Discussing 4e Subsystems: POWERS!

[Lonely Tylenol]

This is something I strongly am against. Players only get to decide what they want to do, and with that have more narrative control over anything the DM has, as the DM only sets up chances.

I notice that you cut out my comments about granularity, which were largely the point of that post, so I'll repeat myself.

If the DM does not say, "the enemy glances at the paladin, giving you an opening," you don't get a chance to use an interesting ability that relies on such an opening. The DM never has any reason to do that, considering that it would be essentially a free giveaway. He never sets up chances, because there are no rules for setting up chances at that level of granularity. The monster is in this square or that. It is attacking or not. It has conditions X, Y, and Z applied by various spells and effects. But did it over-reach when it tried to hit you with its club, granting you an opportunity to knock it down? There are no rules for that.

4e specifically lets you say, yes, the monster over-reached. By blowing this particular encounter power, I get to say it did, and I get to hit it like so. 4e specifies details that 3e abstracts, and those details are things that make combat sound more fun when you're describing what it is that's going on.

Sure, you could ad-lib this stuff, but then you would have to deliberately avoid descriptions that give you mechanical advantages. In 3e, you could turn "I hit for 3 damage," into "I smash his face with my mace," but you couldn't then ask the DM whether smashing his face causes him to have any kind of penalties, as one might expect it would. Book of Iron Might included a whole stunt system to account for these things, because of the perceived need for them. In 4e, you could simply get a face-smashing power that smashes faces and applies some kind of negative status effect on top of it in accordance with what you might expect after smashing someone's face.

4e hands you a bunch of cool actions, and says "here, use these. It'll be awesome." You don't have to wait for your DM to remember to give you the chance to do something other than "I hit for 3 damage." You get to throw in an awesome thing whenever you like. And the DM is given his own awesome things in the Monster Manual. The entire game is geared toward fun descriptions of cinematic combat manoeuvres. I fail to see how that is a bad thing to encourage.

 

[justanobody]

You mean like if the 3E fighter, who deals 1d8+4 with his hammer, rolls three 4s for 8 damage each, then rolls a critical for 25 damage, then rolls another 4 for 8 damage again?



I'm confused - are you saying this was a 'great game device', or a 'strange and silly limit'?

-Hyp.

Thankfulyl I am done with 3rd as they moved on to 4th, and that is what I play a bit now as well as AD&D. I am free from 3rd and its strangeness.

I was saying that the DM deciding everyone should be able to build a fire got around the silly NWPs.

It isn't so easy with these powers to just hand-waive it seems. At least we haven't found it yet.

I notice that you cut out my comments about granularity, which were largely the point of that post, so I'll repeat myself.

If the DM does not say, "the enemy glances at the paladin, giving you an opening," you don't get a chance to use an interesting ability that relies on such an opening. The DM never has any reason to do that, considering that it would be essentially a free giveaway. He never sets up chances, because there are no rules for setting up chances at that level of granularity. The monster is in this square or that. It is attacking or not. It has conditions X, Y, and Z applied by various spells and effects. But did it over-reach when it tried to hit you with its club, granting you an opportunity to knock it down? There are no rules for that.

4e specifically lets you say, yes, the monster over-reached. By blowing this particular encounter power, I get to say it did, and I get to hit it like so. 4e specifies details that 3e abstracts, and those details are things that make combat sound more fun when you're describing what it is that's going on.

Sure, you could ad-lib this stuff, but then you would have to deliberately avoid descriptions that give you mechanical advantages. In 3e, you could turn "I hit for 3 damage," into "I smash his face with my mace," but you couldn't then ask the DM whether smashing his face causes him to have any kind of penalties, as one might expect it would. Book of Iron Might included a whole stunt system to account for these things, because of the perceived need for them. In 4e, you could simply get a face-smashing power that smashes faces and applies some kind of negative status effect on top of it in accordance with what you might expect after smashing someone's face.

4e hands you a bunch of cool actions, and says "here, use these. It'll be awesome." You don't have to wait for your DM to remember to give you the chance to do something other than "I hit for 3 damage." You get to throw in an awesome thing whenever you like. And the DM is given his own awesome things in the Monster Manual. The entire game is geared toward fun descriptions of cinematic combat manoeuvres. I fail to see how that is a bad thing to encourage.

