Quote from: Spinachcat;1032083I love these threads.

One person's pet peeve is another's must have.

It's quite interesting, especially seeing numerous similar pet peeves appear to be D&D mainstays.

Some of mine are a question of taste, but my peeve about race = species + culture is a practical one.  I didn't mind it for a long time, because I've always understood why it was there, and it's a useful enough simplification for some settings.  No, what has caused the peevishness is that as a design strategy it sits right across a major fault line for the way I want to warp the game to my purposes.  That's the very definition of "peeved."  I can't say its bad design, much less wrong, but it still annoys me.  

In fact, it bugs me in exactly the same way that some people fully understand and appreciate the design intent of armor as lowing chance to hit but just don't like what that does to the underlying combat system.  (As opposed to people that rail against it because it offends their sensibilities for how any such mechanic should work.)

Quote from: Steven Mitchell;1032147In fact, it bugs me in exactly the same way that some people fully understand and appreciate the design intent of armor as lowing chance to hit but just don't like what that does to the underlying combat system.  (As opposed to people that rail against it because it offends their sensibilities for how any such mechanic should work.)

The funny thing about the above is that the more I learn about the effectiveness of medieval armor against period weapons and the techniques required to bypass it (ex. Half-swording with a longsword) the more I come to appreciate Armor Class/Hit Points as a combat system; particularly when you use the original hit point description where only the last few are physical and the rest is a mixture of skill, endurance, luck and divine providence that you spend evading and turning lethal hits into glancing blows until you're too worn down to stop a lethal attack and get dropped.

Of course its also led me to feel like their rankings and choices of armor (like making padded the weakest* and continuing to make studded leather** a thing) are completely retarded. I can forgive designers in the 70s/early 80s; they worked with what info they had, but there's been so much research since then that their not updating the lists just comes off as lazy and ignorant.

* Studies have shown that padded gambesons are ridiculously effective at absorbing hits (including sword strikes and arrows fired at close range) and do so far better than any leather armor ever could while also being cheaper and easier to repair than leather. A realistic armor list would have "Padded/Gambeson" as the best light armor entry and leather would be down where padded is now, but simultaneously more expensive than padded.

** Studded Leather was a misinterpretation of Brigandine armor. The "studs" were actually the rivets holding the underlying steel plates to the lining. In actuality Brigandine would be on par with a steel breastplate in terms of protection on its own and would qualify as 'plate and mail' level protection when worn over mail. It was so good and so widely used that its name literally means "soldier's armor" (Brigand is another name for soldier; it got associated with banditry because that's what out of work soldiers did to make ends meet). Hell, most modern hard body armor is a Brigandine-style with overlapping steel or ceramic plates inside a liner. It's also easy to don and not too heavy to wear making it ideal for the adventuring lifestyle.

ETA: If I were doing an armor list from best to worst it’d be Full Plate Harness, Munitions Armor (3/4 Plate), Half Plate, Plate & Mail, Mail (full suit), Brigandine, Mail Hauberk (3/4 mail), Mail Shirt and Gambeson with a HUGE step down to “no armor.” (If a Gameson was AC 9, unarmored would be AC 15 using AD&D values or AC 11 gambeson, 5 unarmored for 3e and later math).

Game "designers" don't research, they crib from Gary's 1973 writings, when Ashdown was about the only source commonly available.  The Internet has resulted in the spread of even more bullshit about armor.  Like jazerant being called "plated mail."

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1032182Game "designers" don't research, they crib from Gary's 1973 writings, when Ashdown was about the only source commonly available.  The Internet has resulted in the spread of even more bullshit about armor.  Like jazerant being called "plated mail."

Like I said, I don't blame Gary for the original armor tables; you can only use the info you have and "garbage in, garbage out" (how was he supposed to know that boiled leather armor was in the same class as jousting armor; stuff you wore in tournaments while armed with sword-shaped bludgeons... basically the SCA/Renfair armor of its day) but yeah, I do kinda hold it against modern 'developers' when they can't be bothered to do half an hour or so research into sources less than half a century out of date (though I make an exception if they're referencing primary sources). It's like saying you wrote a serious time travel story while including T-Rexes that are cold blooded, stand upright, drag their tails and don't have feathers (though this would be entirely forgivable if you said it was a retro 50s sci-fi story).

If you can't do the research equivalent of a sixth-grade history paper, why the heck should I trust your game math or that everything else isn't equally shoddy?

And again, I make an exception for someone just trying to deliberately ape early editions of D&D, but anyone designing something they claim is historically accurate or just to be modern game design using crap like leather and studded leather unironically deserves every jeer thrown at them.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1032182Game "designers" don't research, they crib from Gary's 1973 writings, when Ashdown was about the only source commonly available.  The Internet has resulted in the spread of even more bullshit about armor.  Like jazerant being called "plated mail."

