D&D 4E 4E combat and powers: How to keep the baby and not the bathwater?

[Ratskinner]

This isn't a terrible idea but every time I suggest that the same thing be done for spellcasters (making a limited list of spells that they can use as much as they want) people throw a tantrum.

I'd have XP'd you...but need to spread it around.

Anyway, consider me to be throwing whatever the opposite of a tantrum is about this idea. (Although, I'd still like ritual casting on the side.)

 

[Buugipopuu]

AEDU just trades "I attack I attack" for players rattling the same sequences of encounter powers in every fight, which is hardly more interesting after a couple of encounters, and is stupid from a world building perspective (It implies that 'an Encounter' exists as a well-defined entity within the world, and people are aware of them beginning and ending, you may as well have Final Fantasy-style swirly battle transitions. It also means that no matter what skills you learn, or where you're getting your power from, everything you can do is always in one of three highly granular levels of frequency).

Bot9S did it slightly better by adding recovery methods, although its fluff limited its applicability. Recovery methods are where it's at. Ideally everything is either at-will or expendable once until recovered. Different characters can have different recovery methods, meaning we don't have ADEU's problem that every character is the same with different fluff. Martial characters would generally recover by fulfilling certain conditions (possibly class/stance dependant), like 'enemy attacks someone other than you while you threaten them', 'scores a critical hit' or 'enemy tries to retreat', or for more stealth-focussed characters, for gaining positional advantages ('flank an enemy', 'successfully distract an opponent', 'begin and end a combat round without being detected') while magical characters would re-prepare their spells, with the possibility for risky in-combat casting straight from their spellbooks (in the Wizard's case) or beseeching their deity for extra ad-hoc power (in the Cleric's case).

 

[FireLance]

AEDU just trades "I attack I attack" for players rattling the same sequences of encounter powers in every fight, which is hardly more interesting after a couple of encounters, and is stupid from a world building perspective (It implies that 'an Encounter' exists as a well-defined entity within the world, and people are aware of them beginning and ending, you may as well have Final Fantasy-style swirly battle transitions. It also means that no matter what skills you learn, or where you're getting your power from, everything you can do is always in one of three highly granular levels of frequency).

If you want to get technical, an encounter power is one that you get back after a short (usually 5-minute) rest. You don't rest, you don't get the power back, even if you are attacked again. "Encounter", when used in the context of how often you can use a power, is about as well-defined as "day" - if you assume a day starts after an extended rest (during which you get your daily powers back) and ends with another one.

So yes, there are three levels of frequency: at-will powers that you can use continuously, encounter powers that you need to take a short rest to regain (and you can flavor divine characters praying and meditating and wizards studying their spellbooks to regain their powers during a short rest) , and daily powers that you need to take an extended rest to regain.

 

[billd91]

Now this I have to disagree with. By and large, "I attack" is the best option.

Any of the maneuvers in 3e, if you don't have the feat to mitigate the penalties, are never, ever better than I attack, because you get whacked with a honking great penalty to try. Why would anyone even consider picking up a second weapon if they haven't paid for two weapon fighting? Try to trip without the feat? Yeah right, you fail, you fall down, you succeed, you burned your attack to deal no damage. Depending on how the initiative order is, you basically just traded in your attack for an AOO and the bad guy loses a move action.

Disarm? Monsters outside of humanoids don't use weapons. That leaves Sunder out as well. Grapple? Good luck with that - virtually everything you fight is bigger/stronger/has more legs than you do.

Depends a lot on the campaign. I have run and played a few campaigns in which the primary antagonists were humanoids (humans to be precise). Disarm's got a lot more value in that sort of campaign.

I've also played characters that have had a hard time hitting certain antagonists. But we also played with teamwork. My job was to trip the heavily armored opponent so that everyone else could do a better job against him. Worked pretty well because that was something I could do effectively in that fight.

Too many arguments about the failure of balancing issues or options that aren't as good as other ones assume one size fits all. There's too little view that the game and its options are tools that may or may not be particularly useful for any one campaign's kit.

 

[Hussar]

Depends a lot on the campaign. I have run and played a few campaigns in which the primary antagonists were humanoids (humans to be precise). Disarm's got a lot more value in that sort of campaign.

Fair enough. However, I'd point to the plethora of published adventures out there and say that this is a minority. Most modules do not feature humanoids as the primary protagonist.

