D&D 4E 4E combat and powers: How to keep the baby and not the bathwater?

[pemerton]

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.

I'm not sure I follow.

When a creature is marked by a fighter, it will take -2 to hit a creature other than the fighter. Now who knows this - the creature, or the GM? There is no need to answer this question, because nothing in the game relies on an answer. The game does need to know that the monster chooses to attack the fighter, but doesn't require the imputing of any particular rationale for this.

It's the influence of the penalty on the GM's decision-making that is important for play.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

No game mechanic will entirely stop 15 MAD--at least not one that wouldn't be draconian in its effects on play. But happily, it is not necessary for a game mechanic to do so. Some mechanics do provide various incentives to not engage in 15 MAD play. Different groups will prefer some of these over others, and the ones you choose will affect the playstyle.

For example, I've got nothing against several encounters, wandering monsters, giving XP for mainly treasure acquisition and quests completed, tracking operational resources (like food and water), and keeping the party poor. I've done it and had great fun. Set up your adventures properly in that environment, and you won't often have 15 MAD--and when you do, you won't mind. Players that try it in that environment will use those resources inefficiently, and thus find it counter-productive. That's all great if you want to play that way. It's lousy as heck if you don't. Sometimes I want that playstyle. Other times I don't.

4E encounter powers, surges, etc. don't prevent 15 MAD anymore than any D&D mechanics, DM techniques, tricks, etc. have done. What they do is provide yet another set of tools that will tend to inhibit 15 MAD in certain playstyles not previously well-supported in this department, without the players having to fight the system with a maintained social contract to not engage in 15 MAD. When you prefer not to use those playstyles (whether an instance or all the time), the mechanics will do nothing for you.

Ideally, a modular system would include many different such mechanics and techniques--not because 15 MAD is a huge problem, but because the mechanics and techniques that fit a given playstyle while discouraging 15 MAD are likely to be a good fit for that playstyle anyway.

 

[Eldritch_Lord]

I'm not sure I follow.

When a creature is marked by a fighter, it will take -2 to hit a creature other than the fighter. Now who knows this - the creature, or the GM?

The creature.

Whenever you affect a creature with a power, that creature knows exactly what you’ve done to it and what conditions you’ve imposed. For example, when a paladin uses divine challenge against an enemy, the enemy knows that it has been marked and that it will therefore take a penalty to attack rolls and some damage if it attacks anyone aside from the paladin.

That's the problem with having marking be a purely metagame mechanic. If a fighter yells out "I'm gonna hit you if you touch my friends!" and doesn't mark a creature, the creature knows this; if he yells the same thing and also marks a creature, the creature knows this too. If you play marking as a purely metagame thing, then creatures are receiving knowledge about something that doesn't actually exist because one action they perceive is somehow different from an identical action for no apparent reason, which makes no sense at all.

The game mechanics might not depend on having a reason, but internal consistency depends on having a reason. Doesn't even have to be a good reason, as long as there's something, as long as the mark-er is doing something to indicate to the mark-ee that he's being marked. Otherwise, it's as bad as caster villains who unload all of their daily spells because they know they're only going to fight the PCs, or a few monsters who are mortal enemies sitting around for a while without food or water in a dungeon room because they're only there to provide a level-appropriate challenge, or a Jedi in SWSE who knows that he can't possibly die from something because he has Destiny points left. Game objects acting on knowledge of the metagame works for the Order of the Stick, but is terrible for a normal game, I feel.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

Rationalizing fighter marking in game is easy, because of the way it works. The fighters gets in someone's face, they are marked. You aren't required to do it that way, and can treat it as pure metagame if you want, but it is easy and obvious. This gets a little trickier with some of the other defenders, but it isn't rocket science to come up with a rationalization that will work most or even all of the time. Whether that rationalization is one that other campaigns will use is another question, but then it really shouldn't matter what other campaigns are doing.

