D&D 5E "But Wizards Can Fly, Teleport and Turn People Into Frogs!"

[Hussar]

Raiders of the Lost Ark - Gun vs Sword

Heck of a lot more than 15 feet? I'd estimate they're only about 15 feet apart.

Really? Count the people standing betwwen them. Each person is about two to three feet.

 

[pemerton]

For CaGI, the maximum separation is 2 squares, not 3 ie a gap of at least 10 feet.

4e allows any character to pick up (hence a fortiori to touch) an object in an adjacent square. So if CaGI it is being used, the fighter and target could brush fingers along the line that separate each of their adjacent squares.

For whatever that's all worth.

 

[Libramarian]

It makes some sense. But no edition of D&D ever has given me a Fantasy F----- Vietnam vibe from the rules. To get a fantasy F---- Vietnam vibe your big powers (magic) should be risky and have blow back - even if you're bringing along much larger than life guns you shouldn't want to fire them. You can drop a high level fighter from orbit and he's not just going to survive, he's going to stand up and walk away. If I do that to a GURPS or Rolemaster character they'll be lucky to not end up as strawberry jam - and certainly won't be walking away. Which is another point - if I've taken 90% of a fighter's hit points away by riddling him with two crossbow bolts and a critical hit from an orc with an axe (something that would be an insta-kill in Vietnam and so should be if the game was genuinely about Fantasy F----- Vietnam) he's fighting every bit as strongly as he was when on full hit points. If I do that in GURPS or even in the World of Darkness (or, for that matter even in FATE) our badly beaten fighter is struggling to hold in his guts and is taking massive penalties to do anything.

And that is the problem here. The hit point mechanics in D&D tell me I've a larger than life action hero (as they were intended to do). The magic system in D&D tells me I've a larger than life action hero. And D&D level 4 heroes were called Heroes and level 8 were called Superheroes in the earliest editions. I therefore find the notion that D&D should be gritty-immersive in any edition to be counter-intuitive.

When literally all the rules I can think of to D&D and every single book I have read from Appendix N point to a cinematic story-image game I find the notion that my character image should be Fantasy F---- Vietnam (rather than that of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser as I expect my martial characters to default to) to be a massive break from my expectations. This doesn't mean that there aren't gritty-immersive games out there (GURPS, Rolemaster, WFRP 1/2e). Simply that on almost all counts I don't find D&D to be one of them.

This might be where the disconnect comes in. I played GURPS, WFRP 1e, and MERP before I played D&D. So the notion that we were meant to take D&D as gritty never crossed my mind. In fact of the systems I played in the 90s with the exceptions of RIFTS and possibly Cyberpunk 2020, I think it was the least gritty and most obviously set up for heroic play. Which is pretty much what 2e tells you to do.

You don't look at a 1d4 HP at first level and Longsword 1d8 damage and think gritty? Or save-or-die needle traps on doors with 10% Find Traps?

Sure eventually you become White Feather but at low levels btb Basic/AD&D is pretty damn gritty. Try taking a party of four lvl 1 Basic characters through B2 and watch the bodies pile up.

But anyway I don't think you fully understood me because if you read carefully I am not actually arguing that Fantasy F-- Vietnam is satisfying from an aesthetic perspective. I think it makes some compromises there in order to be more satisfying from a gamist/sim perspective. I don't really like super careful gritty crawl play from a "director stance" PoV; but I do like it a lot from a character/avatar stance PoV.

This guy however does advocate old school FFV from an aesthetic perspective: http://drbargle.blogspot.ca/2013/02/the-old-school-is-pathetic-rant.html

(in case you only read the title: he's saying that the pathetic aesthetic is a good thing, not a bad thing.)

 

[Bluenose]

I must have missed that but I am not convinced of this. I believe you are underestimating how much space fifteen feet is between two people. It is certainly more than three steps.

The Tueller Drill. Here's a link to the original article. There are people who deny it's validity, but police forces believe in it. It is just possible that being within a second or so of being stabbed has an effect on people's psychology.

