billd91
Not your screen monkey (he/him)
But you can never perform a Rain of Blows more than once per encounter in 4e because of the AEDU structure no matter how skilled you are.
D&D 5E With Respect to the Door and Expectations....The REAL Reason 5e Can't Unite the Base
But you can never perform a Rain of Blows more than once per encounter in 4e because of the AEDU structure no matter how skilled you are.
JRRNeiklot
First Post
Or Gurps, or Warhammer, or Harp, or a dozen different games which are all closer to pre WOTC D&D than post WOTC D&D.
BACK to the dungeon? My games have dungeons, certainly, but that's hardly the focus. The focus is a wide world for the pcs to explore.
billd91
Not your screen monkey (he/him)
I wonder how many of those who cheered would take that cheer back when they found out what all the changes wrought by 4e would be. I'll bet it would be a significant portion of the room.
Maybe because the number of people who feel Vancian casting is problematic seems to be smaller than the contingent who rejected 4e. If that's the case, then WotC's best interest is clear. Try to bring back the lost market first, appease the anti-Vancians with alternatives later.... like with the second play test packet's warlock.
LostSoul
Adventurer
This is why I think the longer combat rounds of TSR-D&D work better. Both WotC- and TSR-D&D use very abstract combat systems, so much so that the details of your "melee attack" are unimportant. When you combine that level of abstract resolution with 6-second combat rounds, I think it's easier to ask what, exactly, is my guy doing?
I think that's why, when I play pre-4E D&D, I usually say "I attack the orc" without going into detail. Maybe there's some level of detail if I'm using Power Attack or whatever, but that's limited to what my PC is holding in his hands.
Because of that, one feature of play that I experienced was that the DM shouldered the responsibility of narrating what was happening. A simple, made-up example:
Player: I attack the owlbear!
(roll, hit, 4 damage)
DM: You stab your spear into its side and leave a thin line of blood!
Player: Wow, my guy is awesome.
I'm not sure that's true, but since I'm not particularly demanding of associated mechanics, I could be wrong. Let me touch on the "lethal ballet" for a second and get back to this point.
When I designed the combat system for my 4E hack, I wanted players to make choices that leveraged the fiction to their advantage - or disadvantage, in the case of poor play. I also wanted to picture the scene in my head. (I think that's immersion but I am not sure.) This doesn't demand associated mechanics; it demands (certain detailed) fictional positioning having influence on resolution.
This is why I like 4E - I think that the system makes it easy for fictional positioning to influence mechanical resolution. Dissociated mechanics may play a part here, because the player creates, at run-time, the connection between the game world and the mechanics. Which means that you can create your own fictional positioning - fiction that's relevant to you, in the moment, and can make as much sense as you want it to - instead of relying on the mechanic's connection to the game world.
Anyway. I'm playing my hack with a guy who is really into the medieval martial art recreation scene. After our first session he noted that my system got the "beats" of combat right, for him at least. (I think he had an Italian term for it.) After a few sessions, though, he went back to saying "I attack the gnoll" instead of using his greater knowledge of combat to his advantage.
After playing with this guy for a while, I think he went back to "I attack the gnoll" instead of more detailed actions because he didn't want the responsibility to narrate what was going on. He wanted to make a simple choice - "I attack the gnoll" - and then have the DM describe his character's actions.
I think this creates a reward system for a certain type of "Right to Dream" play. You make a character, but you don't want to have to risk that character's integrity by possibly screwing up with your choices - you want your choices to be low-stress. You pass the ball to the DM, and a good DM will "get it right" and describe your character in the "right" way - passing the ball back to you. Then you express your character well enough for the DM to pick up on what your PC's about, and round and round it goes.
That's what I see as the main benefit to associated mechanics: you aren't forced to create compelling fiction moment-to-moment during play. The mechanics do that for you.
I think that's a pretty controversial statement. Since I don't naturally "get" associated/dissociated mechanics, I think I could easily be wrong, especially if someone who naturally gets the theory says so.
billd91
Not your screen monkey (he/him)
I think you're right about this. Longer more abstract rounds do serve D&D better in a number of ways, not the least of which is not sweating the second by second details with rules.
