is that (like a video game) a monster might have hit point totals for different 'areas'. Attacking the dragon's wings might take away the ability to fly; etc. I'm not sure how I'd implement it, but it's on my wish list.

7) I'd like to see PCs have more options in combat - ie, do more interesting things than spam their 'best attack' every round. I'm intrigued by options such as allowing a free maneuver when you succeed by a certain threshold. AoO for attempting a disarm or trip are right out; I might retain them for FAILING on your special attack.

In D&D3.PF you chop off a hydra's head by using the sunder action as if the head was a weapon the hydra was wielding. The 3e kraken, octopus, and squid also let you sunder its tentacles, but the pathfinder Cephalopods can't be sundered. So a quick fix to 3e would be treating monster parts as weapons/armor wielded by said monster so dragon wings and manticore tails can be sundered like shields and swords. I could also see grappling be expanded to try and disable certain body parts so you can have a guy grabbing the wyvern's tail so it can't sting the wizard in its clutch.

So against an equal/lower level opponent it's probably better to deal hitpoint damage, but against a superior foe your party is ganging up on you want to hit them with debuff actions via sunder, grapple, etc.

3) Vehicle Combat Rules. PCs should be able to take a pirate ship and have a ship to ship combat that is easy, intuitive, and makes sense. Players may take actions to crew the ship and successes may make their vehicle 'better' than the standard rating (faster movement, better defense, better offense) but it needs to be abstract enough that it doesn't take significantly longer than one-to-one combat.

I've been looking at Edge of the Empire for inspiration on that, I have no idea what their funny dice do but they seem to have a passable idea on how to get a party to crew a ship together even if they don't have special "pilot ship/repair ship" skills. An athletic guy can do manual repairs, a perceptive guy can give warnings on incoming enemy fire or terrain hazards, a bossy guy can give accuracy bonuses by coordinating the crew. There's still the problem of "what if repair guy has nothing to repair" and "perceptive guy does perception every turn over and over" though, and EotE gets around that by having more abstracted combat that can finish faster than D&D.

[Rejakor]

PL, your problem is that you are assuming

manually calculating and tracking individual unit food supply, harvest, and storage as just part of their giant kingdom administration spread sheet

is the only possible way to manage a kingdom. In a game.

1. Why doesn't this kingdom have accountants who inform seneschals who bring the broader picture to the player via the MC in the same way that the MC doesn't track the individual life and growth cycles of all the goblins in each and every fucking dungeon the players go to?

2. Why can't player characters do things like 'tally up the accounts' or whatever and receive an overview of what they find in the exact same way the MC tells them what they find when they 'search a room' without describing each and every single fucking empty drawer they open and dead weed they find in cracks in the pavers?

3. Why must every single kingdom detail be manually tracked when things like 'martial skill' can be reduced to stats like HP and BAB?

You come across like someone who read a bad kingdom management mechanics somewhere, decided that you hate it, and now feel the need to assume every possible iteration of mechanics for running a kingdom or whatever is going to be that same mechanics you read one time, and also, that every single person in the world also hates mechanics of that style, therefore, all kingdom-management mechanics are bad and will always be bad.

It's literally not even a coherent argument. That you have to descend into 'whether textual examples are relevant' for the vast majority of your post, and offhandedly dismiss any mechanics other than the ones you personally disapprove of as 'impossible' (because the only reason rts/citybuilder/ck2/kingdom management games work is 'because of the CPU', right? Just like how CRPGs are far too complex to be reduced to rules, paper, and dice, OH WAIT), says all it needs to about the actual content of your argument, to wit, one gigantic assumption and no supporting logic, evidence, or even anything close to it.

[virgil]

You come across like someone who read a bad kingdom management mechanics somewhere, decided that you hate it, and now feel the need to assume every possible iteration of mechanics for running a kingdom or whatever is going to be that same mechanics you read one time, and also, that every single person in the world also hates mechanics of that style, therefore, all kingdom-management mechanics are bad and will always be bad.

While PL may equivocate that they're all the same, he's technically railing against most forms of resource management/tracking, not just the specific example described. It's not even likely because he was burned by a bad kingdom management game as his reason for hating it, it's that he's locked himself in the echo chamber that is his Timecube RPG, and so any deviation is fundamentally flawed.

[PhoneLobster]

You come across like someone who read a bad kingdom management mechanics somewhere

The kobold work hours, food tracking, and migration push pull factor mentions on this thread are direct references to mechanics proposed by Frank and Ancient History.

