Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5320558" data-attributes="member: 42582">The way you talk about using reaction rolls on your 4e hack thread is interesting. But as well as closing down judgement it also opens it up - for example, if an NPC or monster is hostile, then how does that hostility express itself?I haven't used random reactions for a long time, because I've tended to place monsters/NPCs in order to provide a pre-conceived antagonism or foil for the PCs. The judgment, or at least some of it, has been frontloaded into the encounter design rather than the encounter resolution.Thinking more about your Sneak Attack examples, or the way you handle martial encounter powers in your hack, how do you handle the issue of &quot;spamming&quot; - or does it not come up? I think this question has some similarity to the issue of &quot;always using your best skill&quot; in a skill challenge. I tend to find that the way a skill challenge unfolds puts some natural brakes on that, because the players don't always have the ingenuity to find a way to bring the fiction back to the sort of terrain where their best skills would engage. The fact that I tend to have all (or most) of the PCs participating in most skill challenges reinforces this.Do you find that the same sorts of constraints - players simply can't always bend the fiction in the direction that they might like - act as a natural brake on combat powers triggered by the fiction? (EDIT: And further with respect to this - I find the upper limit on skill challenge checks before it's finished one way or the other helps me keep track of where the fiction is and is going - do the many more rolls in a typical D&amp;D combat make it harder to keep track?)</blockquote>

[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 5320558, member: 42582"] The way you talk about using reaction rolls on your 4e hack thread is interesting. But as well as closing down judgement it also opens it up - for example, if an NPC or monster is hostile, then how does that hostility express itself? I haven't used random reactions for a long time, because I've tended to place monsters/NPCs in order to provide a pre-conceived antagonism or foil for the PCs. The judgment, or at least some of it, has been frontloaded into the encounter design rather than the encounter resolution. Thinking more about your Sneak Attack examples, or the way you handle martial encounter powers in your hack, how do you handle the issue of "spamming" - or does it not come up? I think this question has some similarity to the issue of "always using your best skill" in a skill challenge. I tend to find that the way a skill challenge unfolds puts some natural brakes on that, because the players don't always have the ingenuity to find a way to bring the fiction back to the sort of terrain where their best skills would engage. The fact that I tend to have all (or most) of the PCs participating in most skill challenges reinforces this. Do you find that the same sorts of constraints - players simply can't always bend the fiction in the direction that they might like - act as a natural brake on combat powers triggered by the fiction? (EDIT: And further with respect to this - I find the upper limit on skill challenge checks before it's finished one way or the other helps me keep track of where the fiction is and is going - do the many more rolls in a typical D&D combat make it harder to keep track?) [/QUOTE]

Verification