They do. But I prefer the daily limit. Allows a wider narrative range.
And 4e has not only a daily limit, it has an encounter limit. Allows a wider narrative range still.
As a DM I find it more intereseting to plan my encounters around daily powers so that a player can go "all out" if he needs to versus the encounter power mechanic where players always used their encounter powers even if they didn't need to.
And as both DM and player I find it more interesting when the PCs have interesting things to do when they aren't going all out as well as when they are.
Using the daily limit feels more organic to storytelling since players were more likely to save their uses for a strong fight.
And using the encounter limit feels more interesting to storytelling as players are doing different things within that fight. And then choosing whether to save their daily resources (and remember that it's not just the spellcasters that get daily resources in 4e). Also because dailies are fewer it matters more for storytelling. Finally variation in what's done as a fight feels more organic as people get tired.
In short in 4e I have
exactly the advantage you claim for 3e, brought further forward - and other advantages.
The 4E encounter power mechanic is my primary video-gamey gripe. Felt like low cooldown powers that video gamers pop whenever they are up regardless if they are necessary.
You mean opening challenges in a fight. Or is your objection that PCs don't behave like the characters on Power Rangers?
When my players are popping their encounter powers "just because" even when a fight is well-handled, don't even try to sell me on the narrative of that. Encounter powers are not a good story telling mechanic.
It depends at what scale. Encounter powers are not a good tension building mechanic but make the narrative of the fight itself more interesting. Or get boring fights out of the way faster.
Come and Get Me being the absolute worst culprit. I honestly can't think of any more glaring example of video-gamey then that powers.
The one power always brought up.
There were others that didn't make much sense like the weapon damage aura dailies where you were supposed to imagine the character swinging his weapon around endllessly for an entire fight. Didn't matter what the creatures AC was, didn't matter how long the fight went on, didn't matter what his Con was, he could swing his weapon around for 5 minutes or until the fight ended.
And here I thought that you were in favour of resource management and there being mechanics in which people pulled out all the stops. The fighter is already a cold eyed bastard with fast reflexes and the skill to exploit any weakness. Rain of Steel isn't whirling around like a madman with a ball and chain. It's the sword flickering out at any target.
I prefer other mechanics which I think better simulate a narrative.
Okay. So you don't like a couple of the powers. Come and Get It (always the contraversial one and with good reason) and Rain of Steel. That's all you've shown.
Dedicated Crowd Control comes from Everquest. We're not solely focused on WoW are we? Is that the only MMORPG you have any experience with?
Party roles and the Fighter/Cleric/Magic User/Thief party come from
Dungeons and Dragons. Not everquest. Not WoW. Dungeons and Dragons. And were then incorporated into MMOs because they are a good idea. And many controllers would be surprised to be called "Dedicated Crowd Control"; the Hunter can only at most attack a 3*3 area at once and that just does damage. On the other hand it can mess up and hurt bad guys very well thank you.
I was thinking more along the lines of taunt powers which seem to work on even gods in video games just like 4E's defenders taunt power works on gods.
4e does not and has never had a taunt power. Taunt is mind control. 4e simply has people who are fast, accurate, and understand the flow of battle well enough that you take your eye off them at your peril.
4e marking and defender auras? If an attack can hurt a God, then why shouldn't it be able to distract the God - or cut in when the God is trying to attack someone else? And why shouldn't this cause them a penalty to hit.
Believe it or not, unlike in 3e, in 4e taking your six second turn and then standing around like a stuffed lemon waiting for it to come back to you again isn't the default. It's the representation. But Fighters are smart and the master of the battlefield. They pick their moments within the six seconds represented by their turn, choosing when the bad guy's eye is off them to attack. And this distracts the bad guy. If the bad guy were to instead ignore the fighter, the fighter would get a pretty huge bonus to hit.
I was thinking of fire damage working on creatures in a place called Molten Core. Though I think maybe devils have immunity to fire in 4E. I can't recall.
Immunity? Rarely. And why should people who live somewhere hot have immunity to blow torches. Hell, even fire elementals should be no more
immune to fire than flesh elementals are to being punched by a fist. It just isn't the way to do it. Now if you were to give them resistance to fire as opposed to immunity, yes. That would make sense. But immunity is worse simulation than no resistance at all. (I'm also not sure why you think all devils live somewhere hot).
Things work in video games regardless if it makes sense.
Except they don't.
Like powers in 4E that do things like mind control undead,
Depends how you think they are animated.
knock back giants and dragons regardless of size,
Depends on your power. Some do, some don't.
make a god-like demon focus on the fighter threatening him or take a penalty,
Make a god-like demon focus on the fighter threatening him or take three feet of steel to the gut when the fighter does his job? How is the fighter actually being good at picking the right time to attack a
problem with simulation?
and the like. Or you going to argue this with me too? Got an argument?
See above.
I just tossed a bunch back at you which destroy your argument.
You just tossed back a bunch of responses that demonstrate one thing clearly. You do not understand 4e. You do not understand marking. You do not understand taunt. You do not understand fighters. You do not understand encounter powers. Given how little you understand about 4e, you have problems destroying
anyone's argument.
In fact, you seemed to have missed where the 4E designers themselves stated that 4E mechanics were built to better interface with video game design. You miss that statement by the designers?
You miss the fact that there have always been D&D video games until 4e. 4e is the hardest version of D&D to port to a video game because it doesn't have the "Standing round like a stuffed lemon" effect. 3e can be done very simply as turn based assuming you restrict the spell and skill uses (as you need to in any video game for any system - one of the weaknesses about video games).
One of the main intentions behind 4E was to create a game that was still playable as a tabeltop RPG but with a ruleset far more friendly to video game design. Amazing that a 4E booster like yourself would have missed that interview with the 4E game designers.
And if that was one of the intentions,
they failed. 3.X is
easy to port. 4e you need to play with the timings. You need smarter monsters. The turn-based + interrupts system doesn't port well. On the other hand they learned a lot from video games.
I think 4E will make a very good video game. Much better than 3E or any previous edition of D&D.
Of course. That's because the video game designers will need to actually put work into it rather than simply dumping a bunch of tabletop wargame rules into the computer and saying they are done.
All previous editions of D&D were poorly designed for video games.
All previous editions of D&D were designed based on tabletop wargame rules. Turning a tabletop wargame into a video game is
trivial. You just make a computer do the rolling. That doesn't make it a good computer game. It makes it easy to turn into a turn based computer game. Hell, it's not too hard to turn it into a real time game either. 4e with its staggered turn based metric is much harder.
Which is why even when they did design games around previous mechanics, they had to make major changes to get it done. Doesn't make one game better or worse.
What changes? Restricting the spell lists? And they will need to work hard to get 4e working well (although e.g. the Essentials Knight will be much easier to port than the PHB Fighter - and is much more like a classic Fighter. This is not a coincidence.)
). It has ALL of the elements of mechanical progression that one would associate with RPGS: customization, skill points, attributes that actually determine your characters body shape, and even factions! But it was toted as an "action-adventure" instead of an RPG, for marketing reasons.
