T w e n t y S i d e d
From The Archives:
Linux vs. Windows
Finally, the age-old debate has been settled.
DM of the Rings
Both a celebration and an evisceration of tabletop roleplaying games, by twisting the Lord of the Rings films into a D&D game.
Marvel's Civil War
Team Cap or Team Iron Man? More importantly, what basis would you use for making that decision?
Revisiting a Dead Engine
I wanted to take the file format of a late 90s shooter and read it in modern-day Unity. This is the result.
This Game is Too Videogame-y
What's wrong with a game being "too videogameish"?
Missed a word; “give it little cuts”.
The reliable way the DM keeps putting down his players whenever they get remotely invested in his campaign amazes me.
He really has the players he deserves.
He didn’t automatically shut down Aragorn’s attempt to actually use his class features…but that’s about all I can say in the DM’s defence here.
For a system designed for heroic fantasy, D&D can be surprisingly anti cool manoeuvers. The fact that there is no localized damage is a pretty good example.
But that’s the thing, it’s not. It’s based on a system made for battles between normal dudes, which was then expanded to include magic and stuff, which was then expanded to include monsters. The biggest standard monster in 3.x (and I assume even now into 5e) has a combat space 30′ on each side. That sounds huge, until you see say a 40′ long T-Rex pictured next to a school bus (it’s DnD combat space is 15′, because tails don’t count). Sure it’s big, terrifying if it was actually trying to kill you, but DnD dragons are not Godzilla. Nothing in the system is- it’s *other* media that brings in the building+++ sized monsters, which people then want to put into DnD and find out the system is absolutely not designed for. As I recall, LotR does mention what are obviously elephants, but is completely silent on any actual dimensions, with the movie just making them impossibly big because movies.
Actually, I would even put that “heroic fantasy” has few if any monsters of such size either, at least not that you actually fight with a pointy stick.
And of course, all of this belies the main problem of DMotR’s DM being terrible at everything, including comprehension and description of the combat system. Things do not just stand there T-posing between turns, and in order for you to be stabbing it in the feet you would have to be *inside* its combat space. But things move. Maybe it’s in a half-crouch facing someone else and you can get at the meat of the leg, or you’re hitting the base of the tail. Or most likely, you’re attacking the limbs and head which are currently attacking you. Elephant-style enemies are actually the most boring in this regard since they’re relatively square and don’t have any long limbs- except you’d still be attacking that trunk, and you’re not stabbing it in the feet either: you’re hacking off great bloody chunks of meat which seem terrifying to you but apparently only anger the beast, for now, until you reach a major artery and blood pours out like a river and the thing suddenly falls unconscious (or if the deathblow came from somewhere else, you note that the continual blood loss from the legs has been slowing and disorienting it up to that point, etc).
If you want a “monster” which is so big it needs locational damage because it can only be harmed that way, then you make the monster that way. 3.x has ship rules that do in fact work that way. You could in fact attack the howdah the guys are riding on, or try to sunder it off. Hydras and some tentacle monsters do in fact have some built in locational damage for their special mechanics. But the standard game doesn’t have any monsters big enough to actually need that, and the way blood works most monsters *don’t* actually need that, because a big enough hole anywhere is death and you can always say that they’re just hitting the same spot over and over. If anything the problem is that arrows always deal full damage, but as Demonac does in their Tales From My DnD Campaign series, you can also give giant monsters DR which makes arrows nearly useless to fix that problem (they then stumble upon the “railgun ranger” build, but that’s a problem with not fully reading the spell because it doesn’t work on ranged weapons).
DnD 3.x had the decapitation rules for Hydras, including a desperate attempt to make players take the Improved Sunder feat (aka “Yes, I want to destroy my loot!”). But all those really did was highlight how pretty much nothing else had such rules. In the end massive spell damage to the general HP pool + Coup de Grace just bypassed them anyway.
LotR books did not give exact dimensions for Mûmaks, vut they do mention that they were huge, towering and their later descendants (meaning our elephants) were only a faint memory of their former glory.
So the movies got it right.
I have to point out that the word “cuts” has gone missing from panel 5. It just says “give it little on the legs”.