Eldritch_Lord
Adventurer
I'm back; hope you all had a good Thanksgiving or good regular weekend, depending on where you are.
Relativity is the "how" for gravity; we can describe it mathematically, predict its activity, and so forth. We don't know why gravity is attractive rather than repulsive, why spacetime has the number of dimensions it does, and so forth. Same with magic in RPGs: you can describe what it does and can do it great detail, but why chanting and waving your arms lets you evoke fireballs isn't explicable.
No, I'm not talking about the Helpless condition, I'm talking English-language immobilized. See the Conditions section of the DMG:
This seeming contradiction is a side effect of once again assuming that I like everything in 3e, I think. I obviously can't speak for other AD&D/3e fans, but I was in a fairly heated debate a while back over at GitP about whether undead should be crittable in 3e, and I was on the side saying that they should be crittable--for Pelor's sake, everyone knows you stake vampires and headshot zombies, why wouldn't they have weak spots? In my own games, no type has precision damage immunity, but rather creatures that are insubstantial (like air and fire elementals) or amorphous (like oozes) have precision damage resistance; it's hard to deal an extra-damaging blow to something like that, but you can certainly disperse clouds and mash up Jello.
As I tried to emphasize with my mention of Searing Spell and other 3e examples earlier, I think 5e should avoid incorporating immersion-damaging mechanics from both 4e and 3e. It's just that the 4e mechanics get focused on because (A) this started out as a thread about the 4e warlord--sorry OP!--and (B) I'm trying to explain why the contentious 4e mechanics are contentious because former-3e-playing 4e fans frequently complain about the same nonmagical force orbs and other oddities when they played 3e yet profess to not see why the 4e oddities bother people.
I wouldn't say that Evasion, specifically, is less jarring than one of those powers, but I think that a concern for causal agency is a big part of it. Falling damage is abstracted to XdY damage with skill checks to reduce it, and beyond the occasional "You fall into a cart of hay, you're fine" to explain survival from high falls, we don't bother to figure out the shape of the landscape, whether there are sharp sticks in the area, etc. because the ground can't do anything to affect the outcome. Similarly with 3e fireballs: as long as they require an attack roll to get through small spaces and fill a 20-foot radius, it doesn't really matter whether you narrate them as a perfect sphere of flame, a poofy cloud of flame, smaller explosions, or whatever and explain your Ref save in that context
With the powers you mentioned, though, you're dealing with other causal agents. The effect isn't just something you can refluff with the same mechanical effect, because the difference between making falling damage the result of falling onto flat ground or onto sharp rocks is cosmetic detail on your soon-to-be-healed wounds, while the difference between a rogue attacking everyone he runs past and the rogue making everyone he runs past attack themselves is that in the first case it's the rogue being awesome and tricky and in the latter case it's a bunch of people making resoundingly moronic tactical decisions.
Player agency is kind of a big deal in RPGs. When you take away a player's agency in D&D, it's accompanied by a save on the part of the player (dominate and such), an opposed skill check (bluffing), or similar "gatekeeper" mechanics to signal "Yes, I know you wouldn't do this on your own, but your character falls for it, so play along." Diplomacy in 3e, a flat check by the diplomacize-er with no save or opposed check on the part of the diplomacize-ee, explicitly doesn't work on PCs; DM fiat where the DM dictates what your character thinks instead of letting you do it is frowned upon and characterized as the lowest depths of railroading.
So when I see mechanics that just make characters do something without giving the players a chance to resist it, or even giving a nod to Bluff/Will saves/etc. in a wink-nudge-play-along sort of way, that instance of a player taking limited metagame control over an NPC or the GM doing the same to a PC is indeed much more jarring. Even narrative control mechanics don't generally do that--either they let you dictate things that could happen anyway in a manner invisible to the characters (spend a fate point, the enemy misses, which was already a possible result of the roll) or they affect only the invoking character or his environment; compelling Aspects in FATE or similar is not "the BBEG spend a fate point to XYZ" but rather the DM offering the player a choice directly.
