Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5864371" data-attributes="member: 42582">I think part of [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION]'s point is that 3E's approach encourages a type of specialist focus in build which makes it mechancially unviable to choose to to otherwise.The thought can be fleshed out this way: if I'm playing my PC, and I'm inhabiting my PC as a player - so I'm not just an author writing about him/her indifferently, but I want my PC to succeed - then I want to do my best stuff.If I decline from doing my best stuff not because my PC has a reason to ("Ha ha, you're so feeble I can take you with my left hand!") but simply to make the game better at some impersonal story level, then I've stopped playing my PC in the fullblooded sense I've described above. It's insipid.What I want (and what I think Hussar wants) are rules that make sure that, even when I play my PC at full throttle, I don't get boring spamming.Now perfection is a high ideal for any rules system. I've played games in which some secondary subsystems have been shown, in the course of play, to be broken, and rather than bother to rewrite them everyone at the table has just reached a gentelmen's agreement that we won't go there. That is, perhaps, a tiny bit insipid, but it's nothing like deliberately refraining from using your PC's best move - a move that your PC was built to take advantage of - in order to make the game a better one.In my current 4e game, the polearm fighter has a feat that let's him immobilise any marked target that he hits with a basic attack. It's only been in play for a little while so far, but both I (as GM) and the player of that PC have agreed that the feat is on our house watch list, as potentially broken. If we decide that it is broken, he'll swap it out. But it would spoil the game for him to keep it, but only use it occasionally. His job, as player, is to play the PC he's built at full throttle. Corrections in the interests of better play and better story should happen at the extreme meta-level, outside the context of play, by mechanical reform or rectification. Whereas to ask the player to hold back in the actual course of play is, in my view, to ask the player to hold back from fully playing his/her PC.EDITED to add: Although the discussion here is focused mostly on combat abilities, I think the above applies equally to social abilities, exploration abilities and the like. It's why I'm one of those who doesn't think a gentlemen's agreement that the wizard won't take invisibility or knock, but will leave it to the rogue, is not an adequate solution to the problem of spellcaster dominance. Because this is expecting the player of the wizard to play at less than full throttle. Just take the spells out of the game. Or at least make them no stronger than the rogue abilities.</blockquote>

Verification