Well, why bother? The market demographic neither knows or cares, from what I've seen.

Quote from: RandyB;1032015I offered to drop "entropy" from the conversation. You declined. So be it.

Actually, I agreed.
Then I kept debating whether your definition of "Balance-Imbalance" is correct, or should be subsumed into "law/chaos". Because "imbalance" is "chaos OR law"...so you're just taking the three-options scale, and turning it into a two-options one.

QuoteIn real world physics, your definition is correct, as it describes a physical phenomenon identified by taking the Laws of Thermodynamics to their logical conclusion.

And that is what "entropy" means in conversations, when not talking about physics.

QuoteAnd I have known this for several decades.

You're THAT old:D?

QuoteHe did. As Gygax defined the Law-Chaos axis in his moral and ethical alignment schema, starting in the 1e AD&D Player's Handbook, he used Chaos to refer to an ethical concept unrelated to entropy.

Actually, no. Chaos, as Gygax describes it, is quite related to "lack of order".

QuoteTrue Neutrals on the 2-dimenstional Law-Chaos/Good-Evil grid are extremists on the Balance-Imbalance axis, where Balance is their chief value and Imbalance their antithetical value.

It's an axis that doesn't exist, though. Because Imbalance can be either Chaos OR Law. Balance is "balancing between the extremes of chaos and law", therefore both of them are its opposite - but that's not a "new" outlook. It's just the outlook of someone who is Neutral himself, and so is only interested whether other people are Neutral as well, or not.

...but overall, this particular line of discussion is quickly approaching the "as fun as visiting the dentist" state.

QuoteMy preferences of late are definitely in the "all-human PC party" direction, with demihumans as less "near human" and more "alien but not inimical".

Same here.

Quote from: Spinachcat;1032083I love these threads.

One person's pet peeve is another's must have.

It's quite interesting, especially seeing numerous similar pet peeves appear to be D&D mainstays.

Indeed;).

About Leather vs. Padded and crossing the streams with the "PC's Armed in Town" thread.

Leather armor probably wouldn't be seen as battlefield issue and would probably be more effective vs. slender pointed weapons which you'd find in cities.  Gambeson would be hot, not particularly comfortable to wear around town and could be seen as a battlefield type of armor.

Quote from: chirine ba kal;1032200Well, why bother? The market demographic neither knows or cares, from what I've seen.

Why have set dressers for films put in all sorts of meaningful background details that 99.9% of the audience is never going to notice? Because you're a professional dammit and you should care that you're doing your job right so that when the 0.1% do notice they'll appreciate that you actually know your shit (TVTropes even has a name for this; "shown their work").

At least, that's why I do it; for that one-in-a-thousand reader who does care and will come up to me at some convention and thank me for caring as much about what they care about as they do.

I do engraving work for a day job. A lot of it is commercial stuff where I'm doing up a hundred of this or a couple dozen of that that goes to some company looking to give some promotional item out to customers or employees. What keeps me doing the job instead of just packing it in for some 9-5 gig is the <1% of jobs where I'm putting together a custom piece just for them (often for a wedding, birthday, memorial or other special event) and they absolutely appreciate the craftsmanship and thought that goes into the job (more than half of which is presenting them options they didn't even know they had to make it truly personal). But I wouldn't get those jobs without putting just as much work into the other 99+% that the end user probably thinks just pops off an assembly line.

Maybe I'm an anomaly in that line of thinking though.

Quote from: Chris24601;1032204Why have set dressers for films put in all sorts of meaningful background details that 99.9% of the audience is never going to notice? Because you're a professional dammit and you should care that you're doing your job right so that when the 0.1% do notice they'll appreciate that you actually know your shit (TVTropes even has a name for this; "shown their work").

At least, that's why I do it; for that one-in-a-thousand reader who does care and will come up to me at some convention and thank me for caring as much about what they care about as they do.

I do engraving work for a day job. A lot of it is commercial stuff where I'm doing up a hundred of this or a couple dozen of that that goes to some company looking to give some promotional item out to customers or employees. What keeps me doing the job instead of just packing it in for some 9-5 gig is the <1% of jobs where I'm putting together a custom piece just for them (often for a wedding, birthday, memorial or other special event) and they absolutely appreciate the craftsmanship and thought that goes into the job (more than half of which is presenting them options they didn't even know they had to make it truly personal). But I wouldn't get those jobs without putting just as much work into the other 99+% that the end user probably thinks just pops off an assembly line.

Maybe I'm an anomaly in that line of thinking though.