 

[keterys]

There's a pretty big difference between:
* Character uses up their best abilities, is now at 10% effectiveness
* Character uses up their best abilities, is now at 80% effectiveness

Also between:
* Character is holding off from using their best abilities, is at 30% effectiveness
* Character is holding off from using their best abilities, is at 80% effectiveness

As a caster, I find the 15-minute day a far more serious temptation in editions before 4e, particularly so if healing items (wands of cure light and lesser vigor in 3e, for example) are not readily available.

As a DM, I also find the power difference troubling because it makes it easy to cakewalk theoretically difficult fights or TPK on not intentionally difficult fights due to swinginess in player preparation and rest choices.

One experiment I'd have liked to try in 4E was to limit daily power use to one per fight - of course, I also wanted daily powers to always be a big encounter changing deal (no Brute Strike or Fireball, yes Evard's or Consecrated Ground) so that may have been a non-starter, but I'd not mind a similar concept of throttling how fast a 5E caster can expend their load. It does make sense that there is some limitation to throwing everything you got all at once, after all.

I wouldn't mind caster spell slots being balanced around getting them back steadily throughout the day - then you could still let things be wacky or strong, but not terribly strong. I also wouldn't mind them having a variety of at-will spells and rituals and _very few_ big spells they can use per day, more true to Vance and early level D&D. (Nobody really needs 60 spells memorized, do they?)

Anyhow... back on topic a little:
In pre-4e, I found myself largely playing casters. In 4e, I played anything. I think because I need a certain level of complexity and tactical buttons to push to stay interested.

So, even if it's pushed into an optional rules module (which is fine), D&D Next has to deliver some of the cool things I've been doing in 4e with non-casters. It doesn't need Come and Get It - that was frankly a mistake for fighters to get (paladins? sure), and it doesn't need marking, or quarrying, or cursing. But I would like the ability to decide my character is a swashbuckler who is about tumbling about the battlefield and knocking enemies about and over... and not be horribly ineffective, consigned to non-damaging and ineffective bull rushes and trips, as a result.

 

[Hussar]

The creature.

There's a danger here in being a trifle too literal.

For one thing, the "creature" has no mind because it's a fictional construct. However, saying "the creature" here is a lot less wordy and means the same thing as, "The player controlling the target of the power". Because, let's be honest here, the "creature" cannot ever be aware of anything.

So, yes, you're right, the fighter could yell at one creature and the meta-game effect would be zero. He yells at the next creature, and the meta-game effect is a -2 to its attack.

However, how could a creature ever be literally aware that it's chances of hitting anyone other than the fighter have been reduced? As CJ says, all that happened in game is the fighter yelled at the creature. That's it.

I think you're actually adding inconsistencies where none exist by insisting that game mechanics be visible to the creatures/characters within the game. It's not a floating red -2 appears above someone's head when they get debuffed.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

One experiment I'd have liked to try in 4E was to limit daily power use to one per fight - of course, I also wanted daily powers to always be a big encounter changing deal (no Brute Strike or Fireball, yes Evard's or Consecrated Ground) so that may have been a non-starter, but I'd not mind a similar concept of throttling how fast a 5E caster can expend their load. It does make sense that there is some limitation to throwing everything you got all at once, after all.

I wouldn't mind caster spell slots being balanced around getting them back steadily throughout the day - then you could still let things be wacky or strong, but not terribly strong. I also wouldn't mind them having a variety of at-will spells and rituals and _very few_ big spells they can use per day, more true to Vance and early level D&D. (Nobody really needs 60 spells memorized, do they?)

More than once, I've thought that 4E would have had a slightly better feel in play if dailies had been limited to about 4 for the most powerful casters--but then at-wills and encounters (and non-daily utilities) were allowed to expand more in comparison. Whether you then turned dailies into more powerful options than present, or limited them to encounter-long effects, etc. is an open question.

