Quote from: jhkim;1146253I agree with Omega that D&D doesn't have any fundamental problem with disabilities such as limb loss. It's handled in other games similar to D&D. To be fair, D&D does tend to assume that wounds don't affect a character's ability at all -- but that's not absolute. There have been special case rules for limb loss, as Omega notes.

There is the issue that there is no mechanic for balancing characters who have any sort of flaws or weaknesses at character generation time. Many games like Savage Worlds, Unisystem, and GURPS have character flaws that give points to gain other benefits in character creation. But I don't think that is fundamentally built into the system. I've seen plenty of optional rules for adding character flaws into various games including D&D.

1: re:wounds. In AD&D if your character goes to zero or negative HP they start bleeding out and even if revived will be a wreck unable to do much at all till they've had alot of bed rest.

2: 2e D&D introduced some flaws and disabilities in one of the books, Skills & Powers has some for example that can be taken at chargen. Nothing serious though, but it provides a foundation of examples.

Humans are really fragile. Hitting them with swords, axes and arrows either kills them or breaks them, often quite badly.

But D&D has always been about "fantasy superheroes", certainly after 5th level even in the TSR editions.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee;1146303In practice what they do should leave them handicapped sooner than later.

AKA, RuneQuest.

Or Warhammer once your Fate points run out.

I feel like people are using the one example ("I don't like this one implementation of combat wheelchairs in D&D") as a wedge to argue against *all* character disabilities - when that's something that's been in gaming for decades, with lots of fun play. In general, it seems like some people are talking as if (a) disabled PCs are some theoretical new possibility that is only possible now with 2020 liberal activism, and (b) disabled characters are so weak that the GM has to twist his adventures to make them even easier.

Both of those assumptions are nonsense. The example I had of a PC in a wheelchair was from a HERO campaign I ran in 1989. Having character flaws including disabilities might be rare in D&D, but it's been built into many other RPG systems for decades. HERO was one of the first systems to feature this, but it's in tons of other systems since then - World of Darkness, Deadlands, Savage Worlds, and dozens of others. It's certainly not some new invention by millennials.

Further, in those systems, character flaws don't mean the PC is weak -- nor that the GM coddles the players by making things easy for them. In the 1989 HERO campaign, included superpowers, but it was closer to Watchmen than Superfriends. The PC in question (codenamed "Current") was shot through the chest at point-blank range, which was how he ended up in a wheelchair. This happened in the second half of the campaign when we were escalating up to a climactic conflict that was resolved using nuclear weapons. The PCs were all superpowered badasses, including Current, and they were dealing with serious and deadly foes, and I never pulled my punches.

In these games, if a PC has a major flaw, I rarely worry that they're too weak. More often, I'm concerned that they are overly powerful in their field from being highly specialized. As another example, I have twice played a PC who as a drunken master kung fu specialist -- combined with alcoholism. That was a major flaw and there were a lot of situations where he wasn't much help, but he was an extremely powerful martial artist who far outshone the others in combat. I'm pretty sure the GMs had to beef up the opposition after seeing me in action.

Quote from: jhkim;1146292I did read your posts, and I replied to you with questions about your campaign world in Post #120.

Quote from: SHARK;1146298Well, "It's Possible"--there could be a "blind" Warlock, or a handicapped Druid in the campaign, somewhere--though it certainly isn't probable. I mentioned that I would review such characters--whether NPC's or Player Characters--on an individual, case by case basis. If a "Blind" Warlock can use a spell at will to see perfectly well, well, then they aren't really blind then, are they? The same thing goes for a shape-changing Druid. It seems to me such particular examples would likely work better if such characters were non-disabled for whatever length of their career, and then became disabled, from which such a character could then take various steps and actions to mitigate their disabled condition. However, someone born with a severe handicap is not likely to become some kind of adventurer.

Beyond such "corner cases" the reality remains that severely handicapped characters would be weak and helpless, and pose as a distinct liability to any adventuring team. In general, most handicapped characters have problems that make them entirely unsuitable for a career as an adventurer.