And while I'm not utterly against kingdom management, clearly since I have my own system, of sorts, the micromanagement spreadsheet simulation methodology is both the default go to of designers who put no thought into, AND the default go to methodology of people on this board.

Simplified abstracted fast methodology that focuses on actual outputs we give a shit about? That's what I'm talking about when I say your Kingdom Management system and mass combat system need to be thoroughly integrated to the main game, and that every part that isn't integrated to the main game or distracts from the main game needs to be rapidly simplified into non-existence or as close as humanly possible.

THAT is what the pro kobold work hours faction don't accept and if you pay attention what they are arguing against, on THIS PAGE there are posts arguing in favor of micromanaging huge spreadsheets and claiming specifically that managing kobold work hours is totally for real fun for "some players".

So no, Kobold Work Hours and Food Management Spreadsheet The Game are not straw men they are specific references to specific failed methodologies that are still being defended to this day.

[Kaelik]

PL, your problem is that you are assuming

...

You come across like someone who read a bad kingdom management mechanics somewhere, decided that you hate it, and now feel the need to assume every possible iteration of mechanics for running a kingdom or whatever is going to be that same mechanics you read one time, and also, that every single person in the world also hates mechanics of that style, therefore, all kingdom-management mechanics are bad and will always be bad.

The specific system he saw that traumatized him for life is specifically the one that AH and Frank were making in their specific thread for making one, so even though he is slightly exaggerating (for example, you don't track each kobold separately, you lump all your kobolds in one location together) it is somewhat relevant to the thread.

Sure you could have any variation of kingdom management from "once per session you have to answer an either or prompt from your minister that will maybe possibly have some effect on the world if the DM remembers" all the way to "describe the actions of effects of all one million henchmen you have on a day by day basis." But as long as it is reasonable to believe that Frank is advocating for the same level of granularity as the last time the issue came up, it would be reasonable to criticize that level of granularity. Whether he is succeeding or not, I leave up to an exercise for anyone willing to go back and read a 20 page thread from years ago.

[PhoneLobster]

The specific system he saw that traumatized him for life is specifically the one that AH and Frank were making in their specific thread for making one, so even though he is slightly exaggerating (for example, you don't track each kobold separately, you lump all your kobolds in one location together) it is somewhat relevant to the thread.

Having a number for your work hours/production value per kobold then multiplying it by your number of kobolds and then having a similar but different value for your orcs and multiplying that by your number of orcs and adding the totals together...

...that IS tracking it individually. I mean hey you can have a semantics argument demanding that "tracking it individually" also requires individual job assignment or something but AH never got that far.

As for clumping it together, when I suggest "hey maybe you should just have a fixed output for "Kobold Factory"" he explicitly rejected it because "people are going to want to be able to distinguish between an orc with a hammer (Craft (Weaponsmithing) +3) and an Orc Expert 10 (Craft (Weaponsmithing) +20). And you'd really want that distinction if your PC wants to get involved."

Also while this sort of thing has cropped up in threads over the years the most relevant thread for the "traumatizingly bad rules" is just less than a year old
over here. And while you could find a few older threads much of the limited shit talk about how awesome economy micro management spreadsheets are seems to be pretty recent with even Frank's "Acks Domains... OSR rules sets are awesome rite?" thread being only 2015. I know there have been older mentions, but I don't recall anything too substantial barring some ancient content free talk about how mass combat mechanics were a hurdle too far for the Tomes. At a stretch I'd say it's gotten only moderate curiosity in the subject from pretty much anyone on the den since Frank decided he liked a 2014? random ass supplement to a fucking OSR game.

I mean I've personally been talking about this, or trying to, around here since at least my early proto "barby mansions" thread about 2010 or so, but much of the den's response to these sorts of subsystems for a TTRPG is little more than to say "it would be nice, hard to do, totally something we can do, we just haven't got around to it yet this decade, and it would definitely involve a completely separate "mini"-game revolving around lovely huge economy management spreadsheets WHICH SOME PLAYERS JUST LIKE OK". If you could even get that out of them.

Anyway, point is, this isn't really last decades argument, it's last year's argument. People should remember this stuff.

[Lokey]

Let's see, 4th post, Ancient History voices the same concern.

Even if it's as bad as you say, so what? This isn't pro game-dev, it's important that the sub-systems are elegant at each level of detail supported and the system doesn't fall over and spit out infinities when you substitute orc workers for your kobolds or equip them with common magic items or something. And that each level of detail used does something useful and possibly fun, and to do that you need to dig into math that's a bit more complicated than a stab monster in the face engine that encompasses one die + bonuses and a couple of different situation resolution functions.

