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L&L 5/21 - Hit Points, Our Old Friend
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<blockquote data-quote="nnms" data-source="post: 5918178" data-attributes="member: 83293"><p>I definitely agree with this. 3.x frustrated me to the point of quitting D&D for about 8 years (fortunately, that freed up time for games like My Life With Master, DitV, Nine Worlds, Fudge/FATE, etc.,).</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>My point in bringing this issue up is that while it may be somewhat talked about in the DMG, the published monster statblocks completely disregarded the equipment the creature had, what it was wearing, what it was using etc.,.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>The main problem with fiction in combat is that it rarely has an input into the mechanics. So all it really does is add time to each person's combat turn why they describe what a given at-will or encounter attack power looked like.</p><p></p><p>When i ran 4E, it was with explicit scene framing and no DM made plot. It was all improv off of player character goals. Even then, we still found that the combat mode made fiction descriptions unnecessary at best and a time waster at worst. We found it far better to have someone make a specific colour description at the end of each combat. Sort of using 4E combat to produce "story after."</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>I do agree. My issue is that I'm just so tired of it. And how I found the tactical encounter based combat system doesn't produce meaningful outputs. It basically does 1) everyone expends some healing surges and maybe a daily power, 2) a PC dies, or 3) TPK. I managed to get a bit more out of it, but I found it took a lot of work to avoid the "everything is contained in the encounter area & time frame" approach of 4E combat.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>This is exactly what I'm talking about.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>The key to making 4E work for continuous exploration type games was butchering the refresh rates, getting rid of the short rest and drastically changing healing, surges, etc.,. Oh, and dumping the XP budget, the pacing mechanic and the guidelines for encounter and monster design.</p><p></p><p>Pretty much the rest of the system could stay intact <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/erm.png" class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":erm:" title="Erm :erm:" data-shortname=":erm:" />, but it was a big change from the players' perspective. Enough that we ended up just switching to basic D&D.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="nnms, post: 5918178, member: 83293"] I definitely agree with this. 3.x frustrated me to the point of quitting D&D for about 8 years (fortunately, that freed up time for games like My Life With Master, DitV, Nine Worlds, Fudge/FATE, etc.,). My point in bringing this issue up is that while it may be somewhat talked about in the DMG, the published monster statblocks completely disregarded the equipment the creature had, what it was wearing, what it was using etc.,. The main problem with fiction in combat is that it rarely has an input into the mechanics. So all it really does is add time to each person's combat turn why they describe what a given at-will or encounter attack power looked like. When i ran 4E, it was with explicit scene framing and no DM made plot. It was all improv off of player character goals. Even then, we still found that the combat mode made fiction descriptions unnecessary at best and a time waster at worst. We found it far better to have someone make a specific colour description at the end of each combat. Sort of using 4E combat to produce "story after." I do agree. My issue is that I'm just so tired of it. And how I found the tactical encounter based combat system doesn't produce meaningful outputs. It basically does 1) everyone expends some healing surges and maybe a daily power, 2) a PC dies, or 3) TPK. I managed to get a bit more out of it, but I found it took a lot of work to avoid the "everything is contained in the encounter area & time frame" approach of 4E combat. This is exactly what I'm talking about. The key to making 4E work for continuous exploration type games was butchering the refresh rates, getting rid of the short rest and drastically changing healing, surges, etc.,. Oh, and dumping the XP budget, the pacing mechanic and the guidelines for encounter and monster design. Pretty much the rest of the system could stay intact :erm:, but it was a big change from the players' perspective. Enough that we ended up just switching to basic D&D. [/QUOTE]
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L&L 5/21 - Hit Points, Our Old Friend
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