Why Grab Does Not Work

[Derren]

Think about this for a minute - if you were fighting someone equipped with any kind of sharp, pointy thing who was approximately your equal in fighting skill, would you honestly try to rush him and grab him? Personally, I would also use my sharp pointy thing to sharply stick the point in him before he does so to me.

You mean like most combats against plate mail wearing opponents played out when you lacked a heavy weapon?
Grappling (with daggers) was a common tactic against heavily armoured enemies and all knights were trained in it.

 

[JesterOC]

So I wanted to test your Mind Flayer example

So I have two characters both 14 level
One an elf archer so he has the following

Dex 24
Skilled in Acrobatics

So his escape skill is +19

The Mind Flayer at 14th level has a Reflex of 27
So he has a 65% chance of making an escape by giving up a move action and about 88% using both. This is of course he is not dazed. For this discussion lets imagine it is a brain damaged Mind FLayer and it can't use its tenticles or its blast. Which severly limits his options but I don't want to check do the math to see how often this poor sap gets its brains blasted.

Ok now lets have out brain damaged flayer attact a level 14 mage.
Dex 13 (all the power ups have been going to int and con) since it does not need dex for any power and int helps with AC
No skill in Arcobatics
So his skill is at 9

So he has has a 10% chance of breaking free.

Of course check the math but it seems that this is pretty good to me.

JesterOC

 

[Agamon]

Grab =! Grapple

That's a feature, not a bug.

Jester's example shows that it's still useful in some cases, and it's still good at keeping someone from manuevering around.

No more grapple builds is like a breath of fresh springtime mountain air.

 

[Oldtimer]

If you use a standard action and a move action in the effort to escape a grab, you might as well not bother. Because guess what? You've just spent all the actions that would have allowed you to move away! Unless you're willing to burn an action point, your opponent can just grab you again and you're stuck where you are, having spent a round to accomplish nothing.

Now, assuming you only spend a move action, consider the following:

#1: You might fail, in which case you're not going anywhere.
#2: You might succeed and then use a standard action to move away, provoking an OA.
#3: You might succeed and then use a standard action to shift away, but that only gets you one square.
#4: You might succeed and then attack, in which case you still don't go anywhere.

Compare to if you weren't grabbed, which would let you shift and then move to get away from your enemy without provoking OAs.

You seem to forget that you can shift as part of the move action with a successful escape.

 

[FadedC]

You mean like most combats against plate mail wearing opponents played out when you lacked a heavy weapon?
Grappling (with daggers) was a common tactic against heavily armoured enemies and all knights were trained in it.

So basically it's something you only did when you were desperate, and not when you were actually armed with an effective weapon.

 

[IceBear]

I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that actual grappling rules were coming out in one of the later books. As mentioned, this is grabbing, not grappling.

 

[Derren]

So basically it's something you only did when you were desperate, and not when you were actually armed with an effective weapon.

Grappling a armoured foe was not an act of desperation. A dagger + grappling was considered a very effective weapon against someone in plate armour.
Sure heaving a armour breaking weapon might be preferable, but they were mostly heavy and required much room to wield properly.
And most of the time it was better to grapple a foe in plate mail with a dagger than attack him with a sword.

And even if it was a act of desperation, it was a commonly used one and all knights trained for it. So why not have rules for such a common fighting technique?

 

[hong]

You mean like most combats against plate mail wearing opponents played out when you lacked a heavy weapon?
Grappling (with daggers) was a common tactic against heavily armoured enemies and all knights were trained in it.

The correct weapons to use against knights are not daggers, but katanae.

 

[FadedC]

Grappling a armoured foe was not an act of desperation. A dagger + grappling was considered a very effective weapon against someone in plate armour.
Sure heaving a armour breaking weapon might be preferable, but they were mostly heavy and required much room to wield properly.
And most of the time it was better to grapple a foe in plate mail with a dagger than attack him with a sword.

And even if it was a act of desperation, it was a commonly used one and all knights trained for it. So why not have rules for such a common fighting technique?

You mean rules for stabbing somebody in heavy armor with a dagger while trying not to get hit by his sword? Yeah those do in fact exist. It's true there is no bonus or penalty for using certain weapons vs. certain armors, but those rules were wildly unpopular in 1e and are gone for a reason.

 

[Derren]

You mean rules for stabbing somebody in heavy armor with a dagger while trying not to get hit by his sword? Yeah those do in fact exist. It's true there is no bonus or penalty for using certain weapons vs. certain armors, but those rules were wildly unpopular in 1e and are gone for a reason.

You did not simply stab with the dagger, but grappled first. The dagger was mostly only for finishing the enemy of. You had to get inside the reach of the enemy, stay there and force the enemy to expose one of his joints or line up a stab through the helmet. And that was done through grappling.
The armoured enemy defended itself either by keeping the enemy at range (if he had a weapon with longer reach) or by overpowering the enemy in the grapple. Thats why most knights were trained in it.
Grappling was not a act of desperation, but a well used technique when fighting heavily armoured enemies. So "no one used it in real life" is not the reason that grap in 4E is so underwhelming.