[PhoneLobster]

Let's see, 4th post, Ancient History voices the same concern.

AH did a lot of motherhood statements about streamlining and quick and dirty methodology on that thread, while only proposing and digging in defending increasingly complex micro management minutia.

Just keep reading. The actual proposed mechanics are an unfocused meandering spiral into the depths of complexity for no good reason.

[JonSetanta]

In D&D3.PF you chop off a hydra's head by using the sunder action as if the head was a weapon the hydra was wielding. The 3e kraken, octopus, and squid also let you sunder its tentacles, but the pathfinder Cephalopods can't be sundered. So a quick fix to 3e would be treating monster parts as weapons/armor wielded by said monster so dragon wings and manticore tails can be sundered like shields and swords. I could also see grappling be expanded to try and disable certain body parts so you can have a guy grabbing the wyvern's tail so it can't sting the wizard in its clutch.

This right here.

My first character, an AD&D LE Paladin (dark paladin) pried open a Beholder's main eye lid once to prevent the eye rays from blasting the party and himself, while they wailed on the eyeball with impunity.

[Sigil]

In D&D3.PF you chop off a hydra's head by using the sunder action as if the head was a weapon the hydra was wielding. The 3e kraken, octopus, and squid also let you sunder its tentacles, but the pathfinder Cephalopods can't be sundered. So a quick fix to 3e would be treating monster parts as weapons/armor wielded by said monster so dragon wings and manticore tails can be sundered like shields and swords. I could also see grappling be expanded to try and disable certain body parts so you can have a guy grabbing the wyvern's tail so it can't sting the wizard in its clutch.

This right here.

My first character, an AD&D LE Paladin (dark paladin) pried open a Beholder's main eye lid once to prevent the eye rays from blasting the party and himself, while they wailed on the eyeball with impunity.

The first step to that would probably be to take the time to list how what kind and how many (relevant) body parts creatures have (and giving a default template so you don't have to take space to define every humanoid), have a general list of what happens if body parts are damaged (probably in the Condition Summary section of the rules), and call out what benefit any non-standard parts grant so that you know what happens if you damage them. You probably don't want to actually assign hit point values to the parts because then you have a character sheet with lots of little boxes for different damage values, instead add a new (generic) maneuver that you can use to take some sort of penalty to attack and damage to force a fortitude save or have the part be damaged. Maybe a save that fails by 5 or more renders the limb permanently useless (making that line about limbs in regeneration, the spell regenerate, or even low level grafts, useful).

While we're at it rewrite natural attacks, attacks with manufactured weapons, two-weapon fighting, multiweapon fighting, and multiattack to be one set of cohesive rules. That shit comes in second place (right after the 3.5 rules for Rebuke Undead) for rules that are more complicated and consusing than they ought to be.

[Username17]

The "track every kobold" complaint is inherently disingenuous. There is a fundamental difference between having to track every kobold and being able to track every kobold. The first is burden that goes out of control easily. The second is simply potentially useful functionality.

Yes, a large province with big cities in it should abstract itself so you don't track how many coopers there are. But in a zero to hero game the number of grogs working at your compound might be like five rather than fifty thousand or whatever. Being able to track the wages and production of a small enough number of kobolds that you know their names seems like something I would like to do sometimes.

With vassalage and administration and unreliable fantasy censuses, there's plenty of justification for larger domains abstractifying. But it's equally true that in a role playing game, anything could be interesting and important for the story being told. If the action needs to focus in on the staffing and profitability of a single cake shop in Bladereach, the rules should be able to handle that.

That's why having a solid micro foundation is important. Why the game should absolutely be able to tell you how many kobold mouths a farm feeds.

-Username17

[Emerald]

The specific system he saw that traumatized him for life is specifically the one that AH and Frank were making in their specific thread for making one, so even though he is slightly exaggerating (for example, you don't track each kobold separately, you lump all your kobolds in one location together) it is somewhat relevant to the thread.

Having a number for your work hours/production value per kobold then multiplying it by your number of kobolds and then having a similar but different value for your orcs and multiplying that by your number of orcs and adding the totals together...

...that IS tracking it individually. I mean hey you can have a semantics argument demanding that "tracking it individually" also requires individual job assignment or something but AH never got that far.

As for clumping it together, when I suggest "hey maybe you should just have a fixed output for "Kobold Factory"" he explicitly rejected it because "people are going to want to be able to distinguish between an orc with a hammer (Craft (Weaponsmithing) +3) and an Orc Expert 10 (Craft (Weaponsmithing) +20). And you'd really want that distinction if your PC wants to get involved."

