How Can You Politely Say, "Your Character Sucks?"

[blargney the second]

I'm not sure the second guy exists.

 

[pawsplay]

Has divorcing game mechanics and flavor ever been an option for you? That is, giving the bright, plucky, hardworking swordmage a 20 intelligence and maintain that he is not incredibly brilliant? Or, playing the strong, plate-wearing halfling paladin who actually dumped strength for his charisma based attacks?

Sure. I always treat attributes as abstractions, even in GURPS. To me, an attribute score is a sort of bid on how often you would like to succeed at certain things. On the other hand, I am alert to the secondary consequences. For instance, most games will give Spider-Man a lower intelligence than Reed Richards. However, Spidey pretty much always outsmarts people, and can build very amazing things in a pinch, despite not being much of a scientist, in theory. On the other hand, Reed is a brilliant scientist, but he is actually sort of dumb in a lot of ways. I would probably give them the same intelligence score; although Reed is "more intelligent," Peter is probably equally likely to succeed at intelligence rolls, so that is what is important, not their in-universe IQ. Reed would just have better skills.

Looking at your example, the paladin's lifting capacity would be unusually low and he would have trouble breaking down doors. That matters to me. Whatever number is used to get the correct result, that does not matter to me.

Come to think of it, I think this abstraction in 4E is what prompted me to allow the severance of the tie between story and mechanics altogether, because that's certainly not how I played in previous editions.

Certainly, it's one thing that turned me off 4e. I like abstraction... useful abstraction. Characters in D6 Star Wars have high attributes because they're heroic... if you see Dexterity 3D6, it's not because some backwaters governor is secretly a ninja, it's because he's expected to hit more often than not when he shoots a stormtrooper. But the view that you put your 16 or 18 in this stat, you dump that stat because it doesn't matter, etc. to me feels arbitrary.

Why have a trait that at all that never comes into play? Why does 4e have ability scores at all... couldn't you just skip right to shuffling points between your basic attack, your special attacks, your defense, etc.?

 

[Gimby]

Why have a trait that at all that never comes into play? Why does 4e have ability scores at all... couldn't you just skip right to shuffling points between your basic attack, your special attacks, your defense, etc.?

Oh, probably. M&M or True20 show us what can be done on this basis. Can you imagine the howling of "Its not D&D!" if they had done that though?

 

[outsider]

funny... so they are only a problem when they pollut YOUR games....

For the most part. Things that one group considers a serious problem will be fine or even encouraged in the next. There are very few playstyle problems that will be universally considered a problem in every group, which is my point. Powergaming isn't a problem in every group. Weak characters are a problem in some groups.

so if you joined my group, and really wanted to play my game you can't just make your character without any knowladge of the other PCs power levels?!?!?!?!??!

Not quite. In a new group, I'd typically play something that I'd rate about 7 or 8 out of 10 on the powergaming scale. Powerful enough for me to enjoy myself, but still within the powerscale of most average groups, and able to hang even if the group turns out to be a bunch of uber powergamers. If I feel like being really safe, I'll play a leader, as people tend to have far less problem with you buffing them into the stratosphere instead of yourself.

 

[Nifft]

I'm trained to do administer standardized tests, and I know people within a given field vary widely in their particular talents. There are plenty of people who are fantastic surgeons or car mechanics or whatever who do not have minds that are generally exceptional. If a character has a 14 Int, and most fighters have a 10, and the sharpest minds have 16s to 20s, the character is pretty darn brilliant from the standpoint of the ordinary person. Or from a more abstract rationale outside the game world... it's a few points, so what?

Reality ≠ D&D. Your experiences in the former carry no weight in discussing the latter.

Whichever. The point is that if he's 4 points behind at level 1, he's 4 points behind at level 30, or more or less, because there are so many other variables.

Yes. You can never make up for it. Glad you'll concede at least that.

Simply because someone starts as a wizard's apprentice does not mean they will end up being the Arch Wizard of the High Tower, nor does every plucky squire grow up to the nationa's premier jousting knight. Not every legendary character is going to fit a narrow definition of optimization within the game system. Arthur was not the combat monster in the group; Lancelot was. Paksenarrion, in Elizabeth Moon's stories, does not have exceptional skills as a swordsman, but she gains them, even though she is never as fluid as the best she knows, even at a peak where she can outfight many of them.

That's true, but now that I know what you mean, I don't see how it is relevant to this discussion (about how 4e deals with ability scores).

In the d20 version of the Star Wars game, both took a detour from their primary Jedi skills to take levels in Ace Pilot. It's also not a given that either had truly exceptional ability scores apart from an abnormal Dex and a decent Wis and Int. They simply became very high level characters.

In d20 SW, your Jedi wasn't quite a Wizard. He needed skill ranks and BAB rather than spell slots. You can get skill ranks and BAB from many sources, unlike spell slots.

Magic weapons didn't really "make up for" low Str in AD&D. They could just as easily enhance an already powerful powerful character.

