Farewell to thee D&D

[Vyvyan Basterd]

And i disliked that it meant combats could be over in one or two rounds if you were lucky/unlucky. Both as a gm and as a player. As a gm i would be sorely disapointed to see all my careful planning of an encounter wasted by a few dice rolls, regardless of wether it was me doing a tpk or the players nuking my npc's.

3e combats could get very anticlimactic.

This.

I think 3E started its downward spiral in my eyes when playing a certain Adventure Path installment starring Dragotha. Dragotha had alot of nostalgic reverernce to me and the older players in my group.

Two rounds later he was a pathetic pile of ash on a cavern floor surrounded by a barely-scratched party of adventurers.

This was an epic (not literally) battle 20 years in the making and

Epic failure and it just went downhill from there.

 

[Celtavian]

That is just because every single encounter needs a dramatic moment!
Every fight scene in a movie will have a few dramatic moments - unless the movie is bad, of course.
Every combat encounter ain an RPG should have a few dramatic moments. And that's what Encounters and Dailies will provide.

Mustrum,

I do not know if you are a writer or not. I write scripts and stories in the hope of one day making it a profession. I understand storytelling very well.
Encounter powers are lacking drama because they are both overused and underused at the same time. They overused because they are used every encounter, which as I said is like playing the same action sequence every battle as though I would write the same thing over and over again. Which is in essence a bad movie, so encounter powers are an example of a very bad movie. And underused because there is no good, viable reason even from a story standpoint why a character would not be able to execute a learned combat maneuver over and over again as he does with a feat.

As I stated in this thread and the other thread, I run encounters that start what I call a domino encounter. A non-stop series of fights that leaves no time for rest to recover encounter powers. This used to work very well in 3E because the player decided when to use his reservoir of power in the case of casters and fighters were skilled combatants who fighting prowess was always available because it was a physically learned skill. So when I ran a cineematic encounter of a continuous fight, there was no need to explain the recovery of encounter powers.

If you want to discuss film battles, they rarely have rest periods. Usually it is a series of short, easy encounters that don't require much in terms of what the character can do, with one long drawn out fight scene that is a knockdown drag out fight where maneuvers are tried over and over again.

For example, how do you simulate Jackie Chan movie in 4E? Jackie Chan is constantly tumbling and using wild maneuvers. He isn't resting for five minutes to regain his encounter powers. He is always tumbling, doing flying kicks, roundhouse kicks, strange punches, amusing feints, and the like.

When you watch Excalibur the movie, that battle at the end is one long, drawn out fight with the guys just swinging away. No time to rest for encounter powers. Fight until you are dead or have won the battle.

I have difficulty simulating these types of battles with 4E because the player constantly needing at least five minutes of rest.

Sorry man. Your trite explanation for enconter powers is unsatisfying and extremely limiting for a storyteller. Any 4E storyteller will be forced into using the exact same explanations in every encounter for the repetitious encounter powers that seem "special", while at the same time being forced to arbitrarily end encounters to give the players time to rest five minutes to "recover" their learned skills. It doesn't work for me. If it works for you, then enjoy.

But the bad action film is 4E encounter powers. The same action sequence over and over and over and over again. The very definition of a bad action film, cliche, repetitious, and uninteresting.

 

[Celtavian]

And i disliked that it meant combats could be over in one or two rounds if you were lucky/unlucky. Both as a gm and as a player. As a gm i would be sorely disapointed to see all my careful planning of an encounter wasted by a few dice rolls, regardless of wether it was me doing a tpk or the players nuking my npc's.

3e combats could get very anticlimactic.

I concur with this. It did happen. Some encounters were anti-climatic because of a lucky crit or missed save.

But I've also seen that 4E combats can be overlong, tedious, and boring, especially if you miss with your encounter powers and have to wait until the encounter is over to do anything interesting. With all the hit points the monsters have, you can spend a huge number of rounds engaged in a boring, tedious exercise in bookkeeping minor damage, moving around to no great effect, and just having an very dissatisfying and unchallenging encounter that just took time and very few resrouces.

4E fights don't feel particularly dramatic to me. A friend of mine crit with this daily and still didn't killed the guy he hit. That just feels pathetic.

 

[Celtavian]

Well, for me the problem is made worse because I do not have lots of combat anyway, not being into Dungeon Crawling. One, maybe two combats per day or session. More often none. So, I do not really have any need to battle the 15 minute adventuring day - my adventures usually only have one big, important battle, the rest is small fry that doesn't do much, and may even be handwaved.

