Rpgs are Silly but still always awesome

[Valdain the King]

Has anyone ever wondered why rpgs seem to never get the realistic logistics right on combat?

Take dungeons and dragons for example. Strength will never Ever be the most important statistic for combat and meleers. It should still provide damage but to hit? Really? Endurance and dexterity should be the most important skills for a fighter. You need dexterity to act fast and not get hit. You need endurance to take hits and provided by that-be given a feint. Strength is only useful if you are brawling/grappling.

For characters that use bows and other ranged weapons, to hit and concentration matters moreso than dexterity. Dexterity is only useful when ranged versus other ranged. A mediocre amount of dex suffices. Concentration is really a great statistic although its in like no games.

 

Mages and spellcasters should stay the same-intelligence and maybe concentration as just mentioned.

 

Rogues really need just some dexterity and some strength makes them deadly

 

I am not saying that spiderweb did things wrong-the very statement provides jeff a checkerboard match with me with a diet pepsi (I Don't like diet and I suck at checkers)

What I am saying is what does strength ever even do other than provide a bit more force to stab? And what does dexterity do other than provide you to flip like Orlando Bloom at the dance club in moria?

If you have dexterity, then you can evade attacks and move faster, thus attacking more in melee. Just strength wont get you far.

 

The 2nd part of argument is endurance. Believe or not, if you can stay around for a longer fight and the enemy gets tired, they are screwed. Its like that guy with the marbles in his mouth-Sylvester Calzone. He gets in fights with people that are tough. He stays around and right when they start getting tired, he warms up and unleashes war on them. It doesn't always work, but if your skills are similar you can take them down. Endurance should get mentioned with this.

 

I would say the stats to use for a fighter should in lowest to highest order-Strength, endurance, dexterity

The stats for an archer in lowest to highest order should be Concentration, Strength, Dexterity

Spellcaster-Concentration, Intelligence, ?

 

I'll always love rpgs games make me laugh sometimes when I see an item+2 strength or +3 dexterity. Since I was a fighter I took the strength. If this was real life I would take dexterity. Or actually if this was real life I would take a nice big bowl of ice cream.

[Xaiya]

I'll always love rpgs games make me laugh sometimes when I see an item+2 strength or +3 dexterity. Since I was a fighter I took the strength. If this was real life I would take dexterity. Or actually if this was real life I would take a nice big bowl of ice cream.

I'm pretty sure a magic item that boosts your skills for real would be worth far more than a bowl of ice cream.

[Valdain the King]

It depends. Ice cream is a necessity for me, a favorite past-time, a sport, whatever ya call it. Im still 130 pounds so I guess something's to give. If you could give stealth as a skill on item, I'd take that. Rogue in real life much harder than in the games. The save/load part is not functioning yet.

[A less presumptuous name.]

snip

 

Have you heard of Dex fighters?

[Xaiya]

It depends. Ice cream is a necessity for me, a favorite past-time, a sport, whatever ya call it. Im still 130 pounds so I guess something's to give. If you could give stealth as a skill on item, I'd take that. Rogue in real life much harder than in the games. The save/load part is not functioning yet.

yeah, but you could probably sell the magic item and be set on ice cream for a while, if not for life. Plus with plenty of root beer and coffee to go with it. I've discovered that rootbeer floats with a hint of coffee is quite good.

 

And don't true roguelikes have permadeath anyways? If they have save/load, it's to take a break for later continuation.

[Alorael at Large]

As soon as anyone starts bringing up realism in combat I start questioning. Are you experienced in combat styles? I'm dubious.

 

The bigger problem, to me, seems to be that combat really relies on things that are much more interrelated than RPG stats make them. Swords are heavy; you have to be strong to maneuver them with agility. But you also have to be agile so you're not just bashing (that works, but I get the impression that good swordsmanship involves a little more footwork and careful maneuvering than that). And you need endurance to keep doing it. Archery requires strength; to use a longbow requires really impressive strength. But more than that, it requires skill. You can wave a sword around and hit people if you're strong and can treat it like a slightly sharper club, but if you don't know what you're doing with a bow you can't launch an arrow at all. From talking to archers, nimbleness isn't really a big thing at all beyond having decent control over your fingers and arms.

 

Rogues aren't really something that has historically worked in combat. You don't want to bring a knife to a sword fight.

 

Any discussion of what stats are "really" useful for magic are crazy. There is no such thing as magic. Any game with magic is free to make up its own system; I've seen magic that runs on body fat, magic that just runs on rote memorization, magic that's a talent like any other and can be mastered by idiot savants but perplex very smart people, and a dozen other systems. Intelligence is an artifact of D&D, which is probably grabbing it from balance and the old image of the white-bearded wise wizard.

