Grapple: LIVING SHIELD [mearls]

[Dragon Snack]

Well, I was excited about something...

:\

 

[Nork]

But what about when it's just as cool to have the PCs do it?

Here's an example of that kind of system done poorly, and I am part of the team that did it. I worked on the S&S Gamma World. I was assigned the monsters, mostly converting a lare subset of the original critters and adding a few originals. Since the PC mutation rules hadn't been written yet, I hand-converted all the old Gamma World mutations I needed and gave them to the appropriate monsters, in some cases trimming out a lot of hodge-podge powers to help give each creature more of a coherent focus (uhm, sounds familiar all of a sudden...)

The problem was, the PC mutation rules were very different -- and much, much, sparser -- than the original GW rules, due to those designers having a different 'vision' of GW than I had (I was going for as much of the original gonzo spirit as possible, tied to a richer backstory and more of a reason for most of the creatures which existed; they wanted to get much further away from classic GW, but that's another issue). The result was that the monsters had cool mutations which the PCs should have been able to have, but couldn't. I eventually got to extracting them all from the monster lists and writing them up for PC use, but the frustration at the design disconnects in the original PHB tainted the overall reception of the game, and I still get flamed on GW lists over it. So it goes.

Fact is, when a monster does something Really C^h Nifty, and there's no obvious reason why a PC can't do it, too, a player will ask, "How can I learn to do that?" "Wait for the appropriate supplement" isn't always the best answer, though, given how much has to fit into the 4e PHB, it might be the only viable one. Probably won't be too hard, once we see the way powers are designed and scaled, to figure out what level of feat/talent/power this trick is and offer PCs a chance to buy it. ("Well, first, you need to find a friendly bugbear to teach it to you...good luck with that.")

Well you had a fundamental choice:

Make the monsters 'cool' even though the PCs didn't have those options.

or

Make the monsters 'Casper Milquetoast' just because the PCs didn't have those options.


The latter seems to be the strictly worse option. Why make something less cool because something else isn't as cool?


Making the PCs *and* the monsters 'cool' sounds like the easy choice, but in an imperfect world you can never do everything, nor can you polish anything as much as you would have wanted to.

Being irked because a hobgoblin can do something your player can't is like being irked that Demons can come from 'location X' to mess with your party, but your party can't go to 'location X' to mess with demons because the DM really hasn't had time to fully flesh out what they want 'location X' to be yet. Or the DM has just decided that being able to go to 'location X' sounds like a lot more fun in abstract than it would turn out to actually be.

Having a hobgoblin strangler is strictly cooler than having just generic hobgoblins without the ability to strangle people and use them as human shields.

How boring would it be if the first player killed in 4e died from a random club hit from a generic hobgoblin. Would anyone even be discussing the event at all? "Really? A hobgoblin you say? Used a club to hit him and he took damage and died? I say! How terribly exciting."

 

[Lizard]

How boring would it be if the first player killed in 4e died from a random club hit from a generic hobgoblin. Would anyone even be discussing the event at all? "Really? A hobgoblin you say? Used a club to hit him and he took damage and died? I say! How terribly exciting."

Alternatively, you have the present situation:"Wow! That's cool! I want my character to do that! Oh wait...I can't?" (Well, not as a formally written up skill/power/talent/manuver, at least not yet.)

I think we've been "conditioned" by 3e to believe that all basically humanoid 1-hit dice creatures have access to the same toolbox, barring innate racial powers which clearly aren't the result of training. (i.e, no one expects a human to be able to form a troglodyte stench cloud, for example) 4e breaks that conditioning, hard. It may make for a better game, but it also drives home the fact you're playing a game in a way which makes some players and DMs uncomfortable. The fewer OOTS moments in a game, when the game conventions and balance rules really jump up and slap you in the face, the better. I think this is a feature new players, not conditioned to the 3e model and, rather, conditioned by more arbitrary systems found in computer games, will find less jarring. CRPGs and MMORPGs are filled with "Adjective Noun" monsters, and part of the fun is learning of the special attacks or abilities unique to each one. Having your PC be able to learn/use those abilities never enters the equation; after all, you've got your own list of abilities to play with.

Will the 4e model be fun and playable? Almost certainly. Will it take a lot of getting used to for experienced players? I think it will. Will the play benefit outweigh the adjustment shock? Won't know until we see the full rules, I think.

