Spoilering a looong post for space.
[MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION]'s post:
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4e has such keywords. The Wight power Horrid Visage, for example, has the fear keyword and pushes all targets in a blast. It is very clear that this "pushing" is the targets in question falling back from fear when confronted by the undead's horrid visage.
The fear keyword implies that the forced movement is persuasive rather than physical, true. However, (A) it isn't a keyword for the forced movement itself (i.e. not all persuasive movement is fear-based, so you can't use it for every case) and (B) such a keyword wasn't applied universally. If they had distinguished between the two types and done so consistently, there wouldn't be a problem.
Come and Get It, by having no keyword, leaves it open to the player to always generate forced movement regardless of the immunities of the targets his/her PC is confronting. Having no keyword is a power-up.
It's not a matter of power; [force] spells are strictly better than [fire] spells in 3e in all but the very few cases where monsters are immune to force, and that's fine, no one's clamoring to add more unneeded descriptors to [force] effects to nerf them. It's a matter of consistency: there are some monsters who reasonably
should be immune or resistant to persuasive forced movement, and some who
should be immune to resistant to physical forced movement, just as there are those who should be immune or resistant to fear, psychic damage, or other effects.
I'm not seeing the problem. One group uses hit points. Another uses V/W. Another uses RQ (integrated hp and crit mechanics). Another uses Rolemaster (crit mechanics, with a secondary hit point mechanic that plays a very different role from D&D hp). Another uses Burning Wheel (crit mechanic with no hp).
What's wrong with that?
The fact that there is no base system in common for all the rules. It's one thing for
a given group to use, say, the RQ version of hit points, or for
a given variant subsystem to introduce RQ hit points instead of the normal D&D hit points. The problem with inconsistent HP fluff is that you have someone dealing damage with one HP system, healing it with another, and preventing it with a third. Having a crusader or warlord heal the HP of someone who just took damage from a fall is the flavor equivalent of taking a vitality healing spell from a Vitality/Wounds game and using it to heal a Rolemaster character--you can try to increase their vitality or remove their fatigue or morale them up to ignore it or whatever, but that won't help as much as physical healing if they just took a dive off a cliff, and doing so just doesn't always make sense.
That's all I'm going for here. You can use whichever HP system or forced movement system or whatever that you like in your games, and I can use whichever I like in mine, but the base system should pick one flavor or set of flavors for a given subsystem and stick with it, both to make the base system consistent without tweaking and to allow you to replace it wholesale without running into problems.
As to the ability of hit points in 4e to handle the situations you describe - how does a warlord "heal" a character who has taken damage from falling? By urging the character to continue despite his/her injuries. How does a warlord "heal" an unconscious character? There are at least two versions of this: one is that the character has an inspiring dream in which the warlord figures (think Aragorn dreamin of Arwen after he falls over the cliff in the LotR movie); another is that the unconcsious character is roused from unconsicousness by a faint sound, and through barely-open eyes sees someone yelling words of concern/encouragement/command at him/her (think of the scene out of any number of movies about military heroism).
Flip that around, and have a physical healing effect try to heal someone's morale-based damage. Someone is scared half to death, and someone's first aid kit restores their self-esteem? Or take the "avoiding blows until the one that drops you to 0" interpretation--you manage to dodge most blows, except the ones that have poison/a paralyzing touch/whatever because you need those to hit but they only deal a tiny bit of damage, so a giant wasp is more able to actually physically hit you than a master swordsman or a dragon?
Yes, any interpretation of HP you use has a perfectly rational explanation. The problem is that 3e and 4e use multiple interpretations of HP and multiple (often different) interpretations of healing
at the same time. If you have every damaging effect in the game assume HP-as-wounds, then you can use both morale healing and physical healing just fine; one heals the wounds themselves, the other lets you ignore them. If you have every damaging effect in the game assume HP-as-morale, then you can deal with cliff-diving and combat just fine; one bangs you up to the point that you really don't want to move, the other slowly wears down your resolve until you want to surrender. It just doesn't work to have X kinds of healing and Y kinds of damage and mix them together haphazardly because the designers couldn't settle on one consistent take on HP.
