Quote from: Ravenswing;844721Hell, you can just declare that all PCs can carry up to 500 lbs of gear each, anywhere they feel like going, and have one-second-access to any of those items they want whenever they want, and that's the rule.  What's to stop you?

Indeed that sounds exactly like the fantasy of some players.

Quote from: jhkim;844852However, communities have lived with extremely high death rates compared to modern times...

In a number of historical periods the net population growth rate for city dwellers was negative, sometimes significantly negative. The deficit was made up of immigrants from the rural countryside.

Despite all that, a strict adherence to D&D encounter tables is pants on head silly. It's a good thing there is a DM/GM involved to adjust frequency to taste and for setting consistency.

Quote from: jibbajibba;844872So what natural predation controls the were rats?

Weretigers.

Quote from: jibbajibba;844874It it just me or are we seeing some internal consisty here.

Probably just you...or in other words, what Brendan said made a lot of sense to me.

Quote from: jibbajibba;844872Yes it is very odd that monsters could be so common in a small city.

"You encounter a group of 3 were-rats..."

Hold on if we say there are these three Wererats. Each night they rove abroad and kill a guy.

This is a medieval city with say ... 5,000 inhabitants. If these rats kill 1 person a day that is an anual death rate of c 7.5 % of the population. But as they are lycanthropes it's possible that they might also injure some folks who become were-rats, lets take a stab at a 10% injury rate. Just on those numbers we are adding say 3 new were rats in month 2.

So what natural predation controls the were rats? given a close system the were rats will become so dominant that after about 3 months all the people would flee or hire adventurers (possibly armed with magical pipes) to come and sort out the weere rat issue.

This assumes that the only monsters in town are 3 were-rats.

1: Keep in mind it specifically tells the DM to disregard a roll if it makes no sense.

2: In they daytime they are just going about their thing. At night they might be in human form and even in ratman form they use swords. Which means they arent as likely to infect someone. Least in AD&D. A lycanthrope had to actually bite someone for 50% of their total HP to infect. And the AD&D wererats were more likely to take hostages and ransom.

3: In AD&D a town has a population of 1500-6500, and a city has 10-60k. Those are the only two locales youd use the tables for it seems. None of this weirdness in a village or smaller. See above for why the wererat population isnt likely to grow much. They seem more like a thieves guild with some peculiarities. DMG entry for the town/city encounter for a Wererat mentions Swords of Lankhmar even. And they might not necessarily be hostile even.

4: Assuming that they are operating like a thieves guild and just extorting money then people might put up with them to some degree. And these are towns where they are likely to run into level 7+ classed NPCs on the same streets, and the city guard rates captains level 1-5, and they always have with them a level 1-4 magic user. And wererats are only 3HD monsters.

Which shows that some thought was put into all this crazyness.

X: There is actually a BX/BECMI module in Dungeon about exactly this sort of problem you point out.
The PCs are passing through a town just as a were-rat takeover is about to go into full swing. Nicely done module too as it is not apparent until late in exactly what the real threat is. There is also the expansion book for BX/BECMI D&D which features a kingdom that is run by werewolves who are working in a very orderly and self policing manner with the goal towards eventually going public as a stable non-hostile community. Also very well done.

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;844904Sounds like those whispered rumors of what Warhammer Fantasy RPG is like in actual play.

Whispered?  Around here, they brag about it.

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;844904Sounds like those whispered rumors of what Warhammer Fantasy RPG is like in actual play.

A good WFRP game strikes a fine balance between the Crapsack World caricature of Medieval Europe and epic Chaos/Ork/Skaven/etc.-punching.

Quote from: The Butcher;844935A good WFRP game strikes a fine balance between the Crapsack World caricature of Medieval Europe and epic Chaos/Ork/Skaven/etc.-punching.

And going solely by local players and the Internuts, no one has apparently had a Good WFRP game session.  And that's how they like it!

