And AD&D broke my suspension of disbelief hard. 1 attack per minute? There must be something weird going on there. That one or two attack rolls were representative of an entire minute of fighting. I couldn't kill three orcs in a minute whatever I did. What was I doing? Fighting through treacle? Walking round with a portable slow zone? Whatever, the number of people I could attack was not in any way a reflection of what I was actually doing in the battle.
I completely agree with the dislike of the 1 minute melee round. I too didn't like how individual ranged attacks were individual attacks during a melee round but melee attacks were an abstract bunch of feints and retreats and wild swings and stuff. However, AD&D was also a lot more abstract in general than either 3e or 4e; I could much more easily suspend my disbelief about attacks per melee round because you couldn't do anything else
but attack. If I were trying to perform any 3e combat maneuver or ToB maneuver or 4e exploit in AD&D it would really shatter my WSoD because it was a highly granular mechanic in an abstract system.
EXACTLY. He says "... because?" This to you is just fine when it's perfectly clear that the warblade has used no other maneuver and therefore it's not a fatigue issue - he has half a dozen other prepared maneuvers (or am I thinking of the swordsage? Same difference). Mysteriously, you find the "... because?" answer fine for 3.X but not for 4e. Where is the difference?
Because martial adepts don't have a hard limit on their maneuvers. Spend a round or two without using any maneuvers and you get them all back. So where the 4e fighter doesn't have a good explanation for why he can't use his maneuver again, the warblade just takes a 6-second breather (which can still include any other action besides using a maneuver, including attacks and movement) and a crusader takes a 12-second breather (same caveat) and he can re-use any maneuver he used before. As I've said before, there's a spectrum of believability from "Use X powers, each 1/day" and "Use X powers a total of X/day" one one end to "Use X powers a variable number of times per encounter" and similar towards the other end, and 4e powers are too far to the former end while ToB maneuvers are towards the more believable end.
Advice to a real life distance runner is "[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]
Take one day of recovery for every mile raced"[/FONT]. I fail to see why actually needing rest times longer than six seconds is something you balk at on "realism" grounds. A PC is under immense stress when giving it their all in combat - it's the 3.X untiring robots, and the just peachy in six seconds warblades and swordsages that cause me problems.
3e martial adepts don't work for the fatigue explanation, they work for the "openings in combat" explanation. Any mechanic to approximate battle fatigue would look nothing like a "use some number of times per encounter, recover with actions" system, and it really shouldn't. Even if a system isn't explicitly made to emulate one sort of explanation (e.g. hit points as meat, ToB maneuvers as openings in combat), if it emulates it well enough it can suffice, though obviously building in a flavor explanation is best.
Yes. It's like players comparing notes on hit points remaining, or (in a game that has them) remaining Fate Points: "You charge, you've got the Fate Points to handle it", which has no ingame analogue ("You look really lucky today!"??).
It's a general feature of metagame mechanics. Some like this, some don't mind it, some don't like it at all.
Once again, if the fighter exploits were explicitly metagame and affected metagame things only, I wouldn't mind at all.
I'm with Neonchameleon here. A round is not something that exists in the gameworld. The turn structure and action economy of the game don't exist in the gameworld (it's not a world of stop-motion fighting).
It's true that, at the metagame level, there's a definite answer to how many attacks the fighter can make next round. But this is equally true in 4e.
It's not a purely metagame thing. Goblins can run 120 feet in 6 seconds. A 6th level barbarian with pounce can make 2 attacks on a charge and can charge 80 feet in 6 seconds. "From where you are standing now, is it possible for you to kill all four goblins before they run out of the [dungeon/canyon/etc.]?" is a question that that barbarian can answer purely with in-game knowledge: Yes, he can run and attack that fast, and if he strikes accurately enough he can down them all, because he knows he can charge that fast and he knows what he can do.
