If that is the case I might allow it. But to routinely carry around a bunch of pebbles, rather than say several daggers, just to get a Mark at range seems a little daft. Further more I know it would in time annoy the hell out of most the players at my table. First because it would be a stupidly sub-optimal action and thus could lead to the party getting killed,
That's true. I don't think that we need to worry about that, though. It seems to me that the rest of the party taking the player's head off for being stupid in the middle of battle will serve as all the incentive needed to make him stop. Altering the rules to accomplish the same isn't really necessary.
and second, because really in a fight are you going to be more bothered by a pebble thrown by some fool across the battlefield or the rogue trying to stick a knife in your ribs from right in front of you.
Perhaps the pebble is accompanied by a few choice words regarding your mother and her social activities the previous evening.
I might allow pebble chucking as a daily or even and encounter at a push (IE: The conditions were just right for something as benign as a tap from a pebble to distract an enemy in mortal danger). But more frequently than that it would suspend my disbelief and spoil the game.
You mean that it would ruin your suspension of disbelief. But semantics aside,
why? This is an entirely plausible situation - if comical. It seems silly to be so heavily invested in some imagined inviolate level of immersion that a character throwing a rock a few times spoils the whole game for you. Consider, perhaps, that maybe you're not supposed to be
quite that immersed.
To use an all-too-apt metaphor, here: If you choose to build your suspension of disbelief out of fine, fragile glass crystal, I don't feel you have the right to complain when a thrown rock shatters it. You're playing
D&D. Build it out of sterner stuff.
Fine if you use your pebble for one of those attacks, because they normally describe in what why you are marking without dealing damage, and normally they are encounters or daily powers.
That's not quite what I'm talking about.
Let's say that you're playing a Half-elf Fighter. You take Astral Seal (the non-damaging ranged Cleric at-will power) as your Dilettante encounter power. Let's say you then pick up Versatile Master, allowing you to use Astral Seal at-will. It doesn't deal damage, it's not necessarily a stupid option to use, and it still marks the target - not by virtue of the power itself, but because it's used by a Fighter.
What would be your reaction to this?