Neonchameleon
Legend
Can you unpack this statement please?
You know the biggest problem with a statement like that? 4e did not reject "Vancian" casting. Instead it gave everyone gygaxo-Vancian abilities, and did so in a way that far better matched the works of Jack Vance than any previous edition ever had.
It depends what you want. For me they shatter my immersion and also make me feel incredibly disempowered.
Indeed. And to me this is necessary for immersion. I accept it's not what the old school gamists want - but old school gamists shouldn't IMO care about disassociated mechanics. They want abstraction and to step back.
Or you only put monster deaths in detail - that often happens in games I see and with some of my players.
As I said, they have their advantages. They also shatter my immersion and make any immersed level of me at all feel helpless as a fast tense situation unfolds, and it's a whole minute before I can react to it. If I'm involved in pawn play or even author stance rather than actor stance this isn't a problem.
But I get more encounter powers. The fighter in my 4e game has 4 close burst encounter powers. He attacks everyone around him most rounds of combat.
(If he was into multiple attacks rather than close bursts, for whatever reason - eg better leveraging the reach on his halberd - then there'd be multiple such powers to take also.)
So I'm still not really feeling the great contrast with combat superiority dice.
HARP is a light version of Rolemaster with (i) Fate points baked in, and (ii) spell scaling rules that discourage overuse of powerful attack spells. I don't think it can do epic fantasy as well as 4e, nor scene-based play. Too much grit.
I thought I followed the stuff before the snippage, but I'm not sure because I'm having some trouble with the stuff after the snippage.
In AD&D, if someone says "I attack the orc" I know how to resolve that - whereas, in 4e, that's not enough information (it's more like "I cast a spell at the orc", which isn't enough information in any version of D&D; and in 3E, I "attack the orc" isn't enough, is it? Whirlwind attack? Trip? Grapple? Plus Power Attack, Combat Expertise etc).
But I don't know what to imagine, other than some pretty generic image of an orc and a person fighting.
I'm not a particularly visual person. I am quite a sentimental person. For me, immersion is primarily about emotion, and particular images or tropes or connotations that evoke emotion.
I don't especially care what form of swordplay the paladin is using against the hobgoblins. What moves me, and draws me into the fiction, is the conception of the paladin standing against a phalanx of hobgoblins, holding them back and then wading in among them setting them on fire (the particular paladin I have in mind is a tiefling, and when set on fire by one of his allies decided to share some of the joy of it with the hobgoblins).
Come and Get It reliably produces a situation in which the fighter is in the thick of things, beating up on enemies. It's like a little mini-scene framing tool. The details of the fiction that produce that scene are, for me, secondary to the scene itself and the consequences that flow from it.
I'm not at all sure about this idea of "naturally getting" the theory. If you go to the ICE forums, you can find a whole lot of people who "naturally get" the theory about the deficiencies of hits points, and AC, and class features (ICE games are all points-buy variants, in which class only affects the points cost of abilities). But all this really tells us is something about what they are looking for in a game, and why Rolemaster and HARP provide it but D&D doesn't.
Presumably there are people who like RuneQuest but not Rolemaster because RM still uses classes to allocate points costs, and levels to parcel out the points, whereas RQ has neither of these "dissociated" features.
I think this discussion would benefit from more people just talking about what they want the mechanics to do (as you have tried to in your posts).
Ahnehnois
First Post
No! Hit points suck, for precisely this reason. The main reason we put up with them is because we're used to them, and because they are intuitive (as they resemble hit points in a variety of non-TTRPG games; unlike powers, which don't). But they are one of the biggest problems in D&D. A true advancement of the rules to a new and better edition would almost require dumping hit points.
Experience points are an inherently optional pacing mechanic that most people already change or ignore. The attempt to bake XP into the rules through XP costs for spells and items was one of the most universally derided aspects of 3e, and with good reason. It breaks immersion, isn't balanced, and doesn't add anything useful to the game. (Unlike some of [MENTION=6688858]Libramarian[/MENTION] 's examples above, such as plot points, which do add something useful for some people at least).
So, to review, XP and HP are dissociated, and this is a problem, and it would be better to fix this problem rather than adding more mechanics that create new problems.
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