In general, most characters aren't suited for life as an adventurer, just like most people in the real world aren't cut out to be on a Navy SEAL team. They just don't have the necessary qualifications, nor are they willing to risk their lives to that degree. Hell, most people in the military aren't suitable for being on a Navy SEAL team - they are a highly elite force. In a fantasy world, it's extremely rare for anyone to be a wizard or sorcerer or paladin. But player characters regularly are.

In almost all RPGs, player characters are always "corner cases". A typical peasant or woodcutter character would also be purely a liability to a SEAL team. Further, a shape-shifting druid isn't at all a rare case among PCs. If anything, it's one of the most common character types that I've seen in D&D 5E.

In short, most characters in the game-world are weak - and they would be a liability to a SEAL team. It's the rare exceptional characters who get to be player characters and go on adventures.

Quote from: SHARK;1146302The whole fetishization of disabled characters is pretty weird. No, no special abilities, no compensation. No "Balancing" doodads and special uber powers. My world is harsh and brutal, and handicapped characters experience huge handicaps and problems just with struggling to live a normal life, let alone adventuring. It's stupid. People strapped into fucking wheelchairs are not going out trying to fight monsters. They would be swiftly slaughtered and eaten!

I think you're fundamentally mixing up what is *in-game* and is *out-of-game* -- as if talking tough about how you play your elf-games proves how you're really tough. But that's just Internet tough guy posturing -- especially since you've already admitted that disabled characters like warlocks and druids *are* potentially powerful.

In my D&D world, humans in general are weak and frail compared to dragons. Most humans wouldn't qualify to be on a SEAL team, and even a SEAL team couldn't deal with a dragon without modern weapons. But PCs aren't average humans. When my players create characters, they create heroes who special abilities and rare powers like spell-casting and shape-shifting. That's not fucking coddling them - that's laying out the basis on which I will challenge them. And yes, I do take steps to see that they're balanced.

I don't buy into having character creation be a contest of min-maxing. As GM, I take action so that all the PCs start out on roughly the same footing before I start throwing challenges at them. It's not fetishization or coddling to have characters be roughly balanced at creation time. That's just starting everyone out at the same starting line for the race.

Quote from: Spinachcat;1146330Humans are really fragile.

Except relative to every other animal out there. Humans survive levels of pain and injury that would outright kill other species, recover a lot more quickly than other animals (scar tissue isn't pretty, but it does the job of getting us functional much faster than other species) and our endurance relative to other species is incredible (before we figured out missile weapons we hunted animals by pursuing them at a jog until they dropped dead of exhaustion/overheating).

A broken limb will cause most animals to go into shock and die, but humans survive them easily and even medieval doctors could set bones allowing the injured person to recover. People have survived falls of hundreds and even thousands of feet and in a few case even managed to walk away from it. We invented surgery centuries before we had anesthesia and some humans have managed to perform surgery on themselves and survived. Even losing a hand, foot or eye wasn't necessarily a career ender for violence-related professions.

Hell, we regularly injest poisons for entertainment and because we enjoy the taste and ritually and cosmetically pierce, scarify and tattoo ourselves.

Humans are like the Terminators of the animal kingdom and that's before we add things like armor to improve our resilience and weapons to extend our reach.

Honestly, next time I run a sci-fi game, I'll probably give most alien species +1 to two different attributes, but only humans will get +2 to Endurance. We are just that OP in that category.

Quote from: jhkim;1146335I feel like people are using the one example ("I don't like this one implementation of combat wheelchairs in D&D") as a wedge to argue against *all* character disabilities - when that's something that's been in gaming for decades, with lots of fun play. In general, it seems like some people are talking as if (a) disabled PCs are some theoretical new possibility that is only possible now with 2020 liberal activism, and (b) disabled characters are so weak that the GM has to twist his adventures to make them even easier.

Both of those assumptions are nonsense. The example I had of a PC in a wheelchair was from a HERO campaign I ran in 1989. Having character flaws including disabilities might be rare in D&D, but it's been built into many other RPG systems for decades. HERO was one of the first systems to feature this, but it's in tons of other systems since then - World of Darkness, Deadlands, Savage Worlds, and dozens of others. It's certainly not some new invention by millennials.

