D&D4: Most Unique and Interesting Powers.

[Tony Vargas]

Fear my oracular powers, but I foresee that we will soon discover from this thread that Tony Vargas likes 4e and Saelorn does not.

"soon discover?" ;P What is this, 2008?

The DM didn't have to spell it out in detail, because everyone at the table instantly agreed that this was the most logical chain of events for what probably happened at some point within the background of the setting.

You saw 'Teleport,' under Fey Step, assumed it worked a certain way, and have been mocking it all this time in ignorance. ("XOMG! These faux elves are natural teleporters! You can't lock 'em up, they must have to execute them for any crime! LoL! This game is so stoopid!")

While there's "Murphy's Rules" in every game, this wasn't one of them.

My favorite power use though was the party monk using "Drunken Monkey", which if you hit causes damage and then slides the target one square and gets them makes a melee basic attack against one enemy of your choice.

The Monk used it on a Gelatinous cube, ... this caused the cube to kinda.. wooble like jelly over to another gelatinous cube and attempt to engulf it.

Well, 'slam' it. Engulf not being a basic attack. (Sorry, Saelorn has me thinking in technicalities.)

The Monk lurches about, the Cube, a mindless panomnivore with tremorsense, instinctively follows that movement, lashes out when poked, and slams into another cube, the monk having drunkenly stumbled out of its path.

Rest of Party: Woah! What did you just do?
Monk: I.... don't know...

I can totally picture that, as long as the Monk is a young Jackie Chan. ;P

 

[The Crimson Binome]

I think my favorite power was Thunderwave, because it was an at-will power that was entirely different from anything that anyone else could do. It instantly solidified the Wizard's role as controller and secondary damage-dealer (with a specialty against large groups).

 

[The Crimson Binome]

You saw 'Teleport,' under Fey Step, assumed it worked a certain way, and have been mocking it all this time in ignorance. ("XOMG! These faux elves are natural teleporters! You can't lock 'em up, they must have to execute them for any crime! LoL! This game is so stoopid!")

No, we understood how it actually worked. We saw that a blindfold would be sufficient. We just didn't assume that regular old humans, who couldn't see the game rules, would ever figure that out.

All of the evidence was there. They could have figured it out, if they'd bothered to test it. That just didn't seem like something they would do. Maybe in a high-magic setting, everyone would know enough about magic that they would think to try the obvious test, but that wasn't the case in the world the DM managed to cobble together from the three books we had.

 

[Neonchameleon]

They certainly can! Although it's much harder in 4E, where lost HP definitely don't correspond to physical wounds, and someone could surreptitiously recover their HP if you took your eyes off of them for five minutes.

Well, yes. If you're trying to track the wrong number you get the wrong results. People can only recover HP at the cost of Healing Surges. Spending a healing surge to recover hit points is what a professional boxer does between rounds. Which makes it match up to the real world a lot better than a system where a fighter doesn't come out stronger at the start of the next round than the end of the previous one. And once the boxer goes down they go down.

No, we understood how it actually worked. We saw that a blindfold would be sufficient. We just didn't assume that regular old humans, who couldn't see the game rules, would ever figure that out.

I thought I lacked faith in humanity! It's a lot easier to discover than e.g. the source of Samson's strength. And essentially you're proposing humans who never ever seriously interact with Eladrin and humans without either scientific method or legends and fairy tales. To me those people are more alien than most fantasy species.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

And essentially you're proposing humans who never ever seriously interact with Eladrin and humans without either scientific method or legends and fairy tales.

The scientific method wasn't formalized until the 13th Century, and even today most people don't think to apply it in their daily lives. The chance that some random constable or sheriff would want to test something like this is fairly low, and any legends they've heard would be unlikely to include such an exploitable weakness. (A fairy tale might, if it was central to the plot.)

 

[Tony Vargas]

No, we understood how it actually worked. We saw that a blindfold would be sufficient. We just didn't assume that regular old humans, who couldn't see the game rules, would ever figure that out.

You said:

In the game I played, it meant that all Eladrin criminals were to be executed immediately, since it was impossible to imprison them. It was huge and world-defining, but not in a good way.

Blindfolds and windowless cells are hardly 'impossible.' What some rubes who lack information might do is hardly 'huge' and 'world-defining.'

Clearly you wildly over-stated things in boiling your experience down to a one-liner. It happens.

The scientific method wasn't formalized until the 13th Century, and even today most people don't think to apply it in their daily lives.

Yet you've routinely asserted that such methods would be used to drag rules-physics into the fiction as matter of course, even that it was unthinkable they wouldn't be.

If you're going to argue an unreasonable position, at least pick one and stick to it.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Yet you've routinely asserted that such methods would be used to drag rules-physics into the fiction as matter of course, even that it was unthinkable they wouldn't be.

It could be done. It would be unthinkable that it couldn't be done. That's generally true, for all rules. Whether or not anyone would depends very much on the individuals and circumstances involved.

 

[pemerton]

Probably my single favourite power is Come and Get It, because it is so emblematic of both the flavour of 4e mechanics and the flavour of 4e combat.

I think one of the most memorable powers on a creature is the Chained Cambion's psychic chaining Mind Shackles power, which "locks" two PCs together so that, if they are not adjacent, both take damage - and if one saves the other can still be "bound". When I used this to lock together the fighter and ranger, the two players really did start bickering and getting frustrated with one another, just as the cambion's flavour text said was happening in the fiction (a chained cambion radiates pain, rage, and frustration . . . [and] screams its despair within the minds of nearby foes).

The most unique and interesting power for a PC that I can recall is one that I only saw used once (the ones I've seen used a lot have to some extent lost whatever uniqueness they once had): Charm of the Dark Dream, a 15th level wizard domination power that removes the wizard from play - in the fiction, s/he enters the body of the possessed target. This never saw use in combat in our game (shortly after learning it, the wizard died and was reborn as an invoker) but it was used to try and read the mind of a guard so as to learn the password into a fortress (naturally it failed, and mayhem ensued).

(Rereading that second actual play report also reminded me of another power that did see a lot of use between 7th and 15th levels - the wizard's Twist of Space. A terrific power, that also lent itself well to non-combat use in skill challenge-type situations.)

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I had a lot of fun with the Shaper Psion powers.

 

[Herobizkit]

For me, I adore how Ritual Casting works. Having the ability (and the funds) to make campaign (narrative)-changing effects was far more interesting than how much damage I could do.

That, and Traveller's Insight shenanigans - +1 Insight for every language your know. Maximize at your leisure.