ExploderWizard
Hero
Cardinal Richelieu
You mean that fine upstanding cleric of the people?
Watch/read again. Richelieu is merely an antagonist. Milady DeWinter is the source of all evil.
Cardinal Richelieu
Huh? Isn't "needs of the many outway the needs of the one" the defintion of Lawful Good? Isn't heroic self-sacrifice for the cause heroic?
Not getting your point here.
CaW groups prefer fighting when the odds are overwhelmingly on their side. They like setting up the battlefield to ensure this. But that means that, when faced with a fight where the odds are more indeterminate, they often retreat to buy time to set up the battlefield.
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I just found that in CaW groups, everyone was very cautious, and it was hard to act heroicly. Kind of honestly, there's a reason paladins have the whole "Lawful Stupid" stigma. I think that's because the paladin's heroic mindset conflicts with the pragmatic mindset of the rest of the CaW group.
In a CaS group, the outcome is more determined by the fight itself, rather than the factors leading up to the fight. Thus the group is more willing to engage in fights, to confront the villains, to act heroically, without needing to retreat and set up the battlefield first. I find that style of play to be more cinematic and heroic than CaW.
I never played Boot Hill, but didn't it have the same firearms system as Top Secret? Definitely primitive games, though not as whacked as my beloved Gamma World.
Encounter powers 'recharge' (though recharge has a specific jargon meaning in 4e that only aplies to monster powers that recharge in combat) with a short rest. A character starts with 2 at-will, 1 encounter, and 1 daily, and gains dailies and encounters as it levels. Encounter powers never constitute 'most' of those power, but they do form a nice core of less-powerful limitted-use powers.
Healing up to full between serious encounters is not anything new. In 3.x, it became common practice to use comparatively cheap items like Wands of CLW to heal fully between combats. But it was rarely a good idea to go into fights badly wounded in any ed. Between-combat healing in 4e consumes character resources - additional resource management, and a way of modeling wounds beyond immediate ones.
Using an attack power with the weapon keyword is not, in any concievable way shape or form 'casting a spell.' In 4e, a 'spell' is quite specifically an arcane power, and typically use implements rather than weapons. In 3.x and earlier, a spell is typified by using verbal, somatic and/or material components to effect some supernatural change. In AD&D, spells were also notable for being 'memorized.' Only wizards prepare spells in 4e. The prayers and exploits you're refering to have none of those things in common with spells. Clearly, they are not spells.
. . .
Then again, if you are so mis-informed as to consider Divine Challenge or Wolf Pack Tactics 'spells,' you probably shouldn't comment on it in public, either.
Then you tack on the requirement that we are older, have kids, don't want Fantasy Vietnam--that is, the players need some room to screw up without bringing the whole thing down like a house of cards.
One of the key things that 4E brings to the table when you choose to run it as a sandbox, no default encounter balance, is that encounters that aren't winnable are seldom immediately fatal.
IMO, the simplest way to do this is to have both "grind" monsters and "save or die" monsters - clearly labelled in some manner so that a DM doesn't use something that he doesn't want by mistake!I'm not sure if it's possible to write a single edition with both "grind combat" (plenty of time to correct for bad luck/misinterpretation of the odds) and "save or die" or "old style Boot Hill combat" -- 1d6 damage, 6 is just dead -- so you'd better try your darnedest not to get shot!
This is a very interesting post. It's not how I'd DM personally but it seems like a very interesting say to go about reconciling the two sides. What this post reminded me of, however, was this incredibly awesome blog post by a screen writer:
Kung Fu Monkey: Writing: Action Scenes
Summary: having a fight scene in which the only thing that is at stake is "will the main character die or not" is boring in film since the audience KNOWS that the main character isn't going to die halfway through the movie. So, what's better is to have other stuff be at stake during a fight since the audience has no idea if the hero is going to lose those other things that are at stake since the story can continue if the hero wins or loses those other things.
This same logic applies to RPGs. If the main thing that's at stake in a RPG fight is "will there be a TPK or not" then either you've going to have a whole lot of PC deaths (more than even the most neck-beared grognard would probably want) or you're going to have a whole lot of boring combats during with nothing is at stake. And even if you have a risk of a TPK in every fight, whole swathes of combat can still be boring if it has become clear which side is going to win.
If you could have fights in which interesting things are at stake in combat in which it's clear which side's stronger at any given point in the fight, that'd do a lot of reconcile the CaS/CaW sides since the CaS sides could do fun tactical stuff all the time, even if it's clear who's going to win the fight (either due to the initial set-up or due to what's gone on during the first few rounds of combat).
Let's brainstorm some ideas!
There's no way that the PCs can beat the Tyrannosaur! It's just too big! And if we run it's just too fast! How can we run and keep it from chasing all of us down?
The goblin guards are no match for us awesome heroes, but they're going to light the signal fire to bring a thousand goblins down on our heads! How can we stop them?
Help! There's a thousand goblins coming on down on our heads! We're all going to die! What can we do? Let's try to grab a hostage an negotiate our way out!
Ha! Ha! That wolf is dead meat! Let's all go kill it! Silly wolf! ON NO! There's wolves eating our pack mules! Go away wolves!
Stuff like that. Basically what you need to do is give the opposition a way to give the party a headache that PERSISTS AFTER THE END OF COMBAT (logistics and resource tracking is one way of doing this, but not the only one, healing surge draining critters can do this as well) and is hard to get rid of (i.e. persists longer than 24 hours would be ideal) and also give the PCs tools to do useful things in combat that they cannot hope to win so that there is something interesting at stake in any combat even if it's clear which side is going to win if there's a fight to the death.