Why is the Vancian system still so popular?

[Zustiur]

Only if you insist that that cool move is something that the character distinctly knows in game and not simply a meta-game construct, identical to an Action Point.

Wording plays a part in this. Calling them 'powers' or 'martial exploits' implies that they are learned or possessed in some manner. Not that they are ways of controlling the narrative.
Secondly; the fact you have to choose between them as you level up - effectively choosing what your character does or does not know how to do - contributes to the 'character distinctly knows' mentality.
Thirdly; The fact you can choose when to use a power makes a huge contribution. With wizards there is no question that he's casting fireball because he (the character) wants to cast fireball. Yet with martial characters, you're saying that the character has no choice in whether he can lunge right now, or whether he can attempt a hit and run. The wizard's chance of success is determined only by the dice. The fighter's chance of success is determined by the dice, AND by 'fate' (where fate is the player's choice).

By forcing all character types to use the same AEDU mechanic, the game forces players to think differently about the situation.
In 0-3E, the fighter is trying his hardest all the time, and the dice determine the outcome.
In 4E, the fighter has to wait for the right opportunity in order to try his hardest.
It's a question of where the limitation is coming from. With wizards, the character is limited by his own abilities. With fighters, the character is limited by something entirely outside of his own abilities. That discrepancy isn't sitting well with a lot of players. It makes sense for Vancian wizards to run out of spells. It doesn't make sense for fighters to run out of opportunities.

Whether a player likes it or not seems to boil down to, "Do you like, or dislike, being able to control the story as a player in this metagame manner?"
The more I read about martial powers and action points being the player's way of exerting choice onto the story, the less I like them. This thread is making more aware of why I don't like them.

If we are handing over control of combat outcomes to the dice, why are we then including mechanics that allow us to control the dice instead? Why not have the dice determine when an encounter or daily power kicks in, rather than the standard at-will attack? That would fit better with the idea that the dice are determining the outcomes of the combat. It would also resolve the issue of explaining why the opportunity only comes up occasionally - the dice only roll that way occasionally.


You'd be left with a interesting balance issue.
Fighters might be able to achieve their 'dailies' multiple times in a day because the dice rolled well, while wizards would be stuck with their daily limit, but would have control over when to use their powers.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Well, most of the late-3e material couldn't reach T1 simply because they had only 1 book of their resource system

Let me stop you right there. With just the PHB (and the MM1) the big three (C/W/D) are already Tier 1. The Artificer only knows its writeup and the DMG items.

Another assumption on your part. There's nothing inherent in non-daily systems preventing people from nova-ing.

You don't have as much to nova.

If you had a fatigue-based systems like 4e psionics, for instance, where you could boost encounter-equivalent powers into daily-equivalent powers, you can nova just as well as the casters;

Because what you have there is a daily system. It's the being on different recharge cycles that allows the novaing, not that one's powers the other fatigue. A wizard in classic D&D can force most of a day's power through in short order. A fighter doesn't have this choice to nova because he doesn't have such a pacing mechanic.

So if you can practically guarantee a one-hit kill on enemies with your Swarm of Arrows strike, why would you limit yourself to Twin Strikes when they'd be less effective?

Which powers can practically guarantee a one hit kill? And why would you save your strength? That said, I'm going to reiterate that I think you want the Essentials Martial Classes - they generally have no daily powers and the encounter power essentials fighters and rangers get is Power Strike (+1[W] damage after rolling to hit and they can use it several times).

Of course there are misses. This is WotC we're talking about.

Surprisingly few balance misses in 4e.

Likewise, if you take the 1/day/power martial power system and spread it out using a fatigue system or stunt system or plot system or whatever, the ability to use multiple different powers different numbers of times per day based on the circumstances helps people swallow the abstraction and obscures the fact that, at the end of the day (no pun intended), you're still restricting a certain kind of sword swing to limited uses for balance reasons.

Fair enough.

So the fighter is always doing fighter-y stuff, and is always attempting to control enemies' movements. Why is Stop Thrust only ever successful once per day?

Stop Thrusts might be a bad example to use.

Yeah OK, I get the point of metagame mechanics like this. They were popularized by the Forge gaming scene for use in game designs highly focused on Narrativist play.

My question is: does the martial daily in 4e actually serve a legit Narrativist purpose?

In your average 4e combat, does giving the player the ability to choose when they blow their daily actually help them to address a premise and create a theme?

