D&D 5E Fixing the Fighter
- Thread starter Obryn
- Start date
Manbearcat
Legend
Obryn
Hero
Again, remember that we're separating the metagame from the narrative aspects, so ... none of this bothers me in the least. On the metagame level, it all works when it's divided into Daily/Encounter chunks and it works well for a fun game where capable adventurers are being awesome at the thematic stuff they should be awesome at.
That helps my own immersion rather than hurting it by worrying about matching metagame tokens 1:1 to combat events. I don't see a reason for it; it quite literally never comes up in our games. I don't need to try and actualize every single metagame token, because on the narrative level, the PCs are doing the sorts of things they should be doing, and it's a blast.
-O
FireLance
Legend
The balance in chess arises more from the fact that each side has exactly the same number of pieces of each type than the individual balance between pieces. Or would you consider a game in which one player has substituted his eight pawns for eight queens to be balanced?
Remathilis
Legend
This is where we're going to agree to disagree. D&D combat is already highly abstract, so I don't need every feint, parry or thrust accounted for, but I generally assume that any decision a PC can take is one the character would. A wizard cast's sleep because he knows he has sleep memorized. A fighter uses power attack because he knows how to use that fighting technique. There is room for metagame element (I've mentioned Action Points, which can represent all sorts of fiat, luck, or the Will of the Gods if you want it to) but I like them off-camera, influencing things that could be possible without them. Metagame elements should never grant a PC an action he could not do without them.
But if it works for you, great. It doesn't for me. My hope is Next avoids or minimizes them.
Manbearcat
Legend
I think possibly the most difficult gap to bridge is the difference in the way 4e advocates and 4e detractors/advocates of other systems (3.x/PF specifically) interpret/perceive the gray areas in the abstractions inherent to D&D combat. This is, of course, all related to game theory; creative agendas et al. However, that makes some folks twitch so I'll just stay away from trying to communicate in that manner.
It seems to me that the expectations of the mapping of the mechanics to the fiction are widely divergent. One side seems to interpret/perceive and then expect something much, much closer to a 1:1 relationship. The result is, naturally, a constrained narrative that tightly follows that interpretation/perception. Diverging too far from that 1:1 mechanics:fiction relationship and the resultant interpretation/perception/expectation/narrative accompaniment causes them extreme discord. A round of combat (the movement, location and actions of the participants) should be as explicitly conveyed by the mechanics as possible...and table interpretation should be constrained by fealty to that. A melee attack shouldn't have a rider that forces movement of a foe. That makes no sense. That forced movement needs to be a secondary, explicit, construct (repositioning) with its own contest check and its own weight on the overall action economy of the round...and the contest's mechanics and the narrative interpretation have to be tight...as granular as possible without being too much of a pain in the neck. If it comes to pass that the action economy allocated to the rider effect is a little wonky, and therefore not leveraged very often (if at all), then so be it. That is probably the way it should be anyway. Give them a system whose primary design vision supports that and they are happy. Give it not, and something is rotten in Denmark.
The other side is considerably further away from that interpretation/perception and resultant expectation of a 1:1 mechanics:fiction relationship. Diverging far enough away from that 1:1 mechanics:fiction relationship and the resultant interpretation/perception/expectation opens up the diversity of narrative accompaniment/fictional rendering...and they are happy to have it; lack of that causes them extreme discord. A round of combat (the movement, location and actions of the participants) is not nearly as explicitly conveyed by the mechanics as the former group sees it...and table interpretation and the rendered fiction is relatively unbound as a result. A melee attack with a rider that forces movement (slide) is great. For them, its fun, thematically and tactically deep and a designer's miscalculation of the potency of a rider's effect (versus doing damage) won't result in a scenario where its always better to just do damage (rather than spending their action economy on the rider instead). It opens up the thematic fictional and the tactical variance. Give them a system whose primary design vision supports that and they are happy. Give it not, and something is rotten in Denmark.
*** EDIT - This is not a dissociative mechanics statement. This is an "interpretation of the abstract combat engine of D&D" statement and how preconceived expectations, tastes, and creative agendas influence that interpretation.