Quote from: Christopher Brady;844941And going solely by local players and the Internuts, no one has apparently had a Good WFRP game session.  And that's how they like it!

Things tend to get distorted beyond their original meaning over the Internet. Every D&D game is about killing monsters and taking their stuff. Every CoC game ends with the PCs dying, going mad and failing miserably. Every V:tM game is a round-robin session of angst-ridden soliloquies. And so on.

Actually reading and playing the games tends to dispel the bullshit rather quickly. I have plenty of stories to share, but suffice to say we've never lost a PC to disease in my WFRP (admittedly, 2e) games. Not even the Skaven-bitten ones.

In fact, if you play strictly RAW, you're more likely to catch a nasty disease in AD&D 1e than in WFRP.

I played an entire multi-story-arc campaign of WFRP2e without any of the crapsack. Sure, the Border Princes weren't a nice place, but it wasn't grimdark schlock by any means.

Quote from: Bren;843402Me too. I mean why should petty, realistic concerns like gravity, linearity of time, inability to be in multiple places at once, or cause and effect limit my character's actions. The only possible reason any of those would apply is because the GM want's to ruin my fun. It's a fantasy, so anything and everything goes...am I right?

Yes.

The whole purpose in having a few assumptions about "realism" in a fantasy game is to give participants a common frame of reference. A huge oak chest bound with iron straps and filled with thousands of gold coins should be harder to pick up and carry than a goose down pillow. A fighting man wearing heavy armor should be weighed down more than a comparable fighting man wearing no armor at all. There are countless other examples we can add if we so choose.

HOWEVER, these notions of in-game "realism" are NOT meant to give gamer "experts" or clubhouse lawyers or just all-around assholes an excuse to bog down the game with their horseshit pedantry. Especially not when 99 times out of a hundred (and I'm being VERY generous here) their expertise is worthless because simply put, they don't know what the fuck they're talking about.

These notions of "realism" are also not meant to give DMs or players a blank check to give their own tastes and biases the veneer of extra credibility because of "realism". I know of no rule in any of the versions of D&D that expressly forbids bearing arms and armor in town. Now what a DM likes for his campaign is up to him -but it's purely a matter of what he likes or dislikes, so quit bullshitting about "realism".

QuoteYou should literally allow my character to use his bumble-bounce power to avoid damage from a 50,000 foot fall and to change his position in three dimensions, so that he can use his temporal fugue to eliminate Attacker #1 before he was born by simultaneously causing Attacker #1's great-great-grandmother and great-great-grandfather to cease to exist. Also since there is no chronological order, after I have been hit by Attacker #2's gob-jabbar strike I can use my twixitar to time-parry his strike, which retroactively negates the damage, makes a random NPC within 1d10,000 fractars distance pregnant, turns a random other PC's clothes into daisies, while giving  my character 10,000 gold gobstoppars and a lipstick red 1969 Cadillac Coupe de Ville with a lizard man chauffeur dressed as one of the Pope's Swiss Guards.

Because all of these things are the equivalent of PCs bearing arms and wearing armor in a city. Gotcha.

QuoteAfter all, it's fantasy and there should be no limits on my PC from big meanie head GMs.

Straw man much?

Quote from: jhkim;844852I didn't claim that high historical death rate was due to wererat attacks. I agree - they are mostly due to infectious disease, infant mortality, malnutrition, and the like.

And I'd agree that encounter tables (like from the 1st ed DMG) are written more for creating exciting adventures than for sensible world.

However, communities have lived with extremely high death rates compared to modern times - and whether killed by wererats or plague, dead is dead. So there is some justification for suspension of disbelief. Cities could be often like the stereotype of Transylvania - people living in fear, coming home and locking up at night.

This NYT review of a book about the history of urban homicide rates is interesting. Money quote:

QuoteNew data presented at the conference by a Dutch scholar, Pieter Spierenburg, showed that the homicide rate in Amsterdam, for example, dropped from 47 per 100,000 people in the mid-15th century to 1 to 1.5 per 100,000 in the early 19th century.

