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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="mkill" data-source="post: 5775808" data-attributes="member: 55985">Please explain. What is wrong with Barbarian Rage?I agree with the idea, but you'll have to create a huge body of rules if you want this to be defined exactly. Do you really want the GM to pause the game and look up the table for "lightning spells in puddles" when the player tries something like that? For me, this sounds more like "stuff the GM or player can make up on the spot".I mean, an RPG is not a video game. You don't need to hard-code environment effects into the system to happen. That's why we have a human GM, with a flexible, human brain.In other words, this stuff has always been in the game, if you want it.But how much do you really need? Monsters need perception, maybe tracking, and what else? What does a Purple Worm do except digging, eating, sleeping, procreating, killing PCs?If you have some out-of-combat interaction, make an NPC, don't use monster stats.Problem 1: If everyone has "win buttons", monsters have them too. And if anything sucks, it's have your PC do absolutely nothing during a fight. In 3rd ed, our poor bard was left out from more than one fight because of fear effects. Awful.This is why the save mechanic in 4th edition is so useful, because it at least gives you a chance to come back every round.Problem 2: It's anticlimatic. Nothing is more boring than expecting a long, action-rich fight, only to end before it started because the Wizard popped out a one-hit-kill. Ok, it feels awesome for the wizard, and there are some players who like this, but what about the four other guys at the table?Sorry, but that's not good game design. If you have too many options, you start to suffer from analysis paralysis. Psychologically, this happens when you have more than 9 things to choose from. Incidentally, that's where the 3/3/3 comes from. Note that with Paragon paths, racial powers, items and so on, high-level 4th edition characters easily had more than a dozen options to choose from any time. In fact, that's why they came up with Essentials classes that had less rather than more options.Finding the right balance here is key. PCs should have their reliable basic tricks, plus some limited powerful attacks, plus some standard maneuvers everyone can do (charge, grapple, trip, disarm...)The difficulty is that some players love to have tons and tons of options to choose from, while others are very happy just to swing a sword every round.I disagree. This is not how fantasy works. If a 20th-level character could easily be stopped by a group of low-level commoners, they wouldn't be big damn heroes. Besides, it raises the question why a 20th-level character doesn't have better things to do than fight a bunch of low-levels, like, saving the world from the reawokened ancient dragons.</blockquote>

Verification