Do YOU nod to "realism"?

[KarinsDad]

Once I had a guy standing on a platform resting on a giant ball of rock and he could roll it around squishing characters and pushing them around. So the rogue whipped out a grappling hook, snagged him and pulled him off it. That's a small example, but what I find is that fairly plain cut-and-dried situations usually get straightforward solutions.

Not so much a straightforward solution, but I did something similar once. My PC threw a rope with a grappling hook around a BBEG standing near a cliff. It whipped around him back to my PC where I proceeded to jump off the cliff, dragging him with me. I then Feather Falled and watched him fall to his death. The DM actually made the DCs for this real high, but I got lucky and made the rolls. IIRC, I don't think the DM expected my PC to survive because I think he had forgotten that my PC had Feather Fall. He might not have allowed me to try if he had remembered.

I don't quite see these types of solutions often proposed in 4E. I'll have to go check out Hussar's web site.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yeah, I just try to factor it in. Mostly I just make crazy stuff like this rolling ball. There were a couple guys on top that could immobilize from range, and the guy that ran the thing could pull people around, or move the ball, etc. If they didn't do SOMETHING it would have been a mess. There were also these 'anti-gravity' zones that you could use to jump up, or try to climb I suppose, but that was slower and you risked getting crushed. So tactically it was advantageous to come up with something.

The trickier part is doing it so that say a 30th level character has to really do something out of the way. But then high epic stuff really should be totally gonzo, and really more story focused anyway, so players will be thinking about how to do the crazy thing that is the only way to turn off the mountain sized behemoth or something.

 

[Hussar]

Well, KarinsDad, I'll have to go by memory here and I'm getting old, so that's a bit dodgy.

Examples I can remember from the past year and a half:

1. My eccentric rogue, who believes he's a chosen of Kord, tapping a lock with his holy spoon to open it. (Actually failed the check, so, it's still up in the air if he actually IS a chosen of Kord)

2. The aforementioned Calzone Demon incident.

3. Eladrin warlord teleporting to the back of the siege bullette, pushing the driver off and then trying to control it.

4. When horde of rats sieged the barn we had taken refuge in, we blocked the holes up with large boards, pushing the rats back out.

5. Various "push the guy off something to watch him splat" events.

6. Several instances of defenestration.

7. Continuously shoving the Githyanki bad guy back inside the creature that swallowed him to both kill the Githyanki and stop the creature from eating us.

8. Current scenario features a bar fight with the PC's grabbing whatever is at hand to beat up the Far Realms beasties intent on eating their faces. No one has tried setting anything on fire yet, much to my chagrin. That one is available at Neuroglyph games. Fun adventure.

So, yeah, Karins Dad. If your players are not engaging in any out of the box thinking, perhaps it isn't the system that's at fault.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I see lots of little stuff all the time. People jumping on a table and kicking an enemy, leaping over stuff, flipping furniture, sliding on a rope, knocking down boxes, rolling barrels, etc.

There's also a category of improvising. Lots of times that happens with rituals. There have been too many uses of Tenser's to even list, but the wizard in one of my games pretty much just cast that at dawn and used it to do every silly thing all day, including ramming an enemy off a cliff and of course all sorts of bypassing inconvenient terrain. Lots of trap building goes on. PCs using a ritual to remake the terrain in an area to create an advantage before a fight, that sort of thing.

The in-combat stuff really often boils down to forced movement tricks in a lot of cases, shoving people off things or down stairs, or into a trap.

Now and then something more off the wall like modifying the way a power works (Stinking Cloud was made to pour down a vent shaft once). lots of fun stuff.

There are definitely a good percentage of times when the players just use their powers too. This all starts to get kinda fuzzy at a certain point. Where's the divide between 'clever tactics' and 'out of the box thinking'?

 

[Garthanos]

I use powers according to raw (except when we dont use them at all or we decide to use some page 42 and extend off of the power as a base) and use imagination so that they are portrayed in ways that seem plausible.