Professor Stone has estimated that the homicide rate in medieval England was on average 10 times that of 20th century England. A study of the university town of Oxford in the 1340's showed an extraordinarily high annual rate of about 110 per 100,000 people. Studies of London in the first half of the 14th century determined a homicide rate of 36 to 52 per 100,000 people per year.

By contrast, the 1993 homicide rate in New York City was 25.9 per 100,000. The 1992 national homicide rate for the United States was 9.3 per 100,000.

After examining coroners' inquests, Barbara A. Hannawalt, a professor of medieval English history at the University of Minnesota, concluded that most slayings in medieval England started as quarrels among farmers in the field. "They were grubbing for existence," she said. Insults to honor were taken seriously, and violence was the accepted method of settling disputes, since the king's courts were slow, expensive and corrupt.

The knife and the quarterstaff, the heavy wooden stick commonly carried for herding animals and walking on the muddy roads, were the weapons of choice. "Everyone carried a knife, even women," she said, since "if you sat down somewhere to eat, you were expected to bring your own." Given the lack of sanitation at the time, even simple knife wounds could prove deadly.

Keep in mind that the 1992 murder rate for New York was the subject of great consternation because it was so high and had been for a few decades. And the medieval figures are considerably higher.

Quote from: Philotomy Jurament;843546Depends on the city, but even in one that didn't have explicit laws against being equipped for war while shopping at the bazaar, there would be social norms and expectations that would apply pressure against that behavior.  (Talk about negative reaction roll modifiers!)  In general, I'd make it clear that it's a bad idea, in most settlements.

In some cases (again, depending on the town) brandishing weapons and armor in town could make the PCs targets for those who might construe the party as a rich target in need of being robbed and killed. The miscreants might assume the party must be loaded with treasure because who else would need so much protection?

Of course clever PCs might deliberately wear armor and weapons for the express purpose of drawing out would-be attackers. Anyone who remembers the John Wayne movie Big Jake knows what I'm talking about.

Quote from: Bren;843490Sommerjon's examples were magical and physical so I parodied them with absurd magic and physics.

You calmly described policing mages by punching them in the face when they cast a spell (but assumed there would be gesturing and incantation and that a punch would be an effective response; not all casters are like that in fantasy games), so the existence of magic in a fantasy game doesn't bother you. It's only when someone points out that your historical standards may not make sense in a world that departs significantly from the conditions of history, and then you start squealing about argumentum ad fireballum. Sommerjon gave no example that I can find of magic at all, only walking corpses strolling down main street.

Quote from: Bren;844032Yet the answer is always the same. It depends on the setting. I don't think I've ever run a setting where tossing offensive magic or walking around geared up for war is acceptable everywhere. It seemed silly to my 16-17 year old self. It seems just as silly decades later.

It seems odd that you're so bent out of shape over an inadequate armor restriction but are indifferent to games in which all of these other deviations from history exist. "Acceptable everywhere" is typical goalpost shifting.

QuoteWhy don't you point out where I said an armor restriction must be present?

(Hint: My saying I find no weapon, armor, and spell restrictions to be silly, but people are allowed to like silly things doesn't count as my saying a restriction must be present.)

Right there you are saying an armor restriction must be present in a non-silly game; it's kind of pointless to discuss silly games.

QuoteClearly the meaning of "socially allowed" escapes your understanding. Try looking up the words and then reading the sentence to yourself very slowly. Maybe the meaning will become clear. Or ask you mom or dad to explain it to you.

Wipe the froth from your mouth and explain calmly how this restriction works for you as GM: do the player characters choose whether to wear armor or not and accept the results, or should the GM just tell them whether they're wearing armor in any situation based on the "socially allowed" norms? If what's "socially allowed" (by a society created by the GM) always skews one way, how is that any better than an arbitrary restriction solely by the GM? How is this differernt from GMs punishing players who violate your historical sensibilities? "Restrict" sounds like the GM aiming for a particular outcome, not impartially judging what happens.

