D&D 4E 4e and reality

[Neonchameleon]

No. That's a "rules-light vs rules-heavy" or a "combat vs out-of-combat rules" example.

When most people say 'simulationism', they don't mean lots of rules, for everything. they mean rules that are intended to be consistent with the fluff.
most sim complaints involve existing mechanics, not the lack thereof.

Yes. And if they came from GURPS players I'd take them more seriously. As they come from players of older editions of D&D I find them amusing.

e.g. 4e has rules for exceptionally cool martial tricks, but there is no good in-game explanation for why they can be pulled-off exactly once per day / per fight.

As opposed to no times... But there are several reasons that work. Opportunity, preparation, blessing, pulling out all the stops. 3e had no better reason for why Barbarian Rage could be pulled off exactly a set number of times per day.

it has rules to grab or poison things, even things that don't look grabbable or poisonable so you have to come up with tortured explanations for how it works story-wise.

So does 3e. *shrug* Older editions have no consistent grappling rules. So you either need DM fiat (and that's going to be different from table to table and 90% of implementations are going to be bad) or to be unable to grapple.

I don't see people complaining about minions because they're not fleshed-out. they just dislike the same creature having different mechanics depending on whether it's a minion, regular monster or NPC.

What do you mean "The Same Creature"? By the RAW, the exact same creature is never in more than one category. Or do you mean the same type of creature? In which case that's a pure 3e objection. And why shouldn't a six year old use different mechanics from a member of the town guard and him from the Royal Champion?

and, to keep this on topic, they don't complain about the lack of a battle grid, they complain about grids and movement rules they don't find believable.

It's faster. *shrug* Especially for calculating spells. 2e fireball underground, anyone?

And my core problem with pre-4e is that I need to sit there like a lemon if I'm playing a fighter. When I fight with sword and shield I drive forwards, pushing most people back. Tide of Iron is an at will. If you have the battlemat at all and I can't do this easily I'm going to find the combat system too limiting to be credible. A lack of rules easily breaks simulation.

same for healing surges etc…

I find healing surges more plausible than the straight hit point model. And that's without going into issues like Cure Light Wounds doing less as the character level increases.

 

[Plane Sailing]

It can be important. Possible very important. Let's say you are a grappler fighter. The entire point of your character is that you grab things and move them to positions where they can't harm the rest of your group. You really like the idea of your character as a sort of "wrestler" so you don't carry any big weapons with you and you pick all powers that grab enemies, move around grabbed enemies, and can only target grabbed enemies.

Now, you run into a solo ooze or solo swarm. You start the combat the way you always do. You use your at-will power that grabs them until the end of the next turn so you can follow up next round with your attack that moves the grabbed target away and slams them into a wall to get it out of reach of the wizard and the archer in your party. Your DM says "You can't grab an ooze or a swarm. I just won't allow it, it makes the game make no sense."

I think that what you express here is a problem with a sense of 'player entitlement'. What does grapple PC do when he is faced by a band of archers on the other side of a ravine, or a flying foe that is dropping things on him. A *well considered* PC will have other options available to him, carrying a bow or crossbow of sling for those kind of circumstances. He would recognise that although grappling is his 'schtick', there will be numerous circumstances in the game where grappling isn't a reasonable approach to a problem (and foes which can only be attacked by ranged weapons is a very reasonable situation to turn up all over the place).

If I was running a game with a PC who focussed entirely on grappling everything to the exclusion of all else, then he would be laughed at (or sworn at) by the other players when he found himself unable to contribute meaningfully to several fights.

To my mind, the issue of grappling swarms is merely a special case of this situation. Grappling a swarm doesn't make sense, any more than grappling a waterfall makes sense. Pick a different power, use on of the other options, recognise that there are no one-size-fits-all solutions!

Regards

 

[Plane Sailing]

Because swarms are directly on the flipside vulnerable to bursts and blasts - something that even a melee fighter can get with a power like come and get it.

IIRC 'come and get it' wouldn't give you the full damage against swarms because the burst is just to draw people in, and you then make an attack against each of them. Isn't that right?

I'm sure there are some other true fighter 'burst' powers though, so it is just a nick-pick

 

[Nichwee]

IIRC 'come and get it' wouldn't give you the full damage against swarms because the burst is just to draw people in, and you then make an attack against each of them. Isn't that right?

No. The power is a Close power (so it falls under Close rules not Melee rules) and it explicitly tells you to make a close attack targetting all adjacent enemies once the pulls have happened.

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

To my mind, the issue of grappling swarms is merely a special case of this situation. Grappling a swarm doesn't make sense, any more than grappling a waterfall makes sense. Pick a different power, use on of the other options, recognise that there are no one-size-fits-all solutions!

I am of two minds about this. On one hand, one-trick ponies make me sad. On the other hand, myth and legend are FULL of them. I'm a mythic wrestler dealing with an archer on top of a hill? I grab hold of the hill and shake that archer off of it. I make the situation suit my strengths rather than carrying around extra kit that doesn't fit my archetype.

 

[Neonchameleon]

If you want to grapple a swarm, take your cloak off and throw it over the swarm. Then use that as a bag to keep most of them trapped.

 

[Mallus]

Fluff no longer matters; in fact, it's suggested that game effects be refluffed as appropriate. In short, the rules aren't designed to be particularly consistent with the fluff, and it's acknowledged that you'll need to rethink fluff - whether it makes sense or not - in order to maintain the rules.

Effects-based rules, like HERO/Champions, have been doing this for decades. It's not that the fluff doesn't matter, it's more like the rules don't need to dictate a fixed and specific relationship between the mechanics and the fluff ie, a single mechanical description can describe multiple objects in the game's fiction. More importantly, you can leave those descriptions up to the players.