Not on the list.

 

[KarinsDad]

Where's the divide between 'clever tactics' and 'out of the box thinking'?

To me, if you are using a power to force move someone somewhere into a hazard, for the most part this is an example of standard tactics. It's not even up to the level of 'clever tactics'. Half of the ones in Hussar's list are just 'force move the guy somewhere hazardous'.

To me, there are probably in order of cleverness: 'standard tactics', 'clever tactics' and 'out of the box thinking', and pushing foes into hazards almost always falls into the first category. It's 4E 101.

From Hussar's list:

#1 shouldn't be on the list. It's just a player doing something that the DM may or may not have found amusing enough to do something with, but a tactic that shouldn't necessary work at all or result in any change in the scenario at all. A DM could also just look at the player with a raised eyebrow, wondering what that player was smoking that morning.

#2 is standard force movement tactic.

#3 was probably somewhere between 'clever tactics' and 'out of the box thinking' and is the best of the lot, but still something that I have seen done quite a few times in the past.

#4 is probably at the 'standard atypical but fairly obvious tactics' level. Maybe at the level of 'clever tactics', but not really.

#5 is standard force movement tactic.

#6 is standard force movement tactic.

#7 is standard force movement tactic.

#8 I cannot tell. Why not just pull out weapons and smack the nonlethal crap out of the foes and not limit yourself to lesser weapons? If weapons were not available or shouldn't be used, then these are 'standard not using weapons tactics'.

Overall, I wasn't overly impressed with his list and didn't really see much 'out of the box' thinking that hadn't been done in lots of 4E encounters that I've seen.

And this might be where he and I differ. I consider 'out of the box' thinking to be things like in 2E where a Gnome PC cast Darkness 3 feet off the ground and then went around attacking his foes with no vision penalties. The medium sized monsters couldn't see and didn't know that below them, vision was just fine until real late in the encounter and then they got a different penalty for crouching down below the darkness once they figured it out. The PC was able to hold off an entire room of monsters while the rest of the party was fighting nearby.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

To me, if you are using a power to force move someone somewhere into a hazard, for the most part this is an example of standard tactics. It's not even up to the level of 'clever tactics'. Half of the ones in Hussar's list are just 'force move the guy somewhere hazardous'.

To me, there are probably in order of cleverness: 'standard tactics', 'clever tactics' and 'out of the box thinking', and pushing foes into hazards almost always falls into the first category. It's 4E 101.

From Hussar's list:

#1 shouldn't be on the list. It's just a player doing something that the DM may or may not have found amusing enough to do something with, but a tactic that shouldn't necessary work at all or result in any change in the scenario at all. A DM could also just look at the player with a raised eyebrow, wondering what that player was smoking that morning.

#2 is standard force movement tactic.

#3 was probably somewhere between 'clever tactics' and 'out of the box thinking' and is the best of the lot, but still something that I have seen done quite a few times in the past.

#4 is probably at the 'standard atypical but fairly obvious tactics' level. Maybe at the level of 'clever tactics', but not really.

#5 is standard force movement tactic.

#6 is standard force movement tactic.

#7 is standard force movement tactic.

#8 I cannot tell. Why not just pull out weapons and smack the nonlethal crap out of the foes and not limit yourself to lesser weapons? If weapons were not available or shouldn't be used, then these are 'standard not using weapons tactics'.

Overall, I wasn't overly impressed with his list and didn't really see much 'out of the box' thinking that hadn't been done in lots of 4E encounters that I've seen.

And this might be where he and I differ. I consider 'out of the box' thinking to be things like in 2E where a Gnome PC cast Darkness 3 feet off the ground and then went around attacking his foes with no vision penalties. The medium sized monsters couldn't see and didn't know that below them, vision was just fine until real late in the encounter and then they got a different penalty for crouching down below the darkness once they figured it out. The PC was able to hold off an entire room of monsters while the rest of the party was fighting nearby.