That's how I tell stories too Fenes. A few minor build up battles with one big, all out battles. That's how the stories I most enjoy happen.

You don't see a huge number of small combats in Lord of the Rings. You see a few small combats and then a few epic, knockdown, dragout fights where no one has time to rest five minutes for encounter powers. It's everything you got, right now, for all the marbles, no time to rest or wait on some arbitary power.

Monster powers work, player powers work, and they are fight to the death. That's how I like my stories to be told.

 

[D'karr]

Double Post

 

[Celtavian]

re

Well, I just like to say that lucky for me I have some pretty good friends that decided to compromise with me. I've decided to stick around for the main 4E D&D group. And a couple of buddies who like both 4E and 3E said they will try Pathfinder. So I can still enjoy the casters and melees I like to play and tell stories with, and they can enjoy both games with our group of friends. So all is not lost.

I'm just happy to have buddies that can empathize with my dislike of 4E. Truly, I am a wizard at heart. I love playing a wizard that emulate the wizards I love from literature, not so much their powers as the feel of the mysterious, powerful wielder of arcane might that goes along quietly until it hits the fan and then goes off to help the party survive.

That type of wizard does not exist in 4E as everyone in the game is on equal footing. I know that appeals to quite a few people, so I can't fault it. But I like my casters to be able to nova and save the day. Same as some people like their fighters to be able to crit and level a giant in one mighty blow.

I'm just glad I was able to work out with my group a compromise. I didn't truly want to stop playing. But at the same time I didn't want to feel trapped playing 4E since I don't like it. Thanks to all those that empathised with my situation. A 25 year hobby is a hard thing to give up, and hard to do quietly and lightly.

You feel alot of passion for a game like D&D that only a fellow lover of the game understands. That passion runs hot. So I can understand the intensity of discussion both for and against 4E. I'm just glad myself that I won't be trapped playing a game I dislike. No way I could sit at a table and play 4E if I knew it were the only game I would have anyone to play with. I won't have it forced on me. But I can stomach playing 4E for a day a week in the company of friends knowing they will reciprocate and give me a chance to enjoy the game system I prefer.

 

[D'karr]

If you want to discuss film battles, they rarely have rest periods. Usually it is a series of short, easy encounters that don't require much in terms of what the character can do, with one long drawn out fight scene that is a knockdown drag out fight where maneuvers are tried over and over again.

For example, how do you simulate Jackie Chan movie in 4E? Jackie Chan is constantly tumbling and using wild maneuvers. He isn't resting for five minutes to regain his encounter powers. He is always tumbling, doing flying kicks, roundhouse kicks, strange punches, amusing feints, and the like.

When you watch Excalibur the movie, that battle at the end is one long, drawn out fight with the guys just swinging away. No time to rest for encounter powers. Fight until you are dead or have won the battle.

I have difficulty simulating these types of battles with 4E because the player constantly needing at least five minutes of rest.

Sorry man. Your trite explanation for enconter powers is unsatisfying and extremely limiting for a storyteller. Any 4E storyteller will be forced into using the exact same explanations in every encounter for the repetitious encounter powers that seem "special", while at the same time being forced to arbitrarily end encounters to give the players time to rest five minutes to "recover" their learned skills. It doesn't work for me. If it works for you, then enjoy.

But the bad action film is 4E encounter powers. The same action sequence over and over and over and over again. The very definition of a bad action film, cliche, repetitious, and uninteresting.

But Jackie Chan is not a first or second level character and that fight in Excalibur is definitely not between low level characters either. So your complaint that these movies don't have a "rest period" is not valid in the context of the game because paragon and epic level character also do not need a rest. They just get more powers that do nifty things. If your fights are repetitive at levels higher than 5 I'd say the problem is the player's lack of creativity. I've seen some pretty interesting fights as low as 3rd level with hardly any repetition of powers. And even when the players are using their at will powers they usually find an interesting way to describe them to not make it seem repetitive.

Sorry, but I think that your complaint is valid for your game and as such I'm not going to judge it. But saying that the explanation given by MR is trite seems rather contrived.

 

[cwhs01]

But the bad action film is 4E encounter powers. The same action sequence over and over and over and over again. The very definition of a bad action film, cliche, repetitious, and uninteresting.

Change a little in the above statement, and you have my sentiments about 3e.
Especially for non-casters. They usually had few choices beyond what target to hit and when to run away. Special attacks such as trip, grapple, power attack etc. where only ever useful if you had a pc dedicated to the tactic. They would then use this trick over and over again. And ofcourse, these options excist in 4e as well (in principle anyway)...