I realize it's just one anecdote, but I'm currently running a game wherein the starting premise was "You have three ships, eighty soldiers, and four months' worth of food. The New World is a few weeks' sail thataways. You have until next winter to establish a self-sustaining colony, assuming the pirates, rival kingdom's army, weather, and/or dragons don't do you in first. Good luck." and the system we're using is much closer to the one Frank and AH proposed than to your more abstracted approach. My players insisted that all of their followers be statted out so that they could have, say, ten farmers, twenty sailors, four scouts, ten craftsmen, and so forth instead of one big mass of generic NPCs and so they could train this one as a specialized weaponsmith and that one as an alchemist or whatever.

Further, I worked with them to expand the rules for "background stuff" like professions and languages to include things like coordinating teams of crafters working on ships and strongholds, using monster components for crafting, training to gain weapon proficiencies and languages, and the like so that they had some incentives for taking weeks off from adventuring at a time to micromanage their settlement. The group tracks stuff like downtime training for PCs and daily crafting progress for NPCs on a per-day basis for every character.

Granted, this is only really manageable at all because I've written a bunch of scripts to handle NPC tracking and one of my players worked up some custom Excel character sheets to track their training status, but we went to that effort because the group wanted to get that in-depth about it. This gets to having-to-vs.-being-able-to distinction that Frank made just above: when the PCs are micromanaging the efficiency of farming vs. fishing or hand-picking soldiers to accompany them on a particular trip, they can look at the exact numbers for every NPC, but when they're away from the settlement for two weeks and want a quick summary to just tell them whether their current total income has exceeded their total upkeep while they were gone, I can click a few buttons and get the nice big abstract numbers for those things.

I might not go into quite that depth and stay more abstract if I were coming up with generic realm management rules for general consumption, but the fact remains that there's a segment of the playerbase (whose proportion I could hardly guess at but is probably sizeable, given all the fans of AD&D realm management and engineers with too much time on their hands) that does indeed enjoy Spreadsheets & Dragons play, so the track-every-last-kobold approach isn't inherently traumatizing badwrongfun for everybody.

The first step to that would probably be to take the time to list how what kind and how many (relevant) body parts creatures have (and giving a default template so you don't have to take space to define every humanoid), have a general list of what happens if body parts are damaged (probably in the Condition Summary section of the rules), and call out what benefit any non-standard parts grant so that you know what happens if you damage them. You probably don't want to actually assign hit point values to the parts because then you have a character sheet with lots of little boxes for different damage values, instead add a new (generic) maneuver that you can use to take some sort of penalty to attack and damage to force a fortitude save or have the part be damaged. Maybe a save that fails by 5 or more renders the limb permanently useless (making that line about limbs in regeneration, the spell regenerate, or even low level grafts, useful).

I have some houserules similar to this in the same current campaign mentioned above, sort of a cross between the SWSE condition track and called shots. Every creature has a damage threshold based mostly on Con and HD. Deal more damage to something than its damage threshold and it takes a wound, which inflicts increasing penalties to all rolls and to all stat-derived attributes (AC, DCs, etc., including the wound threshold itself); creatures can take five wounds before being taken out.

You can choose to target a particular body part, in which case you make a normal attack against the target's AC adjusted by the relative size of the limb; making such a called shot can be done as its own separate combat maneuver, or can be substituted in for the extra damage dealt by a crit or precision damage. Instead of actually dealing HP damage (so that making every attack a called shot isn't a no-brainer) you tally up the wounds you would otherwise have dealt to the target and figure out results from there. One effective wound damages the limb for one round (hit a hand, the target can't grab you or hold a weapon; hit a wing, the target can't fly; hit an eye, the target is partially blinded; etc.) and imposes a minor penalty to actions with that body part for a while, or inflicts a minor condition (distracted, shaken, entangled, etc.) for a few rounds. Two effective wounds disables the body part until the target is healed, or inflicts a moderate condition (confused, nauseated, exhausted, etc.) for a few minutes. Three effective wounds destroys the body part permanently until restored by regenerate, remove blindness/deafness, or similar, or inflicts a major condition (paralyzed, pinned, some ability drain, etc.) for a long duration.

(Yes, I know, called shots are too fiddly, true strike wrecks everything, etc. Between various spot fixes and a "Don't be a dick" gentlemen's agreement, it's working for us. It'd need much more thorough design and playtesting for a general audience.)

Also:

While we're at it rewrite natural attacks, attacks with manufactured weapons, two-weapon fighting, multiweapon fighting, and multiattack to be one set of cohesive rules.