 

[Neonchameleon]

You don't look at a 1d4 HP at first level and Longsword 1d8 damage and think gritty? Or save-or-die needle traps on doors with 10% Find Traps?

Sure eventually you become White Feather but at low levels btb Basic/AD&D is pretty damn gritty. Try taking a party of four lvl 1 Basic characters through B2 and watch the bodies pile up.

But anyway I don't think you fully understood me because if you read carefully I am not actually arguing that Fantasy F-- Vietnam is satisfying from an aesthetic perspective. I think it makes some compromises there in order to be more satisfying from a gamist/sim perspective. I don't really like super careful gritty crawl play from a "director stance" PoV; but I do like it a lot from a character/avatar stance PoV.

This guy however does advocate old school FFV from an aesthetic perspective: http://drbargle.blogspot.ca/2013/02/the-old-school-is-pathetic-rant.html

(in case you only read the title: he's saying that the pathetic aesthetic is a good thing, not a bad thing.)

Honestly, not particularly. I see chess pieces that take a couple of minutes to roll up. I look at WFRP and see grittiness. I look at Call of Cthulu and see grittiness. I look at GURPS where you could arm the entire party with double crossbows doing 2d+2 impaling damage (two shots, fire and forget, the party brute reloads them after the fight) against people with an average HT of 10 (impaling damage is doubled in the torso - or breaks limbs). That's far grittier than D&D ever was - especially because you almost never have a HT of more than 15.

And above all the reason I can't see AD&D is gritty is that it's Save or Die. You're either alive or dead. Grit is about consequences. It's about being made to live with what happens. And above all it's not about "Take risks like going dungeoneering in the first place and at least some of us will turn into superheroes" (as Old School D&D literally was) - it's about not levelling up and the consequences grinding you down. Jason Morningstar's "Fight Fire" FATE Core module is grittier than early D&D. And that's a FATE module.

As for the article I look at any article talking about "TEH AWESUM" and that literally includes the sentence "You young folk just don't know how to have fun these days! Not proper fun anyhow" as nothing more than a "Get off my lawn" rant. And that's before we get into his misconceptions about ... just about everything. Exalted's social combat is nothing more than turning Charm Person spells up to 11. Balance is something Gygax worked very hard to produce. He worried about it at least in part so others didn't have to.

The Tueller Drill. Here's a link to the original article. There are people who deny it's validity, but police forces believe in it. It is just possible that being within a second or so of being stabbed has an effect on people's psychology.

Indeed. 15ft is well inside the range at which knife beats pistol. And a sword cuts several feet off the effective distance.

 

[Hussar]

Do you have a link?

either way, you are pretty much talking point blank range. I suspect that close it isn't going to be very hard to hit (though I am no gun expert).

This, however is really starting to drag us all way off topic and we are getting lost in the Indiana jones analogy.

At the risk of flogging the equine, I don't want to let this go quite yet.

For me, this is the heart of the issue. If you sift through the thread and look at the complaints about CaGI, you see things like, "but, what about a wizard or an archer" pretty often. But, the problem with that is, it ignores what's actually going on when the power is used.

Take the following example:

Fighter with CaGI is facing three archers. We'll start combat with the archers having advantage, so they are all 50 feet (10 squares) away from the fighter and they are all spaced five feet apart (ie. X_X_X) in a line. The archers win initiative.

Archers shoot fighter, fighter takes damage. Fighter moves then charges, bringing him into base to base contact with the left two archers, but, not the other one. The two archers in contact with the fighter make a 5 foot step back and shoot the fighter again. The third archer doesn't move and shoots the fighter.

The fighter then uses his CaGI, draws all three archers into contact with him.

Ok, now, for that to have worked, the third archer had to stay within 15 feet of the fighter, when he had no reason to, and every reason to simply move back and shoot. The two other archers had just been in melee range of the fighter, and only took a single step back. Heck, the fighter could shift one forward and be in base contact with both again anyway. Also note, the archers, for some reason, didn't bother to pull out their swords but kept shooting.

