Fully agreed. Though in practice that can be easier said than done. You need enemy knowledge, positional opportunity for the team to target and focus them enough, and even then big sacks of hp usually do strong damage such that the trade off for focusing on them vs splitting attacks amongst others isn’t usually clear, even if all the enemy numbers (attack/defense/hp/etc) are known, and definitely not when they are not. (Known minions being one of the clearest exceptions).
I don’t agree here. With a few rare exceptions a player using a power early in an encounter is almost always going to end the day as having been more effective than his ally that waits. As a quick example - Killing one enemy on round 1 is so much better than killing 2 enemies on round last. Yea the 2nd character may have done more ‘damage’, but effectiveness isn’t measured in damage.
Cooordination is better but it doesn’t have to be to that level. A player simply observing another player used his daily power this encounter, maybe I should save mine is fine. The key is realizing that using the power early in the fight almost always provides more benefit.
Depends on how one classifies control I guess. If you mean giving enemies debuffs outside marking, sure. If you mean fighters making multiple OA’s and stopping movement (maybe just marked enemy movement) on them then that’s a really specific build. Most defenders don’t do anything like that.
Its better, but not necessary IMO. Each player can act autonomously without any prior coordination and still end up with results nearly equaling planned coordination. That’s mostly because you can alter your plans after seeing what your ally did.
yea, 4e powers just aren’t models or simulations of your in universe always on capabilities. Expecting them to be since 3e was so much that is understandable, but will ultimately lead to the kind of experience you describe. If you accept 4e powers for what they are - essentially player narrative control to declare the circumstances to gain the benefits for a particular power coming up in the fiction then the problem you mentioned goes completely away. You still may not like the aesthetic, I get that, but it’s not because the game is doing something illogical.
OK, but if a GM has an issue with these; if they're part of a problem with your game, then certainly you would simply not incorporate them, right? So when people point to them as issues, I can't grasp what that issue is. The cure is pretty obvious! Now, I don't honestly think stuff like that makes a ton of difference. I get that it modifies parts of the structure of play a bit, but the game still works fine, in a Narrativist sense. Narrativist play is VERY ROBUST to this sort of issue, the story is A or it is B, oh well!
If they're not that interested in magic items and keeping track of what they need, you might want to consider Inherent Bonuses, where they just automatically get the expected math bonuses as they level regardless of their equipment. There's a checkbox for that in the character builder. I usually just do that myself when running 4e so that I can give them treasure that has other uses than keeping up with the treadmill.
Sounds solid! Out of curiosity, when you use minions, how many do you typically use and how many regular enemies?
Yea. I wouldn’t expect it to improve until way later lol.
Nice.
Well as long as someone is keeping them on that treadmill all is good.
This is a fair analysis in terms of trad play, which is something that 4e certainly aims to allow. However, this sort of argument/problem/solution doesn't really matter in terms of Narrativist play. That is, there's no 'plot' which can be 'spoiled' by the players doing A or B in a game that I or @Manbearcat (I'm pretty darn sure) would be running. OK, the players are clever, they have an exodus knife, they use it to get them past an obstacle in their self-assigned quest. That's great! Now there's a new situation, new obstacles, whatever. Maybe they attain their goal this way, OK. They're now level X and it's on to the next thing, probably driven by some larger overarching thematic elements of play. Again, looking at MBC's PBP thread we can easily pick out these themes and it is really very little effort to imagine what happens if the characters employ such a device.
Ugh! I mean, I don't particularly object to the concept "what is good for the goose is good for the gander", by all means give the bad guys an exodus knife and see what happens. OTOH it would be a bad idea not to give the players a shot at figuring it out and countering it too! Nor should every shtick the players employ in play be automatically countered like it is some 'loophole in play', you are falling into the adversarial classic D&D play trap of us vs them. 4e is much more potent a game as a means to explicate all the rich thematics of its elements and let the players really bring them out and play it up, than as something where the GM is trying to out clever the players and 'block their exploits'. That sort of play works, for a while, but it is pretty limited in its scope, IMHO.
You can punch again, but it will just be an ordinarily effective punch. YOU decide when in the story it makes sense for your guy to make that big haymaker punch that takes down the baddy! Daily powers are much less of a character-side resource and much more of a PLAYER narrative resource, a chit you get to throw into play, and the skill is knowing when. It IS a game after all.
Narrativist play still has to interact with the game mechanics, and for better or worse 4e is based on long rests being spaced out over roughly a four-encounter work day. If your players are regularly taking half the day off, the narrative moving forward has to compensate for that. Players aren't the sole deciders of what happens, and there are NPCs out there pursuing their own goals. Whether its rivals growing proportionately stronger, patrons denying rewards for taking too long to accomplish a task, or the more basic "have a harder fight because you gave your foes time to prepare" approach, taking early long rests has to have a cost or your players are going to find themselves feeling unchallenged pretty quickly.
As I said, I'm not really a fan of the "directly trump their hidey-hole trick" approach myself (preferring to adjust the opposition's schemes and/or encounter difficulty instead) but having played with DMs who do so I can say it didn't produce the negative effects you're afraid of here. The key is being open about it. If you're going to homebrew ways to get at the players in their hidey-hole, make it known in advance that such things can happen, and that the PCs can access the same means against baddies who try holing up themselves.
Sure, but there's ~4 encounters in a work day. Killing one enemy in round one of encounter one is nowhere near as good as killing two equivalent enemies in round one of a later encounter, especially late in the day when resources are running low.
Within a single encounter, that's usually true. But which encounter(s) in the day you unload in matters a lot, and the first one is often a poor choice.
