D&D 4E Anyone playing 4e at the moment?
AbdulAlhazred
Legend
Well, you lose a lot of the tactical granularity of 4e which its power system is built around. I'm not saying you could not design powers around a zone system, but they would almost inevitably be more abstract, pretty much by definition. At that point you would probably want to shift the conception of what exactly powers DO and how combat is narrated, etc.
That is, if powers aren't operating as a set of heavily interacting tactical factors that PRODUCE the narrative by virtue of their high level of detail and small granularity, then what are they doing? In a game where "that room" is the unit of space and position, you will have to engage some other mechanism or practice within the game in order to generate the fiction of what is going on in "that room." Do you see what I mean?
Now, you could try to recover all of that detail with some sort of more intricate systems in some other dimension, like effects that work in terms of initiative order, or conditions, etc. that would try to recapture something like "I fired Thunderwave through the door into that room and pushed all the bad guys back to the other wall." In 4e that would be a literal change in game state on the grid, and the consequences might include freeing up a path for other characters to enter that room instead of being stuck at the door.
I don't know anything about Lancer or how it does this, but most RPGs that have tried zones either don't really deal with close interior combat that much, or don't actually use them in that case (I'm thinking of Traveller for example). In Traveller you have basically 'range bands', which act somewhat like zones in a scenario taking place in moderately uncluttered terrain. Inside something like a starship they just don't really apply, and you go right to fiction where there actually aren't much in the way of actual rules on positioning. The point being, it isn't at all a tactically detailed game in the same way that 4e is. It has a lot of tactical 'stuff' in it, in a sense, like tons of weapons and gear, but how it all works is very narrative.
So, IMHO, no, 4e doesn't work with zones and such, not really.
As an aside, I'm experimenting with a more 'scaled out' kind of combat to reflect upper tier characters "letting lose" and battling each other on a huge scale in HoML. I don't know exactly how that will work, but my feeling is that you just get a whole other set of 'powers' at that tier. While there will have to be a way to translate them back to the 'standard scale' they are not really the sort of thing you would unleash indoors, basically, or if you did, you would expect some pretty cataclysmic results! (IE a Mythic Fire power isn't just going to burn up some guys over on the other side of the room, its going to explode the whole building, and probably half the neighborhood). Still, there IS a grid, its just BIG! Once you 'go mythic' in your fight, then yeah, terrain and such maybe works a bit more abstractly due to the larger scale, but there are still 'squares' and you can thus pull off all the 4e-like sorts of tactics, just at an epic scale!
Garthanos
Arcadian Knight
Thief of Legend , the epic destiny has convinced me we may also have an abstraction scope we need to adjust for in anything covering Legend/Myth class... still thinking about it though
AbdulAlhazred
Legend
Yeah, there might be an argument for simply creating a 'different game' at epic levels. There are things about that which get tricky though. First of all, is that really a good idea in a game design sense? I mean, people play a game to play THAT game, if you graft a whole other game onto the arse end of it, do they ALSO want to play THAT game? It becomes less likely! Epic already doesn't see much play, it isn't going to see MORE if it is basically a whole other RPG.
Beyond that, logistically it is at least awkward. At what point do you transition to this new paradigm, and how do you narratively justify it? What about interactions with stuff on the previous scale? You'd pretty much have to create some sort of 'ascention' mechanic that would paper over the gap in the two games, and even then the mechanics of the 'base game' would need to have SOME meaning in the epic game. A prized signature power has to either 'amp up' or somehow translate.
I think the idea of a more limited 'scale up' is a good compromise. In classic 4e there's no actual rules difference per se. The idea was supposed to be that you'd just change the fictional situation, and maybe battlefields would get a bunch bigger, etc. For practical reasons it turned out people don't make bigger battlefields (the kitchen table is only so big basically). That left many people feeling a bit let down by 4e epic and complaining that it "wasn't very epic." So there's got to be some sort of middle ground where you can make things a lot more 'gonzo' and actually signify that in mechanical terms, but still retain some essence of the tactical play style of 4e intact.
Which is why I'm thinking of this 'break out' mechanic. So, an 'epic' PC can still fight on 5' squares, but if they want to 'bust out' and take the fight to another level (which you might only do against the highest grade of opponents) then they can play on a 30' grid with a few rules tweaks where things are now pretty crazy, but its still kinda 4e. I mean, maybe it would be a bit like how He Man gets pissed and then yells "By the Power of Greyskull!!!" and everything gets a bit crazy.
Garthanos
Arcadian Knight
yes perhaps echos of that kind of thing needs to happen earlier.
Were not epic destinies considered optional in the first place?
The thief of legend makes me want to do Epic more.This thief can steal almost anything eventually can hints of that show up earlier?
Nods turning up the volume.
I think Swarms are a good contributing flavor as part of the scale up... And allow some of those to scale to terrain effects LOL them demon hoards now them hurt a little when you wade through them.
I always like the Battle Form style effects, Shifters
AbdulAlhazred
Legend
Right, I don't think the EDs, and things like Thief of Legend are so much the issue as the transition within the combat mechanics. Those are kind of what hold 4e 'back' in a sense when it comes to playing an altered game at epic. They are very dependent on a specific formulation. OTOH the general rules, and the SC system, etc. are really rather scale-agnostic. 'Steal the color from the king's eyes' is not really a mechanic at all, so it safely exists outside of questions of swarms and whatnot.
So the tricky part IS the combat part. I am not against the ideas of swarms, but that's just one bit. One of the factors IS scale, the scope of a battle is, given realistic battlemat sizes, in the 25-40 square range. 40 squares is 200 feet. My yard is 100x100 feet, or 20 squares on a side. I don't think a battle that spans my lot is exactly 'epic'. Now, admittedly there are going to be some techniques to alleviate that besides scale perhaps, but they all seem like half measures in some sense.
I tried to grapple with this a bit, but not in any systematic way. Sometimes I used note paper to just track separation (a bit like Traveller range bands) if the field of battle became mobile. (And the (non-)treatment of diagonals certainly helps with that!)
And we did use maps with big distances on them, including A3 blow-ups of the G2 maps (still treating the squares as 10', and ad-hoccing the location of PCs within them when single-square distances mattered).
But the scale of powers - pushing, jumping, etc - didn't change. So our biggest push was still probably only 8 squares (an Invoker using Thunderwave) and our biggest polearm sweep at reach 2 (some combination of epic destiny + fighter feats pulled this off).
Here in London that would be an Epic yard, and you'd be a level 28 Oligarch!
Garthanos
Arcadian Knight
sure its not a mechanic but lets look at how exploring the implications of that ability further interacts with or begs for mechanics
I can with a dead enemy steal his eye color scales to I can with a drop of blood (enemy bloodied) steal their eye color. or even I can at a mere touch steal the subjects eye color (and they likely wont notice)
I can with a dead enemy steal his entire appearance. (now it appears he is alive and I am dead or his body now appears invisible)
or scales to I can with a drop of blood (enemy bloodied) steal their appearance.
We very much could have scaling
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