Do YOU nod to "realism"?

[UngeheuerLich]

again: defender aura is much more elegant.
aggro in older editions indeed worked as you described. And did so well enough. As a DM i just didn´t step outside the fighters range usually, as he was standing in between. I still don´t see why 4e haters call it aggro mechanic. It is just a little armor buff. The fighter mark rubs my sense of plausibility a lot more than divine magical challenge.
The knight aura should not be a problem for most players.

You could instead give the knight an ability that gives +2 AC to adjacent allies... that would be the way 3rd edition handled it. But i still guess if the fighters mark had always been the aura, noone would have bothered.

Come and get it is another thing. It needs to have something like "psychic" keyword. Also it needs to attack the will or the passive insight or something. So a) you can give oozes and mindless undead the immune psychic feature per default, and b) creatures with good awareness would not fall for such a trick.

My edition i learnt to play was ADnD 2nd edition. 3rd edition was my long time favourite as DM. 4e is now. Not that 4e is perfect. By all means no. Many problems you make out are indeed problems or at least based on minor shortcomings. Especially before essentials (which would have been a great success, if it had come first to be sure).

For 5e i have a smal list of things:

1) Monsters and PC based on the same assumptions about hp during a fight and damage to be done.

2) Conditions gone as they are now.
instead: return to iconic spells and abilities and acces to it via class

3) Feats and ability bumps gone as they are now.

4) the magic item "balance"

5) Speaking of magic: I want my magic back. How stupid is it to tell the PC wizard, that the spellbooks of the oponents are just flavour and they can´t learn spells...

 

[UngeheuerLich]

The Warden is incredibly easy to explain that when its mark enforcement utilizes the roots and plants to shift players around. And you would be hard pressed to find any decent martial artist that isn't able to to press multiple guys at once. Also, mark voiding powers are common place. Once again the "Have you ever actually played the game" issue starts to crop up when non existent complaints start appearing.

Pretty much how the show operates.

The warden mark stops beeing logical, when you are not fighting anywhere near roots... this is the actual problem: mechanics before story.

If your warden could only use his marking mechanism while standing on earthy ground, most combats would start with roleplaying (how can we get the dragon on the ground etc.)

fighter not beeing able to defend well while beeing flanked:
add: the defender aura is suspended if you are flanked.
This is actually a good idead. This way, you could get a friend out of the fighter´s aura if he is short on hp.
Such easy additions would make the game more plausible for me and i guess for many others. (Not that this exact point is a deal breaker)

 

[technoextreme]

The warden mark stops beeing logical, when you are not fighting anywhere near roots... this is the actual problem: mechanics before story.

No not really. The Warden is a primal spellcaster.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

hmmh... this is also my interpretation, but some people think otherwise...

 

[technoextreme]

hmmh... this is also my interpretation, but some people think otherwise...

If a wizard or even a druid can summon a wall of fire at will in Pathfinder a bunch of roots is kind piddly in comparison.

 

[KarinsDad]

And you would be hard pressed to find any decent martial artist that isn't able to to press multiple guys at once.

This is blatantly false. Having been a martial artist myself for years taught me this. Not only that, a surrounded martial artist is in trouble. He's not able to press multiple targets. He's too busy trying to defend himself and still counterattack. I suspect that you watch too much Kung Fu Theater. The only semi-safe way to attack multiple foes as a martial artist is to move around or grab a foe, keep him between yourself and the other foes, defeat him, hopefully with an incapacitating blow such as a kneecap, and then moving to the next foe.

If a surrounded martial fighter presses a foe on one side of him, the foe on the other side is free to move away. There is no super glue there. Multi-target defender auras allow for that, but real life doesn't. They are total nonsense from a plausibility POV. They are merely a game mechanic used to allow for other game mechanics to work as the designers desire. Multi-target aggro has to real life example in actual melee combat.

Also, mark voiding powers are common place.

Saying it doesn't make it true. Examples?

Once again the "Have you ever actually played the game" issue starts to crop up when non existent complaints start appearing.

This type of statement isn't allowed here on the boards. Just FYI.

 

[Argyle King]

Yeah, I don't J3D. Certainly OOTB epic stuff is hard to challenge well-designed PCs with (though I've seen players that really weren't tactical or savvy enough to do well). It boggles my mind though that well-designed modern solos overleveled by 7 levels are trivial. Something seems a bit eschew there.

I think its true that the PoL world concept is going to lead to epic PCs being relatively exceedingly powerful compared to what you'd likely find in that kind of world (IE high level NPCs and whatnot), but the conceit there is you don't generally match up against WORLDLY opponents. In other settings like say FR that also wouldn't likely be true, as there are some REALLY powerful NPCs.

Even so, in terms of pure capability to do any old arbitrary thing epic 3.x characters are on a whole other level. That is at least they are given tools by default (if you're a caster) that are beyond anything any 4e character can do by the book. Of course you're probably going to want to give 4e epics some of those kinds of abilities as well now and then, but the nice part is they are resources the DM controls access to. The worst you can say is 4e epic can be made to work. 3.5 epic just doesn't and never really will.

Of course by the time you get into high epic play 'realism' should be pretty much irrelevant.

Your point about PoL is a good one. I've often said that the PoL concept doesn't match the 4E mechanics very well. Usually, when I say that, people tell me that mechanics don't change fluff. I personally believe that crunch and fluff does have a relationship, and that changing one usually has an impact on the other, but it often seems as though that point of view is in the minority when I'm having a conversation about it.

...that ties into my issue with 'realism' in 4th Edition. The story being told does not seem to match what is going on when dice are being rolled.