 

—Alorael, who doesn't particularly need more dexterity or more strength in his life. Either would be nice; neither would actually do much for him. Intelligence, though, can never go awry.

[Edgwyn]

In AD&D 1st Ed, a good fighter had str as their highest skill, but did not neglect Dex and Con. Each characteristic in AD&D represented far more things then just one attribute. One roll of the dice in combat represented a full minute of thrust parry counter thrust dodge etc, and in all of that time, you (if you rolled high enough) got to roll one die for damage. And then, the results could mean different things depending on who you were hitting. For example, rolling an 8 for damage with a long sword (the max) against a typical first level character or monster equated to a successful strike that penetrated the chest cavity or skull resulting in quick death. Against a typical tenth level character or monster, that same 8 damage represented a moderate laceration of a non-vital area, but get enough of them and the creature or person would die of a death of a thousand cuts. A character with high constitution and a high level, therefore high hit points cannot physically take more damage than a blue whale, they have just become far more adept at avoiding damage. The different attributes represent far more than just their titles and game balance is far more important than conceptual consistency,

 

One of the things that we all tend to forget when trying to imagine what fantasy combat is like is that the rules assume that most people are wearing some sort of armor or have unnaturally tough skin. One could certainly program a CRPG where high strength helps your blows penetrate the armor of an opponent, high dec/agility helps you hit the opponent more often, having a low endurance results in your blows getting weaker the longer that a combat lasts, high strength allows you to hit more often because you can more your sword faster, etc, but you would have to hide all of that mechanics from most players, because it would be just too darn complicated to track and deal with. The general conventions that get used for determining if a attack hits are greatly simplified, but a lot more fun than real life.

[Student of Trinity]

D&D games were never intended to be remotely realistic, but just to be playable games that didn't feel too completely unrealistic. I spent a while once trying to re-jigger the D&D system and in the end found only one substantial thing I really wanted to change.

 

The basic feature of this system, I decided, was that combat had two steps: hitting and damaging. I decided that the two-step system was really just there for pacing. The hit point system meant that, except at very low experience levels, damage got doled out in small enough bites that killing something — or being killed — became a story that developed instead of a sudden event. Adding the separate roll to hit, before doing damage, added a new layer of pacing, by potentially making each bit of damage into the satisfying culmination of several rounds of missing.

 

There were some obvious adaptations one could make to that kind of system. Some game systems compressed the two layers into one, with a single roll (possibly of many dice at once) determining how much damage was done each round. Somehow these systems seemed to make combat less exciting. Most rounds were about the same and things were too predictable. Some other game systems added a third layer by incorporating some kind of 'critical hits' that would sometimes do much more damage. Some people really liked that kind of thing, but I always felt it made combat a bit too unpredictable. When too much can happen too fast, there's less opportunity to react to events, and this makes the game less of a story and more of a game of chance. So the two-step system seemed basically good, to me.

 

The two-step system let you distinguish different kinds of opponent; things could be tough by being hard to hit, or by having a lot of hit points, or by doing a lot of damage themselves. You could make agile little critters and big clumsy oafs. For a few kinds of fights you could take the die-rolls seriously as realistic representation of individual swings. D&D combat was pretty darn accurate, for example, at simulating the attempt to swat a fly: give the fly a good armor class, because it's so hard to hit the pesky thing, and just enough hit points that if you were unlucky it might survive a hit. D&D combat would also be pretty direct in representing the chopping down of a tree. Sometimes you might miss your aim with the axe and fail to deepen your main cut, so hitting might not be automatic, but it would be probable and you could expect to slowly wear the tree down.

 

Other than cases like that, though, D&D combat only really made sense as a pretty abstract representation of events. You could interpret it into making sense, but you might have to work at it.

[Lilith]

gary gygax is on the record as saying that his specific inspiration for the way hit points worked in D&D was the swordfights in errol flynn movies. for most of the fight neither combatant seriously injured the other but you could tell that while both of them were getting worn down over the course of the fight, one of them was gradually getting an advantage over the other until finally the winner struck a decisive blow

 

so yeah, basically it's a pacing mechanic

[Questionably Legal]

This.

 

http://www.batoto.net/read/_/191673/the-gamer_v1_ch1_by_bap-scans

 

 

 

 

 

Check it out. It's awesome, and it liiustrates pretty well that combat in games is so wildly unrealistic that even comic characters think it's crazy.