I've also played characters that have had a hard time hitting certain antagonists. But we also played with teamwork. My job was to trip the heavily armored opponent so that everyone else could do a better job against him. Worked pretty well because that was something I could do effectively in that fight.

Yup, as I said, if you laser beam focus your character to do one trick really well, then he's useful. Can't really do anything else, but, he does that one thing over and over and over and over and over again really well.

Too many arguments about the failure of balancing issues or options that aren't as good as other ones assume one size fits all. There's too little view that the game and its options are tools that may or may not be particularly useful for any one campaign's kit.

I'd much rather presume that the rules in the game are going to be used. And that means that people are going to use a large chunk of the Monster Manual and not limit themselves (for quite possibly excellent reasons) to a handful of opponents that slot into a specific tactical response.

You need to mechanics to be as broad as possible. That it might work great for you doesn't help me at all and vice versa. I'd much rather a set of mechanics that works fairly well for both of us and we can go on from there.

 

[Li Shenron]

I think this is the problem here: there's nothing in any edition of the D&D rules that tells you to play this way. Where did you ever get this notion? In 4E I'd direct you to page 42 for some pretty good rules on doing this, but I certainly allowed people to try things in earlier editions as well. I'm surprised that you have this attitude... where does it come from?

From this forum, WotC forum, and the gaming online community in general.

 

[eamon]

[concerning the source of the notion that its not "allowed" to use an ability you don't have a power or other rules-based support for]

From this forum, WotC forum, and the gaming online community in general.

It's a very reasonable assumption in any case: Character building is in some sense a tradeoff: you're not making a character that can do everything; (s)he has a speciality. When a rule grants you a certain ability conditional on some investment, of course you can p.42 and just ignore the investment and grant the ability regardless. But in general, that's not going to fly: if you want the ability, you need to invest to get it.

So in that sense, there's a trade-off between rules and improvisation: if the rules say how something's accomplished and you're using those rules, it's not reasonable to just hand out freebies willy-nilly. Of course there might be exceptions; but the default answer will be "well, do you have that power?"

Aside; refering to pg.42 is a cop-out. In principle you can improvise anything, but in practice it's easy to make mistakes or be inconsistent; furthermore it takes much more time than just using pre-written well-thought-out rules. Heck, what are the rules for if not avoid the need to resolve everything on an ad-hoc basis?

 

[steeldragons]

Not to be flaunting my near-complete ignorance of 4e (or if it is a 3e reference, I don't know that either!), but would someone be so kind as to elaborate/site what "pg. 42" is/says. So I and presumably others will have a full understanding of how it applies to people's positions.

Please and thank you.
--Steel "going to go check in the mirror and make sure his grognard isn't showing" Dragons

 

[Hassassin]

Not to be flaunting my near-complete ignorance of 4e (or if it is a 3e reference, I don't know that either!), but would someone be so kind as to elaborate/site what "pg. 42" is/says. So I and presumably others will have a full understanding of how it applies to people's positions.

Please and thank you.
--Steel "going to go check in the mirror and make sure his grognard isn't showing" Dragons

It gives the DM some advice on adjudicating improvised attacks like shoving someone to a brazier of burning coals, and how to frame those in terms of the core mechanics.

The bottom of the page and the main "crunch" is a table entitled "difficulty class and damage by level" that gives you balanced target numbers and damage examples to use for those situations. Most of the text deals with how to use the table.

 

[BobTheNob]

Aside; refering to pg.42 is a cop-out. In principle you can improvise anything, but in practice it's easy to make mistakes or be inconsistent; furthermore it takes much more time than just using pre-written well-thought-out rules. Heck, what are the rules for if not avoid the need to resolve everything on an ad-hoc basis?

thank you for saying. Would have xp,d but not working on iPad. Odd that.

Absolutely. You can't on the one hand say "here is a set of rules for power definitions that dictate how actions are performed in the clearest and most concise way possible" (and all due respect to 4e, it succeed in that spectacularly) and then turn around and say "oh, but you can ignore it if you like".

It's a confusion of approachs to spend hundreds of pages spread over multiple source books documenting power after power after power, which in turn became a vital part of class definition, and then have one page that said "oh, by the way, you can forget about it all and make it up as you go along".

To me, it all felt like they came up with the tightest edition to date, then realized that tabletop RPGs need a certain freedom to be interesting and after all that work added a 1 page disclaimer after the fact.