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[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Originally Posted by pukunui

OK. I get what you're saying here and I don't have an issue with that aspect of narrative control. Giving PCs the power to push, pull, slide, set on fire, etc their opponents is not what I'm complaining about. What I'm complaining about is the artificiality of saying that I can only do those things once an encounter or once a day. That and the fact that I have to keep coming up with justifications as to why I can only do those things so infrequently.

Seen Storminators post?

Martial abilities have one advantage - they aren't as flashy as spells. You can easily count how often the mage casts Fireball. But do you really know how often the Fighter deals damage? How much? Whether he trips his foes or whether the foe can catch himself quick enough to avoid any harm? (and when was it because the fighter was missing and when was it because the fighter didn't actually use the power in question?)

Storminators trick is to "pretend" his character is always attempting to pull of his maneuver. But it doesn't work out every time (because he misses or he doesn't have the power available anymore), and sometimes it works (becuse he hits with the power or the action his fighter took can hardly be distinguished from the action created by the encounter power). Brute Strike or a regular basic melee attack - who could really see the difference. Any attack that kills someone might look like a Brute Strike. Or like a Knockdown Maneuver.

I might just remind you of one thing: Even before the invention of combat maneuvers, tactical feats, Improved Trip Feats, before the invention of exploits, Covering Attacks and Tortorous Strikes, even then people had the idea that a simple, plain melee attack could stand for a large variety of combat maneuvers. It wasn' just sword slash after sword slash. it were uppercuts, parries, dodges, quick strikes... Yet the mechanic was always the same.

But maybe all fancy talking and explaining still doesn't make that a solution that works for you. It might feel "fake" - what's the point of the game rules if they don't map 1:1 (instead mapping n:m) to the game world all the time? That's okay. Don't sweat it. You don't have to like or play the game, even if we'd prefer otherwise.

Or you can just throw all notions of "martial power is not magic" out of the window. Maybe that works for you? To engage a fantasy monster like a dragon, you can't rely on mundane skills. Every martial exploit is just a type of magic channeled into combat. That's why you can't make a second Come and Get Some per round, you used up your magic.

If not, well, see above. Don't expect anyone here having a silver bullet removing all your doubts and problems with a system. Nobody managed to free me of my 15 minute adventuring days experiences in 3E, despite all the people that never encountered it. Nobody could make high level play simpler for me with some fancy words. It were just problems that kept cropping up - some of them, some don't. There are always way to explain why they happen or why they don't happen, but there isn't a way to make them go away until we create a different system.