101 roleplaying descriptions justifying martial dailies

[Ariosto]

A guy held immobilized for a whole minute, and you couldn't just slit his throat? Nope, not according to the rules.

Actually:

Magically Sleeping or Held Opponents: If a general melee is in progress, and the attacker is subject to enemy actions, then these opponents are automatically struck by any attack to which they would normally be subject, and the maximum damage possible according to the weapon type is inflicted each time such an opponent is so attacked. The number of attacks or attack routines possible against such an opponent is twice the number normally allowed in a round. Otherwise, such opponents may be automatically slain, or bound as appropriate to materials at hand and size, at a rate of one per round.

Note the part in bold. Note also that if this procedure were inadequate to the imagined situation, then another could be substituted.

Time factors in AD&D can indeed be irksome if one gives them much thought, but the same holds for those in 3E and 4E.

 

[Ariosto]

Powers and abilities and feats tell you what your character can do, not what they must do. There are rules for acting outside those boundaries -- even in 4th Edition -- if you care to use them.

Which is (quite sensibly, I think) not what anyone I've seen has cared to do. Why should one want to go to all the trouble to avoid using the rules as they were designed to work? There are some bits outside the powers that are actually useful, but the much-lauded page 42 is of a kind with the powers (as is much else throughout the design). I think it would make more sense (perhaps not much, but more) to use AD&D even though none of the spells or magic items were to enter play.

Seriously, are you going to advise anyone to pay all that money for 4E just to end up designing something on one's own that doesn't much resemble 4E? I can think of much better candidates for such kit-bashing.

 

[Ariosto]

Alex: "I fire the powder." Whoosh ... [reaches keg] ... BOOM!
There's an action one can visualize, and it is the cause of the effect.
Might that bother a player who doesn't know that's what happens when you light gunpowder? Maybe, but if there's no rule for it in a pirate game then a lot more players are going to notice the lack.

You're using "fluff" (a term of contempt for such matters in the first place) to conflate common sense and deep scientific knowledge, suggesting that just because some people are unschooled in chemistry we should all act as if plumb ignorant about everything. So far from being masters of the martial arts, our game personae are apparently not to have the foggiest what they are about!

 

[LostSoul]

Note the part in bold. Note also that if this procedure were inadequate to the imagined situation, then another could be substituted.

Was that 1E or 2E? We were playing 2E at the time. We could easily have gotten the rule wrong, though.

But anyways, total agreement with your second sentence.

 

[Ariosto]

That's the 1E DMG, LostSoul -- but we played "0E" just fine without it!

(I think the 2E books serve best as compliments to 1E, as they sometimes offer clear and convenient methods but also sometimes make a half-baked mess of things. More tools in the toolkit is for the good, so long as that toolkit is not too cumbersome to carry!)

The thing is, as much as there was a reason for the shortage of explicit rules in the old game, there's a reason for their proliferation in the new ones.

There are people who like a lot of rules, and people who like a simpler structure.There are people who like situation first, and there are people who want to make up everything after the fact -- and there are those perfectly satisfied with "hit for 8 damage". Heck, there are some who would prefer to treat everything (from puzzles to parleying) as "hit for 8 damage".

One could buy Rolemaster and then just toss all but a few pages of it, and one could do likewise with 4E. Short of that, one could start coming up with house rules for power after power. It would not make much sense to me, though.

If one wants just a loose framework in which (as put in Supplement IV, Gods, Demigods & Heroes) "the 'rules' were never meant to be more than guidelines; not even true 'rules'," then old D&D is that. If you want a super-sized side of number crunching with your simulation, then maybe 3E or GURPS (or an old Fantasy Games Unlimited recipe) will fill the order.

4E cooks up something else, for other tastes.

 

[Pbartender]

Which is (quite sensibly, I think) not what anyone I've seen has cared to do. Why should one want to go to all the trouble to avoid using the rules as they were designed to work? There are some bits outside the powers that are actually useful, but the much-lauded page 42 is of a kind with the powers (as is much else throughout the design).

That much, I think we can generally agree on.

4E wasn't entirely designed to work outside of feats and powers, they wouldn't be there if it was. However, when you need them, if you need them, there are rules and guidelines for stepping outside those boundaries.

