Why the Encounter Powers hate? (Maneuvers = Encounter)

[CleverNickName]

You can Bull Rush all day long in 4E also (it's just a Strength vs. Fortitude roll) but there's also moves/powers that let us do things along with said Bull Rush.

That's what I figured. I was just confused about why it was brought up in response to my post about preferred styles of play. I'm on track now.

 

[The Little Raven]

Many people in my group see encounter powers as an artificially contrived kludge of a mechanic.

What's amusing about this oft-repeated phrase is that ALL game mechanics in every edition of every game ever made are artificially contrived.

 

[BobTheNob]

What's amusing about this oft-repeated phrase is that ALL game mechanics in every edition of every game ever made are artificially contrived.

We are playing a imaginary game with made up mechanics which attempts to emulate a fantasy world.

Everything about this is artificially contrived.

I think the sentiment of the argument is one of relativity of rule against rule.

 

[SoldierBlue]

QUOTE: "This is just bad adventure design and bad GMing.

It is of the essence of running a situation/encounter oriented game that new scenes are framed having regard (i) to the established fiction of the game, and (ii) to stuff that the players will find interesting, and want to engage via their PCs. If the GM has already got a preset list of encounters, so that the scenes framed (i) won't reflect the prior established fiction (eg that an enemy escaped), and (ii) won't necessarily engag the players with situations that they find interesting, and want to throw their PCs into, then we have a classic railroad.

There are plenty of encounter/situation focused RPGs that give good GMing advice on how to avoid this sort of railroading (HeroQuest revised, Burning Wheel, Maelstrom Storytelling, etc). It's a pity that the 4e DMGs mostly failed on this score."



Nope. 'Fraid your logic is flawed here, my friend. Encounter powers beget an encounter-focused game.


The dangers of a tightly-curving highway might be mitigated by better drivers, but we all admit that highway design plays a role in accidents.


Sure, great DMing might mitigate the encounter-based tendency, but not for most DMs, most of the time.


That being said, I have no excuse for my own acceptance of daily powers; they seem to fit better than encounter powers. They certainly don't seem to trap the game into a neverending cycle of encounters in the same way...


And I'm not sure what citing extremely obscure games does for your case - I actually own Heroquest, and I can't even find the term 'encounter' used, at least not in the way most gamers would understand....


As always, play what you want, Gamer Nation!

 

[pemerton]

After thinking about it I'm having trouble coming up with mainstream RPGs that completely lack mechanics where player agency doesn't sometimes trump one to one correspondence between player and character decision making.

<snip>

Just thought of one - Traveler. I don't remember any meta mechanics whatsoever in Traveler.

Traveller was the RPG I thought of as I started reading your post. Also classic (pre-Mongoose) Runequest.

And Rolemaster, although it's an odd case - while decisions about allocating attack and parry out of the melee combat pool, and about balancing risk and reward in deciding timing, spell point expenditure etc in spell casting, can be treated in a simulationist way, they are equally open to being metagamed by the player, with the in character rationale then fed back in if required. This is part of what lets Rolemaster be drifted in a narrativist direction, in my experience.

 

[pemerton]

4e did have differentiation between classes. I can read the rules even now and pluck out the elements. But what classes feel like during play is what matters.

<snip>

Its strange how 2 people can have such very very different experiences.

Perhaps the disconnect is between people who find the action similar and people who find the result dissimilar. No doubt about it, the act of playing any particular 4e character is largely the same.

the only thing I am trying to state is that, whilst there is intention and observation, these are different to actual experience, and my experience with 4e powers and classes was that ultimately they felt same same.

I'm one of those who doesn't get the "same-ness" vibe from 4e either in reading or in play.

I thought that n00bdragon's suggestion was one potentially reasonable explanation for how experiences might be so different - that one person is focusing on the act of playing the character, the other focusing on the results of playing the character.

If you (BobtheNob) are saying that it was also the results that felt the same - as in, the results of the actions taken by the player of (say) a fighter felt the same as the results of the actions taken by the player of (say) a sorcerer - I'm intrigued. What classes were in play in your game?

If you're saying that the "sameness" wasn't in either the act of playing (ie same structure of power suites, choices etc) and wasn't in the results, can you say a bit more about where it was?

 

[pemerton]

Encounter powers beget an encounter-focused game.

<snip>

Sure, great DMing might mitigate the encounter-based tendency, but not for most DMs, most of the time.

