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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="N0Man" data-source="post: 5050561" data-attributes="member: 64066">I strongly disagree with the phrase "systematic flaw".  It seems to imply that it's an objective fact rather than a matter of taste, or that it was oversight or lack of planning.  It may not be your taste, but these were clearly intentional design decisions with specific reasons behind them.You may think Charm Person and Detect Thoughts assist roleplaying, however others (including WotC) feels that these tie the hands of the DM and completely break stories, invalidates encounters, and can solve a mystery with no more effort than casting one of many plot-breaking spells.  Since these types of spells do completely break many social encounters, I personally feel that they *hurt* roleplaying, not help it.Plus it often leads to ridiculous arm races between players and DMs.  Players memorize their list of broken spells, and DMs are forced to either let the players breeze his storylines with no real work, or he has to make his NPCs setup magical defenses against things, and this can repeat.I'm not sure why you'd think this.  There are definitely polymorph, shape change, and disguise effects in 4E that most certainly could make this possible.  Though, I suppose the Polymorph keyword didn't really appear in the first year of books.Not as a party, but several classes (and races) have usable teleport powers in combat.As for Knock, I think again this is an intentional feature.  They want Wizards (or other ritual casters) to be able to use Knock as an option in case you don't have someone with Thieving skill, but in a way that doesn't invalidate the skill.  I think it's a reasonable compromise.  If you have to get a door open during combat, there's still the option to bash it in.I've also seen attempting to open a magically locked door become part of a skill challenge in combat.  While some members had to fend off the monsters, others could use skills such as Thievery, Arcana, or brute force to slowly remove the defenses of a door (or gate, wall, portal, etc) while in combat.You certainly more limited in a lot of plot, story, and encounter breaking powers.Also, many spells that acted as a replacement for skills of previous editions have been toned down, removed, or turned into slower casting rituals in order to make skills or the classes that tend to have those skills more useful instead of being invalidated by casters.They've tried to make skills more useful.  A lot of people dislike how many skills were combined so that a smaller set of skills are present, and feel that actually reduced the impact of skills, but if you think about it that's exactly the opposite of what it does.Decreasing the number of skills, making skills more broad, and making sure every class has a few skills to pick has the effect of greatly increasing the chances of someone in a party having a needed skill and makes it less likely that even your Fighter can often contribute when skills can be useful, rather than just slinking to the back of the party and wondering when the next combat will happen.You see, many of these things that you dislike and see as flaws, some of us think are things that are healthy for gameplay.  It's all about what style of game you want to play.  For me, I prefer the 4E style.</blockquote>

Verification