For those who don't want to run this sort of game, use hit points as meat, or V/W, or whatever. I've got nothing against those options. But I won't agree that 4e hit points can't work. And I also won't agree that it has no advantages - Burning Wheel, for example, has a very nice wounds system, and a very nice morale system, and a very nice system for pushing on despite wounds, but has no mechanic for drawing on your morale in order to push on despite wounds. So BW can do something 4e can't - gritty feel - but 4e can do something BW can't - morale being used to push on despite wounds.
Nitpick: Burning Wheel doesn't have a system currently implemented to do that, but given both a mechanic for morale and a mechanic for pushing past your limits you could have a Power Attack-style "take X penalty to morale/make X check against morale/etc., gain Y benefit for pushing on despite wounds" mechanic, and it would be more internally consistent than the 3e and 4e take on the matter. Then again, Vitality/Wounds is also more consistent fairly often, it just has bad mechanical implications for a heroic game.
And once again, note that I'm not talking about just 4e here: 3e has hit points just as bad, in fact often worse because they didn't really implement morale healing until later in the edition where 4e had it from the start. I just brought up the D&D hit point system, not one particular version of it...though I must admit, I'm biased to like 1e's hit point system best since it picks one view of HP (HP-as-wounds) and sticks with it much better than other editions and also keeps hit point growth in check and has other rules to avoid most of the problems with too-durable PCs.
It seems to me that you "refluffing", here, is changing the mechanics - in particular, immunity to fear now provides immunity to marking, whereas in the core rules this is not so.
I must not have been clear--I'm not saying that you should be able to refluff 4e marking
now and get benefits for it, I'm saying that (A) if they
had given a particular in-game rationale, and if they do give one in 5e, they could hook other mechanics like morale, fear, mindlessness, mobility, etc. to it to make the rules a more consistent whole rather than having things like damage, penalties, movement, etc. that are subject to tags and resistance and such while other things like forced movement, marking, etc. "just work," and (B) if the fighter mark works a certain way in-game and the paladin mark works a different way, then you can introduce more tactical considerations like different stacking, different ways to break marks, and so forth, rather than leaving the base fluff for some of them up in the air and just stating that no marks stack just because.
But anyway, marking isn't a problem in my view, for the reasons Hussar gives:
I don't know if I agree that a fighter mark is always metagame - in some contexts it can easily be seen as having some ingame manifestation - but I agree that it has a strong metagame component. It is a metagame technique whereby the player says to the GM, "If you dont' attack my PC with those monsters, I will hose them, by taking extra attacks and by burdening them with unluck tokens on that attack."
See, in my view, purely metagame mechanics shouldn't be visible to game units. If a fighter marks a creature, it knows it's marked and knows the consequences...so the fighter is doing absolutely nothing in game to mark the creature yet the creature somehow knows that that
particular doing-absolutely-nothing happened and can--not only can, but is
expected to!--change its behavior based on that? That makes no sense.
If the creature knows what's happening to it, there should be something happening in the game world to cause it, and vice versa, or you have something that neither the fighter nor the creature know is going on, but you shouldn't mix the two. Take Force points and Destiny points as an example from SWSE: spending Force points lets you add to d20 rolls and trigger certain abilities, while spending Destiny points lets you do things like negate hits, auto-crit things, activate better abilities, and such. You get 1 Destiny point per level and have at least 5+1/2 level Force points at any given time. They're fluffed as being the invisible will of the Force guiding people's actions, and there's no way for people in-game to know how many of either they have or when they or other characters use one or the like. If the PCs get to a big boss battle and dump a bunch of Destiny points on auto-critting the boss and the boss dumps a bunch of Destiny points to make them miss, there is nothing happening in-game to signify this and no character is expected to change his in-game behavior because of this. (There are several problems with that system such as outnumbering the bosses Destiny point-wise and playing more confident when you have more points stored up, but those are mechanical issues with the quantity and frequency of points acquisition rather than flavor ones.)
