An important aspect of tabletop RPGs that is insufficiently discussed is the theatre of the mind. When playing a game, we - players and DM alike - picture a great variety of things in our minds' eyes. We visualise what ths room looks like, what this monster looks like, what this NPC looks like, and so on. No doubt we also do it when reading splatbooks and modules: we picture in our heads what is not depicted for us in illustrations. But we don't talk a great deal about how this mind's-eye aspect of play works, how to improve it, and what its implications are.
As a very small preliminary matter, there are certain things that I have always found it hard to envisage - things that, when I try to picture in my mind's eye, I always find either look silly, or actually impossible to make concrete, and I was curious whether readers have their own examples to add. Here are some of mine:
- Bird men which wield objects. If a bird man only has four limbs (i.e., two wings and two feet) then it has to wield a weapon or pretty much anything it cannot hold in its beak with its feet. But the idea of a bird man using one foot to swing a sword or hurl a javelin or whatever is faintly ridiculous.
- Dragons, or other creatures without primate-style mouths, which speak. How does a dragon's mouth move when it talks? What does that actually look like?
- Melee combat between creatures of obviously very different sizes (a human against a hill giant; a human against a sprite). What does it look like for a hill giant to hit a human with its 12' long club and for that to not kill or at best completely incapacitate that human? How can a human slashing away at a hill giant's knees with a sword that in relative terms is a bit like the short blade on a Swiss army knife do enough damage to eventually kill it?
- A fight against a gelatinous cube, or indeed any other amorphous jelly-like object. Slashing a big jelly with a sword is readily visualised. But slashing it with swords until it dies is not. Let alone stabbing it with spears or beating it with maces or whatever. You can imagine pieces being gouged out of it, or cut off, but that would imply a reduction in HD which the rules don't facilitate. You have to imagine the jelly retaining structural integrity but being 'wounded' enough times to give up the ghost.
- A rakshasa's hands are the wrong way round. Really difficult to envisage.
- A person being slowed or hasted. This is not hard to envisage, but hard to envisage and imagine it with a straight face. It is difficult to imagine somebody being hasted without Benny Hill music playing in the background. And it is difficult to imagine somebody being slowed without it looking like silly for-laughs slo-mo like in Zoolander.
https://www.enworld.org/media/1-aarakocra-1981-fiend-folio-b-png.68906/full
ReplyDeletehttps://youtu.be/Or8G_jDcLNo?t=32
https://youtu.be/DIhrvt8o2io?t=135
https://youtu.be/BzQGj1e-cVA?t=315
https://preview.redd.it/i-can-grip-things-backwards-v0-k8p6fx00emha1.jpg?width=640&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=9a22819c45d224bb909d376873ebc3f2bd58f9a4
https://youtu.be/r4p_3LE35U8?t=240 played at 2x speed
... if that helps any.
Ha!
DeleteI generally like the image of a bird-man firing a bow with their legs but agree melee weapons look ridiculous
ReplyDeleteFor dragons speaking - birds easily and sometimes very convincingly mimic human speech with no facial flexibility. I imagine the jaw moving a fair bit and the muscles of the throat are clearly working, but the sound alteration mostly happens in the throat with no lip involvement. Speech probably has a notably 'off' sound to human ears.
I generally picture oozes as being strung with thin filaments that can be destroyed by trauma and are necessary to containing cohesion.
Good idea on the oozes.
DeleteConcur about the dragon speech. That's exactly what I meant to say – if a mynah bird and a parrot can do it, why not a dragon?
DeleteI'm confused. Why are these hard to visualize? Aside from just, ya'know, visualizing them, there are comic books, cartoons, Anime and Manga, movies, TV shows, descriptions in books, computer and video games, etc .
ReplyDeleteYes, silly me.
Deletere: Dragon's speech: Probably like how a parrot can imitate speech.
ReplyDeleteNice way of putting it.
DeleteAlso think of crocodiles and how they make sounds. Didn't know they made sounds? Search it on youtube. Their fellow dinosaurs are very vocal.
