Cleave: Give me room to work, my minions!

[broghammerj]

I think it sucks because it makes no sense. Why should the adjacent enemy receive 3 pts of damage? The rules doesn't take into account the adjacent target's AC. What if the adjacent is invisible, what if he is under the Displacement spell?
And why 3 pts of damage? The 18 STR fighter with a greataxe and the 12 STR fighter with a dagger both deal 3 pts of damage? What if I'm wielding a Flaming sword? Shouldn't the adjacent enemy get some fire damage too? What about a poisoned dagger, shouldn't the adjacent enemy be poisoned too? What if I deal 1 pt of damage to the primary target, does the adjacent take 3 damage?

And I think it sucks because the rule got worse. 3E Cleave was just good and simple, hit an enemy and gain an attack against other enemy. Too powerful for 4E? Make it per-encounter. Don't like it? Make it an attack roll against two adjacent targets, if hit, each target receives half-damage.

Automatic 3 pts of damage to adjacent enemy simply sucks.

I actually really agree with you. The power will also be worthless at high levels....who cares about 3 points of damage at 20th level. The old cleave was at least still useful.

 

[Imban]

In the encounter, are the rats your enemies? Because if they are not, then cleave is not even relevant. You attack one enemy, if you hit you can do paltry damage to another enemy.

A rat is most definitely a valid target for your killing it with a sword, and because you're killing it with a sword, it's your enemy.

I still don't think there's an actual exploit in this instance, because it usually comes up when the effect tied to "hit an enemy and..." is something much more broadly applicable than "...automatically do a tiny amount of damage to another." Like, say, "...heal one of your allies for 10 HP." Especially if you're low on resources, that's certainly worth hacking apart rats.

 

[occam]

Here's the effect of the 4e fighter's at-will cleave power:

Hit: [W] damage, and an enemy adjacent to the target takes 3 damage.

So here's another weird situation: You strike the opponent in front of you with your dagger, hit, and follow through with a cleave on the boss standing behind him, at least 5 feet away from you. Thus, Cleave grants you reach.

And if you need reach without an intervening opponent, toss a rat in front of you.

Again, I don't think this is a big deal in terms of game effect, and I can personally make the visualization work, but it could be a hit to verisimilitude for some.

 

[occam]

I think it sucks because it makes no sense. Why should the adjacent enemy receive 3 pts of damage? The rules doesn't take into account the adjacent target's AC. What if the adjacent is invisible, what if he is under the Displacement spell?

And why 3 pts of damage? The 18 STR fighter with a greataxe and the 12 STR fighter with a dagger both deal 3 pts of damage? What if I'm wielding a Flaming sword? Shouldn't the adjacent enemy get some fire damage too? What about a poisoned dagger, shouldn't the adjacent enemy be poisoned too? What if I deal 1 pt of damage to the primary target, does the adjacent take 3 damage?

How's this for a house rule that should resolve most of these complaints. Instead of:

Hit: [W] damage, and an enemy adjacent to the target takes 3 damage.

try something like:

Hit: [W] damage on primary target. If the attack roll to hit the primary target is sufficient to hit another target adjacent to both the primary target and to you, that target takes half the damage done to the primary target. If your weapon has an effect that requires a secondary attack against one of an opponent's defenses, the secondary target receives a +2 bonus to defenses and saving throws against that effect.

Of course, this is more the 3e approach of including extra rules text to handle conceivable corner cases and support verisimilitude more directly. Is it better? Probably so, for some people. It's definitely more wordy, though.

 

[D'karr]

I actually really agree with you. The power will also be worthless at high levels....who cares about 3 points of damage at 20th level. The old cleave was at least still useful.

It's very possible that the power does scale with level, but that is just speculation. We can't be sure since we have only seen a 1st level character with the power.

 

[Imban]

So here's another weird situation: You strike the opponent in front of you with your dagger, hit, and follow through with a cleave on the boss standing behind him, at least 5 feet away from you. Thus, Cleave grants you reach.

And if you need reach without an intervening opponent, toss a rat in front of you.

Again, I don't think this is a big deal in terms of game effect, and I can personally make the visualization work, but it could be a hit to verisimilitude for some.

This is sort of amusing, but generally not a problem for me, except in edge cases. The way I prefer to run things is that players can't just point to mechanics for what they're doing, however - they have to have a game-world description of their actions that makes some coherent sense.

So I'd probably implement a restriction that you have to be at least reasonably able to assail the target of your cleave - so I'd nix cleaving through a Gelatinous Cube in a 10' wide hallway to hit the goblin on the other side, cleaving something flying over a 5' wide chasm in order to hit a monster on the other side of the chasm, cleaving through a shield wall, or other goofiness of that nature where a melee assault on the second target would be flat-out impossible.

 

[Carnivorous_Bean]

"Okay, Bob, you dump your bag of rats out and the terrified rodents instantly scatter in all directions. Now, which way do you want to chase them?"

 

[LostSoul]

That absurdity, and the need to institute house-rule fixes (and note, there *will* be cases where you can cleave off a rat, legitimately) breaks immersion for me. It makes DnD less of a role-playing experience, and more of a board game.

The idea that you need to have immersion in order for something to be a role-playing game makes me sad.

 

[Kraydak]

The idea that you need to have immersion in order for something to be a role-playing game makes me sad.

Think of it as the difference between a CRPG (with a very restrictive, not game-world logical rule set due to programming limitations) and a PnP game. Now, I'm not saying CRPGs aren't fun, but they aren't the same thing as PnP games yet.

(BTW, I do hope that those DMs denigrating the infamous bag-of-rats never plan on using normal rats under minion rules in 4e... Let us be consistent here )

 

[MrGrenadine]

On the fence

This is why I can't wait until I have the 4e books in hand:

As written, I much prefer the 3.5 cleave. Its just as simple as the 4e version, ("If you drop a foe to 0 hp, you can make an attack on an adjacent foe" is pretty simple to me). It also makes more sense to me in a storytelling way, but lets leave that out for now--the bigger issue for me is that the 3.5 version is just more fun.

In 3.5, if I happen to knock an opponent out (fun), I get to roll another attack (fun!) which could be a critical (fun!!!) that would knock out another opponent (fun!!!!!). That gives me a lot of hooks to hang some good roleplaying on, and I like the tension of whether or not I'd even get to use the feat, and whether or not that second attack will hit and all that.

In 4e, the auto strength-modifier damage to an adjacent foe mechanic? Although reliable, its also pretty unremarkable, which is a lot less fun to play.

But here's the rub: maybe there's more info in the rules which would make the 4e version just as much fun to play. Can't wait to see. (And if not, I'll hope for a kindly DM who would let me use the 3.5 version.)