Forked Thread: Once per day non-magical effects destroy suspension of disbelief

[mmadsen]

I see daily and encounter powers as a special move which makes the hero unique and instantly identifiable. But it is also something that the hero should only be able to pull off rarely.

There are two separate issues here. First, you can accept that a move should be hard to pull off -- that the right opening appears roughly once per fight or once per few fights -- without agreeing that per-encounter and daily powers are a "good" way of implementing that idea.

I put "good" in quotes, because it really depends on what criteria you care about. If you want to give the players simple but interesting choices to make, a meta-game resource works. If you want an immersive simulation, a meta-game resource makes no sense at all.

The "daily" and the "encounter" limits are there to keep those moves special, and to stop the action movie becoming a boring loop of the same shot played over and over again.

I think we understand that and even agree on it, but that doesn't mean the mechanic makes sense.

 

[Mort]

Deciding when and where the character is going to get lucky isn't an abstraction of anything in the real world.

Is it fine for a game? Sure, for many people -- but obviously not for everyone.

The game was already abstract, this just adds a level of player narrative control to that abstraction. Another way would be to give drama points or fate points or action points - which while some people find them more palatable are essentially the same thing.

 

[mmadsen]

The game was already abstract, this just adds a level of player narrative control to that abstraction.

Narrative control is not abstraction though. That's the point.

Another way would be to give drama points or fate points or action points - which while some people find them more palatable are essentially the same thing.

I'm not personally against some amount of narrative control in an RPG, because we're obviously not simulating a random group of guys who may or may not make it, depending on how the dice fall -- but I really dislike the idea of an RPG with no underlying simulationist model.

It's not just the heroes who have players taking a bit of narrative control here and there to nudge things in the right direction. There's no notion of martial exploits without narrative control.

 

[Oblique]

The power system in 4th edition -indeed the system as a whole- is explicitly not intended to simulate an in-game reality. The rules are an abstraction operating at a level above the imagined world the characters are living in. This separation is deliberate, and serves the intended design goals of the game's writers. They have stated this message consistently.

Preferring a simulationist rules system is perfectly valid, but recognize that asking for an in-game rationalization for Daily martial powers, or what Hit Points represent, or what a character's Move distance is in feet and how a character can potentially move that distance an X number of times in a given encounter without suffering fatigue, is really just another way of stating your own preferences. Preferences that 4th edition makes no bones about not meeting.

 

[Intense_Interest]

If you want an immersive simulation, a meta-game resource makes no sense at all.

I don't think that there is an immersive simulation that can be written if you specifically desire to break the immersive simulation. Order Of The Stick foolishness follows at any attempt to question the internal logic of the game-physics. This is a Results-Based rather than System-Based metric.

If you are not prepared to make the steps required to understand certain meta-game situations (Martial Is Not Mundane, A Once Per Day action is only possible in a Once Per Day situation), all that means is that you have not taken those steps.

 

[hong]

It's "bad" because the decision the player is making is not related to the decision the character is making.

That's fine. This is because there is more than one way to play RPGs, beyond "it's what my character would do".

That's not a problem at all in a board game. It is a problem in a role-playing game, because you're no longer making decisions as the character.

In MY day, generic food metaphors used peanut butter and ice cream, and we LIKED it.

 

[Bigwilly]

This is why I would have preferred a common power point pool. So you could use an encounter or low level power twice, but dailies and high level ones would cost more points. That would be easier to rationalize as fatigue, ki or whatever.

One thing I noticed with power pools for spellcasting in 3.x was that spellcasters tended to focus only on high level / effecient spells over all others. By limiting big bang powers to 1/day you prevent this sort of powergaming as you have to rely on your normal powers most of the time and occasionally ie 1/day can pull off something amazing.

The other way to rationalize dailies that I have seen put forward is that only rarely in the ebb and flow of combat does your character get the opportunity to pull off one of these special moves - while in reality the PCs can decide when these moments occur.

 

[mmadsen]

The power system in 4th edition -- indeed the system as a whole -- is explicitly not intended to simulate an in-game reality.

Agreed. And for many gamers, that makes it a bad design, because they don't share the designers' goals.

The rules are an abstraction operating at a level above the imagined world the characters are living in.

I wouldn't call narrative control an abstraction above the game world.

Preferring a simulationist rules system is perfectly valid, but recognize that asking for an in-game rationalization [...] is really just another way of stating your own preferences.

"Just" stating your own preferences?

 

[LostSoul]

There's no notion of martial exploits without narrative control.

Do immersion and narrative control have to be at odds with each other? Isn't it possible to have both?

I personally feel more in-touch with what's going on in the gameworld when I have the narrative control to describe what's going on in the gameworld.

 

[Hussar]

MMadsen - I believe you have a strange definition of abstract. Abstract isn't a fuzzy sort of realism, that's realism. Abstractions are divorced from realism. Full stop. A single die roll that decides a combat is not realistic in the slightest - it's entirely abstract. A 1 minute round where you only get one attack is an abstraction. Deciding that your maneuver will finally have a chance of success RIGHT NOW is an abstraction.

There is no particular difference.