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I recommend this video to look more into OSR philosophy regarding the rules: https://www.youtube.com/live/bCxZ3TivVUM?si=aZ-y2U_AVjn9a6Ua
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this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023
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5e has too many rules? If anything it seems to be lacking rules. D&D in general has too many options, but 5e often has nothing if you want rules to handle specific non-combat situations,
When systems go even lighter, it stops even feeling like we are playing a Game, and it starts feeling like annotated improv, which is very much not what I want to play. It never feels right to me as a player to be making sweeping declarations without knowledge of what the GM and the other players are planning.
Okay, explain to me why do you need rules for holding your breath in 5e. Because that's a good example of too many rules, in OSR you would use something already existing.
And you do you, but really the OSR tend to teach players to find ways to avoid rolling altogether by stacking deck in their favor before attempting something.
Frankly I could point it right back at you as the example of a good thing to have. If you need to dive underwater without equipment or cross smoke during a fire, it's useful to have a reference of how long you can keep at it, how many rounds does that take, how much distance you can cross, what happens once you can't keep at it anymore. We are talking about adventurers, it's surprising that this is somehow thought of as an irrelevant edge case.
Are we expecting that the player should always have spells or some magic scuba for this?
I really don't get what's with OSR and not wanting to roll. I'm playing an RPG, I'm up for rolling. Though in this case, the rule does not even require rolling until you are already drowning.
Oooor, 1 con roll. It can be that easy
1 con roll for what? A turn? A minute? 10 meters of movement?
The value of more thorough rules is setting common expectations among everyone. If you'll just keep making it up by vibes, you don't need any system. You might not even need dice,
Per turn. We already have rules for difficult terrain and for movement. Adding more than that is completely unnecessary
As others have expressed pretty well, a game that fucks up its own core system is bad game design.
5e keeps on breaking its own core system. Pf2e tries to make everything work with the core system, that's why its bloat is less confusing than 5es, but it's still there for the sake of complex combat options
I wouldn't call that a fuck up by any measure. This seems meaningfully distinct than just "difficult terrain", since its a hazard in itself. It's not a matter of just going slow, just staying there is dangerous. Not to mention it can compound with difficult terrain.
In practice, I'd still prefer the 5e rule where everyone has at least some time they can manage being in there as opposed to just rolling con and having your wizard drown immediately when they touch water like it is a video game.
There is a survival skill in the core of the system, right?
For tracking and foraging. You don't roll Survival to resist damage so I don't think the idea is the same here.
And you know, just because it could be done in other ways, it doesn't mean the way they are doing it is bad, even if you don't like it.
For the few times your players want to swim a lot underwater OR if you use monsters designed to drown them long term
Because water is generally everywhere and you might go in it? Surviving poisonous gases? Strangulation? If you wanted to point at rarely used rules there's a plethora of better options to pick. This is more like asking why do you need rules for combat.
Except the rules are written in such way that they render holding breat irrelevant. You may as well write "unless in combat a character can hold their breath. When in combat, you must roll concentration at end of your turn or suffer level of exhaustion. DM may decide to treat particularly dangerous or prolonged situation as combat at their discression". And done, you didn't need to invent new rules just for it, you used an existing system. You could even simplyfy it further and just slap it under concentration rules.