It's about player empowerment. A fatigue system might have been better (although it would have been a whole lot spammier). On the other hand hard coding into the rules that fighters can do seriously cool things was absolutely needed from a metagame perspective after 3.X.

What the 4e martial daily does is make it easy to balance martial characters by doing it in the most obvious and boring way possible (imo).

Most obviosu from a design perspective. But the results at the table are a different matter. A fatigue system normally leads to whole cases of spam as there's one trick that works better. And a fatigue-and-cumulative-penalty sytem is an extra layer of bookkeeping.

QUOTE=Libramarian;5889266]That's cool, I'm happy as long as that's recognized as basically the issue -- AEDU as a balancing technique, rather than AEDU as a narrativist technique.[/QUOTE]

I've drifted the game into At will/Scene/Episode pacing. The daily recharge has IMO not been good for anything. (This goes for all editions).

By forcing all character types to use the same AEDU mechanic, the game forces players to think differently about the situation.
In 0-3E, the fighter is trying his hardest all the time, and the dice determine the outcome.
In 4E, the fighter has to wait for the right opportunity in order to try his hardest.

Let me rephrase that statement. In 0-3e fighters can not pace themselves. And pacing yourself is one of the key skills of any sort of athlete. Which means that in 0-3E, by "Trying his hardest all the time" fighters are not even close to fighting smartly. Now a fatigue system (with the inherent spam) might have worked better. But the ability to pace yourself is a vast leap forward over any previous PHB fighter.

If we are handing over control of combat outcomes to the dice, why are we then including mechanics that allow us to control the dice instead?

Player empowerment?

 

[billd91]

Wording plays a part in this. Calling them 'powers' or 'martial exploits' implies that they are learned or possessed in some manner. Not that they are ways of controlling the narrative.
Secondly; the fact you have to choose between them as you level up - effectively choosing what your character does or does not know how to do - contributes to the 'character distinctly knows' mentality.
Thirdly; The fact you can choose when to use a power makes a huge contribution. With wizards there is no question that he's casting fireball because he (the character) wants to cast fireball. Yet with martial characters, you're saying that the character has no choice in whether he can lunge right now, or whether he can attempt a hit and run. The wizard's chance of success is determined only by the dice. The fighter's chance of success is determined by the dice, AND by 'fate' (where fate is the player's choice).

I think that does a good job of explaining one aspect of the disconnect with martial dailies in 4e. I'd add that I think the issue could have been made much better, conceptually, if the daily exploits had all been built off of encounter power the PCs had already selected. If, for example, each encounter power had a "daily" level of achievement listed with it that could be obtained by spending a martial daily token (the number the PC gets is equal to the number of dailies he be able to expend at that level), then the system would have been a little easier to accept. The daily would more clearly fit in as an element of a chosen fighting style, just raised to be an exceptional success of that particular maneuver.

I think there are several other ideas that could have been incorporated for martial dailies that would have been better than the AEDU structure without being more than a step or two away from it. I think another would be to give the martial characters daily tokens again, let them choose their daily powers, and then use them by expending the tokens but allowing them to choose to use said daily multiple times as long as they have tokens to power it. Then the mechanic becomes a lot closer to 3e's rage in concept - exhaustion becomes an easier to rationalize reason for the limited uses.

 

[Bluenose]

I think that does a good job of explaining one aspect of the disconnect with martial dailies in 4e. I'd add that I think the issue could have been made much better, conceptually, if the daily exploits had all been built off of encounter power the PCs had already selected. If, for example, each encounter power had a "daily" level of achievement listed with it that could be obtained by spending a martial daily token (the number the PC gets is equal to the number of dailies he be able to expend at that level), then the system would have been a little easier to accept. The daily would more clearly fit in as an element of a chosen fighting style, just raised to be an exceptional success of that particular maneuver.

I think there are several other ideas that could have been incorporated for martial dailies that would have been better than the AEDU structure without being more than a step or two away from it. I think another would be to give the martial characters daily tokens again, let them choose their daily powers, and then use them by expending the tokens but allowing them to choose to use said daily multiple times as long as they have tokens to power it. Then the mechanic becomes a lot closer to 3e's rage in concept - exhaustion becomes an easier to rationalize reason for the limited uses.

A thing I've thought about be to give the Martial classes a larger variety of At-Will powers, including ones that could be used as interrupts or reactions. Then each one would have an associated encounter/daily-type ability that would activate when you exceeded the to-hit score by 4 or more. So You'd have the At-Will Shield Bash and if you rolled high enough then you could get an extra effect, perhaps knocking someone over or dazing them for a round. So you would always have a chance of pulling off a special manoeuvre, but wouldn't be gauranteed it.

