Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mister Doug" data-source="post: 4531408" data-attributes="member: 66623">I'd probably quibble with some of your points.1) Economy of actions is an attempt to fix the huge number of complex actions that became possible in 3e by the interaction of iterative actions, pets, summon spells, followers gained thorugh the leadership feat, etc. Since huge number of actions = huge damage = monster or PC dead before actions occur, can lead to very weird, swingy and (IMHO) unrealistic results wherein the brutal, terrifying enemy is swarmed by attacks by a ginsu fighter and his small army. Besides, this isn't very interesting to play out. This isn't as much of a problem in, say OD&D, which provides few options for actions in a turn because, as EGG pointed out, D&D combat is abstract.2) Your concern is understandable, but back in OD&D or Holmes, the big differences between low-level charactes were hit points, the armor and magic items the characters could use, and the fact that spellcasters had some access to a few spells, and we could tell them apart. I think there is a reson to believe the philosophy of differentiation by powers is reasonable, though I think the debate over whether it has been successful is also reasonable.3) See, I just don't see that the powers are all the same. Fighters, for instance, have powers that damage, shift, mark, knock down enemies. Makes sense to me, and reminds me of the development of powers for characters in games like hero system. The potential problem I see is that powers are gained every level, so the incremental power difference between a first level power and the next level power of the same type seems kind of small -- and with so many powers, they have to be pretty specific to have a niche, which seems the most difficult parts of designing and balancing powers rather than having open, flexible powers.4) Yeah, that is a problem, but seems to me continuation of a problem that had begun to develop in 3e rather than a new problem for 4e....5) See point above. Also, my experience is that unless you run a very role-play heavy game, the only reasonable thing to keep an eye on is power. If one player has fewer roleplay abilities, it's still fairly easy to keep that player in the game. If one player is useless in combat, they can die quickly on accident. This is a real problem. And this is hard for an inexperienced DM to miss until they have dead PCs on hand, and usually PCs feeling like they built a cool character and were punished for it.If you were marketing a game hoping to bring in new or inexperienced players and DMs, I think a company could do worse than focusing too much on making characters balanced based on combat ability.Of course, there are other ways to balance PCs, though I am not sure D&D has ever done a good job of actually doing that.</blockquote>

Verification