So it would be reasonable for marking to be a metagame thing if creatures explicitly did not know they were marked unless someone noted it in-game, e.g. "Foul demon, I challenge thee, lay not a finger on my companions or Pelor's wrath blah blah blah" (and even then, you could be bluffing about marking someone), and the fighter was able to make extra attacks and effectively grant +2 AC to all allies because he's Just That Good or Because Plot. It would also be reasonable for marks to be a particular in-game thing, as people seem to want and as the game basically treats them, and have creatures being able to react to them. Having a purely-metagame thing impinge on the game world with no explanation, though, comes back to the issue of inconsistent fluff.
When you say "always better" I assume you mean "always better for your preferred playstyle". I can tell you it's not always better per se, because at the moment at least I am enjoying my 4e campaign more than I enjoyed my previous RM campaign (and I can tell you, I enjoyed that campaign a lot!), and that is because 4e is better than RM at giving what I want from my game, and that part of that is precisely the "fortune in the middle" mechanics of 4e, which leave GMs and players to (as you put it) "make stuff up".
By always better I mean from a design perspective: the old truism of "better to have X and not need it than need X and not have it" and all that. Perhaps it is my experience as a software developer that leads me to insist on consistency in flavor and mechanics rather than the 3e/4e hodgepodge of having some things highly codified and others left up to fiat--to use a programming analogy, it's much better to build your system to work correctly in a vacuum and provide good APIs and plugin support for later customization than to leave a few features for DLC or modding and just assume they'll be filled in well later--but it also comes down to the fact that these mistakes (in my view) just didn't have to have been made in the first place and could have been done right so easily.
The 3e devs went to all this trouble to make a skill system, and one major complaint about 3e is that spells start to overshadow skills; it wouldn't have been difficult to change those spells to use the new skill system, since they were rewriting things anyway, but they didn't, and now it's both a perceived problem with the game and more trouble than it's worth to really redo yourself. The 4e devs went to all this trouble to make a combat maneuver system, and one major complaint about 4e is that improvised attacks and combat maneuvers are weaker and less reliable than powers; it wouldn't have been difficult to change those improvised actions to be generic-use powers in the same power system like the Basic Attack powers are, since they were codifying things anyway, but they didn't, and now it's both a perceived problem with the game and more trouble than it's worth to really redo yourself.
It's that fact that these problems could have been fixed so easily by the devs in the design stage, yet they were left there and ended up causing so many players to have problems with or dislike the system, that leads me to insist so much that 5e sit down and make things work
right the first time, instead of leaving things to be fixed by players like they did with the last two editions.[/sblock]
[MENTION=1544]Zustiur[/MENTION]'s post:
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I keep coming back to the original question of this thread: What are the good bits of 4E combat, and how can we keep them without including the bad bits of 4E combat?
I guess that way to answer that methodically is to first ask ourselves; What did 4E do?
To that I answer the following:
4E made the following improvements:
I'll address these individually. If I don't mention something, either I agree or I disagree to a small enough extent that it's not worth nitpicking.
Improvements:
3. Balanced spellcasters with martial characters
Note that this is only a good thing with respect to combat spells; losing the win-button spells was good for martial/magic parity. Out of combat, loss of many of the more "interesting" effects and/or making them much harder to access made exploration and other non-combat things less interesting, and there were plenty of "noncombat" spells that were usable in combat and couldn't be duplicated by martial types yet were quite fun and balanced. So I agree with you on this 70% or so.
4. Removed ability score altering effects (thus, less recalculation)
The existence of ability score reducers as well as the existence of negative levels was a good one, actually, in my opinion; they provide mechanical variety and handy effects (e.g. it's much more elegant to have negative levels that say "take -X to every roll and lose 5X hit points" than to have a bunch of different mechanical takes on life draining). The problem with them was too much calculation, as you noted, and their ability to take you out of combat by bypassing HP. Making stats and effective level have minima of 1 would have solved the latter issue, and implementing 4e stats such that you didn't have multiples and half-multiples of Str everywhere or multiple stats adding to single things would have solved the former.