 

[Hussar]

That's cool, I'm happy as long as that's recognized as basically the issue -- AEDU as a balancing technique, rather than AEDU as a narrativist technique.

This I largely agree with. AEDU is mostly a balancing technique. D&D is about as Narrativist as it is Simulationist.

 

[Hussar]

If we are handing over control of combat outcomes to the dice, why are we then including mechanics that allow us to control the dice instead? Why not have the dice determine when an encounter or daily power kicks in, rather than the standard at-will attack? That would fit better with the idea that the dice are determining the outcomes of the combat. It would also resolve the issue of explaining why the opportunity only comes up occasionally - the dice only roll that way occasionally.

I think that this idea has legs.

The major problem with this system though, is that it's fiddly. Say you balance the "big effect" powers by giving each a sort of "activation threshold". Instead of simply having a critical hit, you have a series of powers that activate if you roll above a certain number.

Cool idea actually. I could see it being a bit problematic at higher levels of play. If you have eight or ten different effects possible, then it could be a PITA to keep track of. ((I rolled a 15, hrm, that means I could do this or this or this or this or this....)) Doesn't have to work that way, but it's an issue you'd have to be careful of.

I'd also key it to die roll only and not to total attack value. Although, thinking about it, you could even simply have a single series of effects, the higher your total attack value, the bigger the effect. The old 2e Grapple and Unarmed Combat rules had a similar table - your damage and chance for KO was based on your die roll, not an actual damage roll.

I could see this as a fairly easy modification of the existing power system. You simply have a grid based on die roll. As the PC gains levels, you add new powers to whichever number is applicable.

Hrm... I think this could work.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

... I could see this as a fairly easy modification of the existing power system. You simply have a grid based on die roll. As the PC gains levels, you add new powers to whichever number is applicable.

Hrm... I think this could work.

I did something similar with my hybrid Fantasy Hero/D&D/homebrew combat mix several years ago. Once you go there, it is also handy to leverage the Hero "burnout" mechanic instead of slots. That is, the upper ends of that die roll you mentioned can give you some nifty extras, but the lower end can give you some nasty side effects. You don't want it balanced 50/50 for nifty/nasty, but a little bit of nasty on the lower end gives ones pause.

Note that a nasty effect still allows this attempt to work. You hit for normal damage, but damage your sword in the process. Oops. You hit for normal damage, but burn out your magic missile conduit in the process, recharge only on rest. And so forth. Now you don't have to track slots at all, or even worry about pacing with at-will, encounter, 5 minutes, scene, daily, adventure, power points, etc. during the fight. Those only matter on recharge once something goes down or is damaged. Thus, a "daily" power is one that you can use at-will, same as any other, but any nasty results that diminish or burnout that power stay until the next major rest.

Ideally, such a system would also come with an option to let the player choose whether to risk the nasty for the nifty, or not. So in a short skirmish with a couple of orcs, the fighter can choose to use normal attacks and not risk any such damage. Go for the extras in a tough fight, risk the drawbacks--your choice.

In previous versions, this wouldn't work well in D&D, because about all a fighter had to fall back on was extra weapons. (That is, a wizard risks burning out a particular spell, while the fighter risk burning out his main weapon, there not being anything else attached to the weapon to burn out instead.) But in something built with 4E-style "powers", but balanced for repeatable "encounter" or "daily" options, this can work. Alternately, weapon usage or something else can be expanded to embody such effects, so that the fighter has multiple options to risk for such rewards. Perhaps "maneuvers" as they have discussed.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

This I largely agree with. AEDU is mostly a balancing technique. D&D is about as Narrativist as it is Simulationist.

It is not the AEDU that helps 4E support narrative play, though the player getting to pick when the EDU part happens does open up a little room. The main thing about 4E powers that support narrative play is that they are effect-driven instead of process/result-driven. (This is similar to how some of the early Forge Narrative play happened in Champions, with its effect-based mechanics.) You could get at least 80% of the same result with all at-will powers, as long as they were effect-based powers.

 

[WizarDru]

I think it's worth pointing out that Essentials appears to have internalized the idea that Daily Martial powers did not sit well with some players. I know I was confused when we realized that the Knight had no Dailies. It bugged my wife, who had taken that class, because she found she suddenly lacked a 'big hit', similar to what she had with the 4E fighter.

