The Gap in the Armor of Baldur’s Gate and 5e
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[1] a world in which you have half-demons, dragons, vampires, magic spells, mindflaying dimension-traversing humanoids with tentacle mouths, people with magic artifacts embedded in them and primed to explode etc
I'm pretty sure the author is aware of this perception.
He is a professor of pre-modern military history, and students come into his classes thinking that pre-modern European battles were at least a little bit like the things they see in 300, or LotR, or D&D games, when in fact they get more wrong than right.
Also, the fact that a setting is fantasy is not carte-blanche for being unrealistic. We could e.g. critique characters as acting against their motivation if they do so, we don't just say "There are dragons so who cares if someone just randomly decides to hit themselves in the head with a hammer"
But a teacher complained he had to explain you keep moving laterally if you run off a cliff instead of falling straight down.
The whole Schroedingers cat thing and about state collapsing to “reality” under observation as manifest when the coyote, suspended in mid air, looks down and THEN a suddenly falls.
I bet there’s a lecture buried in that phenomenon somewhere. IANAQM.
But it has often represented itself as more than that.
I guess as a tabletop RPG you can run some sort of hyperrealistic variant of D&D, but at its core it's got a few to many talking swords for that sort of thing.
Although what breaks immersion varies. Someone who's at most shot a few cans or a deer won't perhaps question a bad guy being sent flying backwards from a revolver shot, a war veteran might see this as jarring and unrealistic.
I mean the main trailer artwork has Laezel bearing a greatsword with a kind of semicircular notch in the blade with a hook on it like you could use it as a giant tin opener. Hopefully noone needs to be told that's unrealistic when she herself looks like some sort of psychopathic grinch knight.
I believe his points on historical accuracy are actually more about physics consistency although he does explain some of the confusion away with the mistaken Victorian historical assumptions.
The other issue is that this kind of fantasy is often the way by which people learn about history. This means that when fantasy engages in very ahistorical treatments of things with potential historical analogues, people will assume that the fantasy treatment is realistic. This definitely applies to armor--people will look at the armor types in a fantasy game and assume they're at least broadly reflective of how armor in Medieval Europe worked, since it's not overtly coded in fantasy unless it's explicitly dragonskin or something like that. So when DnD is treating leather in a completely different way from how it normally works... that's a constant canard that historians are continuously having to try to rebut (much like myths about full plate meaningfully restricting movement).
[1] Just to remind you, studded leather is a misinterpretation of images depicting something like brigandine armor. In brigandine, the apparent studs have value--they're the attachment points for metal plates. But the entire point of studded leather as an in-universe armor type is that it doesn't contain these metal plates, so the studs serve no purpose.
It makes no sense, and it doesn't have to. It's all just for fun. D&D is a huge mishmash of all the ancient mythologies and folk tales, plus a bunch of modern ones invented just for the game.
Sometimes it can be fun to get into the medieval mindset and have the rules reinforce their erroneous beliefs (maybe bloodletting is treated as a useful treatment for diseases, for example). But in this case, if the armor types are based on a misunderstanding in the Victorian era, I don't really see the fun in pretending that these other types of armor both exist and would be useful.
Now sure, some changes are nice (frenzy barb becoming decent), but mostly I find it to make things more boring. But luckily for larian, I'm very much not your average gamer.
Though, no computer games use it (unless you squint really hard at ES1 & ES2)
FWIW, my group is currently playing Free League's Alien, which is very much not crunchy.
My group is currently playing Fantasy Craft, which has a bit too much crunch for us. For the past 2 months I've had an idea for overhauling the battle system mulling around in my head.
https://illwiki.com/dom5/dominions-random-number
Edit: The genre is more of a strategy game than an RPG.
If your best value is 6, the result is "success with nothing bad". If it's 4-5, the result is "success with a consequence". If it's 3 or lower, the result is "failed with a consequence".
Special-cases: a 0d6 dice-pool is rolled by rolling 2d6 and picking the worst value. And if two (or more) of your dice come up as 6, it's "success with an extra benefit".