It seems to me that the expectations of the mapping of the mechanics to the fiction are widely divergent. One side seems to interpret/perceive and then expect something much, much closer to a 1:1 relationship. The result is, naturally, a constrained narrative that tightly follows that interpretation/perception. Diverging too far from that 1:1 mechanics:fiction relationship and the resultant interpretation/perception/expectation/narrative accompaniment causes them extreme discord. A round of combat (the movement, location and actions of the participants) should be as explicitly conveyed by the mechanics as possible...and table interpretation should be constrained by fealty to that. A melee attack shouldn't have a rider that forces movement of a foe. That makes no sense. That forced movement needs to be a secondary, explicit, construct (repositioning) with its own contest check and its own weight on the overall action economy of the round...and the contest's mechanics and the narrative interpretation have to be tight...as granular as possible without being too much of a pain in the neck. If it comes to pass that the action economy allocated to the rider effect is a little wonky, and therefore not leveraged very often (if at all), then so be it. That is probably the way it should be anyway. Give them a system whose primary design vision supports that and they are happy. Give it not, and something is rotten in Denmark.
The other side is considerably further away from that interpretation/perception and resultant expectation of a 1:1 mechanics:fiction relationship. Diverging far enough away from that 1:1 mechanics:fiction relationship and the resultant interpretation/perception/expectation opens up the diversity of narrative accompaniment/fictional rendering...and they are happy to have it; lack of that causes them extreme discord. A round of combat (the movement, location and actions of the participants) is not nearly as explicitly conveyed by the mechanics as the former group sees it...and table interpretation and the rendered fiction is relatively unbound as a result. A melee attack with a rider that forces movement (slide) is great. For them, its fun, thematically and tactically deep and a designer's miscalculation of the potency of a rider's effect (versus doing damage) won't result in a scenario where its always better to just do damage (rather than spending their action economy on the rider instead). It opens up the thematic fictional and the tactical variance. Give them a system whose primary design vision supports that and they are happy. Give it not, and something is rotten in Denmark.
*** EDIT - This is not a dissociative mechanics statement. This is an "interpretation of the abstract combat engine of D&D" statement and how preconceived expectations, tastes, and creative agendas influence that interpretation.
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Ahnehnois
First Post
Well, if they were promoted according to the rules, yes (virtually impossible to do though). If you simply start the game that way, you aren't really playing chess anymore because the rules of chess define what the pieces are.
Of course, D&D and chess are different types of games anyway.
The point is that the different character classes and other character options don't have to be balanced at the level some people are suggesting. A lot of times I'll see people define "balance" in terms of classes being equal to each other, but that's really a small and relatively unimportant subset of what balance is in this context.
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The problem that some people have, myself included, are powers that cause forced movement without cause. The power forces the enemy to make a move or do something that it may not normally even do. I can understand magic, concussive force, wind etc as something that would cause forced movement but having a power that dictates what the enemy is going to do is where people have a problem.
My creature may have fought a fighter before who did something similar, like Come and Get it, and so he wouldn't fall for it twice but the power takes that freedom away and causes the creature to make that same mistake again.
My creature may have fought a fighter before who did something similar, like Come and Get it, and so he wouldn't fall for it twice but the power takes that freedom away and causes the creature to make that same mistake again.
Why are they invisible? If they lead to increased hits/crits, then if the PCs were doing a statistical tally they would be visible over the medium-to-long run.
But we assume that no such tally is being undertaken. Just as we assume the fighter is not conducting controlled experiments to see how often s/he can leap over a 100' cliff and survive.
The daily power won't be used every day, for reasons such as: not every day has a fight on it; not every daily power is used every day. And in any event, who is keeping the tally?
Exactly.daily powers don't happen every day. That makes the assumption that you're getting into a fight every single day, after all.From the characters viewpoint, sometimes they make a particularly powerful blow when they're fighting. Was that a crit? Was it a daily power? Only the player knows.
You are choosing, here, to make the metagame visible within the ingame fiction. If you narrate your game so as to make the metagame overt within the fiction in this way, of course it will look stupid. That is not any sort of peculiarity of 4e, and of course is the whole premise for Order of the Stick (which is based on 3E, not 4e).
Hence, most RPGers - at least, the ones I know - choose not to make the metagame overt within the fiction in this way. In my game, at least, while the players call for one another to make skill checks, the PCs don't - they just talk about doing things. While a player might say "I can't go in, I've only got 6 hp left" the PC doesn't talk about his/her hit points (or level, or attack bonus, or AC, or XP to next level, or any of the other metagame elements).
Here is a dialogue of your style from 1st ed AD&D:
Fighter: Wizard, we really need to be able to walk through dungeon walls. Why don't you learn Passwall from that scroll we found?