Which should highlight that different players see it as a problem or not. When I played a 4E fighter, I didn't have a problem with the fact that I could only use 'Villain's Menace' once per day. It was a 'boss-killer' and the meta-game nature of it didn't bother affect my enjoyment of the narrative. I accepted it as a meta-game mechanic. I don't see it the same as an action point, because the action point increases player agency and is far more utilitarian than a daily power: it can heal, it can harm and it can often be used to do something outside of the range of normal ability (at least with the DMs I game with, myself included). It's also worth noting that action points accumulate, while dialies do not. A daily is a special trick that can only be used once a day like a magic bean, while an action point is something that replenishes as the adventurer continues to adventure.

The argument that dailies are 'special moments' where the martial character simply does better than normal only applies if you ignore many of them don't emulate that behavior terribly well. You only need to look at stances (of which there are currently 358, only 40 of which are NOT dailies). You either have to accept the meta-game aspect or the fiction, for some people, makes no sense. Aragorn can pass easily through dense terrain...once in a while, when he feels like it. Sometimes Gimli can do amazing things against an unwary opponent, but other times he can't do anything but basic attacks. For some players, that can break them out of the fiction of the game and they find that unsatisfying.

For my part, it doesn't bother me at all, but I can understand why some people would have a problem with it. We periodically come to 'well, the rules don't say 'No' moments in 4E, where the rules have clearly been streamlined to make a faster playing game, even if it occasionally sacrifices believability to do so. We usually just say, 'Hmm. Well, it makes things much easier if it works this way...let's say this happens and move on'. I can imagine some groups are completely derailed by such events.

But as billd91 points out, the AEDU system (like the Vancian system) is not beholden to alternate implementations to address such concerns.

 

[Tony Vargas]

T1 and T3 classes don't have inherently different resource systems. There are T1 and T3 Vancian casters and psionicists, the T1 casters simply have access to more spells/powers within their system.

That's radically different resources.

And that's my point. You seem to think that "using daily powers" inherently means "more powerful than any other resource system." It doesn't.

It's just worked out that way before, quite consistently. Limited-use abilities are compensated with greater powers. When players find ways around the limitations, they become overpowered. Even when they show restraint and don't, those abilities make them the star of the show.

Just use whatever explanation works at the time? Really?

Yes, really.

Rogue: "We have them on the ropes, Mr. Fighter! Shoot them with your Swarm of Arrows Technique!"

Fighter: "Are you speaking in tongues again, Exnur? I don't even carry a bow. And another thing, why can't you ever remember my name? It's insulting."

And what part of "there are ways to make martial sources equally powerful that don't involve 1/day restrictions on powers" isn't getting through?

The part where it's been tried many times and invariably and completely failed.

Yet 4e martial dailies look almost like an attempt to give one power source narrative mechanics while other power sources have internally-consistent or simulationist mechanics

4e doesn't give detailed rationales of how any powers work. The mechanics of a wizard preparing spells are one thing, but the nature of arcane magic is left entirely undefined, as is why an arcane daily is daily (it's not quite vancian memorization, since a wizard can prepare at-will or encounter utilities, and can still recharge his dailies without his spellbook, just not swap them around). Martial characters are said to be 'superhuman, not supernatural,' but no reasoning is given for some of their exploits being at-will and others 1/encounter.

That's all added by the player. You choose to come up with rationales for arcane dailies that work for you, and rationales for martial dailies that don't. That issue is entirely in your head. The system is fine. It's balanced, it's consistent, it's fairly easy to use. If you can't figure out how to play a martial character, don't play one, but don't deny the rest of us the option to do so.

To be fair, the designers weren't trying to balance the 3e classes, they were trying to unify and upgrade the core while porting everything else over mostly unchanged.

Balance has always been a goal of the game. It's just a goal that prior eds failed badly at. 3e, perhaps even a little worse than AD&D, which, while positively crazy, at least could be used by the DM to pound casters out of a dominant position by sufficiently emphasizing their many weaknesses and limitations, or to build up an overshadowed character by dropping a sufficiently powerful an exclusive-use item in his lap. In 3e, with commoditized magic items, new spells every level, and with concentration and save DCs susceptible to rampant powergaming, the top-tier was the exclusive domain of full casters. In AD&D, balance was poor, but it at least didn't always break in the same direction, and there was not enough player control of character development to enable 'optimized builds.'
In 4e, balance still isn't perfect, and magic items still commodities and optimizing builds still an option, but at least the top tier of classes is a lot more diverse, with only truly benighted and un-supported classes like the Seeker out in the cold.