Done that too. All multiattack abilities are just "You get one extra attack with [type of weapon], and all attacks this round are at -2", and any Improved or Greater versions of those just reduce the penalty by -1. TWF/MWF affects a manufactured weapon in a non-primary hand, Multiattack affects natural weapons, Flurry of Blows affects unarmed strikes, Rapid Shot affects ranged attacks, and so forth. "Full attack" is just another multiattack ability gained by everyone at +6 BAB that lets you multiattack with any weapon, and that automatically improves from from -2 to -1 at +11 BAB and to -0 at +16 BAB.

So a monk with Flurry of Blows, TWF, and Multiattack (Slam) making a full attack doesn't need to figure out how four separate multiattack rules interact, he just needs to decide whether he wants his attack routine to be -0, -2/-2, -4/-4/-4, -6/-6/-6/-6, or -8/-8/-8/-8/-8 (though if this campaign didn't involve lots of large battles against numerous mooks, it obviously wouldn't be worth it to have or use more than one or maybe two of those abilities); at higher levels, when +16 BAB, Greater Flurry, Greater TWF, and Improved Multiattack come into play, he just gets to choose between -0/-0/-0/-0 or -1/-1/-1/-1/-1, nice and simple.

Again, this could certainly use some tweaking for general consumption, but thus far the "treat all multiattacks like a less sucky Flurry of Blows" approach has seemed to work well enough for us.

And finally:

That shit comes in second place (right after the 3.5 rules for Rebuke Undead) for rules that are more complicated and consusing than they ought to be.

We've similar simplified Turn/Rebuke Undead. When you turn or rebuke, all undead in the area must make a DC 10 + 1/2 effective cleric level + Cha Will save or suffer the following effects for 1 minute based on their HD relative to effective cleric level (and obviously undead aren't inherently immune to [Mind-Affecting] stuff in this campaign):

Turning
Up to level/2: Cowering on a success, destroyed on a failure
Between level/2 and level: Frightened on a success, Panicked on a failure
Greater than level: No effect on a success, Shaken on a failure

Rebuking
Up to level/2: Dominated for the duration on a success, Dominated indefinitely on a failure
Between level/2 and level: Compelled (like suggestion) for the duration on a success, compelled (like geas) indefinitely on a failure
Greater than level: No effect on a success, Charmed on a failure

The CL-based limit for rebuking things applies to all turned or rebuked creatures, regardless of which one you're using and at what level each creature is affected.

[PhoneLobster]

but the fact remains that there's a segment of the playerbase (whose proportion I could hardly guess at but is probably sizeable, given all the fans of AD&D realm management and engineers with too much time on their hands) that does indeed enjoy Spreadsheets & Dragons play, so the track-every-last-kobold approach isn't inherently traumatizing badwrongfun for everybody.

Your claims are so bat shit insane that, frankly, I do not even believe them, at least not in the way you intend.

What your claims look like to me is a bunch of kinda dumb guys with (maybe) some scripting and excel skills SOMETIMES tracking giant piles of irrelevant numbers with the false impression that it means anything and SOMETIMES (fairly often actually) ignoring them and using mind caulk, fairy tea party, and constant flow last minute ass pulled "new rules" to fill the gaps and gloss over the giant gaping issues that arise. It doesn't sound like a remotely reproducible rules set that could ever represent anything other than that one highly specific game with that highly specific group, and I severely doubt if it even represents THAT as accurately as you THINK it does.

If you had anything other than "totally scripts and shit yeah!" you might have a single design decision or principle that could be presented as a means of achieving a single specific desirable game design goal.

You don't have that, instead your methodology IS your only, rather circular, goal, you basically JUST have a bare faced claim that "some players totally like giant spreadsheets".

And people who like giant spreadsheets they are the offensive caricature of TTRPG players most of us have spent decades trying to explain to outsiders isn't really a thing. It is literally a joke and a slur, NOT a believable or valuable minority of the hobby.

[Blade]

You might have a point in that probably very few people find it exciting to handle giant spreadsheets and book-keeping in itself (though I'm pretty sure there are still people who do it. I mean, there are people working in accounting and loving it).

However, tie some rewards to intricate mechanisms, and suddenly you have plenty of people who will actually do it.

If your rules only give you x work resources per y people working for you, you'll have players argue that their workers are golems who don't need to sleep and are much better at labor than another player's kobolds. So they'll expect to get more resources per people. And then if you detail this, you'll have players trying to find a way to optimize this, and so on and so forth until you have the giant spreadsheets.

[tussock]

But if you were in charge of D&D, you could *potentially* do anything with it. You are not required to be constrained by the solutions in 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th or 5th edition.