Wizard: I tried, but I failed my "learn spells" roll.
Fighter: . . . ?
Wizard: I tried, but I failed my "learn spells" roll.
Fighter: . . . ?
Gee, AD&D must be a pretty crappy game with all this inexplicable, "just because" metagame stuff! But wait, no one who played AD&D actually narrated events like that. The wizard said something like "I tried, but I couldn't understand it. I have to study it more [ie in the metagame, gain a level] before I have a chance of masterying it." And in your examples, the fighter in a decent game would say something like "I tried, but they're onto me" or "I'm doing my best!" or some other ingame explanation that leverages such relevant ingame factors as position, speed, exhaustion, skill etc.
The PCs don't have to explain anything. The participants in the game - players and GM - have to narrate some fiction. Just as, in AD&D, some ficiton has to be narrated to explain why the wizard can't learn Passwall when the "learn spells" roll is failed. That's pretty much the essence of an RPG - narrating fiction that accommodates the outcomes generated by the mechanics. 4e just has a greater looseness of fit in this respect then a more simulationist ruleset (as [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] noted upthread).
That's contentious in itself. Given that I regard hit points as predominantly a metagame resource, and given that every edition of D&D has balanced a fighter's greater hit points against a magic-user's spells, I think this sort of balance is inherent to D&D.
If Fate Points are tolerable in the hands of all players, then I don't understand why they wouldn't be tolerable in the hands of one player. And if Fate Points are tolerable in the hands of one player, then why wouldn't some sort of merger between Fate Points and PC resources be tolerable?
A concrete example might be the 3E monk - we balance the monk by giving the player of the monk a 1x/day Fate Point (turn a miss into a hit, or a hit into a crit), and then attach it to Flurry of Blows - when flurrying, 1x/day the player of the monk may turn a miss into a hit, or a hit into a crit.
If Fate Points are tolerable at all, I don't see how that particular ability is not tolerable. And what that ability is, in effect, is a 4e-style daily power. The player choosing to use that power rather than some other one is no different, as a play experience, from a player choosing to use a Fate Point at this particular juncture.
Now if Fate Points are not tolerable at all, because of their metagame character, fine. I've played RPGs that eschew metagame altogether (classic Rolemaster or Runequest) and am familiar with the aesthetic. My point is that, if Fate Points are tolerable, than so should martial encounter and daily powers. They are no different. And using them to achieve parity of mechanical effectiveness between classes is no big deal, once the tolerability of Fate Points or similar metagame devices is permitted.
Obviously not. But you were trying to argue that character sheets are not lists of player resources because when a character is passed from player to player, so is the sheet. And my point was that all this shows is that the resources attach to a player position, which may be passed from person to person in much the same way as a position in chess, or indeed any other institutionally-defind office.
Manbearcat
Legend
This is precisely what I was getting at upthread (when I was strangely attacked for hypocricy...I still don't understand it nor am I going to attempt to parse it further). Why would any player belligerently represent the fictional positioning/narrative of his character's actions as a metagame expression/interest unless he was trying to make a caricature out of the experience of RPGing in general and the current play at that table specifically? Its an absurd attempt at mockery...a willful one...one that I find hard to believe to be anything but the most extreme outlier (if it exists at all outside of a beer and pretzels MST3K, Monty Python, Rosencrantz and Gildenstern are Dead, "lets have a funny go at D&D and all of its oddities" Friday night). I've never witnessed it and I suspect that most folks would tell a player like that to "exit stage left" after the game is done.
That is brilliant! Unfortunately, I cannot xp. I never even thought of that one (why I'm not sure) during these conversations. Another pure metagame construct embedded in AD&D but from the Wizards side of the ruleset. *** DO NOT BELIEVE THE RUBBISH TO FOLLOW AS IT IS COMPLETELY INCORRECT BECAUSE MY BRAIN APPEARS TO BE FULL OF ROT. ROGUES CAN RETRY ALL THEY WANT AND TAKE 20, ASSUMING THEY HAVE THE TIME. I WAS THINKING OF AD&D THIEF MECHANICS. HAT TIP @Remathilis AND @JamesonCourage Its a match for the "failed lock pick, can't attempt again until I put a Skill rank into Pick Locks" for Rogues in 3.x. *** The proper 3.x analog (the same thing procedurally as in AD&D) is Spellcraft to learn a spell from a spellbook or scroll. Failure there means you cannot retry until you've gained another point of spellcraft.
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