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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Barastrondo" data-source="post: 4858694" data-attributes="member: 3820">I'd consider it a troublesome point, and I'm a firm believer in a game that rests heavily on judgment calls. Essentially, 4e is predicated on the idea that you can reskin mechanical effects. You can use the stat block of a hobgoblin soldier to represent an orc, and as long as you give him a more orcish racial ability instead of the hobgoblin one, nobody should even notice. The DM here is saying that you can't reskin mechanical effects based on context or situation. He's reading the maneuver in questions as one specific maneuver, instead of a variety of potential maneuvers that the character can execute that are represented with the same mechanical effect. For example, 4e assumes that if you have a power that does damage and knocks the target prone, you can elaborate on how you knock the target prone in different ways each time. Maybe last time you delivered a blow to the back of the opponent's knee. But you can also use the same mechanics to overbalance a giant spider or shove an opponent's feet out from under him. Or to strike a giant in the ankle while his foot's descending. You can have different in-character actions that are mechanically represented with the same exploit, and in fact that's a great tool for encouraging players to get into their character's heads and visualize the combat as more than just tokens on the table.  I'm all for judgment calls, but the idea that a player isn't allowed to creatively reskin maneuvers to make combats look visually differently — and to keep his character as useful as it's expected to be — is pretty much on the harsh side. A question: Has he ever used good old Page 42 of the DMG to adjudicate interesting stunts? Getting him to wrap his head around that might help him see the value of being able to represent a variety of different in-character actions with a simple core mechanic.</blockquote>

Verification