That's what they thought when they were designing fourth edition, and look where that got them.

1) I agree, XP for monsters has big problems for incentivising things that are not murder. But don't ever forget, both the combat system is awesome, and getting better over time is awesome, and both things things still need to work.

2) I agree, morale for everyone, except leaders. PCs are all leaders, so immune to morale, but so is the Orc chief and the Necromancer and all sorts of folks. Your summons and dominated and hirelings meanwhile fail morale checks all the fucking time, just like the monsters do.

3) I disagree, vehicle combat rules that are anything other than indistinguishable from the ordinary movement rules for every other thing in the game are always really stupid, and probably always will be. PCs and Otyughs don't actually change direction simultaneously, and we don't care about that either, adding rules just makes it worse. Giving them an over-large base size and having squeezing rules basically does work though. Wagons can have a size of their turning radius and it basically works.

4) I agree, at some point there are too many Orcs and too many townsmen and we break out the company combat system, with 10 minute turns and quarter-acre squares and we find out how many people survived. Like morale, results don't apply to leaders.

5) I agree, at some point the numbers of Orcs and armies are far too fucking big for that turns bullshit and you switch to your days and 1-mile hexes for playing at generals, and then to seasons and 20-mile hexes for playing at kings. Or we don't, because it's difficult to stick with the appropriate levels of abstraction, which are very abstract indeed.

The further arguments here about how much of the big scale stuff you can see in the small scale stuff is interesting. PCs have to carry food, on a personal level, so having the big scales output things that can potentially be further resolved, like the availability of food, or the chance of plague, will often find a use. Pushing data up scales you have to be much tighter with. You don't want millions of personal-scale operations to actually have an effect on the larger scales or someone might try to do it, and that would be bad, but maybe they could give a small bonus to the cavalry charge.


6) I disagree, boss monsters are a bullshit concept in D&D because today's boss must function as tomorrow's soldier and the final act's mook. Having fiddly shit tied to any of them is wrong and sticking it only on the highest level stuff always ends in disaster, like 4e with it's epic solos that never ended.

7) I disagree. Just let the killing blow do whatever the fuck you want, death, stun, disarm, whatever, at that point we know you deserve it. Rules for stealing weapons and stuff are interesting if you have no weapon, but have to be a very bad idea compared to having a weapon in the first place or people spam that instead, or you limit it and then people do interesting things for a few rounds and then spam even more boring stuff, like 4e, and fuck 4e.

8) I agree, the Wizard class should be split up. At least into five parts, with not so much overlap, and probably some variety of spell tracking methods now that there's more than one. Having said that, they also need a huge amount of remaining overlap so we don't write five versions of the same fucking spell, that section of the book is too big already. Just narrower Wizards, please.

9) I am on the fence. People really do like their Fighters getting their magic through magic items, and that being a bit of a surprise as to what they actually end up with. I also think the rules for Fighters actually getting those items can totally be in the DMG, rather than the table of Fighter class features. Still, swapping into being a Wizard at some point is good for everyone, and the rules for that should work.

10) I disagree about all possible social influence rules. I think characters of various levels and classes should just have a standard size army and domain they can control and either they get it by summoning demons or charming basilisks or subduing lizardmen or asking the king or whatever the fuck, the limit is always the same. Same for wealth and other forms of character power, frees up the game to just give stuff out in ways that make sense in the world if you can find it in your class features or adventure modules or con the DM, I don't even need to care.

Also, in general, I'd prefer general rules that apply to a bunch of situations. Possession by a ghost will work like possession by a fiend (for example). As much as possible, the various systems that I've laid out will share an anatomy so it isn't hard to figure out how we got to our final results.

You have to watch that though, there's the whole foolish consistency thing to be aware of. To some extent, the rules for turning into a bear in combat need to be really different to the rules for travelling as a bear overland or summoning a bear to fight or having a bear companion. 3.0 had the idea that a bear was a bear, but it turns out some of those things are very, very powerful, and you need to not do that with them.

Possession and domination in general should be a thing that happens with morale failure, which leaders are immune to, and PCs are of course all leaders. That solves all sorts of potential problems before they even show up. Turning the PC into a frog is hilarious, telling them they now are best friends with the Vampire is not, but having their henchmen all go turncoat on them totally is hilarious again. Ditto, you can't charm Jabba the Hutt, or Greedo of the MacGuffin, it just doesn't work.

[deaddmwalking]

6) I disagree, boss monsters are a bullshit concept in D&D because today's boss must function as tomorrow's soldier and the final act's mook. Having fiddly shit tied to any of them is wrong and sticking it only on the highest level stuff always ends in disaster, like 4e with it's epic solos that never ended.