To describe my position: Wearing armor in dangerous places is natural and advisable, and completely moot in places that are absolutely not dangerous. Rarely specific situations will be hard for a party that depends heavily on one kind of character; anti-magic areas or rust monsters or whatever. NPCs who view the PCs as odd (based on all sorts of factors) can have many possible reactions: fear, curiosity, avoidance, supplication, hostility, indifference, and so on. Dangerous places are more accepting of a wide variety of non-hostile PCs; the half-orc paladin would be welcomed as a protector in a frontier town, once the people decide she's on their side. "Restricting" armor as a general policy is game unbalancing for the games I run (and for most D&Dish games), and that outweighs any "historical" value it might have.

QuoteAnti-magic is not like a law against armed and armored characters fighting. It strips off existing magic and prevents the casting of new magic. It is much more like magic that strips off armor and weapons and prevents the acquisition of new armor and weapons.

Taking away armor from characters who depend on it for their effectiveness is exactly like taking away magic ability from characters who depend on that. Anti-magic is more severe, but I was sticking to a common game feature; substitute reduced spell casting level if you prefer. Your proposal of policing mages by hitting them when they start to cast spells would correspond to attacking the armor wearer when they start to fight, rather than preemptively taking their armor away.

Quote from: Elfdart;845002In some cases (again, depending on the town) brandishing weapons and armor in town could make the PCs targets for those who might construe the party as a rich target in need of being robbed and killed. The miscreants might assume the party must be loaded with treasure because who else would need so much protection?

I LOVE this fallacy.  OK, let's take a look at the players in this potential skirmish.

In the Red Corner, you have four or five people who have walked into town wearing their loot, so likely a suit of plate armour bearing a big honkin' weapon, with a Fighter attached.  Next up, a lithe member of the bandit's same profession sporting a short blade or five, easily accessible and some designed for both throwing, or just plain stabbing.  Third is the heavy with a mace and shield, likely also wearing plate, and wearing a tabard depicting his or her faith.  And finally is the Robed Wonder, bearing a stick and possibly reading a book.

In the (soon to be Black and) Blue Corner, you have a gang of maybe five to ten desperate men, who've killed, but never actually fought, and typically are clad in light armour, like leather, which is easily disguised so that the city guard doesn't round them up, as they have to live there.  And killing an unarmed/unskilled foe is leagues harder than fighting one who is trained to fight back.  So we got maybe 5-8 bravos armed with light armour, carrying relatively short blades facing off, even if they're setting up an ambush, against a crew of trained fighters and killers.

Yeah, not happening, there are easier marks to hit.  Like that caravan master and merchant who can be beguiled into leaving their entourage behind.

One thing a lot of people forget is that, outside of being stupid, criminals (which includes street robbers and bandits) are also cowards.  Meaning if their target(s) looks meaner than them, they will reconsider their plans.

Now, in some games, namely D&D and it's clones, armour being what it is, these guys have a slight chance, but realistically (and in some other game systems) plate amour is more or less immune to short, one handed blades.  And having to wrestle down your foe, so you can stick a sharp pointy bit into his armpit, while s/he's hacking and slashing at you and your buddies is an exercise in death.  So the question becomes, do you Mr. Bandit want to be the one to die, so your buddies might be able to bear Mr(s). Fighter down?  I doubt it.  And that's just one out of the four or five you need to deal with so you can loot them.

No, they won't attack.  They'll wait until these five are out of their armour before trying to shake them down, and it will be a shake down, with threats that the bandits will hope won't get laughed at. Cuz if they are?  Then they'll have to run away, or commit to a fight they're not entirely sure they want to deal with.