I think you've misunderstood me.

Of course encounter powers are about an encounter-focused game. My point is that, in good encounter-focused RPGing, the content and consequences of the encounters aren't known in advance. And that GMs who plan them out in advance are bad GMs (because railroading).

To reiterate: crucial to a good encounter-based game is that a given encounter/scene is framed in response to, and in light of, what came before (ie not in advance - because what came before can't be known in advance of actual play).

And I'm not sure what citing extremely obscure games does for your case - I actually own Heroquest, and I can't even find the term 'encounter' used, at least not in the way most gamers would understand

I haven't got my copy of HeroQuest revised in front of me, but look for the discussion of the pass/fail cycle. Each episode in the cycle is an encounter/scene/situation. HeroQuest revised is based around the scene at least as tightly as 4e D&D (apart from other features, the unfolding of the pass/fail cycle directly sets DCs).

As for obscurity, HeroWars/Quest and Burning Wheel aren't especially obscure. They're some of the leading examples of contemporary RPG design. And Robin Laws cut and pasted whole chunks of the HeroQuest revised rulebook into 4e's DMG2. (Including the discussion of the pass/fail cycle.)

 

[BobTheNob]

If you (BobtheNob) are saying that it was also the results that felt the same - as in, the results of the actions taken by the player of (say) a fighter felt the same as the results of the actions taken by the player of (say) a sorcerer - I'm intrigued. What classes were in play in your game?

If you're saying that the "sameness" wasn't in either the act of playing (ie same structure of power suites, choices etc) and wasn't in the results, can you say a bit more about where it was?

Fair questions well asked.

It was about mid paragon we noticed. By this stage everyone is at the same power "count". We have done alot of combat by this stage and are entering fights by pattern. The patterns of the players were very similar.

Now, the whole pay was phb1, we got on the 4e train fairly early. So fighter, paladin, rogue, ranger, cleric(later warlord) and wizard.

The sameness wasn't the powers themselves, there was fluff to make them distinct. But the delivery mechanism (as in the AEDU strcture) and end result of it's use became indistinct. The thing that did remain distinct was the core class and paragon features, they did keep characters recognizable. But without that you just have the AEDU, and when one player delivered and encounter that caused x damage and slowed a target, and player b used a different power that caused y damage and slowed a target(with some light variance) using the same power structure for delivery...

This was an observation of result. In all, 4e was the most successful campaign our group has ever played, and it's the robustness of 4e that helped this result.

But ultimately, some aspects left us flat. We spent a lot of time talking about the campaign once it was over and this was a common complaint from all involved.

I stress again, I'm not claiming this is what happened to others, and I'm not saying this is gospel. But the community that claims 4e can be same same...at least I can say I understand where they are coming from.

 

[pemerton]

[MENTION=82425]BobTheNob[/MENTION], thanks for the reply.

In my group they've just reached 17th level. The feel is very different, but maybe that's a reflection of the PC builds.

The fighter is the most controllery PC - a polearm close burst specialist, with lots of forced movement, prone etc plus the fighter OAs and interrupts.

The paladin is very different - most of his area attacks are with his symbol rather than khopesh, and he is a little bit strikery (gauntlets of blood, a bit of cold cheese, and a few other things going on).

The archer-ranger-cleric is the only bowman, so plays differently again (mostly pure damage, but quite different from the paladin). The sorcerer moves between range and close (using teleport and fly quite a bit) and is the heaviest hitter who also exercise quite a bit of zone-style control.

The wizard (now reborn as invoker) has been the leat combat-y of the PCs, mostly ranged attacks (and used to use a dragonling familiar who could appear 6 squares away to deliver his bursts). The invoker has shorter ranged powers and will probably do a bit more close-in fighting, I think.

In addition to the different sorts of effects they seem to have, there are also the differences in action suites - the sorcerer and fighter are both interrupt rich, the paladin has a couple of retaliatory immediate actions (Eye for an Eye and Retaliatory something-or-other) and the ranger has Disruptive Strike, plus Combined Fire from his paragon path.

So even the AEDU structure doesn't produce the same suite of options for each PC.

Anyway, as I said, maybe this is in part a build-dependent experience.

 

[BobTheNob]

I will add this. When essentials came out it's re-think of the existing classes went a long way to addressing this concern. I sometimes wonder with essentials that wotc wasn't thinking the same thing because the way the martial class's got a work over was so damned close to what I was thinking was needed.