Ditching OA's, replace with....?

[wlmartin]

*sigh*

First page in, and we're two useful posts and more than twice that telling me how wrong and stupid I am for my heresy against OA's.

Okay, I get it, I'm a dumb person who is stupid and dumb. Blah blah blah. Can we get past this initial revulsion to change now and get some solid look at the actual thing from a practical standpoint? Assume I am a rational and intelligent individual capable of making choices for myself about what makes my games good or bad.



Okay....how?

Monsters get to run around and do whatever they want. So do PC's. I would guess this would up flanking, which would make "striker-y" monsters who add damage with CA more powerful, and it would also do the same for rogues. But rogues get CA on a regular basis anyway, right?

So this might up some damage with a corner-case monster. Since I'm of the opinion that battles last too long in the first place, a little extra damage isn't going to turn me off....so, that's cool!

With all the running around, I would guess this also makes powers that immobilize, prone, grab, or slow even more valuable. The only way to stop or flank something might be to make it stop. On the other hand, shifts and forced movement become slightly less key. Difficult terrain and walls and things become more key, too, since those are the things that limit your movement.

When I look at defenders, I see Fighters relying a lot on OAs, but with the proposed fix of "Immediate Interrupt to do an MBA and, if hit, stop the action" for Combat Challenge, that gives them back a good chunk of their "stickiness" (and even enhances it a bit, since they can stop any action, not just movement).

I don't see any of these effects as particularly game-ruining...is there something I'm missing?

@ OP / I am sorry if you felt I was telling you that you were dumb, not at all. I did want to highlight that removing OA would be fundamentaly damaging but if you house ruled it to work it would be interesting to see the ramifications.

The argument of "The monsters get to do it as well" argument doesnt hold sway with everything in D&D.

We can have PCs winning every encounter with a monster typically because it is what I call the Die Hard mechanic. In Die Hard, Bruce Willis can kill many terrorists on his own but in reality doing this would be near to impossible and you would need a lot more to do the same job, however that wouldnt make good TV!

In D&D it is similar, a group of 5 PCs can take down whole armies of monsters because the balance between monsters and PCs is not equal.

Monsters will crit a lot less than PCs and even when they do they have nothing more than max damage (no vicious or crit damage) - so removing Crits would create an unbalance favoring Monsters over PCs and the argument of "Monsters get to do it too" wouldnt be fair.

OAs are very much a similar beast. In combat OAs are geared to keeping people fighting in tight formation and not running around like a lunatic however if PCs are smart, they will provoke less OAs than monsters since typically monsters of low intelligence (which is quite a lot of them) dont move tactically and even their tactics block in the MMs say that they will provoke OAs without care.

So if you removed OAs, players could get by but Monsters would be at a serious disadvantage and to compensate for this you would need to alter the XP tables for monsters or at least throw in 2 minions per encounter extra or something.

D&D 4e is quite well balanced but this is a trial and error method that has taken them YEARS to get right. There will have enough playtesting with monsters and PCs in house with WotC where they put all the rules together and saw how fair they were -

The rules of the game are heavily interwoven.. If you gave players 2 feats at the start instead of one, that could give them a +1 to hit or damage essentially increasing their level by 1 from that basis and it would mean that they threaten monsters at a level higher than they are supposed to.

So in short... not a TERRIBLE idea for suggesting OAs to be removed but it would be better to try and find a better way to work with them since removing them could prove difficult

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Maybe simply force characters to do what ever the would need to do if they want to avoid the AoO?

Engaged
While you are adjacent to an enemy or in an enemies threatened area, you are engaged.

• You take a -5 penalty to ranged and area attacks.
• You cannot move normally, but you can shift or teleport. (Forced movement is unaffected)
• You can take a move action to disengage, requiring you to shift 1 square and then end the engaged condition until the end of your turn.

Basically, instead of creating special actions to take in regards to AoOs, you simply can't take some actions, or suffer harsh penalties. The disengage option is simple and removes any special considerations about positioning. If you said "I disengage", you did and it doesn' matter how many enemies are still adjacent to you. If you can't escape due to your positioning, you can't disengage, but you can still use powers without worrying about taking extra damage.

 

[wlmartin]

Maybe simply force characters to do what ever the would need to do if they want to avoid the AoO?

Engaged
While you are adjacent to an enemy or in an enemies threatened area, you are engaged.

• You take a -5 penalty to ranged and area attacks.

I think this one, yes I can see a penalty for ranged and area attacks having an effect although it wouldn't feel like as much of a penalty to do this as being hit and I fear that more ranged attacks would end up being put out there that normally wouldnt be and thus things become unbalanced

• You cannot move normally, but you can shift or teleport. (Forced movement is unaffected)

How is this different than normal
Now you can shift 1 square and you don't get an OA, if you are suggesting that a player can shift their normal movement then it defeats the purpose of it being called a shift which is specificaly designed to counter OAs

 

[Dykstrav]

I think the biggest result of removing opportunity attacks will affect your defenders. Some of their class features (and much of what they do when actually at the table) is going to depend heavily on how you deal with opportunity attacks.

I remember my very early 3E days when not every group used attacks of opportunity (they were often decried as "power gaming," many groups didn't incorporate them until 2002-3 or so), so I do know how removing them affects those games. Although the experience is with 3E, it still might be helpful.

In games without attacks of opportunity, the combatants indeed move around more. The biggest net effect I directly noticed is that your arcane caster gets their ass handed to them more frequently--establishing a line and defending your "artillery caster" is far more difficult when critters can just run unchallenged right past the fighter to get that squishy sorcerer. Most battles involved a big damage dealer running up and smashing the caster, then getting killed when that caster's allies swarmed and focus-fired on them. After the casters on both sides got smacked, the melee types would square off. Ranged attackers were awesome since they could take out casters from a distance.