 

[mmu1]

It's not really a problem when that one Bugbear happens to have a special ability that no PC can get. Annoying, but not a problem.

It becomes a problem when many monsters / monstrous NPCs are designed along similar lines - they get some "cool" defining ability that doesn't have a general rule for it and which the PCs (or even other opponents) can never learn or apply, no matter how much it'd make sense for them to have it.

The more I hear about 4E monsters, the more they sound like game pieces. Why not have some of them start moving sliding two squares ahead and one over before they explode, while we're at it? :\

 

[Kaisoku]

I think people need to get over the idea that every player should be capable of every "maneuver" at all times.

Each instance in this thread where a person said they would want that ability, it was for "their strongman/grapple/assassin" character.

The design philosophy for 4e hasn't been to say that ONLY monsters are capable of doing this combat maneuver*... rather, that it requires special training to do it, and this monster has it.

Nothing bars a player from getting that "special maneuver" as well. But it's still just ONE character doing it all the time, and ONE monster doing it all the time. Rather than EVERYONE that grapples doing it all the time (thus making it less special).


This is something I'm totally fine with. It keeps these special moves.. well.. special. Monsters and Characters that use them will remain unique in doing so, rather than just getting a +4 at doing it, etc.


*Unless of course the monster has some special appendage or bodily function that allows it, etc. Swallow whole being monster only still makes sense, etc.

 

[Rechan]

This is something I'm totally fine with. It keeps these special moves.. well.. special. Monsters and Characters that use them will remain unique in doing so, rather than just getting a +4 at doing it, etc..

Aye.

 

[Voss]

Yep---that's what I guessed when I saw the write-up.

I enthusiastically approve of this design decision---another example of the 'back to basics' approach that seems to be motivating the designers.

Its actually the exact opposite of 'back to basics'. Its fairly complex- every monster has its own small pile of special rules that only apply to it or a handful of other monsters. Universal rules would be back to basics. Monster specific rules involve either memorizing every single monster you're using, or always having the rulebook open to the monster's entry.

More and more, the design reminds me of the Dungeon! boardgame or a D&D version of Heroquest. Not in the complexity necessarily, but the feel and style is players pushing around limited playing pieces, not playing characters in an RPG. That can be fun, but not really what I'm looking for in a role-playing game.

 

[AZRogue]

I don't think the PH has rules for that, but I imagine it'll show up if/when we do assassin-style rogue maneuvers.

Mr. Mearls, I'm not sure if you'll ever read this, but I would like to add my overwhelming support for the idea of including such a rule in the NEAR (please, oh please God) future. Such a maneuver--interposing the body of someone you are strangling OR grappling between you and an attack--would be an AMAZINGLY powerful and entertaining option.

It would make an enemy holding a hostage actually MEAN something, without having to (obviously) wave the magic DM wand. The possibilities are so entertaining that I'm stunned.


But, even more importantly, I've wanted for a long, long time to play a grappling Aikido type character who moved through combat throwing enemies to the ground, placing them in joint-locks and submission holds, and basically being the "non-violent" violent type. It's been something I've tried many different times (the Monk didn't come close and the 3E rules regarding Grappling made it about as useful as using my Cooking Skill during combat). My own extensive rules (new Class, new Grapple rules, thirteen pages of single spaced text) got close but weren't allowed by my DM as he wanted to stick with only WotC material and wanted to avoid d20 products. It worked in my own game as an NPC but no one really appreciated as they killed him, heh.

So, if you could keep this in mind when designing rules for combat manuevers and unarmed combat, I would be willing to trade a random limb.

 

[Rechan]

Be aware folks, we do have a Martial book coming up in what, October?

We might just have maneuvers/powers/whatever for Rogues and Fighters and unarmed stuff in there.

 

[AZRogue]

Be aware folks, we do have a Martial book coming up in what, October?

We might just have maneuvers/powers/whatever for Rogues and Fighters and unarmed stuff in there.

I really hope so. Effective unarmed combat that allowed grappling/throwing to be as, or nearly as, effective as other combat options is something that I really want. Most books I've seen fall short after they hit the "kung fu" stereotype and don't bother to go the distance and become something that I actually want to use. Kung fu is great and all, but I want make my DnD equivalent to Steven Seagal here.