101 roleplaying descriptions justifying martial dailies

[Ariosto]

Personally, I look at the major objection in this thread to be confusing. I don't understand why an official fluff justification is really preferrable to having the freedom to choose whatever fluff I want.

Some people like to deal with the imagined world from a character's perspective. From that point of view, it's not abstract numbers. Things have physical qualities, perceived via the five senses and with certain consequences. If they've got to choose between dealing with a situation in those terms familiar from real life, or dealing with it in pure game terms, they probably prefer the former. The two, they think, should be in some semblance of common-sense harmony. They're Alice, and dissociated mechanics are Wonderland.

A very simple abstract basis, such as in old D&D, is easy to modify in a more concrete direction. That's partly because of the lesser investment in rigid rules. 4E can give an impression of being more like Chess; that a knight moves always in an "L" pattern (rather than like a real horse) is a built-in part of the overall game balance, and that balance is given a high value by players. New D&D has a lot of rules, filling a lot of pages that cost (to some people) a lot of dollars -- with a lot more on the way.

So, people who put a premium on playing the latest version (perhaps because so many others are) may wish that it were more to their tastes. In the real world, of course, wishing does not make it so!

 

[I'm A Banana]

Instead, I hypothesize that the reason is because "I try to knock the weapon out of his hands" is something that a player who didn't know the rules is likely to come up with on his own, while "I try to hit the enemy at the right angle to jar his armor loose and make him easier to hit" is not something a player would likely come up with on his own unless he was aiming for that particular power effect. Thus 3e can be better than 4e at supporting the "player comes up with fluff, then DM translates it into mechanics" because 3e mechanics are more geared towards the kind of fluff players are likely to independently come up with.

In my case, your hypothesis is very, very confirmed.

I frequently play with people brand new to the game. I don't want to say "Learn your powers! Memorize these rules! This is how you pretend to be an elf!"

I want to ask: "How do you pretend to be an elf?" and then have rules to adjudicate it when that elf might not succeed at what she wants to do.

That's also the way I prefer to DM: to think of a cool effect, and then come up with rules that are used in that circumstance. That cool effect can come out of left field in the midst of play (and usually does), so I can't plan ahead for it -- I can't say "this is an NPC and this is a monster and this is an ally," I have to say "This is some dude. What do you do with him?"

DMing under the other paradigm is insanely frustrating for me, and is one of my biggest beefs with 4e (which, again, is not a horrible game), because it requires at least three different types of balance all at once to provide for every contingency.

The stunt rules are solid, but they're weak (they don't provide for different conditions or effects, so that's hard to adjudicate on the fly), and they don't replace the powers system (which is another one of my big beefs with 4e, in part because of dumb stuff like martial dailies).

And I think there's a better middle ground than FATE or T20 or some of the really abstract systems out there. Somewhere out there is a world where a charge is different than a taunt or a disarm and yet I don't need to couch them in arcane rulespeak in order to use them and balance them with each other.

 

[Ariosto]

I remember a bizarre moment from an otherwise excellent 4E session in which a PC (either a fighter or a rogue) by "remote control" made a monster move out of a building and into the open. It made no sense for the monster to do that, and in an RPG I would want a darned good explanation (such as a powerful magic charm) for being compelled to do something so disastrous against my will. I have not seen fighters or rogues use such powers against players, but I would be curious to.

 

[LostSoul]

Just to play devil's advocate here...

This could have a problem. Do players know (and play as if they know) what powers their characters have?

They would know, because their characters know. They have trained at certain moves and have become quite good at them.

On the other hand, if players do know what powers their character has and use that information in describing their fluff, then it's not clear that you've actually changed much. Players are still choosing what powers they want to use first, then describing fluff based off of those powers in order to use those powers. In the above example, a player would decide he wants to use Lead the Attack, and then come up with a fluff description appropriate to the situation. So it's still "powers first" and not "fluff first," which isn't what you seem to want.

Here's why it's different:

If I was DMing for you, and your Warlord make that action (against a hobgoblin elite or something), I would rule it like this:

slice off his armour, weapon, Str v AC, 1/2[W] and -2 AC until the target can repair his armour.

Now if you said something like, "I come at him with a flurry of blows, none doing much damage, but each one tells me something about how he fights, hoping to pick up a weakness", I might resolve it like this for your Warlord who has Lead the Attack:

probing attack, weapon, Int or Str v AC, 1[W] + Str and you discover the target's weakness. If you exploit the weakness, you (and all allies to whom you communicate the weakness) gain a 1 + Int mod bonus to attack rolls against the target. Miss: +1 bonus to attack rolls.

I'd also describe the weakness that you've found. The bonus would last until the target didn't have the weakness any longer; this probably means level gain.

In order to do the full 3[W] you'd need to do something extraodinary, exploiting the fluff at the moment for a big smash.