Further, in those systems, character flaws don't mean the PC is weak -- nor that the GM coddles the players by making things easy for them. In the 1989 HERO campaign, included superpowers, but it was closer to Watchmen than Superfriends. The PC in question (codenamed "Current") was shot through the chest at point-blank range, which was how he ended up in a wheelchair. This happened in the second half of the campaign when we were escalating up to a climactic conflict that was resolved using nuclear weapons. The PCs were all superpowered badasses, including Current, and they were dealing with serious and deadly foes, and I never pulled my punches.

In these games, if a PC has a major flaw, I rarely worry that they're too weak. More often, I'm concerned that they are overly powerful in their field from being highly specialized. As another example, I have twice played a PC who as a drunken master kung fu specialist -- combined with alcoholism. That was a major flaw and there were a lot of situations where he wasn't much help, but he was an extremely powerful martial artist who far outshone the others in combat. I'm pretty sure the GMs had to beef up the opposition after seeing me in action.




In general, most characters aren't suited for life as an adventurer, just like most people in the real world aren't cut out to be on a Navy SEAL team. They just don't have the necessary qualifications, nor are they willing to risk their lives to that degree. Hell, most people in the military aren't suitable for being on a Navy SEAL team - they are a highly elite force. In a fantasy world, it's extremely rare for anyone to be a wizard or sorcerer or paladin. But player characters regularly are.

In almost all RPGs, player characters are always "corner cases". A typical peasant or woodcutter character would also be purely a liability to a SEAL team. Further, a shape-shifting druid isn't at all a rare case among PCs. If anything, it's one of the most common character types that I've seen in D&D 5E.

In short, most characters in the game-world are weak - and they would be a liability to a SEAL team. It's the rare exceptional characters who get to be player characters and go on adventures.




I think you're fundamentally mixing up what is *in-game* and is *out-of-game* -- as if talking tough about how you play your elf-games proves how you're really tough. But that's just Internet tough guy posturing -- especially since you've already admitted that disabled characters like warlocks and druids *are* potentially powerful.

In my D&D world, humans in general are weak and frail compared to dragons. Most humans wouldn't qualify to be on a SEAL team, and even a SEAL team couldn't deal with a dragon without modern weapons. But PCs aren't average humans. When my players create characters, they create heroes who special abilities and rare powers like spell-casting and shape-shifting. That's not fucking coddling them - that's laying out the basis on which I will challenge them. And yes, I do take steps to see that they're balanced.

I don't buy into having character creation be a contest of min-maxing. As GM, I take action so that all the PCs start out on roughly the same footing before I start throwing challenges at them. It's not fetishization or coddling to have characters be roughly balanced at creation time. That's just starting everyone out at the same starting line for the race.

Greetings!

"Internet Tough Guy" posturing? WTF Jhkim are you babbling about? That doesn't have a damned thing to do with it, dude. As you mentioned, probably most normal people wouldn't make it as Adventurers.

Exactly. If most normal people wouldn't be likely to make it as Adventurers, what would be the likelihood of severely handicapped people making it?

As I mentioned several times now, I have a game world that is distinctly harsh and brutal, and there are not a lot of doodads and tech and whatever around to help severely handicapped characters. Characters that are blind, strapped to wheelchairs, or otherwise suffering from severe handicaps simply do not fit well within an Adventuring team, and would likely die soon and swiftly if they were to even try. Most would never even be accepted into an adventuring team, as the suggestion is ridiculous. Normal adventurers would seek to recruit team members that are physically mobile, rugged, and healthy. Most adventurers do not want to be accompanied by weak, helpless characters that have a myriad of handicaps and limitations. Such handicapped people would most likely be slaughtered swiftly out in the wilderness and eaten by monsters.

Adventuring is a profession of sorts for mobile, strong, and rugged individuals. Not handicapped characters strapped to a wheelchair.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

Quote from: SHARK;1146341Greetings!

"Internet Tough Guy" posturing? WTF Jhkim are you babbling about? That doesn't have a damned thing to do with it, dude. As you mentioned, probably most normal people wouldn't make it as Adventurers.