The campaign went pretty much how I described from about level 8; onward. There were a few hiccups around 11 when monsters had Paragon Tier abilities, but the players didn't yet. We also struggled against a sand dragon because of horrible luck for the players combined with ridiculously lucky rolling on the part of the GM, but that's it. For the most part, the PCs from this campaign dominated the enemy.

The bard character I was playing wasn't my original character. I switched to the bard after my first PC because problematic, and I realized that it was annoying the GM. I wasn't trying to build an uber PC; I just picked the options which seemed good and things fell into place the way they did on their own.

The GM started to use extra monsters and such after seeing how these earlier battles went. He wasn't playing with a GM versus player mentality; he just wanted fights to have some tension and drama rather then being a foregone conclusion.

@ KarinsDad

I think the most powerful member of the group from that campaign was a charisma Warlord built straight out of the PHB1. I believe he may have had 2 feats which were not PHB1 feats. One allowed him to use inspiring word on two people at a time; the other was one of the newer weapon expertise feats. There were times in which he could buff the party enough that we virtually could never miss hitting the enemy. That combined well with my Bard because I had Mantle of Unity - an encounter power which allowed the PCs to share their best defenses with each other. This meant that for at least a round, the enemy had no hope of hitting us (short of a critical,) and we barely needed to try to hit them.



As I've said, I play and enjoy 4th Edition. I'm currently running a game now, and I'm enjoying it immensely. However, part of getting to where I could enjoy the game involved me changing my expectations. The kind of game I expected when first going into a session of D&D and the 'realism' involved is not what I got out of my earlier 4E experiences. For a time, I would say I was bordering on 'h4ter.' Eventually I realized that I had to change because trying to bend the game to what I wanted was making me more bitter than I felt I should be when playing a game that was supposed to be fun.

I am working on things to modify the game, but I still believe there's a point past which I'm better off playing a different game if I want a certain type of experience or a certain sense of 'realism.'

 

[KarinsDad]

No not really. The Warden is a primal spellcaster.

That's a bit of a stretch.

The Warden is from the primal power source and uses evocations. So does the Barbarian.

Neither of them would be considered primal spell casters. For example, I don't know of anyone who thinks that a Barbarian casts spells.

You seem to be confusing spell caster with someone who has supernatural powers. These classes don't use implements, they use melee weapons. They are able to access forces and spirits of nature, but it's nowhere near what one would normally and traditionally consider spell casting. With that type of definition, everyone would be a spell caster who isn't in the Martial Power Source and even classes in the Martial Power Source could be considered spell casters.

Druids and Shamans? Yes, people could consider them primal spellcasters because they can or do use implements.

Barbarians, Seekers, and Wardens are not what one would consider spell casters, even though they augment normal abilities with primal power.

This lack of "the same language" used is a bit of an issue for the flavor of 4E. In 1E to 3.5, Druids and Clerics did "cast spells". In 4E, the traditional spell caster is now more or less relegated to someone using an implement and the traditional melee character is now relegated to someone using a weapon. There really is no other definitions in 4E because the power source definitions are somewhat nebulous and murky (as is the smorgasbord of what is allowed within those power sources).

Granted, there are always the exceptions like the Swordmage who is considered using an implement when fighting with a weapon. He too is not often considered to be casting spells per se, but some of his powers are spell-like. The same applies to Paladins who have the ability to fire off divine energy at range.

Wardens have some close burst and clost blast type of effects, then again so do Barbarians.

This is the issue that I brought up earlier. Every class feels a bit like a spell caster in some ways. But there aren't definitions of Non-spell Caster, Partial Spell Caster, Spell Caster in 4E.

 

[KarinsDad]

@ KarinsDad

I think the most powerful member of the group from that campaign was a charisma Warlord built straight out of the PHB1. I believe he may have had 2 feats which were not PHB1 feats. One allowed him to use inspiring word on two people at a time; the other was one of the newer weapon expertise feats. There were times in which he could buff the party enough that we virtually could never miss hitting the enemy. That combined well with my Bard because I had Mantle of Unity - an encounter power which allowed the PCs to share their best defenses with each other. This meant that for at least a round, the enemy had no hope of hitting us (short of a critical,) and we barely needed to try to hit them.

The Bard himself isn't PHB1.

I suspect that most PCs had powers and items from many different sources, even if they didn't have feats. Surely the players pulled stuff from at least ten different books if not more.

As for the Warlord, the game designers never understood the concept that buffs should be +1 for an encounter, or +2 or +3 for a single attack. Instead, they are often +4 or even +stat and it becomes totally nonsensical from a game mechanics POV. They did errata some of the powers, but even adding +4 to hit in a D20 system is grossly unbalanced. WotC hands that out as an encounter racial power. Sigh.

The problem isn't with the idea of the system, it's often with the implementation of the idea. You ran into this issue at level 30 for many many game design reasons.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Total disagree here:

of course, +4 to one attack is "unbalanced"
but the system should be able to handle such things. Why? because turning a miss into a hit is fun. Especially on an important power.

+1 to hit on all attacks is a lot less impressive to be honest... you will notice its effect less often, as the important powers only miss once in 20 attacks by exactly that single point.

actually i would not bother with +1 bonuses at all, as it is statistically too unreliable. Dailies or encounters should add +4 for a single attack.

Maybe the next edition needs a different idea on how much you should hit in general. In 3.5 it does not really matter if you hit or hit one round later... (except when it is the killing blow)
In 4e, not hitting is indeed very unfun. Especially on dailies or encounter powers.