Now if a Fighter without Lead the Attack tried the exact same thing:

probing attack, weapon, Str v AC, 1[W] + Str and you discover the target's weakness. If you exploit the weakness you gain a +2 bonus to attack rolls against the target, and you may increase the bonus from Aid actions by +2 if you communicate this weakness to your ally.

Reason being the fighter doesn't know how to communicate as well as the Warlord who has trained in coordinating attacks.


This puts a lot of load on the DM, though.

 

[cangrejoide]

I remember a bizarre moment from an otherwise excellent 4E session in which a PC (either a fighter or a rogue) by "remote control" made a monster move out of a building and into the open. It made no sense for the monster to do that, and in an RPG I would want a darned good explanation (such as a powerful magic charm) for being compelled to do something so disastrous against my will. I have not seen fighters or rogues use such powers against players, but I would be curious to.

You dont need a charm to do that, you could say they tricked him into it.

 

[BryonD]

I keep hearing that 4E is about using your imagination to come up with explanations.

This is by no means my entire problem, but it is a big problem on its own.

I want whatever I imagine to come first.

I say what I imagine and it is up to the rules to provide the results.
Saying that the rules determine the action and it is up to my imagination to obediently follow along is far less than what I want.

Sure, it may be a great exercise in imagination to constantly play Pop Quiz: Justify This Result - The RPG.
But forgetting the rules completely and simply imagining what you would want to do is, to me, a much more recreational imagination activity.

4E asks: Which of your powers do you use and why does it work right now?

The games I prefer ask: What do you do now?

 

[Mallus]

I want whatever I imagine to come first.

Then play without formal rules (it's the only way to be sure).

Regardless of edition/system, the actions you want your character to perform need to be translated into the 'language' of the system. No system I've ever played --outside of pure DM Fiat-- puts 'whatever I imagine first'.

 

[BryonD]

Then play without formal rules (it's the only way to be sure).

Regardless of edition/system, the actions you want your character to perform need to be translated into the 'language' of the system. No system I've ever played --outside of pure DM Fiat-- puts 'whatever I imagine first'.

I've certainly argued the merits of purely free-form RPGs in the past.

But that aside for what I hope are obvious reasons, there remains a huge difference between putting whatever I imagine in the language of the system and requiring my imagination to follow the requirements of the system.

Anyway, it is far from being an all-or-nothing proposition. The games I play have some limitations, and I am constantly open to options for pushing those boundaries. But it has been shown that a reasonable level "whatever" I imagine is being achieved in the games I play. I certainly not interested in back-tracking.

 

[BryonD]

I agree with this very much.
4e gives me the freedom to fit the rules into the fluff I want. Or I can look around this board and find the fluff I like. Plus it cuts my prep time at least in half and I can concentrate my preparation timewise on the story, especially with the use of DDI. This is quite liberating.

I also think that a lot of 3e players were not very interested in the fluff to begin with and did not use it when creating their characters. The 3e optimization board is a good example.
Nobody talked about this, only with 4e have I heard or read of a discussion like this.

I think there is a real gap on this point.

For me, I agree with you on the surface. I'm not particularly interested in fluff. I'm interested in mechanics. But I think you greatly misunderstand the why of that. Roleplaying and fluff are not between the covers of a book. I'm interested in mechanics because the whole question is how well can those mechanics grab on to whatever I imagine.

In my games the level of liberation to build the world, characters and actions that I imagine goes far beyond what you have described.

And honestly, one of the oft-repeated complaints against 4E is that it is far too much like a mini battle game or a video game. To claim that these people would see it this way and yet be concerned that there is too much fluff is a total contradiction. I think you are failing to grasp the view point of other people and using your own alternative as a straw man.


Also, it is quite possible to be into playing a detailed open game and ALSO enjoy experimenting with the min/max potentials of the game. These things are neither linked nor exclusive.

 

[Mallus]

I've certainly argued the merits of purely free-form RPGs in the past.

Hey, that's something we have in common .

But that aside for what I hope are obvious reasons, there remains a huge difference between putting whatever I imagine in the language of the system and requiring my imagination to follow the requirements of the system.

Oh sure. It's the source of some of my dissatisfaction with 3e. 3e lets you model a a great deal, but thanks to the 'language of the system', some models work a lot better than others, and therefore begin to dictate play because of that increased utility.

ie. 3e doesn't just allow you a make a melee fighter that's good at tripping an opponent, it incentivizes making a melee fighter that does little else.

It's a tricky problem. Either the system is more abstract, where 'what you imagine' has little to no mechanical representation (ie 1e combat), or it's more detailed, but those detailed rules begin to inform action choices more than the particulars of the in-game world (ie, both 3e and 4e combat -- but hey, at least 4e combat makes terrain more important!).