So yes, perhaps I'm biased in thinking that there's more refluffing/metagame "wiggle room" when dealing with the scenery than with other actors. To address forced movement, then, there's a difference between using forced movement on objects, using "persuasive" forced movement, and using "compulsory" forced movement. Forced movement to knock a barrel into someone? No problem; no agency involved. Using "compulsory" forced movement to telekinese someone into a bonfire? No problem; it's not dictating or countermanding agency. Using "persuasive" forced movement to scare someone into a bonfire? Problem; if the target knows it's there he wouldn't move into it on his own and would choose another path if he was told "you have to run away from the rogue" as opposed to letting the rogue move him.
To justify someone moving into an obvious hazard even in the confusion of combat, to my mind, requires more than just the fog of war and distraction. If there's a bonfire between me and my enemy, no amount of "Hey, wimp! Come and get me!" is going to make me run through it to hit him, and if there's an obviously squishy easy target to my left and an obviously armored tough target to my right it'll take a lot more than "C'mon, fight like a man!" to make me pass on the wizard and go for the fighter. Either they have to be supernaturally persuasive or very very good at pushing peoples' buttons (represented by Bluff or Will and shouldn't work on mindless creatures and animals), or they have to physically move me into the way (represented by Str or similar and shouldn't work on very big creatures).
If you'll permit me, I think I'd like to split 2 into two points, 2a) "Does it promote dynamism and depth within the tactical interface and the accompanying flavor" and 2b) "Does it promote a running combat narrative in a genre/archetype-relevant fashion?" As you might have gathered from my previous link-filled post, I'm in favor of evocative fluff but think the solution to James Bond is a full machine gun clip to the face rather than an elaborate deathtrap, so separating genre tropes from engaging tactics is important.
That said, while some of those probably wouldn't be on a priority list I'd create myself, I'd rank them in the order 2a-3-1-5-4-2b and 6 doesn't even make the list. To explain, I rank tactical depth and balance over fun here because it's possible to have fun with an imbalanced and/or shallow system; "is it fun" isn't a measure of a good mechanic, because you can have fun in a game session full of boring, clunky rules if you're playing with friends, while balance and depth are often components of games people describe as fun. Functionality and ease of use are more important to me than multiple flavor interpretations because I value having a mechanic with one inflexible interpretation that works well over having a mechanic with multiple flexible interpretations that doesn't. Number 6 is off the list because anything abstract enough to not have even a tenuous connection to the game world is too abstract to be useful and is likely more G or N than S.
Relativity is the "how" for gravity; we can describe it mathematically, predict its activity, and so forth. We don't know why gravity is attractive rather than repulsive, why spacetime has the number of dimensions it does, and so forth. Same with magic in RPGs: you can describe what it does and can do it great detail, but why chanting and waving your arms lets you evoke fireballs isn't explicable.
No, I'm not talking about the Helpless condition, I'm talking English-language immobilized. See the Conditions section of the DMG:
DMG said:
This seeming contradiction is a side effect of once again assuming that I like everything in 3e, I think. I obviously can't speak for other AD&D/3e fans, but I was in a fairly heated debate a while back over at GitP about whether undead should be crittable in 3e, and I was on the side saying that they should be crittable--for Pelor's sake, everyone knows you stake vampires and headshot zombies, why wouldn't they have weak spots? In my own games, no type has precision damage immunity, but rather creatures that are insubstantial (like air and fire elementals) or amorphous (like oozes) have precision damage resistance; it's hard to deal an extra-damaging blow to something like that, but you can certainly disperse clouds and mash up Jello.
As I tried to emphasize with my mention of Searing Spell and other 3e examples earlier, I think 5e should avoid incorporating immersion-damaging mechanics from both 4e and 3e. It's just that the 4e mechanics get focused on because (A) this started out as a thread about the 4e warlord--sorry OP!--and (B) I'm trying to explain why the contentious 4e mechanics are contentious because former-3e-playing 4e fans frequently complain about the same nonmagical force orbs and other oddities when they played 3e yet profess to not see why the 4e oddities bother people.
