DMs: What Powers Do PCs Get That You Hate?

[KarinsDad]

Realistic, huh?

I prefer the term plausible to realistic. Nothing in the game system is very realistic, but many elements are plausible or less plausible.

My stance is that it's too restrictive to think that the Martial power source can only ever produce 'realistic' results. It's a frigging power source! It's not the absence of a power source. Imho, all power sources tap some supernatural source to allow its users to do stuff that is clearly not realistic.

Yeah, I understand this POV. I just find it totally game mechanics and not reasonable fluff to call what melee types do a "power source". Let's turn them into 4 color comic book superheroes while we are at it.

Let's give them force fields, and teleport, and phasing through walls, and healing, and growing 30 feet, and flying, and invisibility, and walking on water, and breathing underwater, and shooting energy beams out of their eyes, and duplicating into three people.

The other classes have a power source that can do virtually anything mystical or supernatural that one can think of, so the melee types have to have a power source that can do that as well. Uh huh.

There comes a point in time where the mega-anything should be allowed into a power source becomes "less plausible".


I would have prefered a much stricter limitation on what could go into each power source. Right now, it's a bit of a hodge podge. Sometimes its reasonable, sometimes it's just the bigger, better, badder syndrome.

 

[Plane Sailing]

I would have prefered a much stricter limitation on what could go into each power source. Right now, it's a bit of a hodge podge. Sometimes its reasonable, sometimes it's just the bigger, better, badder syndrome.

Me too - I sometimes think that originally they envisaged something quite distinctive for the different power sources, but it got lost in the shuffle somewhere along the line.

Cheers

 

[fba827]

Me too - I sometimes think that originally they envisaged something quite distinctive for the different power sources, but it got lost in the shuffle somewhere along the line.

Cheers

I could be imagining it but I would swear that in an early interview, designers said that in initial drafting for 4e, they were going to do just that.. like certain damage types would be limited to certain power sources (like radiant just for divine was the example given). But they had to move away from that when they realized a party could get hosed if the monsters they were up against needed 'something' that the chosen classes had -no- way of eventually getting with some planning.

 

[lukelightning]

Second wind. Because nobody but the dwarf ever uses it.

 

[nightwyrm]

Second wind. Because nobody but the dwarf ever uses it.

My player's warden with cloak of walking wounded uses it. Went up 50 hp in one turn after I took so long to wittle him down. Made him essentially unhittable for a round too.

The power that annoys me the most is the shaman's spirit OA attack that grants hps whether it hits or not.

 

[Iron Sky]

Second wind. Because nobody but the dwarf ever uses it.

Our Warden uses the crap out of it. Saves his action points pretty much just to Second Wind. With all the Action Point and Second Wind buffs he gets from being a Warden, feats, and items, his AC goes up something like 7 and all other defenses 4 (and he heals 2 surges at 33 each - at level 12).

 

[Rechan]

Second wind. Because nobody but the dwarf ever uses it.

Ha! The group I play in needs those second winds, man. We have a monk and a barbarian, and me, the lone healer just can't keep them up long enough. So either they desperately use their SWs, or I run over and use a standard action to give them one.

 

[blargney the second]

Wik haaaaaaaates Visions of Ruin. It's really funny.