DeleteThe Heretic
A world where multiple civilizations share a common architectural standard of 10 foot/3 meter wide halls/corridors.
ReplyDeleteThat's a different post! ;)
DeleteAre there actually many bird-like (four-limbed) birdmen in D&D? I think most of them are more like a human plus wings on the back.
ReplyDeleteHmm. I will survey the Monstrous Manual.
DeleteThe Aarakocra were originally depicted as having four limbs with hands at the end of feathered, winged arms.
DeleteThey may have changed this later on.
#3 is easy. You used the example of a man fighting a hill giant. In AD&D1E a hill giant is only 10 or 11 feet high, so a 6' man with longsword can hit a hill giant anywhere.
ReplyDeleteIf the giant is very much bigger (say a 21' tall storm giant) the man can still reach the groin (which seems like it might be a telling blow).
Let's say that the fighter is a dwarf and is fighting a 25' tall titan, so that he can only reach the legs. His 3' long blade is proportionally like a nine inch knife would be to a human - plenty long to inflict wounds. Cuts on the legs will be painful and will bleed, and the fighter wins when he eventually severs a femoral artery.
Looked at the other way, the titan's blows are incredibly powerful, but they are also comparatively slow and ponderous. As the titan's club is descending the dwarf fighter sees it coming. He angles his shield to deflect most of the force of the blow, and he is twisting away from it as it's hitting. The result is that the dwarf's left arm has gone numb from the blow even through the shield and he feels like he's pulled a muscle in his side. It'll be that much harder to avoid the next one (i.e. the dwarf fighter took 22 points of damage, but he still hit has 33 points remaining so he's still in the fight.
Interesting way of putting it - very Wizard Knight.
DeleteAs a former aviculturist, a current cohabitant with two zebra finches* and three budgies, in addition to partial 'custody' of a cockatiel**, I'd say the answer to avian humanoids is in the beak. Birds do EVERYTHING with their beak. They build their homes, feed their kids, defend their territory, all with their beaks. If the beak is nasty enough, they don't even need weapons. I could see them using their beaks with slashing weapons and slings, and maybe using their claws to hold bows while the beak holds the arrow. They should be pretty good at ranged attacks. Dropping things on people is natural and if they have to process three dimensional space in order to take advantage of flight. It's the beak.
ReplyDelete* This is extraordinary if you know anything about zebra finches. Worse that rabbits. If I let them do their thing I'd have 80+ by now.
** Cockatiels are cats with wings. Temperamental, flighty, lovers of cardboard boxes, one minute your scratching your head the next they're biting your hand...
The Heretic
Whenever I think of avian sophont making ranged attacks, I always think back to Italian use of æroplanes during African colonial wars in 1910, dropping large nails from on high. It is not hard to imagine, say, raven-men dropping darts resembling plumbata down upon prey or foe and causing much havoc.
DeleteYes - cool image. Even just rocks.
DeleteEhhh, sometimes I find things hard to visualize, although it is more I have a static image of a character and it is difficult to visualize them moving when you only have a still image. A similar thing happened or happens with video games adapting war-games, suddenly people have to figure out how the mini model actually moves.
ReplyDeleteAlthough, I don't see why imagining something looking silly would be a bother? I feel like you are already in the atmosphere of listening to a fairy tale when you are playing a role-playing game. Little kids get terrified on Halloween even though most Halloween costumes look naff, that's the headspace I feel people need to be in to enjoy RPGs.
Most theater, especially when they include masks or monsters, doesn't look 'realistic', yet it has a feeling of believable-ness if the production is giving it their all.
I feel like modern television and film has arbitrated this idea of 'real looking' to most modern western people, that doesn't have anything to do with the real world. Someone said that real Jellyfish goo out of the water doesn't look 'real' or 'realistic' at least not in the way that hollywood makes it.
I guess what I am trying to get at while I rambling is things don't need to look 'realistic' and sometimes should look silly.
Oh, I completely agree with the point you're making about how modern TV and cinema dictate what is 'realistic'. That's something worth its own post.
