Goblin Picador

[Fallen Seraph]

Actually, some people jump out of airplanes, have a failure with the parachute, fall several thousand feet and survive. Some rare few walk away with nary a scratch. Most get splattered, of course. Many people survive falls from lower heights as well.

So, it's not like every fall over 15' is invariably fatal.

Well maybe not without a scratch but yeah they do survive. There is actually video of a woman who's parachute didn't employ properly and she spiralled down to the ground, landing face first onto cement and lived (had to go facial reconstruction, but she lived).

 

[FadedC]

This is a goblin, remember? You're talking about the equivalent of a person harpooning a grizzly bear. If the bear wants to go elsewhere, it's damned well going to, and you dragging on the rope is not going to stop it; all you'll accomplish is to make it really, really mad. Not only that, but this particular grizzly bear can grab hold of the rope, so you can't even use the pain to force him to move.

This goblin has a 16 strength, the same as the dwarven fighter. I'm fairly sure your harpooning a grizzly bear analogy doesn't work.

 

[AllisterH]

My only concern is that if every monster ability has o be explained just in case the PCs want it, as a DM, I'm less likely to use it just to forestal the headache

 

[Dausuul]

This goblin has a 16 strength.

So what? He still weighs thirty pounds. If he hauls on the rope really hard, he's just going to pull himself toward me, not the other way around.

(Unless they made goblins a lot bigger, which I suppose is possible given the changes to halflings.)

 

[FadedC]

So what? He still weighs thirty pounds. If he hauls on the rope really hard, he's just going to pull himself toward me, not the other way around.

(Unless they made goblins a lot bigger, which I suppose is possible given the changes to halflings.)

I never really had a good feel for how big goblins were in 3e, but yeah I'd assume they must be more like vicious dwarves now.

 

[Storm-Bringer]

So what? He still weighs thirty pounds. If he hauls on the rope really hard, he's just going to pull himself toward me, not the other way around.

(Unless they made goblins a lot bigger, which I suppose is possible given the changes to halflings.)

Doesn't that make the ability rather useless against anything larger than the goblin, then? Namely, the PCs?

 

[small pumpkin man]

*resists suicidal urge to dive back into argument about the nature of hit points*

My only real complaint--and it's not so much a complaint as a concern, since we haven't seen the MM entry for it yet--is that the picador's defining special ability seems... wonky.

I don't expect the mechanics to be totally realistic, or to account for every possible corner case. That's what we have DMs for, and I'm prepared to adjudicate those. What worries me is when the mechanics, used as they were designed and intended to be used, raise immediate and serious verisimilitude issues. I should be able to use the mechanic on a player, absent special circumstances, and not have that player react with, "What the hell? That makes no sense!"

In this case, the reaction I expect is, "What the hell? How is one tiny little goblin holding me in place?"

I can come up with excuses to justify it, but if I'm having to make excuses, I've already sacrificed a lot of immersion.

Still, maybe the Monster Manual has a description of the picador's harpoon attack which makes it intuitively obvious why it works the way it does. I hope so.

Firstly, those are the minature stats don't expect too much. Secondly, harpoons and similar weapons on the end of chains or ropes have been used by humans to catch creatures much larger than us since history began, their kinda designed to do that.

 

[small pumpkin man]

I thought True20 & M&M were d20 derivatives? Or were you only speaking of Cyberpunk 2020 in predating 3e... Anyway, the point wasn't that D&D did it first or best but that it was a marked improvement over what we had before.

True20 and M&M are both d20 yes, and I didn't make that clear, no. Yes, it was an improvement, but the one place where it was still clunky was "special case combat actions" which tended to involve 2-3 rolls at different things, often opposed rolls and AoOs, when they could have just been "roll one d20, add bonuses, check vs dc"

D&D is totally combat oriented. The bulk of the rules have always been concerned with resolving combat.

Sure, I meant more so than earlier editions.

Sure, 4e further unifies the mechanic in that it appears to get rid of opposed checks (Str vs Str type checks are now Str vs Fort defense, for example) and active defense rolls (Fort/Ref/Will now being static). The difference between attacks & touch attacks still exists - a touch attack in 3e is an attack roll vs Ref defense in 4e. Anyway, this is definitely an improvement, but it's not some radical change over what we have now. Pick a relevant skill/ability/whatever, pick a DC, have the player roll.

The problem is disarm, feint and grapple all use completely different rules, so if you make up a new combat action on the fly, it's in no way obvious what you should be rolling against. 4e makes it easier to figure out what you should be rolling against, making the process, well, unified. I consider this a "marked improvement", although I can see why other people wouldn't see much of difference.

 

[Spatula]

The problem is disarm, feint and grapple all use completely different rules, so if you make up a new combat action on the fly, it's in no way obvious what you should be rolling against. 4e makes it easier to figure out what you should be rolling against, making the process, well, unified. I consider this a "marked improvement", although I can see why other people wouldn't see much of difference.

Well, excepting grapple (ugh) and to a lesser extent bull rush (how far do I move him?), these were all very simple - opposed attack rolls if you're going after a weapon (disarm, sunder), opposed ability check if you're trying to move the target (trip, overrun, bull rush). Grapple is largely a mess. Here's hoping the 4e version finally gives us some simple wrestling rules without making it mostly useless (I'm looking at you, SW SAGA). And it looks as if feinting has been sort-of absorbed into the rogue's at-will attack powers, which don't target AC directly as I recall.

But judging by trip, 4e resolved the issue by simply removing these actions as general combat maneuvers. If you don't have the power, you can't do them, unless perhaps there's rules for performing martial exploits that you don't actually have and that may not even be a part of your class (and if so, why not rules for using arcane, divine, etc. powers "untrained"?). So I'm not sure I'd label that as fixing the problem - anyone can simplify things by axing the troublesome parts.

 

[Just Another User]

*succumbs*

This is my interpretation. At least in my games, any attack that takes off hit points is an attack that connected. Partly this is because most "rider" effects, like poison and harpoons, only make sense if the attack hits; mostly, however, it's because the terminology of the game reinforces the idea very, very strongly.

Beside you add constitution to hit points, not dexterity.