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Convincing 4th Edition players to consider 5th Edition
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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5961829" data-attributes="member: 42582"><p>I think this is true, and I wish I could XP your post.</p><p></p><p>This comes up again and again in my campaign - players doing stuff with skills, and with powers, that require adjudication based not on a preset correlation of particular tasks to particular DCs, but on exptrapolation from the fictional possibilities already established in play.</p><p></p><p>A recent example I posted about was the dwarf fighter-cleric making a Hard 16th level Endurance check to hold Whelm stead within a furnace so that his dwarven artificers could grab it with their tongs, preparatory to reforging it as Overwhelm. There is nothing in the DC charts that tells us that this is the sort of thing a paragorn warpriest does by using Endurnace. It emerges out of play. (I think of it as something like the rule in HeroQuest revised that the GM has to impose genre logic on declared actions before then allowing them to proceed to resolution - so even if a PC has Fast Runner 17 and a Horse Modest Galloper 12, it doesn't necessarily follow that the PC can make a check to outrun the horse.)</p><p></p><p>I think these elements of 4e are utlimately flaws in its design. The game works best when the DC chart is used - this is what the pacing and dynamics of the game are balanced around - but all those "simulationist" DC tables require you to read back from the level-appropriate DCs to particular story elements. They're a needless constraint, in my view, and in the case of the jumping rules create too much of an incentive to design a range of jumping utitlity powers that ultimately I think should all just be handled as bonuses to Athletics (just like the social utility powers grant bonuses to Diplomacy) - although arguably the relationship between jumping ability and the grid <em>requires</em> something less abstract here - which just highlight another of 4e's weaker points, namely, it's lack of smooth integration of its combat and non-combat resolution systems.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 5961829, member: 42582"] I think this is true, and I wish I could XP your post. This comes up again and again in my campaign - players doing stuff with skills, and with powers, that require adjudication based not on a preset correlation of particular tasks to particular DCs, but on exptrapolation from the fictional possibilities already established in play. A recent example I posted about was the dwarf fighter-cleric making a Hard 16th level Endurance check to hold Whelm stead within a furnace so that his dwarven artificers could grab it with their tongs, preparatory to reforging it as Overwhelm. There is nothing in the DC charts that tells us that this is the sort of thing a paragorn warpriest does by using Endurnace. It emerges out of play. (I think of it as something like the rule in HeroQuest revised that the GM has to impose genre logic on declared actions before then allowing them to proceed to resolution - so even if a PC has Fast Runner 17 and a Horse Modest Galloper 12, it doesn't necessarily follow that the PC can make a check to outrun the horse.) I think these elements of 4e are utlimately flaws in its design. The game works best when the DC chart is used - this is what the pacing and dynamics of the game are balanced around - but all those "simulationist" DC tables require you to read back from the level-appropriate DCs to particular story elements. They're a needless constraint, in my view, and in the case of the jumping rules create too much of an incentive to design a range of jumping utitlity powers that ultimately I think should all just be handled as bonuses to Athletics (just like the social utility powers grant bonuses to Diplomacy) - although arguably the relationship between jumping ability and the grid [I]requires[/I] something less abstract here - which just highlight another of 4e's weaker points, namely, it's lack of smooth integration of its combat and non-combat resolution systems. [/QUOTE]
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