4e tries to give every class more options, which include encounter, daily and at-will powers. Though i haven't really played 4e as much as 3e yet (ofcourse), it seems to work fine, at low level, for giving varied combats. When you run out of encounter powers and dailies, you still have a choice of at least two different at-wills + the stunt system (page 42?).

imx it seems to be enough.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Mustrum,

I do not know if you are a writer or not.

I write code, not fiction. I am more a consumer kind of guy.

Encounter powers are lacking drama because they are both overused and underused at the same time. They overused because they are used every encounter, which as I said is like playing the same action sequence every battle as though I would write the same thing over and over again. Which is in essence a bad movie, so encounter powers are an example of a very bad movie. And underused because there is no good, viable reason even from a story standpoint why a character would not be able to execute a learned combat maneuver over and over again as he does with a feat.

(1) The problem in D&D (and most others RPGs) tends to be that there are way more combat encounters then in a typical story, from a story-telling point perspective. I mean, think about how many real battles we have in LotR - that would never be enough for the span of a typical D&D campaign.

As I stated in this thread and the other thread, I run encounters that start what I call a domino encounter. A non-stop series of fights that leaves no time for rest to recover encounter powers. This used to work very well in 3E because the player decided when to use his reservoir of power in the case of casters and fighters were skilled combatants who fighting prowess was always available because it was a physically learned skill. So when I ran a cineematic encounter of a continuous fight, there was no need to explain the recovery of encounter powers.

If you want to discuss film battles, they rarely have rest periods. Usually it is a series of short, easy encounters that don't require much in terms of what the character can do, with one long drawn out fight scene that is a knockdown drag out fight where maneuvers are tried over and over again.

Long-Drawn out fights are perfectly possible using a mix of lots of Minions and powerful individual foes, possibly attacking in waves - but all within one encounter.

For example, how do you simulate Jackie Chan movie in 4E? Jackie Chan is constantly tumbling and using wild maneuvers. He isn't resting for five minutes to regain his encounter powers. He is always tumbling, doing flying kicks, roundhouse kicks, strange punches, amusing feints, and the like.

Jackie Chain is constantly using tumbling, flying kicks, roundhouse kicks and so on because - like most movie characters - he is fighting Minions - if he hits, he gets to do all kinds of cool stuff. And of course, Jackie Chan has probably a DM that uses DMG p.42 a lot more then me or you (or your DM?).

When you watch Excalibur the movie, that battle at the end is one long, drawn out fight with the guys just swinging away. No time to rest for encounter powers. Fight until you are dead or have won the battle.

I have difficulty simulating these types of battles with 4E because the player constantly needing at least five minutes of rest.

Did you ever try this in 3E? Sure, the Fighter manages to do that (if someone keeps him up with some healing spells), but the Wizard? He's out of useful spells quickly, and then (unlike maybe the Wizard-That's-not-really-a-wizard-as-we-all-known, Gandalf) he can't get out his sword and staff to kick ass.

Sorry man. Your trite explanation for enconter powers is unsatisfying and extremely limiting for a storyteller. Any 4E storyteller will be forced into using the exact same explanations in every encounter for the repetitious encounter powers that seem "special", while at the same time being forced to arbitrarily end encounters to give the players time to rest five minutes to "recover" their learned skills. It doesn't work for me. If it works for you, then enjoy.

You are not forced to re-use flavor text if you don't like it. Just because you use the same mechanical representation for a certain task, doesn't mean you use the same narrative. And vice versa, of course...

But that's not something everybody seems to be capable (or at least enjoying) to do... *shrugs*

Ultimately, everyone has to make his pick according to preferences. Though I still don't get why you'd give up D&D entirely, but well, there are a lot of other games out there that also deserve a fair chance to be tested and played...

 

[billd91]

A question thats been bothering me a little. Why all the drama? Yes, someone made a new edition of some fantasy roleplaying game. No, it may not have been all what you hoped it would be. And importantly, No, it doesn't mean you aren't allowed to dislike the new edition and play something else, while borrowing the few things you like.

Why all the wailing and gnashing of teeth and tearing hair out? There are lots of alternatives out there still. Even older editions of the same game.
Why do people get so emotional about this?

Because we love, man. We lovetoo much.

Seriously, what do you expect about a hobbyist and his/her passions? We wouldn't be nearly as invested in our gaming, spending time on gaming messageboards, if we weren't quite passionate about it.