No, really, they could. Only level affected attack rate, but attack bonus and damage were a combination of level, Strength, and magic bonuses. A guy with a THAC0 of 8 didn't care if two points of that came from Str and two came from his sword, or if instead four came from his sword and Str gave him nothing.

Also, in 2e your DM could give the low-Strength dude a Belt of Giant Strength, which granted a fixed Strength rather than a bonus -- the guy with 18/98 would have gotten no use out of it.

In 3e, the belt did stack, but you could build a weapon with a higher Enhancement bonus rather than more special abilities. If you had a very high Strength, you might add on Ghost Touch instead of another +1. If you had a low Strength, you could make up for it with Weapon Finesse + bonus damage (e.g. Holy, Shock, Bane, etc.). Even if it was often optimal to be a two-handed Power Attack monkey, it wasn't required, and against whole classes of foes the bonus damage dude would have been at a significant advantage.

In 4e, you lost both degrees of flexibility. You can't trade out enhancement bonus, and you can't use ability boosters because there are none.

No, that's not why. There has never been a "make up for" set of abilities in D&D. It has always been power on top of whatever you had before.

See above.

(...) it makes 4e an easier game to mess around with, because the expected variation is so narrow, you almost can't make yourself unable to hit somehting.

Agreed. This was one of their goals, and they achieved it.

But that's not what I was doing. I just liked the idea of the character. I never felt gimped, useless, or impractical, although I realized other characters might have some advantages in some ways.

So when you said this:

I felt that given the constraints I placed on him in the beginning, every victory was worth celebrating.

... you didn't mean that those constraints impaired your PC? If they did impair him, that's the only meaning of "gimped" to which I refer -- you need not sleep in a box, nor wear only paraphernalia, to be "gimped".

Sadly he no longer works for WotC.

Cheers, -- N

 

[UngeheuerLich]

I really believe, in hindsight, that gauntlets of ogre strength as they were in ADnD are way better than they were in 4e and really really better than in 3e.

I could really imagine using gauntlets of ogre power in 4e and begin with something like 18 Strength in heroic, 20 Strength in paragon and 22 Strength in epic or something like that...

ths way, you can give a character a decent strentgh score without gimping a character that began with a 16 or more... (the 16 guy will even be ahead in late epic...)

This way you can give your non strength characters a decent melee attack

 

[Nifft]

I really believe, in hindsight, that gauntlets of ogre strength as they were in ADnD are way better than they were in 4e and really really better than in 3e.

I could really imagine using gauntlets of ogre power in 4e and begin with something like 18 Strength in heroic, 20 Strength in paragon and 22 Strength in epic or something like that...

ths way, you can give a character a decent strentgh score without gimping a character that began with a 16 or more... (the 16 guy will even be ahead in late epic...)

This way you can give your non strength characters a decent melee attack

Eh, then you'd have the cheese-weasels telling everyone to put an 8 in Strength and make sure those gauntlets were on their Wishlists.

The 4e way is at least pretty blatant: if you want to be a decent Fighter, you put a 16 in Strength. Period. No fancy tricks, no tricky traps.

Cheers, -- N

 

[billd91]

Eh, then you'd have the cheese-weasels telling everyone to put an 8 in Strength and make sure those gauntlets were on their Wishlists.

Fortunately, that was never much of a problem because 1e/2e didn't encourage DMs dishing out treasure based on player wish lists. A PC could never count on ever finding them (or making them) and so they could never form a rational strategy around requiring them.

One of the best things about the gauntlets of ogre power (and gloves of dexterity) was that they worked best as compensatory magic items - you got the most benefit out of them by giving them to PCs not already blessed by a high stat. The mentality was significantly different.

 

[Nifft]

Fortunately, that was never much of a problem because 1e/2e didn't encourage DMs dishing out treasure based on player wish lists. A PC could never count on ever finding them (or making them) and so they could never form a rational strategy around requiring them.

One of the best things about the gauntlets of ogre power (and gloves of dexterity) was that they worked best as compensatory magic items - you got the most benefit out of them by giving them to PCs not already blessed by a high stat. The mentality was significantly different.

Well, there were no rules saying yea or nay, so you could count on getting magic items precisely in so far as you could count on using "social engineering" on your DM.

By codifying reward rules, 3e and 4e have limited the potential for "social engineering" to unbalance a game.

Cheers, -- N

 

[Wolfwood2]

Eh, then you'd have the cheese-weasels telling everyone to put an 8 in Strength and make sure those gauntlets were on their Wishlists.

See, we solve that problem by bringing back the ability minimum for classes. It would even fit with the 4E philosophy of avoiding newbie traps. Creating a character with a low score in your class's primary attack stat is one of the few ways left for people to screw up their character, so why not just make a minimum 16 (after racial adjustments) be required and also require that one of your two +1's at the every 4th level stat increase be devoted to it?

It's probably a good idea in general, even without trying to make old school stat items work.