Nikosandros
Golden Procrastinator
Ironic and true. The OP really had his wish granted... he got to relive all the things that he missed.Honestly, this whole thread is the 4e forum experience in a nutshell.
Ironic and true. The OP really had his wish granted... he got to relive all the things that he missed.Honestly, this whole thread is the 4e forum experience in a nutshell.
I assert my definitional disagreement - as I have previously throughout the thread - that player agency for their character (those last three words are important too) comes from having their characters be able to exercise what I believe is the central premise of a role-playing game: that anything can be attempted, and that when this isn't so there's an in-game rationale for why such a limitation exists.
Saying that a certain action becomes less effective and/or more difficult to pull off from one moment to the next for a purely metagame reason inhibits that character agency
Intent, by itself, is not enough. Agency means the ability to try and do something; wanting to do it is insufficient.
Cars, brocolli, rice with stew, the analogies keep piling up. At the end of the day, are we here to annoy each other with counterpoints based on the wrong extrapolation? I guess the answer is 'yes, yes we are."
This is a figment of your imagination. The idea that everything you try always has the same chance of success, no matter what you have done before, how tired you are, and which muscles in specific are tired is just as silly as the idea that Usain Bolt can run the 400m with each 100m taking exactly the same length of time.
In short the game isn't about wounds. So it always must have been wounds. Riiiight.
Because clerics have good PR. Healing times in AD&D are about those of marathon runner recovery.
They aren't arbitrary which means they must be an incredibly limited subset of what's going on.
No, I meant what I said. If you associate you limit.
And it having no actual effect on characters until you reach 0hp has always been part of the system. Most games fixed that because if you want hit points to be physical damage that is necessary.
Apparently you think that duelling with everyone around you in the time it takes for most people to engage in one person can accurately be summarised as "Swinging a sword in a circle around you". This is your issue.
Ah! The heart of the matter!
The restriction is NOT arbitrary. It's designed to enforce genre conventions. It's designed to maximize variance in power use and minimize use of the same power over and over again. It is not associated with any particular in-fiction constraint, true. But it is NOT arbitrary.
As this thread has unsurprisingly demonstrated in the last few days, you can see just how polarizing 4E was. This thread may be locked soon just because you asked a question that was nearly guaranteed to get edition-warsy. All that to say: yes, there was a lot of change and a lot of opinion about that change. 4.0 took D&D in a whole other direction; to summarize the changes is nearly impossible, and it's just going to offend some people regardless. In short, it was a very different game, and some liked it and others didn't.I see that 4E was polarizing in a number of ways. But can someone give me the "jist" of the whole thing? Or maybe point me to a site that has already broken it down?
This is a product of your own mind, and nothing more. While external factors are by their very nature associated, the idea that somehow fatigue only applies when performing special moves is so lopsided as to be on-its-face discarded for its lack of believability.
The game is about wounds, it's just not about the debilitating effects of wounds. Again with this silliness that "we must perfectly model all aspects of reality!"
It's this sort of deliberate ignorance of contrary evidence that makes your argument hard to take seriously. 1E was, at best, inconsistent on the nature of hit point loss. Accept it and move on.
Not so. You have the ability to attempt to do anything - that's inherently less limited than a paradigm where you can't try to do anything.
On the contrary, if you dissociate you limit.
Not only is the debilitating nature of progressive injury not at all necessary, it's not even desirable. Once again, D&D is not trying to be, nor should it be, a perfect simulation of the real world.
Apparently you think that performing a single action once will necessarily fatigue you to the point where you'll suck at performing it again (but not fatigue you in any other regard). That's your issue.
And then when rationales are offered you reject them. Apparently no one in your world ever gets wise to tricks, no one tires, and no one needs to pace themselves ever.
Saying that you frequently can't pull the same stunt twice with the same effectiveness is just common sense on the other hand.
You have the ability to try.
You have it backwards here. Gary wrote that article explaining his rationale. But by its very nature, magic has an in-game reasoning for how it functions, under whatever rules it uses. Magic works the way it does because it's magic, and ergo that can be recognized in-game.
Untrue. Skills are (by themselves) physical abilities that can be used in various intuitive ways. Magic isn't intuitive, as it doesn't need to model anything except itself - ergo, neither are "because game."
The restriction is arbitrary, because it has no corresponding in-game function that it's attempting to model or explain; a genre convention has nothing to do with what's happening in-character. I fully understand your reasoning in that 4E is trying to enforce a certain style of game - but from an in-character standpoint, that is an arbitrary imposition, since there's no reason within the context of the game world for the character's abilities to suddenly be limited in such a manner, either in scope or efficacy.