Exactly. If most normal people wouldn't be likely to make it as Adventurers, what would be the likelihood of severely handicapped people making it?

As I mentioned several times now, I have a game world that is distinctly harsh and brutal, and there are not a lot of doodads and tech and whatever around to help severely handicapped characters. Characters that are blind, strapped to wheelchairs, or otherwise suffering from severe handicaps simply do not fit well within an Adventuring team, and would likely die soon and swiftly if they were to even try. Most would never even be accepted into an adventuring team, as the suggestion is ridiculous. Normal adventurers would seek to recruit team members that are physically mobile, rugged, and healthy. Most adventurers do not want to be accompanied by weak, helpless characters that have a myriad of handicaps and limitations. Such handicapped people would most likely be slaughtered swiftly out in the wilderness and eaten by monsters.

Adventuring is a profession of sorts for mobile, strong, and rugged individuals. Not handicapped characters strapped to a wheelchair.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

Then again, most INT dump stat fighters wouldn't even pass the ASVAB.

Quote from: Spinachcat;1146330Humans are really fragile. Hitting them with swords, axes and arrows either kills them or breaks them, often quite badly.

But D&D has always been about "fantasy superheroes", certainly after 5th level even in the TSR editions.




AKA, RuneQuest.

Or Warhammer once your Fate points run out.

In Pavis a Runequest/Glorantha city there is a tavern called Gimpy's owned by 3 retired peg legged ex-adventurers. No doubt when the Neo-Marxists at Nu-Chaosium get done with the woke rewrite they will no longer be retired.

Quote from: Chris24601;1146337Except relative to every other animal out there. Humans survive levels of pain and injury that would outright kill other species, recover a lot more quickly than other animals (scar tissue isn't pretty, but it does the job of getting us functional much faster than other species) and our endurance relative to other species is incredible (before we figured out missile weapons we hunted animals by pursuing them at a jog until they dropped dead of exhaustion/overheating).

A broken limb will cause most animals to go into shock and die, but humans survive them easily and even medieval doctors could set bones allowing the injured person to recover. People have survived falls of hundreds and even thousands of feet and in a few case even managed to walk away from it. We invented surgery centuries before we had anesthesia and some humans have managed to perform surgery on themselves and survived. Even losing a hand, foot or eye wasn't necessarily a career ender for violence-related professions.

Hell, we regularly injest poisons for entertainment and because we enjoy the taste and ritually and cosmetically pierce, scarify and tattoo ourselves.

Humans are like the Terminators of the animal kingdom and that's before we add things like armor to improve our resilience and weapons to extend our reach.

Honestly, next time I run a sci-fi game, I'll probably give most alien species +1 to two different attributes, but only humans will get +2 to Endurance. We are just that OP in that category.

I think Spinachat has it right, humans are really fragile, especially compared to other animals.  According to one source (and it's on the internet so of course it's true) it takes 11 pounds of pressure to collapse a human trachea.  Compare that to a crocodile or a tiger, just for starters.  We're the Earth's alpha predators because of our intelligence and technology, not physical toughness, IMO.

Quote from: Chris24601;1146337Except relative to every other animal out there. Humans survive levels of pain and injury that would outright kill other species, recover a lot more quickly than other animals (scar tissue isn't pretty, but it does the job of getting us functional much faster than other species) and our endurance relative to other species is incredible (before we figured out missile weapons we hunted animals by pursuing them at a jog until they dropped dead of exhaustion/overheating).

Um... what humans are these? Relative to every other animal out there humans are appallingly fragile and can NOT survive things many animals can. The exceptions are the freak outlier cases where someone is damages in what should be a catastrophic way, but circumstance says otherwise and they live. My great grandfather for example was shot in the head and lived and continues his law enforcement career to retirrment. Then he died to slipping on ice and falling 2 or 3 ft. No. Really. That is how his long adventuring story ended.

Quote from: jhkim;1146335I feel like people are using the one example ("I don't like this one implementation of combat wheelchairs in D&D") as a wedge to argue against *all* character disabilities - when that's something that's been in gaming for decades, with lots of fun play. In general, it seems like some people are talking as if (a) disabled PCs are some theoretical new possibility that is only possible now with 2020 liberal activism, and (b) disabled characters are so weak that the GM has to twist his adventures to make them even easier.

