Majoru Oakheart said:
I mean, I exaggerate a decent amount. People fall asleep, but its mostly because we decide to game in the one time our schedules all overlap, normally ending up with at least one of the players having only 4 hours of sleep before the game or is showing up after working for 12 hours straight.
No, I assumed you meant figuratively. In fact I have players literally fall asleep in my sessions all the time, but that's because we get to game very rarely and so play for 15 hours straight when we can all get together on the same night without work the next day. Someone falling asleep is normally how we decide on the end of the session.
But this is exactly why we need to keep the game moving and keep everyone concentrating on the game. When the game gets slow or as soon as a player feels their actions are useless in the combat they either fall asleep, start talking to the person next to them, start asking the whole group what they are doing on the weekend, etc.
Absolutely, I agree.
I'm not saying that 4e will SOLVE this. It certainly won't. But it helps.
I don't believe that it will for my group. From what I have seen (which I aknowledge is not a complete game) it would in fact make these problems vastly worse in my opinion.
Near the beginning of 3e, we saw some of those builds. Recently, however, no one in my group would be caught dead playing something that bad. My characters are severe min-maxers.
I think you may find problems regardless of the system you play then. I personally find min-maxing to be a problematic gaming style (though if it works for you and your group who am I to judge).
I know. I just never write my own adventures. I admit, I'm too lazy. I haven't even attempted to come up with my own idea for an adventure since shortly after 3e came out and my players derailed my plot so badly I couldn't recover it.
Ah, my solution is to not write adventures and to have no (preordained) plot. But improv is a difficult style to manage.
However, not every battle is unique.
Really? I try to make every battle a little unique. Even if it's only, "so this time you're fighting orcs on a flight of stairs".
Some of those examples seem like cheap excuses to remove people's powers or make it so they can't play their characters. I'm all for interesting environments. I'm not about inventing monsters with abilities to counter the players or environments specifically created to make a player stop what he's been doing. If he's been doing it, it means he likes to do it. I'd just like to make it more fun for him by giving him better options.
As a DM my objective is, I imagine, the same as yours. To entertain the players and give them a wonderful gaming experience. I have no desire to "beat" the players and "win" or to teach them a lesson or control what they do. Just for the record.
To entertain the players in combat requires an entertaining fight which could come from any number of sources. This entertainment doesn't have to come from the mechanical aspects, perhaps its comical and you have 20 goblins riding dire-kittens and hitting the characters with bladders on a stick, perhaps it has beautiful imagery or is spoken in rhyming couplets or whatever rocks your players' boats, but I'll focus on the mechanical aspects being entertaining for this discussion.
In order for any mechanical aspect to be interesting it has to do two things, 1) occur and 2) be relevant to the PCs.
A monster could be immune to non-magical weapons, but if everyone in the party has magical weapons and only ever uses them then that aspect is not interesting. (Hopefully the monster has something else interesting about them than just that though so all is not lost, the party can be entertained by some other aspect).
A monster who is immune to an attack that the party always uses is guaranteed to satisfy both criteria, it'll occur since the player always trips opponents and it'll be relevant to the PCs because it's evading their primary ability.
This isn't something you'll want to use commonly, but it is definitely something interesting.
If your player is sensitive about his ability and would be upset by it being nullified, then absolutely you should avoid using this technique. But if... (as your example implied)... they are bored by having used the trip attack every action for the last 5 levels, then give them an entertaining reason to try some other maneuver.
self-buffing favored soul
Yes, unfortunately divine classes tend to be a little busted. CODzilla et al.
My players universally declared Warblade from Bo9S to be way cooler than the fighter.
Agreed. I love Bo9S. Thankfully the Bo9S feats can be taken as fighter bonus feats letting you dip into them if you want.
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Also thanks for sharing your experiences with simulationism at the bottom of your post. Since they're personal experiences exclusive to your group I can't really respond, but it was interesting to read about them.
