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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3724796" data-attributes="member: 4937">There were alot of things about that example of combat that bothered me, and the apparant decision to replace AoO with triggers was one of them.  Frankly, I don't see how that reduces the complexity - particularly from the stand point of the DM.  But in addition to not reducing the complexity, it creates metagame problems of a player not knowing the sort of thing that will provoke an AoO.  In 3rd the details were somewhat complex, but the basic idea (doing something that drops your gaurd while you are in combat is bad), is pretty easy.  Perhaps there is a unifying theme that will be revealed, but the general direction is away from what I need as a DM and doesn't seem to improve the experience as a player.The other interesting thing about the combat is that it seems to have moved away from iterative attacks.  There doesn't seem to be such a thing as a 'full attack action' any more.  Maybe one didn't come up for the purposes of the example, but from the description it seems like they've done away with it.  Now that is interesting, and I'm not sure what I think of it.  I certainly can see why they did it - the lack of cinematic cool in a full attack action is one of the major complaints many players have with the system - but the details of getting rid of it (which I have considered before) are not trivial.  In particular, I fear from the example that we will be seeing a proliferation of action/events taking place in each round.  And that doesn't seem to me to be a simplification either.  In fact, it sounds like an increased tactical and memory burden on the DM.What is interesting to me, speaking as a programmer, is that the combat as described (if the underlying mechanics are what I think that they are) is much easier to program a real time game for than D&D's historical mechanics.  In other words, its a good bet that one of the design goals of 4th edition was to make transition between paper and CPU as seemless in either direction as possible.</blockquote>

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