The problem is once you start into pre-4e spells you can't categorize at all because every spell is so fuzzily defined that NO way of using it HAS to be categorized as just "doing the normal thing" and not creative play. Even all the hackneyed ways of using a spell like casting Silence on a pebble and all that stuff was creative thinking ONCE. I'd call the gnome thing 'clever tactics' myself, on a par with using a push in a clever way or something like that.

I think a lot of it has to do with the way you think about rules. If you think about rules as a way of just resolving things, so that when a player says "I want to do X" then you find a rule and apply it (and maybe X is using a power and maybe it isn't, it doesn't matter) then whatever is clever is clever. Pushing someone off a cliff is clever. Maybe it is pretty easy to accomplish, but if it was done with page 42, some DM decided way of doing something in some previous edition, some arcane subsystem, or whatever it is equally just executing a plan with whatever is at hand and using whatever rule is there to figure it out. If you look at the rules as describing in-game reality then maybe only cunning gaming of the rules is clever and everything else looks like just pushing pieces around the board. If you play OD&D then almost EVERYTHING looks clever because the rules hardly give you any help at all. In 4e you will just see the exact same actions taken by the PCs and brush it off as "just playing". Frankly I think the rules are just tools and clever is clever.

 

[KarinsDad]

Pushing someone off a cliff is clever.

...

In 4e you will just see the exact same actions taken by the PCs and brush it off as "just playing".

...

Frankly I think the rules are just tools and clever is clever.

I think pushing someone over a cliff when you have few or no push mechanics is clever.

I think pushing someone over a cliff when you have been given a plethora of push mechanics and this particular tactic has been around for 3 years and talked about for 3 years and done in games right, left, and upside down for 3 years is "just playing".


No different than having a gun and killing someone is "just a simple attack" whereas not having any weapons and killing someone is "more clever".


If the game system says "here is a forced movement mechanic" and "here is a hazard", it's not exactly clever to figure out that you can force push someone into the hazard. It is especially not clever when the player has done it for the 50th time.

 

[Hussar]

Well, KarinsDad, this does shed a fair bit of light on your opinion though. Your definition of "do something clever" is really, "Do something that is not specifically allowed by the rules" and thus anything that is provided for in the ruleset is not clever play.

I defined it differently, and thus got different results. One wonders though, since you earlier complained that all your players ever did was spam at-will powers, how often do they even do things that are allowed in the mechanics, but, not specifically part of their powers? Since your example of the grappling hook character would not be clever play in 4e (since it's specifically allowed for with the forced movement rules), can you give an example of 4e play showing creative play?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think pushing someone over a cliff when you have few or no push mechanics is clever.

I think pushing someone over a cliff when you have been given a plethora of push mechanics and this particular tactic has been around for 3 years and talked about for 3 years and done in games right, left, and upside down for 3 years is "just playing".


No different than having a gun and killing someone is "just a simple attack" whereas not having any weapons and killing someone is "more clever".


If the game system says "here is a forced movement mechanic" and "here is a hazard", it's not exactly clever to figure out that you can force push someone into the hazard. It is especially not clever when the player has done it for the 50th time.

It was clever in AD&D to push someone over a cliff more so than it is now in 4e? I'm a little dubious. It was just as obvious a tactic then as it is now. Nor do you need a power to do it in 4e any more than you needed one to do it in AD&D. The point is it is equally 'obvious' or 'clever' and the rules system has little, if anything, to do with that.

Nor, again, do I think the VAST majority of cases of people using spells in AD&D were particularly clever. They were quite effective, massively so by comparison to not having spells, but clever? Certainly there WERE clever uses, now and then. I see clever uses of powers today too. In both cases the vast majority of the time the power/spell gets used either for whatever it was designed to do, or it gets used for one of a few well-established off-label uses. And I don't really agree with people that say that 4e powers aren't as easily usable in clever ways as any spell ever was. Some aren't, but some are, and you have more of them so it doesn't take as high a percentage to fill the need.