5e is the best introductory system and the best system for a night of drinking though. Less thought, more play.
BG3 is even more introductory. It's an opening to d&d for new players and a soft, super fun system for old players. Source: I'm loving bg3.
(To continue the sweaty nerd trend of this thread:) No, not even close. 5e is somehow both bloated and complex while being simultaneously being too constrained in what actions you can take for anyone not familiar with it, and mostly gets by via name recognition and becoming synonymous with "TTRPG" these days.
There's tons of PBTA games and similar that are much simpler for people to pick up in a single night of gaming, ones where all of your character's creation and rules fit on a total of maybe 4 pages. My current favorite is Monster of the Week, but there are lots of other good ones out there.
I guess maybe when I said it was the best introductory, I also included (in my head) the massive online following for 5e, making the meta of gaming a little easier for people with no experience with table tops.
"Hey kid, ever hear a Hero System?"
FIRST HITS ALWAYS FREE. That's how they sold it to me as an undergrad many moons ago.
Actually all the hits are free now, because Hero Designer and all the books are incidental to find on the interwebs, because who gives a shit? The hell is Hero System? Just think of the nerd cred you get when you reveal you not only play TTRPGs on the weekend, but you play a dead and forgotten one.
"Phoenix Command is essentially a realistic wound ballistics simulator created from the authors' computer models and presented as tabular data in book form."
cRPGs are interesting because you get less of that color but have the capacity to actually do all kinds of calculations - get rid of a single HP value and track body parts individually, process damage based on location, use complex non-linear calculations, all are orders of magnitude less work than the video effects will run. I think we’ll see more divergence there between what humans enjoy running versus playing if they don’t have to do the math.
For example, an Arcane Trickster throwing up a reaction 'shield' spell doesn't cause the hit to miss either, it just was blocked(as it added 5 to AC).
The thing that always brings me back to Hero - aside from the infinite flexibility - is the fact that the mechanics separate Accuracy and Penetration. DND in all its incarnations always bugged the hell out of me because of how - *HOW* - a piece of steel means I SOMEHOW MISSED. In Hero, and in all "Armor as Soak" system mechanics, you hit, then the effect has to penetrate.
Good Lord why is this so hard to find in an RPG system.
Anyways, over the . . decades . . I've formulated a bucket list of extreme streamlining for Hero, since newer players aren't super keen on all the "math"[1]. And also, honestly, some of the mechanics beg for streamlining[2]. But Hero Lite, as I've been calling it, has been pretty damn sweet, even if my wife sometimes calls it a "simulator for bleeding to death". So, like real life, then.
And the players just need to track their STRONG (STR/BODY), STAMINA (END/STUN), and how many ACTIONS they got left. We use poker chips. Also sometimes someone's foot gets blown off. I have index cards for that, and also for stuff like "Grenades You Brewed Up in the Pool Supply Store".
Anyway, need to get ready for tonight's Star Wars HERO game. Far more important than mechanics is story, character, and tone. And yknow, everyone has fun, that's all that matters.
[1] For pete's sake it's not a lot of math. It's arithmetic with fractions. Is that hard?
[2] STUN and ENDURANCE have no business being two different attributes. Just use STUN, halve ENDURANCE costs, and call the stat STAMINA.
I always thought of DND AC as a combination of accuracy and effect. High AC might just mean you get hit but it doesn't do anything, or it could mean you dodge everything, or the attacker whiffs, or some other intervention happened. I've seen DMs do similar.
You want it more complicated, home brew some rules to make it more complicated, right?
I for one don't mind mathy/complicated games, but, as you say, fun should reign.
But ok, I don't want to sound like an ignoramus. I get it[1]. It changes the game pretty fundamentally, and totally throws levelled systems under a bus.
Dig it: if your soak and "hit points" go up consistently, it's not going to be long before a lot of damage sources are just meaningless. That cuts into the drama of the game, it actually makes it a different genre; worth noting here that Hero started out as Champions . . a superhero game.
