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No. But it does approximately. If that approximation is way off, it can strike somebody's plausibility bone. I can think of a few situations where you'd want a plausible measurement of how far a character can flat-out sprint without always having to fall back on fiat. Something where the rest...

"Very interesting!" – Sanjuro, Yojimbo /sits back, watches rival camps array forces, reaps benefits

The way I think of it is that 4e combat is more granular than 3e combat, which still carries with it some of the assumptions from the 1e days where it was imagined that your character was doing a lot more than what was described by roll-dice-see-if-you-hit. 4e combat more specifically describes...

Ehn. Fighter/rogue. (In 3e anyway.) Westley doesn't ever really lead people in combat, and the-guy-who-comes-up-with-the-plans-involving-two-or-three-others is waaay too broad a concept to be something only a warlord could do. But most fantasy heroes who show talent leading troops into battle...

It's very easy to forget this because there isn't cause to look at it very closely 99% of the time, but initiative and turn order in D&D is a total and complete abstraction for the sake of playing a game and, in all of its implementations, is even more of a hash than hit points are, wrt...

FWIW while I'm in camp 2 at least in terms of narrative possibilities, the prospect of having another hit point fight is giving me the howling fantods at this point, and at least this thread has come up with some really good suggestions for making the possibility of wounds part of the game in a...

I share a little bit of the original poster's prickliness towards the easy-money aspects of 4e monster design. On the other hand designing your own monsters seems easy enough compared to the whomping headaches of designing 3e monsters that buying new Monster Manuals to find a tweakable concept...

No, you completely can be, it's just that the effects aren't modeled in the game – it's possible, under the longtime D&D hit point model, to take a thrown knife to the belly at 1/2 your total hitpoints, stagger along for the rest of the fight or fights and what is presumably protecting you and...

Okay, to switch geek hats and go pop culture now, the problem with the stuff about Die Hard around here is that at the time it came out, Die Hard was actually a nominal move towards realism as compared to the Schwarzenegger/ Stallone model of '80's action hero – here was a hero who was an...

Which is, at least, some recovery time, and is fine with those of us in the "throw me a flipping bone here" school of quote unquote realism. If we had been more demanding than that, we'd have gone over to a VP/WP system, or Rolemaster, as one commenter chirpily reminds us. Hp loss degraded...

Yeah, many of the quote unquote explanations thrown around these parts are either very arbitrary (the benevolent-goddess-of-healing scenario) and thus may or may not work with whatever other atmosphere the campaign has, or just not something I'd (remotely) buy, which raises the spectre of: how...

With the new approach to monster building, it seems as though they'd have to put humans in the Monster Manual in some shape or form.

I am still about 50/50 on 4e. The new monster generation system sounds like it would make me very, very happy indeed and is a huge huge improvement. I generally think the combat system is an improvement, with characters doing more different things and moving around a lot more. There are...

You did just make me remember the old types-of-insanity table from the back of the old DMG or somewhere. :D

I've never noticed the long missile ranges in 3e to come up nearly often enough to be any kind of tyrannically oppressive issue. Usually I've had to go out of my way to set up fights like that, to be a special kind of obstacle or give an archer character a chance to shine. In 4e, it's probably a...

Actually I think the 4e fighter class is, among other things, explicitly not designed to accommodate the concept of a hero who is great at grappling, and that stuff is coming in some subsequent book, tied to a future monk class or possibly something else. This is part of that "stronger class...

I don't know that I would use a lot of the schmancy armor types, which seem to have been designed for the wild & crazy epic plane-hopping stage of the game, but this is the sort of thing you can fairly easily change for your own game, so it doesn't upset me or anything. Maybe I'm just not that...

Fair enough – the 3E mechanic isn't my baby either and I stated earlier that I don't particularly hate the 4E approach. Shake?

Ok fine. Make the penalty kick in after two attempts. Despite your sneering it is logical as a counter-strategy to lull the defender into defending against one set of moves, so yeah, the attacker could rack up some bonuses from doing this, at the cost of time. I don't think that would be very...

Eh? The defender still knows what his adversary is trying to do, which aids him a whole lot – sure, there are multiple ways to take somebody down, but that rules out a whole lot more they could be trying to do. It's a complete advantage in a combat situation if one guy has, in general, figured...