Really, stat damage could easily be implemented in 4e without much hassle. If you deal 2X Dex damage to a character, what happens? Drop Dex-based attacks, AC, and Ref by X. If you deal 2X Con damage to a character, what happens? Drop Con-based attacks by X and HP by 2X. No carrying capacity to worry about, no adding Wis and Dex and Int to AC, no Str-and-a-half to weapons, practically none of the fiddly bits that made it a pain in 3e remain in 4e. I'd actually like to see the return of other penalties
like stat damage and negative levels (if not those exact things) in 5e, though obviously rarer/later than in AD&D/3e so those who dislike them wouldn't have to run into them.
8. Page 42 exists to cover gaps
Rants already made--I don't think it deserves expansion but rather replacement. Just noting my disagreement.
9. Introduced minions, elites and solos
Nitpick: minions and elites already basically existed in 3e as well. Just give enemies either the common array and minimum HP or heroic stats and max HP, and give the minions the various teamwork/aid another/swarmfighting/etc. feats and spells if you want synergy. Action-economy benefits for solos existed in the form of spells in 3e, so while adding solos in 4e gave them access to those effects in a more elegant and universal manner you can still run a "solo wizard with elite guards and minions" battle just fine in 3e without much or any houseruling.
10. Switched to Attack vs Defense mechanic rather than the old saving throw system
This isn't something better so much as it is a matter of taste. The time-saving argument doesn't really apply as long you make separate attacks against each creature: A 3e PC wizard tosses a
fireball and the DM makes a ton of saves for the NPCs, then the 3e NPC wizard tosses a
fireball and the PCs each make one save; a 4e PC wizard tosses a
fireball and makes a ton of attacks against the NPCs, then the 4e NPC wizard tosses a
fireball and makes a ton of attacks against the PCs. No distributed effort there. You also lose the ability to use saves outside of the save vs. effect framework (e.g. Reflex saves to catch yourself when you fall) and have the interesting fluff of a disease "attacking" your Fort defense. On the other hand, the system is
much more consistent and elegant when the attacking party is the one that does the rolling.
I find that save vs. effect and attack vs. defense are both inferior to the "PCs roll all the dice" variant, as that
does speed things up (the above case of the 3e PC wizard does all the rolling in this variant, freeing up the DM) and retains the benefits of out-of-combat use and flavor consistency.
Drawbacks:
10. There is less meaningful variety in spell duration
I'd argue that this is actually a benefit, though again only for "combat" spells. Conceptually, it is better to have fewer, more standardized durations than to have more, more irregular durations, just like it's better for 3e spells to have a range of Touch/Short/Medium/Long than to have 30 feet or 60 feet or sight or a mile per level or other irregular ranges. Had 4e implemented durations more consistently, it could have worked out well. The devs instead relied on little changes like end of target's next turn vs. start of target's next turn to provide variety rather than providing any actual variety by having fewer, more consistent and more tactically interesting durations.
Discuss
So, how I'd fix the drawbacks you mentioned as well as your advantages which I see as drawbacks:
15 minute work day: If daily powers are recoverable, most incentive for the 15-minute work day goes away, since everything else is already on a per-encounter basis. Implement a rule that the first short rest you take between encounters recovers one daily power, and add that you can spend an action point during a short rest to recover a second daily power. That changes "daily" powers to "ration over several encounters" powers, and not only disincentivizes the 15-minute work day (since now you can actually use more daily powers the further you go) but also partially addresses the martial dailies issue.
