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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5625281" data-attributes="member: 82106">The issue is the 'closure' of the rules. That is the characteristic of a single unified resolution mechanic that each instance of its use is a process which is consistent with all the others. This allows the rule system to be much more expressive and flexible because different parts of it can 'talk to each other'. AD&D was really hobbled by the fact that every part of the system was speaking a different language. So for instance you couldn't really have effects which boosted someone's 'next die roll' or helped them 'climb better' because each of these concepts didn't mean a specific thing. If it was a rogue doing the climbing then everything would have to be expressed in % terms, but if it was some other class of character doing the climbing then (well actually nothing, in 1e only a thief COULD climb at all, kind of the extreme of this problem). Thus I argue that 4e is actually vastly more expressive as a system than previous editions where everything was a special case and if somehow in the course of play it became desirable to have these different things come together in some fashion then it had to be cobbled together. For example take enhancement bonus and weaplements. In AD&D and 3.x you can't even EXPRESS THE CONCEPT of "an item that makes it easier to attack with magic" and even if you can create something that conceptually DOES that (by say fiddling with saves) it isn't working on a basis that is similar enough to magic weapons that you could say something like "well, you can make a +2 item" and something like a 'weaplement' (which just falls out of the 4e rules by accident) simply cannot exist.3.5 DID actually go a long ways down this road, just not all the way. In information theory the general expression of this is that the number of semantic elements which are compatible with each other generates a set of valid combinations that are the square of the number of said elements. If we have a 4e style game with 10 'elements' then there are 100 permutations. If you have an AD&D style game where only a few elements are valid combinations you have a sum of a set of smaller expressions, and the same 10 elements might only generate a fraction of the number of useful permutations.Personally I think the issue with 4e has nothing to do with 'sameness of mechanics'. It has more to do with overload of specific game elements. There are for example such an enormous number of powers that inevitably they begin to overlap and lose any real distinctiveness. If even a small fraction of the fighters 492 powers feel like 'spells' to the players, then any given fighter can easily stop seeming distinct from a wizard. This is amplified by the way all the powers tend to blend into each other to a large degree because with so many they have endless overlapping minor variations of effects. 4e doesn't need different mechanics for different classes, not at all. What it needs is a small and highly distinctive set of POWERS for each class. It is perfectly fine for those powers to use the same mechanics as in fact those mechanics are amazingly expressive.</blockquote>

Verification