Previously in the thread, you were suggesting that 4E could not do that at all. What I'm saying is that, while 4E doesn't do it nearly as well as other system that are based around it, it does have those sorts of rules available for the occassions when they're needed.

Seriously, are you going to advise anyone to pay all that money for 4E just to end up designing something on one's own that doesn't much resemble 4E? I can think of much better candidates for such kit-bashing.

Absolutely not. That was never my suggestion. My suggestion was, essentially, "If a player wants his character to trip an enemy in 4E, and his character doesn't have a power that lets him do it, he doesn't have to say,'I can't do it at all'. Instead, he can use the available 'Actions the Rules Don't Cover' rules to attempt the action outside of powers."

In 4E, those rules aren't primary rules, they're a backup because you can't have a specific rule for every situation that could ever possibly arise.

I'm not telling anyone to redesign 4E. I'm telling people to use the rules that are already there for the situations that require them.

 

[Pbartender]

If one wants just a loose framework in which (as put in Supplement IV, Gods, Demigods & Heroes) "the 'rules' were never meant to be more than guidelines; not even true 'rules'," then old D&D is that. If you want a super-sized side of number crunching with your simulation, then maybe 3E or GURPS (or an old Fantasy Games Unlimited recipe) will fill the order.

4E cooks up something else, for other tastes.

Ah... this gets at what I'm suggesting.

In this context, I (me, myself, personally) see 4E as a fusion of those two styles... It has a decent portion of detailed rules for the more common situations that happen in a typical D&D game -- fantasy combat and adventure exploration -- and then has a handful of more generalized rules -- like stunts and skill challenges -- to handle the occasional situation that falls outside those bounds.

Of course, the desingers decided to focus on the detailed combat and adventuring rules (what has always been the focus of D&D adventures and rules), while the leaving the generalized rules short and vague, leaving it up to the players to use their imaginations and the DM to use his own good sense when applying them.

 

[ExploderWizard]

I really don't see a need for justification. What has happened is a large blurring of the divide between the magic and non-magic abilities of characters. If every power is simply considered a superpower then there isn't a need to worry about what is magical and what isn't.

Player characters being special individuals with "gifts" makes more sense in the 4E power structure than the traditional highly trained adventurer. This also makes sense of the fact that the rules for PC's and NPC's are vastly different. This major assumption also helps with the retraining rules. Powers grow and fade outside of the control of the character.

Lighthearted adventures can feature characters more like The Greatest American Hero rather than Superman.

Viewed in this light, the whole package makes perfect sense to me. If I want non-supers fantasy I can play another game.

 

[Pbartender]

I really don't see a need for justification. What has happened is a large blurring of the divide between the magic and non-magic abilities of characters. If every power is simply considered a superpower then there isn't a need to worry about what is magical and what isn't.

Player characters being special individuals with "gifts" makes more sense in the 4E power structure than the traditional highly trained adventurer. This also makes sense of the fact that the rules for PC's and NPC's are vastly different. This major assumption also helps with the retraining rules. Powers grow and fade outside of the control of the character.

Lighthearted adventures can feature characters more like The Greatest American Hero rather than Superman.

Viewed in this light, the whole package makes perfect sense to me. If I want non-supers fantasy I can play another game.

I like to look at it through the lens of mythological heroes... Who were essentially the fantasy superheroes of their times.

 

[Mallus]

In my experience, we never described what happened in the combat round. It usually went like this:

"I hit AC 3."
"That hits."
"8 damage."

That was my usual experience of 1e combat too.

This is, to me, the same problem that 4E has, though it's a little different. Both versions allow you to consider only the mechanics without engaging the fluff at all.

That's for getting what I was trying say, Lost. I was starting to worry I was speaking moon-man language.

(4E has great rules (in my opinion) on how to adjudicate "unexpected" actions, but the powers create "power blindness" and those unexpected actions aren't often attempted.

In my 4e group it isn't 'power blindness' so much as the regular class powers are simply fun to use, so we use them. I imagine once we start getting bored of the canned powers, we'll start stunting more.

The party rogue uses Acrobatics stunts from time to time, and my paladin, who, to make a long, oft-told story short, has a small deity crammed down his pants, sometimes stunts Diplomacy in order to beg for a boon from the god (like a 1-time use of the Clerical daily).