Now my counterargument to THAT - and yes, I am arguing with myself, it's Friday - is that some of the boss monsters in the DND5 module I ran for 4th level PCs had over 200 HP. Two Hundred God Damn Hit Points We're Going to Be Here All Night. So, which is more meaningless: doing 11 HP of Magic Missile to a 200 HP behemoth, or doing nothing at all because he's soaking 11 points of damage? Well, by definition the second one. But the first one can get damn boring if the GM lets it turn into a HP counting contest[2].
And a good GM never lets it come to that.
The encounter is never just a flat grid and a monster, it's a lava river, a waterfall, cliffs, flying mounts, a vat of toxic goo, freezing cold, the deaths of friends. There's also a real time component in addition to the game time: at one hour playtime, the players hear a distant army. Two hours, the ork scouts spot them. Three hours, they see the mass of the army. Etc, etc - the point is, the world moves on with or without the PCs, but the path it takes changes with the actions of the players. Gives the players a sense of danger, urgency, and reinforces the suspension of disbelief since the baddies aren't sitting in a cave waiting to be murdered.
[1] And let's be honest, people that want lite games are going to Fate anyway.
[2] Which - if I'm playing - my Bearbarian Druid is going to win, because damn, that build NEVER runs out of hit points.
(I am in the EU btw. No one I know ever considered it "a joke").
I don't doubt there are other, easier, more fun tabletop systems. But a system your friends are playing vs a system you'll have to make new friends in is a comparatively massive bar to entry.
And I'd argue that the feats and spells are largely fine. Sure, there's not dramatic variation but that's because in a simple system there's only so much you can do, and DnD has a spell that mechanically covers every such niche. Combine that with the desire to have some mechanically similar but differing in roleplaying implications, and you've got DnD's spellbook.
Agreed. In practice, if you're shot while wearing a bulletproof vest, the bullet isn't penetrating the armor, but it's still doing concussive damage to your skin and organs-- you can even still die from internal bleeding. This varies by caliber, range, penetrative ability of the round, etc.
For D&D, this would be the difference between being shot by an arrow while wearing plated mail, versus taking a cannonball to the chest. The calculation needs to be "was the attack successful" and the technicalities handwaved away. You take damage from the arrow depending on whether it pierces a gap in the armor. You take damage from the cannonball depending on whether it hits you or misses.
> some developers truly believe that people want to sit around watching other people roll dice and do math for ages.
It's cheap and quick to do any number of calculations in CRPGs, but it's a snorefest when you bring that approach to IRL gatherings after everyone's been drinking. At that point you might as well try to play FATAL.
I'm not aware of any version of D&D where just being bigger makes you harder to hit. In the current (5th edition), I believe size has no effect on chance to hit. In some earlier editions, being bigger makes you easier to hit, and being smaller makes you harder to hit (e.g. 3rd edition: https://www.d20srd.org/srd/combat/combatStatistics.htm).
Generally I've had DM's that understand your characters AC: if you have high AC because you're quick and nimble, it would be some sort of dodge, but if you have high AC because you're huge and wear plate armor, the attack "miss" is treated as if an arrow simply bounced off your armor.
But yeah, the system is generally broken. That's sort of why the devs of Baldurs Gate 3 had to homebrew a lot of fixes, and in general just gave up on a lot of mechanics and can't really implement anything past level 12.
The real nonsensical part of the D&D system is hit points. Someone hits you in the face, and you take "damage" and lose hit points. As long as you have some HP left, this "damage" is completely harmless and does not affect your ability to fight. If you are a high-level character, you can be punched in the face many times with no adverse consequences. Until you reach 0 HP, which suddenly makes you unable to take any action.
I remember hearing that the AC/HP system was originally borrowed from some miniature wargame involving ironclad warships. It definitely makes more sense in that context than with living creatures.
Also, if I remember correctly, the class/level system was the part of D&D that was considered obsolete in the 90s. Back then, almost everyone was using a system where you developed each skill and ability independently. Then 3e resurrected D&D and classes and levels became popular again.