In games like that, arcane casters were heavily invested in the Toughness feat. Many human casters would take it twice at 1st level so they could start with 10+ hit points. They were also more heavily invested in defensive magic, most arcane casters had to split their spells between offensive power and defensive stuff to stay alive. Spells like mage armor and shield were imperative, and most casters took either blur or protection from arrows as soon as they got 2nd-level spells. Stoneskin and other such spells were important later on. In 4E, controllers aren't as fragile, so maybe that won't happen. On the "plus" side, casters could also toss spells with impunity since they don't provoke. Some casters would stand toe-to-toe with threatening critters and attack them right back with spells like burning hands or shocking grasp.

Overall, there was less of a "line." Some parties bunched up so they could have the fighter or rogue help defend them or so the cleric could heal them. Some parties spread out and engaged targets in individual fights and let the cleric worry about patching up characters that dropped. In such games, mobility was very important, so people made hard decisions about wearing light armor.

Hope that helps.

 

[Scribble]

Do OAs really serve a purpose anymore?

It seems like they came about after casting times and weapon speeds were removed to allow people to interup other actions. Since we have powers that do that already now, do we really need the OA?

 

[TwoSix]

Well, according to the Compendium, there's only 12 powers that are Opportunity actions. I don't think I quite believe that, because I know there are some zone powers with Opportunity Action secondary attacks that I'm not seeing.

Regardless, you probably want to have a general rule as to what powers of that action type get changed to.

Also, I'd say the major problem with OAs isn't what triggers them, since most people seem to like that engaging in melee causes tactical complications. Rather, it's that they can happen SO often (1 every turn, which means probably between 10-20 possible triggers in a round, depending on the number of combatants). Then, the fact that they have triggered tends to start the clusterf*** of 4e action resolution, the trigger of a trigger of a multipart power.

So, if you want to avoid the clusterf***, get rid of OAs. Every power that was an OA is an immediate interrupt.

 

[OnlineDM]

I think Dykstrav put it well. If you remove opportunity attacks, then defenders will probably have a harder time protecting their squishy allies. Note that this goes for monster defenders, too.

If you don't mind this, then remove OAs. If this bothers you, either keep OAs or find an alternative that will work for your game. I think it's an interesting idea in this thread - what could we use instead of OAs to still let defenders defend without making things as messy as they are?

I think looking to the Defender Aura can provide some inspiration. If you're in another creature's aura, there are certain consequences for taking certain actions (walking, running, making ranged or area attacks). Perhaps those consequences will simply be fixed damage (similar to the original Paladin's punishment mechanic). Perhaps it will be getting to make an attack of some sort (but now we're back to OAs). Perhaps it will be damage plus an effect (such as "your movement stops").

Personally, I'm fine with OAs as they currently exist at my tables, but I think it's interested to brainstorm other ways of handling them.

 

[vagabundo]

I think OAs were developed to help with some issues that occurred due to the turn based nature of DND combat. If you are fine with some issues of monsters swarming past fighters in the front line or firing bows at point blank range, then I think you should be fine.

There are some class options, powers and feats that mention OAs you would have to disallow or chance, but I don't think your experience would be significantly altered. I say run with it for a trial period and see how it shakes out.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

If I remember Basic and 1E correctly, they went with prohibiting the kinds of actions that would provoke in 3E and 4E. (The older games are all somewhat mushed together in my mind with house rules and variants from Dragon, though.) In any case, the actual effect was that it was possible for the tougher characters to position themselves to slow down a dogpile on the weaker characters. But if the wizard got surrounded, and didn't have some ready defensive spells--he was so hosed.

For 3E or 4E, I'd go with the penalty to attacks option, rather than straight nullification of options. That always gives the dogpiled character a choice--even if picking between two relatively bad options. Having a choice when in trouble makes the player feel a bit better.

For 4E in particular, I'd go with something like -2 to all attacks for the full round after provoking. And then stacked on top of that, if you provoke a defender, they get to mark you. For the fighter, rather than apply damage, let him stop movement. I'm not sure what other defenders would need to compensate, if anything. Take the paladin for example. His mark damage isn't usually decisive. But now a hoard of weaker opponents running by him have a total of -4 to hit (and -2 to hit him). And if they risk that -4, they all take his mark damage. So getting to mark multiple opponents is not a bad trade for an OA--and would certainly handle the main task of making people respect the defenders.

The ones that really get messed up with that rule, however, are the melee strikers. I suppose controllers or leaders with nasty status effects they want to dish out also could be affected. So how about stacking on the rules in the preceding paragraph that any character can "lock" onto a provoking opponent and gain a +2 to hit with their next attack against that guy?

Provoking is now pretting nasty, but it doesn't involve any rolling. You've got -2 to hit everything, and the guys that you provoked have now got a +2 to hit you on their turn. If you provoked a defender, you are also marked. If you are the lead brute ogre trying to bust through the line, you'll suffer. But at least the horde of goblins following you won't all give up the +2 to hit them, even if they do suffer the negatives.

For flavor purposes, this rule is assuming that a thinking opponent simply can't totally let down their guard when someone is waving a big axe under their nose.

 

[erf_beto]

What if you left OAs the way they are, but only for Defenders and Soldiers? They are trainned to do just that, after all. Other roles would be restricted to an immediate interrupt.
As an option, if the rogue or the cleric want to "hold the line", have them ready an action, or begin a stance (something like Total Defense, that's available to everyone) with a minor action or something.
After all, should the warlock really be able to run around, curse and shoot lasers, while still having enough concentration and focus to stab every single goblin that passes through him?