Quote from: Elfdart;844990These notions of "realism" are also not meant to give DMs or players a blank check to give their own tastes and biases the veneer of extra credibility because of "realism". I know of no rule in any of the versions of D&D that expressly forbids bearing arms and armor in town. Now what a DM likes for his campaign is up to him -but it's purely a matter of what he likes or dislikes, so quit bullshitting about "realism".

How does the lack of rules in D&D about something translate to "if the GM imposes such a rule, you should admit it's purely because of his preferences which are obviously not about realism"?
Do you really think that D&D is the ultimate guide to realistic roleplaying, and contains all situations concerning realistic law enforcement or social interaction:D?
I'd guess that this is simply an issue left to GM adjudication, because you know, real people should just have some common sense;).

Quote from: Elfdart;844990These notions of "realism" are also not meant to give DMs or players a blank check to give their own tastes and biases the veneer of extra credibility because of "realism". I know of no rule in any of the versions of D&D that expressly forbids bearing arms and armor in town. Now what a DM likes for his campaign is up to him -but it's purely a matter of what he likes or dislikes, so quit bullshitting about "realism".

Were we just talking about D&D then? I didn't realise. I must have forgotten that any discussions about wearing armour must be D&D.

In any game, there are two things that heavily impact the game:

• Rules Information
• Setting Information

Rules information covers things like how effective armour is, what effect it has in combat and so on.

Setting information covers things like what armour is available, how much it costs, what attitudes to armour are in different places and so on.

I would not expect a rulebook to contain setting information, unless the rules are tied to a single setting.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;845010I LOVE this fallacy.  OK, let's take a look at the players in this potential skirmish.

In the Red Corner, you have four or five people who have walked into town wearing their loot, so likely a suit of plate armour bearing a big honkin' weapon, with a Fighter attached.  Next up, a lithe member of the bandit's same profession sporting a short blade or five, easily accessible and some designed for both throwing, or just plain stabbing.  Third is the heavy with a mace and shield, likely also wearing plate, and wearing a tabard depicting his or her faith.  And finally is the Robed Wonder, bearing a stick and possibly reading a book.

In the (soon to be Black and) Blue Corner, you have a gang of maybe five to ten desperate men, who've killed, but never actually fought, and typically are clad in light armour, like leather, which is easily disguised so that the city guard doesn't round them up, as they have to live there.  And killing an unarmed/unskilled foe is leagues harder than fighting one who is trained to fight back.  So we got maybe 5-8 bravos armed with light armour, carrying relatively short blades facing off, even if they're setting up an ambush, against a crew of trained fighters and killers.

Yeah, not happening, there are easier marks to hit.  Like that caravan master and merchant who can be beguiled into leaving their entourage behind.

One thing a lot of people forget is that, outside of being stupid, criminals (which includes street robbers and bandits) are also cowards.  Meaning if their target(s) looks meaner than them, they will reconsider their plans.

Now, in some games, namely D&D and it's clones, armour being what it is, these guys have a slight chance, but realistically (and in some other game systems) plate amour is more or less immune to short, one handed blades.  And having to wrestle down your foe, so you can stick a sharp pointy bit into his armpit, while s/he's hacking and slashing at you and your buddies is an exercise in death.  So the question becomes, do you Mr. Bandit want to be the one to die, so your buddies might be able to bear Mr(s). Fighter down?  I doubt it.  And that's just one out of the four or five you need to deal with so you can loot them.

No, they won't attack.  They'll wait until these five are out of their armour before trying to shake them down, and it will be a shake down, with threats that the bandits will hope won't get laughed at. Cuz if they are?  Then they'll have to run away, or commit to a fight they're not entirely sure they want to deal with.

Actually, if the bandits are even somewhat intelligent, it becomes even more comical. Since they know how easy it is to steal from the sheriff's lockbox, the bandits start to spread the story that the PCs are violent morally retarded sociopaths planning on sacking the town - thus letting the local authorities deal with the heavies while the bandits prepare to steal their belongings when they are not wearing them - like when the PCs have been incarcerated.