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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 5664068" data-attributes="member: 2067">Nice! Some really solid advice here, thanks everyone!I'm getting a clearer picture of OAs as things that help defenders...well...defend...via discouraging movement around them. I might be partial to the idea that OA's are a unique defender/soldier thing, perhaps linked to the mark. That might help limit it to only a few times per combat, without eliminating its role entirely. Making the front line a little more permeable seems OK to me, especially given 4e's flattened HP distributions. In one of my games, the "frail spellcaster" is actually the party thief, who is a paper tiger being shot out of a glass cannon. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> And he mixes it up in melee pretty frequently. Melee doesn't seem nearly as deadly to casters as it was before, and this keeps being true if the casters don't provoke themselves for casting anymore. On the other hand, it might also be something that melee strikers value, too, since it helps keep an adversary near them, without running away every turn....hmmm....To get a little more specific, what gets my undies in a bundle is the slowdown of gameplay that happens in these situations. Suddenly an action that takes all of 3 seconds to resolve normally ("I move six squares!") takes twenty to fourty times as long ("I move six squares!" "Wait!" *roll attack, do math, determine hit, roll damage, do more math, reference add-on effects, make some more notes, determine if the original move is possible* "Okay!"), even just with one OA. It eats up table time, interrupts the flow, and makes me just want to deny it, on sort of a visceral, "Ugh, not this noise again" kind of level. It is like if a boss constantly interrupted you to tell you to make small changes to your work. More OAs just makes the problem even worse.</blockquote>

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