D&D 4E 4e -- Is The World Made Of Cheese?

[Plane Sailing]

Maybe. But it seems every time I start liking 4e, the rules (if you can call them that) go out of their way to slam me in the face with ham-fisted "simplicity" that makes the game world impossible to believe in.

The problem is that you are trying to use the mechanics for killing things (hit points) in place of whatever rules are appropriate for tunnelling.

You don't kill a hole in a mountain, you have to excavate it.

Even 3e had rules that said "a DM can rule a particular source of damage ineffective against certain objects". I think the exact example they gave was that you can't use a club to damage a rope. Personally I used exactly the same logic to prevent someone with a sword or axe chopping through a wall - inappropriate tool. Want to tunnel? Get a pick.

 

[Lizard]

Sorry, I just don't see this. What amazing insight was required to come up with the claim that a wooden spoon won't dig through a stone wall? If you can come up with this idea while writing a post, you can come up with it during a game.

Because you need to "apply common sense" to each and every player/object violent interaction, instead of having a baseline to work from.

My personal houserules will be quite simple:
a)If an object is wildly inappropriate (a mace to cut a rope), it doesn't work unless the player has a really good explanation or bought me Chinese food.

b)Hardness, in general, is carried over from 3x. Paragon-level materials double their base hardness; Epic materials triple it. (Or maybe +2/+4. Might be better.)

c)If the object being attacked has a +2 hardness over the attacking object, damage is halved; if it is +4 over the attacking object, the object cannot harm it unless there are special circumstances. See 'a'.

Quick, easy, and takes up about 3 lines.

 

[kromelizard]

To be precise, stabbing folks with swords is not an odd occurrence within the context of the fantasy genre, whereas routinely carving your way through walls is.

This should not need to be stated.

Maybe your fantasy genre doesn't include the possibility of tunneling under the walls of the fortified city by night, or cutting out of prison with the magic knife the wizard concealed with prestidigitation, but mine is a little less restrictive.

With a rules guideline in place that figured ahead of time that players might want to use their damage dealing potential for something other than murder, the DM can devote his attention to the other complications that might arise e.g. discovery, exhaustion. Without the rules guideline the DM has either the choice of fabricating one; issuing multiple, probably inconsistent, spot rulings; or doing what most DMs do when operating by fiat, saying "You succeed" or "You fail," because inventing interesting sub systems for non-combat encounters isn't what the DM is for, it's what the game designer is for.

This particular sub-system presents the world as a weird homogenous mass of stuff in a way that the previous system didn't. It's a bizarre choice that creates more work for the DM rather than less, because now it requires you create the numbers for Hardness yourself.

I get that you would rather just tell the fighter "No, you can't hack your way down to the next dungeon level with your adamantine sword," but I'd rather say yes to what is essentially a reasonable solution to the unreasonable problem of the dungeon, have a guideline for how well it would work, and then figure out what possible result there might be to this action. It makes the world more complex and interesting if a reasonable solution can be attempted. And it's reasonable enough solution that "break the wall down with bulldozers" is a routine urban fighting tactic for the Israeli army.

 

[Vempyre]

Was space so tight that a paragraph explaining this, and a second column added to the table on P. 65, was simply not possible?

This.

Judging on how there isn't elixirs while they are mentioning to exist in the PHB and how they handled KotS pre-gens and various other things that I saw ... they havn't been afraid to cut stuff from 4E products that might have made sense to be in it when they hit their maximum pre-established page count for a particular product.

 

[eleran]

Because you need to "apply common sense" to each and every player/object violent interaction, instead of having a baseline to work from.

My personal houserules will be quite simple:
a)If an object is wildly inappropriate (a mace to cut a rope), it doesn't work unless the player has a really good explanation or bought me Chinese food.

b)Hardness, in general, is carried over from 3x. Paragon-level materials double their base hardness; Epic materials triple it. (Or maybe +2/+4. Might be better.)

c)If the object being attacked has a +2 hardness over the attacking object, damage is halved; if it is +4 over the attacking object, the object cannot harm it unless there are special circumstances. See 'a'.

Quick, easy, and takes up about 3 lines.

Brilliant!! I like the looks of those. Now, you're going to ask why you had to come up with these rules instead of the designers. I assume the position that had the designers come up with rules for this that half the people out there would dislike them and house rule them to suit themselves and their campaign. They just cut out the middleman.

 

[Thasmodious]

"Apply common sense" is also 4e RAW. All the tools you need to apply common sense are in the DMG. You just need to supply the common sense. Perhaps that is the problem?

Seriously, how about making a few more issues out of absolutely nothing. Next you'll be bemoaning the lack of a solid set of rules for PC digestion and food consumption, including tables on region specific foods, their spicy levels, and interaction with PC allergies, a timetable for 'nature calls'.

If you quit worrying about what is or isn't spelled out for you in the RAW and just DM, I think you will have a lot more fun. We're called Masters for a reason.

 

[Lizard]

Seriously, how about making a few more issues out of absolutely nothing. Next you'll be bemoaning the lack of a solid set of rules for PC digestion and food consumption, including tables on region specific foods, their spicy levels, and interaction with PC allergies, a timetable for 'nature calls'.

Well, we don't need the Aftermath nutrition charts (which included roaches and, ahem, "long pig"...)

But let's discuss the rules whereby you lose level hit points/day without water (after three days), so a typical 1st level character lost in the Desert Of Searing Sands will take 20+ days to die of thirst...

 

[Old Gumphrey]

The problem is that you are trying to use the mechanics for killing things (hit points) in place of whatever rules are appropriate for tunnelling.

You don't kill a hole in a mountain, you have to excavate it.

Even 3e had rules that said "a DM can rule a particular source of damage ineffective against certain objects". I think the exact example they gave was that you can't use a club to damage a rope. Personally I used exactly the same logic to prevent someone with a sword or axe chopping through a wall - inappropriate tool. Want to tunnel? Get a pick.

That, and why do people think a lack of hardness would only apply to a wall and not to the thing they are banging against it? Punching an adamantite wall would give you broken knuckles, not a hole. I don't need hardness rules, because I know that adamantite is harder than flesh and bone.

 

[Anguirus]

Maybe. But it seems every time I start liking 4e, the rules (if you can call them that) go out of their way to slam me in the face with ham-fisted "simplicity" that makes the game world impossible to believe in.

Frankly, I found the half-hearted simulationist stuff in 3.x pretty difficult to believe. I like the fact that 4e doesn't claim to be accurate at simulating much else than fantasy combat. The fact that there's no standardized "stone" or "adamantine door" stats seems more realistic to me...after all, construction standards will vary.

(Though at least 3e's rules on starving/suffocating made more sense!)

 

[Old Gumphrey]

Well, we don't need the Aftermath nutrition charts (which included roaches and, ahem, "long pig"...)

But let's discuss the rules whereby you lose level hit points/day without water (after three days), so a typical 1st level character lost in the Desert Of Searing Sands will take 20+ days to die of thirst...

Actually if you have a really good Endurance check it could feasibly take much longer. I don't understand why this is even listed. After 4 days without water, most people are already dead. It's not because they're not tough, it's because your body requires water as a fuel source.

The only thing I can think of is that it's more cinematic to not dehydrate to death, but rather than continuing to live for a month without water and food (and not losing any ability scores) I'd much rather have the DM railroad me into an oasis. Yeah, that's cheesy, but it's far less cheesy.

The rule should be "after 3 days without water, you find a water source."