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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 4621446" data-attributes="member: 5143">That's kind of the point.  I'm not trying to model real life at all.  I'm trying to model defeating some monsters in a fantasy world that acts a lot like a fantasy novel or movie.  And I'm trying to do it in the simplest and most fun way possible.What this means is that most of the time heroes in the story are swinging with their weapons.  Very rarely do you see them rolling around on the ground grappling someone.  Even though you DO see fighters in Ultimate Fighting doing it all the time.  I don't like UFC because it's boring to watch two fighters holding on to each other for minutes on end without even hitting each other more than once or twice.We instead want a system that encourages people to hack their way through their enemies, dropping them quickly and efficiently but with the tension involved in the fact that they MIGHT die.Grappling is rather difficult to come up with "realistic" mechanics for that don't slow the game to a crawl.  In any good simulation of it, it still involves 2 of the combatants to hold on to each other and vieing for the upper hand in the grapple so they can finally make the move that will win.  It's a good idea in real life, but it's really slow and undramatic compared to a couple of quick slashes of the sword.Disarming has the side effect of pretty much ending the fight immediately.  In any movie or book, anyone who is disarmed is entirely at the mercy of their opponent.  They are defeated and pretty much only get to die or surrender.  It provides a overwhelming advantage to anyone who succeeds in it.  If it takes you 4 rounds of attacks to kill someone vs 1 round of disarming to win, you take the 1 round of disarming because it is more effective.  Unless it is difficult to disarm.  In which case, ideally, you want the fight to end at the same point regardless of whether someone decides to disarm or just attack.  You want options, but you don't want an option that isn't "attack with weapon" to be the best one.  Because in most movies and books people attack with their weapon more often than any other attack.  So, you have to make disarm such a bad option that you only succeed in doing it every 5 rounds or so, so that it is less effective than attacking normally.  In which case, it is so bad and boring that no one will ever do it anyways.  Might as well remove it as an option and save space in the book.  It also has the disadvantage that it is completely useless on anything that doesn't use weapons.  Making the chance of using it REALLY low.Bull Rush has a legitimate, although rare, use.  That's why it stayed.Sunder suffers almost almost all the same problems as disarm.  With the added problem that destruction of enemies equipment often causes problems with expected treasure by level tables.  Plus, it's no fun at all when the enemy uses it on you.Trip happens to people all the time in books and movies, so it is certainly well represented.  But, you still don't want it to be the best thing to do.  You also don't want it to be SO bad as to not be worth doing.  This means that you run into the problem I mentioned in a previous post: If the goal is to lower an enemy to 0 hitpoints and trip doesn't advance that goal by the same amount as just attacking an enemy, then it is worthless.  So, the only real way to do this is to make sure it does damage AND knocks someone prone.  But that makes it clearly BETTER than a normal attack.  So, you need to give a normal attack some advantage over tripping to make it so tripping doesn't get done every round.  The easiest way in 4e to do this is to make all the powers that trip people encounter or daily powers.So, I submit that Grapple, Disarm, and Sunder are all "excess".  Disarm is better modeled as a finishing move than anything else.</blockquote>

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