DeleteMelee with a giant: in OD&D a hill giant is 12' tall. This is a problem, and it's true that in a less abstracted system a blow that connects should be devastating, but if we're to be realistic about combat, the big problem for the human fighter is actually the giant's vastly greater reach. In real life even a reach advantage of 6" is terribly difficult to cope with, so getting close enough to hit a hostile giant would be a nightmare. Hurting it once you did would be no biggie, though – a 3' sword would still go clean through a hill giant's torso if thrust to the hilt. That'll kill anybody.
ReplyDeleteFor cinematic D&D combat I think Corathon is completely correct about how to do it.
Jellies and oozes: Some of them do split when struck, possibly varying between editions – I had it in my head that the Grey Ooze split from weapon attacks, but a quick survey of the Monster Manual suggests only the Ochre Jelly splitting from lightning bolts. In any case, these creatures are actually surprisingly highly specified in their makeup by the MM for the most part, with only the gelatinous cube seeming to pose a real problem. At any rate, for any ambiguous cases relating to slimes &c. I would recommend the manga Dungeon Meshi, always brilliant on ecology.
Rakshasa: In 1e, rakshasas actually do not have the reverse-hands; like the lich's phylactery, this is a folly of 2e which has cemented itself in the collective mind, and is really just an example of why 2e is bad and wrong. Look up the entry in the MM: no mention in the text, no backwards hands on Tramp's illustration (which is one of my favorites). In short: do not visualize this. It is stupid.
Slow/haste: I think the key here is to not visualize it as the person being slowed to moving at literal 50% speed or hasted to 200% speed, but only slightly slowed/hasted such that it provides the combat effects stated. Again, in a real fight having your opponent moving at 50% speed wouldn't grant him half as many attacks: he would get NO attacks, because that is a level of disadvantage which is impossible to compensate for. Analogously, if you're literally twice as fast as your opponent you can simply hit him at will and evade all his blows, not just score two hits to his one. So, the speed changes must be slighter ones, maybe 10-20% or so (it's obviously very difficult to test this rigorously, but that would be the ballpark I'd expect from fencing experience). Yes, I know this conflicts with movement rates, but those are so detached from reality anyway in D&D that I opt not to care.
Excellent points made.
Delete"this is a folly of 2e which has cemented itself in the collective mind, and is really just an example of why 2e is bad and wrong." Shapechangers having a single distinguishing tell, like backwards hands or feet, and magicians hiding their souls in objects, like Koschei, are old and strong fairy tale motifs. That probably has more to do with them "sticking" than 2e's pernicious psychic control.
Delete"A rakshasa's hands are the wrong way round. Really difficult to envisage."
ReplyDeleteSo make a model. Take a cheap miniature (preferably plastic) and a pair of clippers, sever both hands at the wrists, reattach them the wrong way around, and there's your backward hands right in front of you, no imagination required. Two minute job with the right glue if you focus on speed and not how clean it looks.
If you chose a fig with suitable weaponry and somewhat poseable arm sockets you can even can an eyeful of just how alien and awkward it would be to use a sword or mace or whatever with that anatomy, although shields will hardly be different at all.
Now consider that the rakshasa is used to being that way, and probably used to fighting people with more normal combat stances. How fast can you adjust to those strange, clumsy-looking strikes when it's trying to kill you? Or maybe it just tigers up some and mauls you without playing around with swordplay, which seems like an easier solution all around..
It would look very disturbing and confusing....although that brings me back to the point of the post. ;)
DeleteDragons talking: Patrick did a whole post on this a while back. https://falsemachine.blogspot.com/2024/07/a-friendless-fingerless-mind.html
ReplyDeleteBird-men have been covered quite well by people above, but I could add that raptor-types might wear gloves with sharp metal talons like daggers rather than fighting with a sword, so they can swoop past and slash at enemies or choke them out like pigeons.
The giant one was also covered above, but I figure a fighter could also cut the giant's hamstrings so it falls down, then stab it in the belly or neck.
Indeed, a great post.
DeleteI always fancied that sapient birdmen should use their wings to fly in place, more or less, while using both their legs to wield weapons or tools.
ReplyDelete