Yeah this "no one should ever play a disabled character!" line is really grating.

Quote from: Omega;1146348Um... what humans are these? Relative to every other animal out there humans are appallingly fragile and can NOT survive things many animals can. The exceptions are the freak outlier cases where someone is damages in what should be a catastrophic way, but circumstance says otherwise and they live. My great grandfather for example was shot in the head and lived and continues his law enforcement career to retirrment. Then he died to slipping on ice and falling 2 or 3 ft. No. Really. That is how his long adventuring story ended.

How many people do you see survive a broken leg versus what happens to a horse with a broken leg?

Granted, Chris is quoting a well-known copypasta, but he's not wrong. When it comes to stamina and long-distance running, humans smoke other critters across the board. Now, how we -got- there is another matter for argument (I tend to like Marvin Harris's suggestions).

Humans where alpha predators for thousands of years before the invention of clothing,

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee;1146365Humans where alpha predators for thousands of years before the invention of clothing,

Indeed. Pursuit predation is a thing and why I specifically referenced The Terminator... because the hunting method was essentially chase the critter and make it run, then jog along behind it and come at them again every time they stopped running and thought they were safe.

Because of how quadrupedal respiration works the animal starts to overheat and needs to stop, but then before it can rest, the humans caught up to them again and made it run. Eventually the critter just couldn't run anymore and the humans then poked it with pointy sticks or threw rocks at it until it died (accurate throwing is another uniquely human trait owing to the structure of our shoulders, hands and wrists).

All because of the efficiency of bipedal movement and our ability to sweat and breathe independently of our running stride allowed us to go a lot further without tiring. Horses, wolves and hyenas can manage sustained runs totaling about 12.5 miles (20 km) in a day. Humans can manage 26 miles (42 km) in a couple of hours and ultra marathons of 60+ miles (100 km) or more are within human ability.

The only thing close to our level of endurance is specialized breeds in specialized conditions (ex. Huskies in an Alaskan winter; which helps them bleed off the the heat; will do 60+ miles when prodded by humans)... other than that, we're frankly ridiculous outliers in the animal kingdom for our combo of big brains, ability to throw things accurately, and our ability to keep going and going where other animals would fall over and die.

We basically have racial bonuses to Int, Dex (the throwing stuff part) and Con (the stamina and shock resistance parts anyway) compared to most animals.

Humans are fragile compared to other animals, at least in one sense: Physical strength. The idea that chimps are 5-8 times as strong as humans has been debunked, but pound for pound they're still at least twice as strong, and it's not just brachiator arm strength, it's leg strength too. I've seen various explanations for this, ranging from a side effect of neoteny to trading strength for precision.

Quote from: Pat;1146381Humans are fragile compared to other animals, at least in one sense: Physical strength. The idea that chimps are 5-8 times as strong as humans has been debunked, but pound for pound they're still at least twice as strong, and it's not just brachiator arm strength, it's leg strength too. I've seen various explanations for this, ranging from a side effect of neoteny to trading strength for precision.

A lot of just comes down to one of the trade-offs for our insane endurance is we traded a lot of our fast-twitch muscles (good for explosive force like sprinting or smacking things really hard) for slow-twitch ones (good for sustained activity like long-distance running). The proportions of them in humans are MUCH higher than any other animal species on Earth.

In a biological sense humans are actually hyper-specialized to do one type of hunting really really well... its just that type of hunting allowed for all sorts of secondary follow-on benefits;

- the same bipedal gait and efficiencies that allowed us to outlast animals as we pursued them also gave us the energy efficiency to have surplus power for our oversized brains.

- the same higher intelligence that allowed us to coordinate using language and track using environmental trails also allowed for us to pass knowledge across generations and apply the abstract thought of reading tracks and spoor and broken branches to determine the prey's location to matters beyond hunting.

- the same articulation that allows us to grab and throw accurately also gives us the precision to craft more sophisticated tools than other species.