You can see this most easily with a new group of players at early levels--say 2nd for example. Each character is sitting there with their 2 at-wills, 1 encounter, 1 daily, 1 utility, and whatever they can dish out with p. 42 and basic attacks. If that encounter is used, and the at-wills don't seem to be getting the job done, that daily looks awfully attractive. If you had, instead, 3 at-wills, 3 encounters, 1 daily, 2 or 3 utilities (and an explicit power for p. 42 printed out), the daily starts to look more like something you save for a truly tough fight--not merely one that got a little dicey.

Of course, you could also build in some other costs to dailies to emphasize their strategic nature even more than the above, and that would help to. It should be a strategic choice instead of a tactical one.

 

[pemerton]

The creature.

There's a danger here in being a trifle too literal.

For one thing, the "creature" has no mind because it's a fictional construct.

<snip>

how could a creature ever be literally aware that it's chances of hitting anyone other than the fighter have been reduced? As CJ says, all that happened in game is the fighter yelled at the creature. That's it.

I think you're actually adding inconsistencies where none exist by insisting that game mechanics be visible to the creatures/characters within the game. It's not a floating red -2 appears above someone's head when they get debuffed.

I agree with Hussar here. "The creature" in this context is a short hand for "the player of the creature" - much as the 4e PHB uses "you" to refer to the player and his/her PC without distinction. And the point about creatures being a fictional construct applies doubly so to NPCs/monsters, who don't even have a sole dedicated player inhabiting them, but are just one of the many game elements the GM is adjudicating in any given situation.

That's the problem

<snip>

it's as bad as caster villains who unload all of their daily spells because they know they're only going to fight the PCs

<snip>

or a Jedi in SWSE who knows that he can't possibly die from something because he has Destiny points left.

I'm still not seeing the problem.

My caster villains always unload everything they've got. That's part of the point of encounter design (if they're not going to unload it, don't give it to them).

Now there are issues about how one colours that: is the enemy spellcaster lacking in spells because he's weak, stupid or already spent them buffing his army? That can be interesting and important in the context of the fiction, but I don't see any deep reason why the mechanics have to change. Of course, in 3E or Rolemaster the mechanical representation of the NPC would have to change, because of the way those systems relate mechanical representation to fiction - but I don't see why this is a necessary desideratum of an RPG as such.

And as for players who play their PCs as if they can't die because they have fate points, or hit points, or whatever, left - isn't that the point of plot protection mechanics? This actually relates to the Falling Damage thread - but if your players are spending their PCs' hit points by jumping over cliffs instead of walking down the mountain trails, it seems to me that the problem in your game isn't the hit point mechanics - it's that you're not setting up very compelling situations for your players to spend their hit points in!

 

[pemerton]

There's a pretty big difference between:
* Character uses up their best abilities, is now at 10% effectiveness
* Character uses up their best abilities, is now at 80% effectiveness

Also between:
* Character is holding off from using their best abilities, is at 30% effectiveness
* Character is holding off from using their best abilities, is at 80% effectiveness

Completely agreed. For my group, this is the mechanical difference that produces the change in gameplay.

D&D Next has to deliver some of the cool things I've been doing in 4e with non-casters. It doesn't need Come and Get It - that was frankly a mistake for fighters to get (paladins? sure

I think it's obvious that D&Dnext won't have CaGI, but I have to make my obligatory post protesting the description of the power as a mistake. At least in my experience, the power works well in play - the fighter in my game is a polearm fighter who uses Footwork Lure and Rushing Cleats, so the idea of him using his deft polearm skills to wrongfoot and ensnare his opponents just reinforces the whole colour of the character. And I like it as such a blatant statement of 4e's non-simulationist aspirations. Together with martial healing, it provides (to me, at least) an unambiguous signal of how 4e is meant to play.

 

[BryonD]

Together with martial healing, it provides (to me, at least) an unambiguous signal of how 4e is meant to play.

I've always said that 4E does an awesome job of being what it was intended to be.