I wanted to respond to this because my intention was not clear. I don't think there needs to be a divide between 'regular monster' and 'boss monster', so this would be a 'universal system'. A manticore and a dragon both have wings, so they'd both be vulnerable to having their wings targeted by some type of special attack. At the same level you're fighting great-wyrm dragons, you can one-shot the manticore, so you don't have much reason to focus on reducing it's capabilities piece by piece. So while you could, you probably wouldn't. On the other hand, at the level where you consider a handful of orcs a challenge, the manticore's enhanced mobility is likely to be a problem. Instead of shooting it 200 times until it dies, I'd rather players had the option of 'shooting the wings 3 times' and then running up and attacking it in melee.

You're free to disagree, of course, but I like that you could approach the same encounter in different ways - either focusing on reducing the monster to 0 hit points through normal attacks as fast as possible OR reducing it's effectiveness through less direct attacks.

At least, I think I'd like that in the abstract. Implementation does strike me as difficult, but I like the ideas presented that it would require some type of Resistance Check by the creature and wouldn't directly interact with the hit point system.

[momothefiddler]

I realize it's just one anecdote, but I'm currently running a game wherein the starting premise was "You have three ships, eighty soldiers, and four months' worth of food. The New World is a few weeks' sail thataways. You have until next winter to establish a self-sustaining colony, assuming the pirates, rival kingdom's army, weather, and/or dragons don't do you in first. Good luck." and the system we're using is much closer to the one Frank and AH proposed than to your more abstracted approach. My players insisted that all of their followers be statted out so that they could have, say, ten farmers, twenty sailors, four scouts, ten craftsmen, and so forth instead of one big mass of generic NPCs and so they could train this one as a specialized weaponsmith and that one as an alchemist or whatever.

This (and other parts of the post) reminded me of this game, which was tons of fun. I don't still have the minecraft server where I built our valley and all the buildings I planned out (I do still have this screencap) but I do still have our little town's charter that I wrote up, and that we argued about for a delightful amount of time, and I have the revised version after arguing, and I have the spreadsheet with all our craftsfolk and soldiers and such, which were few enough that they were tracked individually (to the point where I traded Prak my two starting fighters for their one starting crafter).

...Which is where I was going with this. We plotted out our small people to differing levels of detail (some fighters got a nationality and a weapon, some crafters got nothing but a name, the steward was pretty vague at first and got fleshed out in play, the carpenter and mason were in love...). Similarly, elsewhere in the spreadsheet I have everyone's research labs, which also had varying levels of detail. It's just really nice that that can vary across players within a party, as well as across parties in different games.

Man, that game was real fun. I bet yours is too.

[Kaelik]

Instead of shooting it 200 times until it dies, I'd rather players had the option of 'shooting the wings 3 times' and then running up and attacking it in melee.

You're free to disagree, of course, but I like that you could approach the same encounter in different ways - either focusing on reducing the monster to 0 hit points through normal attacks as fast as possible OR reducing it's effectiveness through less direct attacks.

At least, I think I'd like that in the abstract. Implementation does strike me as difficult, but I like the ideas presented that it would require some type of Resistance Check by the creature and wouldn't directly interact with the hit point system.

It sure looked like you wanted to replace everything with hitpoint damage. And that's a really common problem, but honestly, implementation wouldn't even be very hard at all, since it has already been implemented in 3.5:

"A winged creature can be tripped, and if it is, it falls as if it didn’t maintain its minimum forward speed."

And you can totally throw bolas at it, or take a feat that lets you make trip checks with your bow at range.

And yes, that feat sucks, because it requires 5 other feats and has a BAB of +12 as a requirement and then gives you a penalty to trip checks you were never going to win against a Dragon anyway. And it interacts with the flying rules, which are terrible.

But since you already want to redo feats (and "can trip people with a bow from 1000ft" is a decent small feat) and you really have to to redo flying rules for your system to not have all the same flaws as 3.5 as soon as flying comes online, and you want to redo trips and/or the MM so that people have a non zero chance of ever tripping monsters without being a tripstar who commits weapon, all feats, and class levels into just that one tripping thing, fixing the other problems you need to fix automatically fixes the problem with people not being able to trip manticores out of the sky.