I agree with you - but I think we're both anomalies. I know exactly what you're taking about, re the detail and craftsmanship getting put into a project. I think you have the stats right, too; over all the time I've been in this hobby, I'd agree that about one in a thousand players who drop by one of my games actually notices the fine detail. The vast majority of them, I've found, simply don't have any background or knowledge to appreciate, understand, or notice what's on the table in front of them.

Like you, though, the very very rare times that somebody does indeed notice that Lord Chirine has a deck chair or that the Ladies-in-Waiting all have nice beach umbrellas does really please me.

It's the process of getting to meet them that I'm finding depressing.

Quote from: CRKrueger;1032203About Leather vs. Padded and crossing the streams with the "PC's Armed in Town" thread.

Leather armor probably wouldn't be seen as battlefield issue and would probably be more effective vs. slender pointed weapons which you'd find in cities.  Gambeson would be hot, not particularly comfortable to wear around town and could be seen as a battlefield type of armor.

The irony of this statement is that one of the primary articles of men's clothing in the period, the doublet, grew directly from the gambeson (or as it was sometimes called, the arming doublet) and gambeson's themselves often served double duty as jackets in colder weather during the period.

Your best bet for inconspicuous armor in town would actually be a brigandine (i.e. a doublet with metal plates sewn into it) as the outer lining could be leather or cloth. Nobles and courtiers often had brigandines with ornately embroidered outer surfaces making them basically the "bulletproof vests" of the day for the rich and powerful.

One that had metal plates just protecting the torso would probably be more than sufficient for city use and, if you needed something heavier you could throw it on over a gambeson (or a gambeson and mail) and add a helmet and you're ready for a real fight.

Which actually is another pet peeve of mine. Armor types in a lot of D&D settings are all or nothing affairs when the reality is they were a whole lot of pieces. A suit of full plate could also function as half plate or a breastplate just by removing pieces and there'd always be a gambeson under that to boot, but if you wanted to wear armor that way in D&D you'd need four separate suits of armor (padded, breastplate, half plate and full plate).

Quote from: chirine ba kal;1032205Like you, though, the very very rare times that somebody does indeed notice that Lord Chirine has a deck chair or that the Ladies-in-Waiting all have nice beach umbrellas does really please me.

It's the process of getting to meet them that I'm finding depressing.

I'm Catholic... if I'm suffering it's probably because I deserve it.

My other thought is that the nice thing about the people who do care is that they will talk about it and, even if the listener doesn't care that much, they'll still know that you're professional enough to include those details and, slowly but surely, you'll get a reputation for quality that translates into more sales than you'd get if all your work is shoddy (its how I'm still in business after a dozen years while the business partner I split with who's main concern was profit lasted barely two years without me).

No one's going to remember the crap he put out, but I've made pieces of art that are going to be family heirlooms for generations. Even if they don't know me from Adam, they'll be appreciating my work long after I'm gone. My intention with game design is similar... I want to take the care with the design that will see it pulled off the shelf and enjoyed years from now the same way I can still enjoy an old school game (Palladium Fantasy 1e being my favorite) today.

There's a reason I try and shoehorn certain house rules in certain types of games.  I want armour to, even if it's to vaguely seem like it, mimic some of the real world properties.  And I will modify what I need to get even if it's just the 'feeling' of getting 'right'.

Quote from: Chris24601;1032204Why have set dressers for films put in all sorts of meaningful background details that 99.9% of the audience is never going to notice?

99.9 percent of them don't.

Quote from: chirine ba kal;1032200Well, why bother? The market demographic neither knows or cares, from what I've seen.

Frankly, I agree.  You know how hard I worked to construct a medieval world with some degree of authenticity for my RPGs, and you know that nobody gave a crap.  It's the same in any endeavor, by the way; the vast majority of model railroaders, for instance, do not CARE that the Athearn 40' boxcar is 1 HO scale foot too wide.

Quote from: The Black Ferret;1032077For me it's technology creep. We go from standard medieval type weaponry, like crossbows ans siege engines. Next thing you know, there are guns and you have gadgeteers running around with flimsily disguised near-20th century tech. And don't get me started on "crashed alien ships with laser guns lying around to pick up."

Ever seen The Book of Wondrous Inventions?  Hooo boy.  I really dug that book, but for entertainment value more than using any of it in a game.

Speaking of crashed alien spaceships...I had a lot of fun running a few groups through Expedition to the Barrier Peaks back in the day.  Learned a lot from the first time I ran it.  Second time and subsequent times, the adventure ended with a horrifying engine core breach resulting in "you now have...six...hours to reach minimum safe distance" and a satisfying nuclear explosion meaning that no, they wouldn't be back to get more power discs for the fucking blasters or antigrav belts.

Oh, and don't neglect the "you have no idea how this thing works" tables.  Nothing says "quit dicking around with this shit" like disintegrating the fighter's +2 longsword.