Starting with the bold part. 4th shouldn't limit you to what you can do like that...D&D shouldn't limit you like that.

What I do in the case of your "glacnes the paladin" bit, is nothing.

The enemy swings and either hits or misses. If it is a critical fumble, then he probably falls on his ass.

When it comes time for the player to do something they can add any flare they want. Any opening they wish the "exploit" for lack of a better word considering 4th's keywords....They can try anything they want.

It doesn't always mean they are going to get massive amounts of damage for trying something new and different.

That is the only thing I see 4th offering, is a bunch of bonus damage for things you could previously do if you only said you were going to hit someone with a hammer, but in turn you lose being able to do some things. Like creating your own flare.

To me the extra damage is not worth the narrative restrictions, among which is having everything keyworded. So when you say something the first instinct is that it menas a power if that happens to be the name of that powers.

 

[Hypersmurf]

Thankfulyl I am done with 3rd as they moved on to 4th, and that is what I play a bit now as well as AD&D. I am free from 3rd and its strangeness.

Okay. So the 1E fighter with a longsword, dealing 1d8+1 damage, rolls 3, 2, 3, 9, 4 for his five attacks. The fourth one was so much bigger than the first three, but the fifth one was lower than the fourth one!

I was saying that the DM deciding everyone should be able to build a fire got around the silly NWPs.

You didn't say that at all. You said the PC could never build a fire, which was a 'great device'.

Starting with the bold part. 4th shouldn't limit you to what you can do like that...

It doesn't. Read DMG p42.

When it comes time for the player to do something they can add any flare they want. Any opening they wish the "exploit" for lack of a better word considering 4th's keywords....They can try anything they want.

That's exactly how we're playing 4E.

That is the only thing I see 4th offering, is a bunch of bonus damage for things you could previously do if you only said you were going to hit someone with a hammer, but in turn you lose being able to do some things. Like creating your own flare.

4E hasn't prevented any flair on the part of my players.

So when you say something the first instinct is that it menas a power if that happens to be the name of that powers.

Train your players so that their first instinct is something helpful.

-Hyp.

 

[Toras]

See, I would love to see a/the power design rules. A basic balancing mechanism for constructing powers and balancing them against the other. I'd suggest point based, with different totals for at/will, encounter, and daily.

Then you pay for effects, targets, areas,....etc and then balance them against drawbacks like typed damage, defense,...etc. Then we could just make what we wanted from powers and not worry about it.

 

[justanobody]

Train your players so that their first instinct is something helpful.

-Hyp.

I am A player of 4th.

We decided it wasn't like D&D and we are just playing and accepting it as-is without thinking it is D&D, but a new game. It just doesn't fit for us to call it D&D because of these wonky things.

Also your 1e example doesn't change the range of the damage capable like the Crushing Blow power does change the range of the damage because of its single use.

 

[Hypersmurf]

Also your 1e example doesn't change the range of the damage capable like the Crushing Blow power does change the range of the damage because of its single use.

The range isn't important at the time, though. 8 damage at a given point in time is 8 damage, whether it was the maximum on 1d6+2 or the minimum on 8d10.

If I roll low four times and high once on 1d8, is that any different to rolling average four times on 1d6 and average once on 2d6? Why is one acceptable, and one unacceptable?

In the game world, the characters don't know the range of possibilities that might have just occurred; rather, they know the single possibility that did just occur.

-Hyp.

 

[justanobody]

The range isn't important at the time, though. 8 damage at a given point in time is 8 damage, whether it was the maximum on 1d6+2 or the minimum on 8d10.

If I roll low four times and high once on 1d8, is that any different to rolling average four times on 1d6 and average once on 2d6? Why is one acceptable, and one unacceptable?

In the game world, the characters don't know the range of possibilities that might have just occurred; rather, they know the single possibility that did just occur.

-Hyp.

But I know and that is what makes me feel something is off. I never said my PC feels anyway specific about it.

This is like where the whole Magic Missile being able to move a lever comes into play, where something just doesn't feel right, and explaining away doesn't work to well either.

Just not something I like about it.

Since I know the ranges of probability change because of odd insertion of a new range, then something is off for me, the player.

Back to the original thought, why do you need the powers, and how many are there really when you take into account the status effects?

Why not just let items offer status changes, and the bonus damage, and remove the powers. That is what they do now anyway except for melee types that get bonus weapon damage.