I wouldn't say that Evasion, specifically, is less jarring than one of those powers, but I think that a concern for causal agency is a big part of it. Falling damage is abstracted to XdY damage with skill checks to reduce it, and beyond the occasional "You fall into a cart of hay, you're fine" to explain survival from high falls, we don't bother to figure out the shape of the landscape, whether there are sharp sticks in the area, etc. because the ground can't do anything to affect the outcome. Similarly with 3e fireballs: as long as they require an attack roll to get through small spaces and fill a 20-foot radius, it doesn't really matter whether you narrate them as a perfect sphere of flame, a poofy cloud of flame, smaller explosions, or whatever and explain your Ref save in that context
With the powers you mentioned, though, you're dealing with other causal agents. The effect isn't just something you can refluff with the same mechanical effect, because the difference between making falling damage the result of falling onto flat ground or onto sharp rocks is cosmetic detail on your soon-to-be-healed wounds, while the difference between a rogue attacking everyone he runs past and the rogue making everyone he runs past attack themselves is that in the first case it's the rogue being awesome and tricky and in the latter case it's a bunch of people making resoundingly moronic tactical decisions.
Player agency is kind of a big deal in RPGs. When you take away a player's agency in D&D, it's accompanied by a save on the part of the player (dominate and such), an opposed skill check (bluffing), or similar "gatekeeper" mechanics to signal "Yes, I know you wouldn't do this on your own, but your character falls for it, so play along." Diplomacy in 3e, a flat check by the diplomacize-er with no save or opposed check on the part of the diplomacize-ee, explicitly doesn't work on PCs; DM fiat where the DM dictates what your character thinks instead of letting you do it is frowned upon and characterized as the lowest depths of railroading.
So when I see mechanics that just make characters do something without giving the players a chance to resist it, or even giving a nod to Bluff/Will saves/etc. in a wink-nudge-play-along sort of way, that instance of a player taking limited metagame control over an NPC or the GM doing the same to a PC is indeed much more jarring. Even narrative control mechanics don't generally do that--either they let you dictate things that could happen anyway in a manner invisible to the characters (spend a fate point, the enemy misses, which was already a possible result of the roll) or they affect only the invoking character or his environment; compelling Aspects in FATE or similar is not "the BBEG spend a fate point to XYZ" but rather the DM offering the player a choice directly.
So yes, perhaps I'm biased in thinking that there's more refluffing/metagame "wiggle room" when dealing with the scenery than with other actors. To address forced movement, then, there's a difference between using forced movement on objects, using "persuasive" forced movement, and using "compulsory" forced movement. Forced movement to knock a barrel into someone? No problem; no agency involved. Using "compulsory" forced movement to telekinese someone into a bonfire? No problem; it's not dictating or countermanding agency. Using "persuasive" forced movement to scare someone into a bonfire? Problem; if the target knows it's there he wouldn't move into it on his own and would choose another path if he was told "you have to run away from the rogue" as opposed to letting the rogue move him.
To justify someone moving into an obvious hazard even in the confusion of combat, to my mind, requires more than just the fog of war and distraction. If there's a bonfire between me and my enemy, no amount of "Hey, wimp! Come and get me!" is going to make me run through it to hit him, and if there's an obviously squishy easy target to my left and an obviously armored tough target to my right it'll take a lot more than "C'mon, fight like a man!" to make me pass on the wizard and go for the fighter. Either they have to be supernaturally persuasive or very very good at pushing peoples' buttons (represented by Bluff or Will and shouldn't work on mindless creatures and animals), or they have to physically move me into the way (represented by Str or similar and shouldn't work on very big creatures).
If you'll permit me, I think I'd like to split 2 into two points, 2a) "Does it promote dynamism and depth within the tactical interface and the accompanying flavor" and 2b) "Does it promote a running combat narrative in a genre/archetype-relevant fashion?" As you might have gathered from my previous link-filled post, I'm in favor of evocative fluff but think the solution to James Bond is a full machine gun clip to the face rather than an elaborate deathtrap, so separating genre tropes from engaging tactics is important.
That said, while some of those probably wouldn't be on a priority list I'd create myself, I'd rank them in the order 2a-3-1-5-4-2b and 6 doesn't even make the list. To explain, I rank tactical depth and balance over fun here because it's possible to have fun with an imbalanced and/or shallow system; "is it fun" isn't a measure of a good mechanic, because you can have fun in a game session full of boring, clunky rules if you're playing with friends, while balance and depth are often components of games people describe as fun. Functionality and ease of use are more important to me than multiple flavor interpretations because I value having a mechanic with one inflexible interpretation that works well over having a mechanic with multiple flexible interpretations that doesn't. Number 6 is off the list because anything abstract enough to not have even a tenuous connection to the game world is too abstract to be useful and is likely more G or N than S.
