pemerton said:
I think they are saying that I can have tactical combat for its own sake - with exciting manoeuvres and funky battlefield features.
I don't see them saying anything about expressing the story via such things.
That's because in 5e, if the promise of modularity is fulfilled, it can't have
a story. There is no "the" story. There is only YOUR story, the story of you and your fellow players at your table.
This is part of what it means to make a game that does not have One True Way To Play It: whatever you choose to do at your table
is the entire game as far as you and your group is concerned. But it might not be very similar at all to what someone else does. Given that one of the tabletop RPG's biggest strengths is flexibility, this is a Good Thing.
So if you want tactical combat to express something about the game world (a statement which befuddles me with its opacity), it is up to YOU to put that in there. After all, not everyone wants that.
You can play the game you want to play. Thee game doesn't assume that they way any particular group wants to play is the way that everyone ought to play. The message of 5e doesn't seem to be "D&D is about fighting monsters!", the message of 5e seems to be "D&D is
your story. Tell it how you want to."
That does require a bit more assembly, usually, but it results in a much more fulfilling experience, IMXP.
pemerton said:
4e presents as a tactical combat engine - but this is just the vehicle for something else, namely, high (if you prefer, gonzo) fantasy storytelling. This is achieved by integrating the mythic stakes at crucial points of PC and NPC/monster design, as well as by giving the players a high degree of control over how their PCs confront those stakes (both in build and in action resolution, via powers, surges, action points etc).
This befuddles me. Most of 4e's story elements are tremendously superfluous to me personally, because they are not well integrated with the mechanics. This is a strength in certain respects: it allows very easily customizability and re-fluffing. But the mechanics don't, IMXP, provide gonzo fantasy storytelling. The mechanics don't integrate "mythic stakes" (whatever that means) at "crucial points of...design" (whatever those are), and the mechanics (targeted as they are at minis combat) present one ideal confrontation for resolving any problem (namely, minis combat, in which you get to use powers, surges, action points, etc.).
The 4e chassis provides mostly minis combat. The 4e mechanics for, say, using a blue dragon as an antagonist for an adventure, don't tell me anything about high fantasy storytelling. It tells me how they act in minis combat, but if my primary interest isn't in minis combat, it's all a lot of wasted mechanical onanism. 5e seems to want to recognize this, to say that people have different needs, to acknowledge that minis combat isn't necessarily The Point.
Dragonslav said:
They're both immediate reactions/interrupts, so they add complexity to the system, and they're both mechanically appealing for their effects, but what they're really good for is realizing a character in the realm of combat. In interaction, a character bluffs his way through a guard checkpoint by pretending to be a visiting ambassador; in exploration, he pulls a lockpick from his cravat and picks open a dungeon door; and in combat, he pulls an ally into the path of a oncoming arrow --> this guy is clearly an aristocrat with a shady background.
As much as I enjoy tactical combat, if the "tactical combat module" turns out to amount to just "I charge it. Now I bull rush and push it one square. Oh, it's facing away from me, so now I hit it... with combat advantage," then I'm not sure whether I'll prefer that or the fast-paced simplicity of the core combat rules, if it means getting through combat and into interaction and exploration faster.
Two points.
First, you don't need minis combat to represent that shady noble pulling an ally in front of an arrow. It works just fine abstractly, if you like abstract representation.
Second, I don't think any grid combat system bandying about rules for facing is at any risk for over-simplifying things any time soon.