[Emerald]

What your claims look like to me is a bunch of kinda dumb guys with (maybe) some scripting and excel skills SOMETIMES tracking giant piles of irrelevant numbers with the false impression that it means anything and SOMETIMES (fairly often actually) ignoring them and using mind caulk, fairy tea party, and constant flow last minute ass pulled "new rules" to fill the gaps and gloss over the giant gaping issues that arise. It doesn't sound like a remotely reproducible rules set that could ever represent anything other than that one highly specific game with that highly specific group, and I severely doubt if it even represents THAT as accurately as you THINK it does.

If you had anything other than "totally scripts and shit yeah!" you might have a single design decision or principle that could be presented as a means of achieving a single specific desirable game design goal.

I threw in the several variations on "But this might not work for other groups" to stave off the inevitable "But that only works for your group, no real gamers like Spreadsheets & Dragons!" I didn't expect to see a "But you're delusional, it doesn't even work for your group!" Well done, sir.

No, there are no "new rules this session" or asspulls, everything was worked out and written down before the campaign and then tweaked by mutual agreement through the first few sessions as we saw what worked and what didn't. No, there's no reliance on mind caulk or MTP (at least, no more than 3e usually requires for its edge cases), just a difference in level of detail between "Okay, we're gonna have three farmers work on the consecrated farm for the double income, have another three farmers work on the normal farms, and train up the rest from basic to expert farming proficiency and rotate them out after two weeks to train the initial farmers; we'll have half the laborers go collect lumber for the half of our craftsmen who are building our warships while the other half of the craftsmen work on making armor for the soldiers and the other half of the laborers train up in crafting so we can speed up our ship production in time for the raid" versus "We'll be gone for two months, just put all the farmers on food duty, all the laborers on lumber duty, and all the craftsmen on ship duty." The downtime rules in general are plenty reproducible, it's just the specific details that don't generalize (for instance, the setting is an Iron Age one so there's no Crossbows or Plate Armor proficiency, so that would have to be written up to use the system in a generic game).

As far as design principles go, I mentioned one already, that downtime should take a good amount of in-game time but provide enough mechanical benefit that players are incentivized to spend lots of non-adventuring time at the settlement. Other design principles included the fact that this game would be more of a hexcrawl/exploration game, so survival mechanics, weather, languages, and the like were expanded and mechanics that let you subvert that (like create water being low-level or there being lots of low-level sources of flight and teleportation) were removed or modified; that most combats would be against large groups of weaker foes instead of boss monsters, so anti-mook mechanics (like multiattacks and turn undead) were streamlined and handed out more freely; and that the setting is Iron Age and low wealth so stuff PCs usually get from magic items was made mostly inherent or was condensed into a few signature items, and monetary wealth comes in the form of favors, rare materials, and the like more than actual coinage. Just because I didn't mention guiding principles before doesn't mean we didn't have any.

You don't have that, instead your methodology IS your only, rather circular, goal, you basically JUST have a bare faced claim that "some players totally like giant spreadsheets".

And people who like giant spreadsheets they are the offensive caricature of TTRPG players most of us have spent decades trying to explain to outsiders isn't really a thing. It is literally a joke and a slur, NOT a believable or valuable minority of the hobby.

My current group consists of three software developers, a business analyst (the spreadsheet guy), a sysadmin, a DBA, and a nurse. My last group was two software developers, an EE, an accountant, and an HR guy. My two college groups consisted of five computer science majors, four chem majors, and a physics major between them. Of the four groups various friends of mine are playing in at the moment, only one of them doesn't have a computer-and-math-people majority, and even then it's almost half and half.

I've yet to play with a single gamer who didn't fit the spreadsheet fanatic sterotype to some extent, which makes sense given that D&D is a game of fiddly math, complexity, tons of tables, and system mastery. Yes, there are plenty of people who are allergic to spreadsheets, can never remember what goes into calculating an attack bonus, and have trouble adding up the result of 2d6+5, but those are no more the majority than the spreadsheet types are--and the spreadsheet types are far more likely to gravitate to detailed mass combat, realm management, and similar subsystems, as opposed to just having the DM handwave it all in the background, so catering to the spreadsheet demographic with those subsystems makes sense.

...Which is where I was going with this. We plotted out our small people to differing levels of detail (some fighters got a nationality and a weapon, some crafters got nothing but a name, the steward was pretty vague at first and got fleshed out in play, the carpenter and mason were in love...). Similarly, elsewhere in the spreadsheet I have everyone's research labs, which also had varying levels of detail. It's just really nice that that can vary across players within a party, as well as across parties in different games.

Man, that game was real fun. I bet yours is too.

Yep. We're two in-game years and six or seven hilarious PC deaths tragic PC deaths replacement PCs into the game, with the settlement at almost three hundred people and growing, and the whole group is having a grand ol' time.