For example, Champions has a single power called Ranged Killing Attack, or RKA for short. It's used to describe any particularly nasty distance attack; the bullet from a sniper's rifle, a bolt of superheated plasma, a razor-edged boomerang, or even the potent stink-eye from a Gypsy witch. Champions also provides a neat system of modifiers, so you can subtly alter the mechanical effects of each power, but using them is entirely optional.

It's simply more efficient than a system in which each new power/ability/character concept needs it's own discreet set of rules to describe it.

It a way, 're-fluffing' make the game's fiction more important, because players aren't limited to the fluff/fiction directly covered by the game's designers. They're encourages to create their own, and match them to the mechanics as they see fit.

For (another) example, in our M&M2 campaign, I play a young Mexican-American boy superhero who flies around in a flaming, horseless chariot and drops pyramids on villains heads. He does this via post-Singularity reality-hacking technology used on him by his no-good relative from the future.

Needless to say it would be a cold day in Hell before a game was written that specifically addressed fluff like this.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Honestly, how many of these 'fluff doesn't match mechanics' issues are there in 4e? I hear people complain about swarms and oozes constantly, and one guy that insists that solos with anti-lockdown mechanics are an issue (though I don't understand that one to be honest).

I just think this is WAY overblown. As Plane Sailing just said sometimes you are a badass in one situation and sometimes you are just not going to be able to handle another situation. The grabby fighter sucks against a swarm. BFD. I don't know of ANY swarm filled adventures personally. Once in a while a swarm rears its ugly head and ALL the fighters swear up and down and do the best they can (or fall back on some trick or other like Come and Get It. Just like PS says your melee ranger is dirt against archers on a ledge, that's what the archer or wizard are there for.

I totally agree that a large swath of monsters like undead having a blanket type of immunity can suck. I'm happy with the way 4e mostly deals with this. Undead and poison maybe is a marginally bad case but poison in the hands of PCs has NEVER been a particularly encouraged or common thing in any edition of D&D. I mean you CAN make a character build that leverages poison a whole bunch but said character can also easily have other things they can do. I'd be very surprised to find a PC running around that is hapless against undead in 4e.

So really I just don't have a problem with the DM being able to say NOW AND THEN in certain restricted situations "well, that doesn't work, you just can't grab a swarm grabby fighter." Yeah, it will put a dent in him against that one opponent but them's the breaks. The whole ooze thing is too trivial to even bother with and this is an example of where the FAQ is correct, just make up some reason why prone makes sense for that one tiny little instant in time. It just isn't that big a deal. It has come up a few times in play with us and the players were perfectly happy with the way it worked. They asked and I just said "eh, the ooze is knocked back and confused by your attack" and it was fine. It happens once in a blue moon.

I don't see encounter and daily use limits as really having anything to do with 'realism' at all. I know I've said this 100 times in other threads but it seems never to sink in. These limits are NOT character limits, they are player limits that are imposed on the player's power to alter the narrative of the story by having his character do cool extra powerful things. You only get so many chances to do this in a day. It is just like limits that exist in any game, they are there to allow the game to play. If it REALLY becomes urgently necessary to justify this in game you can but it is VERY rare that it comes up. DMs simply need to point this out to the players. I know I did way back at the start of each of the games I run and that was all that ever really needed to be said on the subject.

In other words overall you can easily play 4e in an acceptably 'realistic' seeming way without any big hassle. It does that as well as any other edition of D&D ever did. Now and then you CAN redescribe something, and now and then you CAN alter the application of the rules to a specific situation. Finally you can simply understand that the game is played by the players, not the characters, and some rules are there to balance PLAYER interaction with the game, not explain things in terms of the characters.

 

[Mallus]

If you want to grapple a swarm, take your cloak off and throw it over the swarm. Then use that as a bag to keep most of them trapped.

That works!

Really, there's always been, and always will a degree of disconnect between game rules and the fiction of the game world. Anyone who tells you different is trying to sell you something.

Want to grab a swarm? Use your cloak like NC suggests. Want to trip an ooze? Hit it so hard it splashes apart into temporarily discombobulated puddles.

It's really not too hard to fit the mechanics to the fiction, if you use a little imagination, even when you're playing D&D 4e.

 

[DracoSuave]

To my mind, the issue of grappling swarms is merely a special case of this situation. Grappling a swarm doesn't make sense, any more than grappling a waterfall makes sense. Pick a different power, use on of the other options, recognise that there are no one-size-fits-all solutions!

Regards

Here's the core issue tho.

My character is in a game of power fantasy. He is expected, in the narrative, to do fantastic things. The bounds of our mundane reality are not his reality. I do not find it believable within the genre of power fantasy that he has such limitations is Earth physics. With enough skill, he can leap 30 feet regularly, move faster than Usain Bolt, turn on a dime, while wearing armor made out of metals heavier than any found on earth.

And all this is believable, because he's NOT on Earth. He doesn't obey the laws of physics because he's not in a world of physics. He's in a world of heroes, of legends, of demigods, of the fantastic. He is in a world where one who grasps power can take it and -become- power.

He can't grab a waterfall? Why the hell can't he try? He's not Dwayne Snibblin, computer programmer. He's GORGANASH THE CONQUERER, and with his axe has brought nations to his command.

I mean really... when you watch the LoTR movies, do you cry '!' when Legolas does that awesome stuff to take down an oliphant? No. Why? Because his world is not the same as ours. What he does is plausible for him to do. He's just as martial as anyone... but he transcends the laws of -our- world by dint of simply not being in it.

When you say something is impossible, you need a better reason than 'It's not realistic' because of the nature of the world you're playing in. In the D&D presented in the books, it IS possible, and it IS plausible, and to claim otherwise breaks versimilitude while Page 42 exists.