Now, how believable is it that when someone is in your face with a sword, you don't take out your sword to defend yourself, but, rather, you step back and shoot again. In 3e, this is exactly what you would do, unless you had quick draw, because you lose iterative attacks for changing weapons. There's a serious disincentive to change weapons. But in 4e? You lose nothing.

So, how unbelievable is it, how immersion breaking, for those archers to drop their bows and step up with swords when the fighter feints being off balance (uses CaGI)? After all, they only had to make a single step forward and pull out their swords.

Same with the wizard. Unless the wizard has absolutely no melee range spells (extremely unlikely in any edition, but particularly unlikely in 4e), how unbelievable is it that the wizard steps up with the thought of a Shocking Grasp shot to the head when the fighter "slips" on a rock and goes to one knee? Remember, the wizard is already in melee combat with the fighter before CaGI gets used.

And, note, even in the errata'd CaGI, you STILL don't get to choose the square the baddy moves to. It's a pull effect, which now ignores difficult terrain, but, pull simply means that it travels the shortest distance towards you. Just as if the target had been suckered by your feint. So, no, it's still not mind control. It's a nice abstraction of a feint that works.

 

[Guest 85555]

Here's another fundamental disconnect: I don't see why the PC has to take any penalty at all. Why can't the PC impose a penalty on the target unless it does what he wants instead? Either it moves adjacent to the PC or it takes a -2 penalty on all attack rolls, for example.

You could do anything you want. But you take the penalty because you are creating an opening in your defenses (thus the ac penalty) to attract the target. Smething like a -2 penaltyto the opponent, i just am having trouble understanding what you are doing exactly. What can I do to you that would make your defenses weaker unless you moved where I want you to?

 

[Guest 85555]

Ok, now, for that to have worked, the third archer had to stay within 15 feet of the fighter, when he had no reason to, and every reason to simply move back and shoot. The two other archers had just been in melee range of the fighter, and only took a single step back. Heck, the fighter could shift one forward and be in base contact with both again anyway. Also note, the archers, for some reason, didn't bother to pull out their swords but kept shooting.

Now, how believable is it that when someone is in your face with a sword, you don't take out your sword to defend yourself, but, rather, you step back and shoot again. In 3e, this is exactly what you would do, unless you had quick draw, because you lose iterative attacks for changing weapons. There's a serious disincentive to change weapons. But in 4e? You lose nothing.

So, how unbelievable is it, how immersion breaking, for those archers to drop their bows and step up with swords when the fighter feints being off balance (uses CaGI)? After all, they only had to make a single step forward and pull out their swords.
.

I find it very unbelievable they are going to switch weapons upon seeing an opening and stepforward. Changing weapons should be problematic midfight imo. Ymmv.

 

[Guest 85555]

The Tueller Drill. Here's a link to the original article. There are people who deny it's validity, but police forces believe in it. It is just possible that being within a second or so of being stabbed has an effect on people's psychology.

i did look into this a bit just know. Concrete data was a bit difficult to find. Just going to say again, this is really a detour into the indiana jones analogy, and doesn't really shed light on cagi, but it looks like mythbusters took this one on as well. In their reenactment of the drill it became an issue at fifteen feet. But the key of it is the gun being holstered, not the difficulty of aiming at close range. If the guns out of the holster then its quite a different story. It does shed light on the difficulty of switching weapons mid fight as well.

 

[Guest 85555]

At
For me, this is the heart of the issue. If you sift through the thread and look at the complaints about CaGI, you see things like, "but, what about a wizard or an archer" pretty often. But, the problem with that is, it ignores what's actually going on when the power is used.
.

People may have raised this issue, but it isnt the heart of our argument at all. I didnt even notice this line of reasoning until you brought it up. Most of the focus has been on forcing the other guy to move. And that seems to boil down to how one perceieves the shift to your adjacent square (you clearly see that as a lure, but we dont).

I think we've dragged this on way too long however. I can accept that you find it believable. Just asking you accept I dont find it believable. I really dont think it should be this much of an issue for people.