Repetitive power lineups: This one, I feel, is mostly due to the same-y-ness of powers in general and the fact that characters get too few of them. For a quick fix in 4e, change the power schedule such that you gain new powers at higher levels rather than retraining old ones (i.e. your powers known constantly grow) and allow each character to have some number of "floating powers" that can be used to trade things out during a short or extended rest. For a better fix in 5e, include a better variety of powers (everything should look more like the 4e wizard and less like the 4e ranger), mix up power frequency, and also allow power swapping from a limited list.
Class homogenization: It all comes down to the power schedule. At a minimum, use some AEDU, some Psionic, and some Essentials mechanics in 5e; I'd prefer something more like the Vancian/ToB/ToM/MoI levels of variety, but that's an absolute minimum.
Effect and bonus tracking: Simple: Ditch the BS "+X for one round" effects. Tactically interesting, mechanically nightmarish. Instead, have such powers last the whole encounter but be conditional; don't give +4 to attack for 1 round/1 attack, give +2 to all attacks against flanked creatures or whatever. Those kinds of situational-but-long-lasting bonuses you can write down and track much better than short-duration general stuff. Also, while you can have some of those powers, try to limit ongoing bonuses in favor of granting action options. Instead of giving you +5 to attack for a while grant an immediate attack, or instead of granting extra damage change the type of damage dealt, or something. That takes the same effort to track but both reduces computations and adds variety.
Round length: A lot of this comes from the bonus issue above and the fact that both everyone uses minor actions and everyone has situational actions that they use each round. If more powers were used once and continued on, rather than forcing people to choose to use boosting powers on each turn, and if the number of things to track and rolls to make were reduced, it would decrease turn length by extension.
Lockdown: If you have 4e-style saving throw durations, make all penalties and bonuses non-stacking, and cap them at +/-5. If you have just ongoing effects, allow saving throws/repeated attacks at increasing bonuses (for the target) or penalties (for the attacker) to break free.
Healing fluff: See my explanation above. If you stick with a single interpretation of HP, this problem tends to solve itself.
Non-power powers: Write a coherent improvisation framework rather than telling the DM to wing it.
Minions and elites: Use lower-level monsters in place of minions and higher-level monsters in place of elites; this also partially solves the "no attack bonuses relative to monsters" problem, though you'd have to increase expected hit rate in tandem.
Dump stats and attribute pairs: One solution I like is to evenly distribute what the stats can do (i.e. consider stats without pairings and ensure they're all relatively equally important) then wherever you pair attributes have them add 1/2 the lower stat bonus instead of just taking the highest. That gives a reason to actually have higher secondary stats in the pairs, and mitigates situations like Str/Con classes in 4e having worse defenses overall.
Bonus treadmill: Honestly, there's very little point to leveling if you're just going to increase numbers while keeping the same hit frequency. The problem here was just bad monster math in 4e. If instead of introducing Expertise feats and other stealth patches they had simply changed monsters to scale at 1/3 level or whatever, the math would be closer but with the PCs gaining in advantage, encouraging them to look for options instead of numerical boosts.
Required magic items: Contrary to Hussar's claim, you actually
do need magic items, as you say, because it's the effects you want, not just the pure numbers. Inherent bonuses take care of the numbers, and I'd argue that skills and class features should take care of the effects. You don't need to pick up flying boots, bags of holding, staffs of fire, and a partridge in a pear tree if you can use Acrobatics to balance on air à la 3e epic skills, Athletics gives you a bigger carrying capacity, and your Pyromancer arcanist theme/kit/path/PrC gives you perks with fire powers and the ability to change powers to deal fire damage for free.
High monster HP: 4e fixed this with later monster math, just make that standard from the start.
Powers are too verbose: Interesting powers are always going to take up more space, since they're more detailed. However, most of the page space bloat comes from the boilerplate. If you establish a general power template and then general rules for each different kind of power, you don't need to repeat the level and area and range and stat and... for each power. At-will powers can be made into one- or two-liners this way, and even dailies would be significantly condensed. Also, get rid of the excess margins and larger font; they're unnecessary once you have a standard format and better descriptions.[/sblock]
