I really hate whenever I try to explain how some bad rules can be abused and immediatelly get someone say shit like “If this happens in your group, change it” as if that would solve the problem. And whenever it is not soemthing you witnessed personally, then it means it never happens and could never happen.
So it is, I’d been looking at the damage and healing rules on 120. I’m sure that’s going to be fun to bring up at the table…
Still, I don’t think that’s as egregious as something like pun-pun or sorlocks short resting to regain spells. There are exploits in other systems, but not at the level or frequency of D&D.
yeah, unfortunately the CoC rules have always been kind of a mess. it still has a lot of that early RPG “stream of consciousness” aspect to it.
But yeah, at the end of the day, the number of rules you have is far more relevant to how many “exploits” there are, so CoC/VtM being less “crunchy” will result in less exploits.
I’d disagree on the second part, because of my other example, PF2e - the original had most of 3.x’s problems, but the code-like specificity of 2e is really showing it’s possible to stop stuff slipping through the cracks. There is a level of interplay between crunch and the possibility of exploitability, but I don’t think it’s as strict as bigger systems and more rules inherently lead to more exploits.
I mean, as i stated, i can’t really vouch or argue against pf2e, since i dont play it and haven’t really read the rules of it since it was in playtest. That said, just googling, i see some things that could be considered exploits like a reddit thread talking about being able to do 520 damage in one attack, some chatter about a “resentment witch” being able to make power word stun or color spray effectively permanent, and a youtube video by the rules lawyer about “OP builds”, so it seems like there’s at least some system exploitation going on.
Obviously a tighter controlled system is less vulnerable to exploitation (see D&D 4e), but that also doesn’t mean that is necessarily doesn’t exist. Another counter example system with lots of rules and lots of exploitation of them would be shadowrun, especially older versions, which were even worse than D&D in some respects.