Then the player can hit someone in the head as many times as they want to bonk their enemies and remove potential arguments about why you can do something only one time....

Maybe if fighters didn't have some implied magic wild-talent to do this extra damage it wouldn't be so bad. But having the magic feel, and then limits on something seem odd.

Like getting a $100 bill and being told you cannot spend more than $1 in any given place. Yeah right!

 

[Hypersmurf]

Why not just let items offer status changes, and the bonus damage, and remove the powers.

To what end?

Maybe if fighters didn't have some implied magic wild-talent to do this extra damage it wouldn't be so bad. But having the magic feel, and then limits on something seem odd.

It doesn't feel like magic or a limitation to me.

Sometimes when a 1E fighter hits someone with a longsword, he deals 2 damage, and sometimes he deals 8 damage.

Sometimes when a 4E fighter hits someone with a longsword, he rolls 1d8, and sometimes he rolls 3d8.

Why does one feel magic and the other doesn't? In 1E, I could assume that the 8 damage attack was made with a better angle, or a more vulnerable opportunity, or that the 2 damage attack was mostly deflected by a lucky parry. In 4E, I can assume that the 3d8 attack is made with a better angle, or a more vulnerable opportunity... the cinematics don't require any sort of magic.

-Hyp.

 

[justanobody]

To what end?

A hammer can stun people. Say the hammer can do it only once per day. This restricts the weapon, but not the fighter.

The fighter can still hit someone on the head and maybe stun them, but the hammer offers a better chance at doing it. If the rules allowed for stunning someone such as deciding who to kill and who to knock unconscious.

So the fighter can do the same thing over all day and expect the same result without himself being the cause for discrepancy.

I know Crushing Blow doesn't offer stun, but trying to keep out of the damage are and keep the same example of something to do.

It doesn't feel like magic or a limitation to me.

Sometimes when a 1E fighter hits someone with a longsword, he deals 2 damage, and sometimes he deals 8 damage.

Sometimes when a 4E fighter hits someone with a longsword, he rolls 1d8, and sometimes he rolls 3d8.

Why does one feel magic and the other doesn't? In 1E, I could assume that the 8 damage attack was made with a better angle, or a more vulnerable opportunity, or that the 2 damage attack was mostly deflected by a lucky parry. In 4E, I can assume that the 3d8 attack is made with a better angle, or a more vulnerable opportunity... the cinematics don't require any sort of magic.

-Hyp.

OK, that works for you, but um...what about me? To me it feels magic. That will not be changed by anything anyone says.

So we really have to disagree on how the powers look. You can explain the magic I see to your satisfaction, but not to mine. That is fine, and good it can work that 3way, but doesn't negate that we each seem unable to agree on it. Oddly enough unlike some on the internet feel...we don't have to agree on it. You can like it that way, and I am fine with it, and hopefully you are fine with me disliking it the way it is.

 

[Hypersmurf]

So the fighter can do the same thing over all day and expect the same result without himself being the cause for discrepancy.

You're assuming the fighter is the cause of the discrepancy. Why not assume that the decision the fighter makes is whether or not to hit someone on the head, and the decision the player makes is whether or not the target might be stunned? That way, we can narrate anything as the cause of the discrepancy. The hammer glanced, or the hammer hit square. The target had his teeth clenched and wasn't disoriented, or the target's jaw snapped shut and he's rattled. The blow was caught short, or the blow struck at optimum distance.

The fighter isn't saying "I'll use my Stunning Hammer Blow", the fighter is saying "I'll hit him on the head". The player is saying "I'll spend my daily use of Stunning Hammer Blow to mean that this hit will stun the target".

All the fighter knows is that sometimes, if you're lucky, smacking someone on the head with a hammer will stun them.

From his point of view, it's no different to a feat that says "On a successful hit, roll 1d6; on a 6, the target is stunned". Sometimes, if the player rolls a 6, the target is stunned; sometimes, if the player doesn't roll a 6, the target isn't stunned. The fighter doesn't get to decide whether or not the target is stunned; sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn't.

In 4E, sometimes the player decides to use a power that stuns - like rolling a 6. Sometimes, the player doesn't decide to use a power that stuns - like not rolling a 6. From the fighter's perspective, it's exactly the same - sometimes, people get stunned, and sometimes, they don't.

-Hyp.