How Does "The Rules Aren't Physics" Fix Anything?

[Storm-Bringer]

No kidding, considering I'm talking about Fourth Edition, as you were considering the specific problem of yours I was addressing was "why can I heal my NPC ally all day but not raise him?" Which is a decidedly 4E mechanic, because in 3.x you can raise anybody as long as they want to come back.

How is that different, mechanically, than 4e? I was referring to the difference. In 3.x, any character can be raised unless the DM decides otherwise, and you are saying that in 4e, any character that the DM decides can be raised. I am pretty sure that 'as long as they want to come back' is one of the fluff elements in 4e also. So, you used 4e fluff, but you exactly described how things work in 3.x now.

How is that different, let alone improved?

 

[Cadfan]

So, an Ancient Dragon should have roughly the same chance to grapple as a Kobold?

Was this question asked in good faith?

Kobold: CR 1/4, Str 9, BAB +1, Size Small, Grapple -4 as a result

Ancient Red Dragon: CR 23, Str 39, BAB 34, Size Gargantuan, Grapple +60 as a result

Take away the size modifiers, and you get

Kobold Grapple: +0
Ancient Red Dragon Grapple: +48

0 does not equal 48.

Let me restate the matter clearly. Many high level monsters in 3e grapple, because a huge monster that picks up your PC and bashes him into the floor is kind of cool. Your primary defenses against having this happen to you are, first, your touch AC, second, your grapple check, third, your escape artist check if applicable, and fourth, teleportation, freedom of action, and other magical countermeasures. The problem is that three out of four of these things are worthless.

Your touch AC isn't going to help you. You must have an awful lot of confidence in your touch AC if you think that a high level grappling monster will be swayed by it in the slightest. This is especially true for characters like Fighters. Perhaps the 4e math will change this a bit, but that's how it was in 3e.

Your grapple check won't help you either. Your 3e grapple check scales at the same rate as your BAB and your Strength, but, the monster's grapple check scales at the same rate, plus more. What does the monster get that you don't? First, your overall attack bonus is calibrated as if you had relevant magical weaponry, and for normal attacks is calibrated against the monster's overall bonus. However, when you start grappling, you don't get to use your shiny magical sword. You lose an advantage that was necessary to keep you even, and the monster doesn't. Then, the monster usually gets a size modifier that you do not receive. Now you're behind by, usually, over 10 points. And in an opposed check, that's an enormous difference in odds. Feats really won't help you, either, as the difference is simply too vast. After all, even a level 20 fighter with a strength of 30 is looking at a grapple check of a whopping +30. That's useless against even a CR 12 purple worm, with its grapple of +40.

Escape Artist won't help you either, for the same reasons, except that you had to pay skill points to suck at escape artist, and you get to suck at defensive grappling for free.

That leaves magical countermeasures. These tend to work automatically, with no chance of failure. That's... kind of lame.

So grappling is being reworked. One of the problems, size modifiers to grapple, is being axed. This is probably a good thing, as 1) it helps the overall situation, and 2) kobolds clinging to your legs and biting you is kind of cool.

And no, this doesn't mean that a kobold gets to grapple just as well as an ancient dragon. Unless its a kobold with 23 character class levels in a martial class, and an elite ability score array, in which case it might get close. I don't know why you thought otherwise, but consider the matter settled.

 

[Rex Blunder]

You are stringing two different points together as though they are related, then claiming confusion. I would say that is disingenuous.

No, not disingenuous. I genuinely don't understand what you're saying.

I understand your point 2, "raise dead has not changed one whit". No problem there. But I don't understand your point 1 at all:

"The first point is, why is healing different than raise dead for NPCs?"
How is healing different from raise dead for NPCs? Is this difference unique to 4e?

"Can I apply successive healing spells to an NPC to bring them back up to full hit points?"
Yes, up to the limit of their healing surges, just like PCs, according to Chris Sims. So, that's not where your criticism of 4e lies.

"Does it work when they are at zero? Or negatives?"
These are questions we haven't been told the answer to. However, I seem to remember a developer saying that the DM can just declare that all the dropped enemies are dead, so you don't have to go around the battlefield slitting throats after the battle. So this is an area where you may have a point that PCs will be explicitly treated differently than NPCs.

"Does the DM let the entire mission fail because the NPC dies without an 'epic destiny' to allow them to be raised? Or does mission failure count as a 'destiny' for that NPC?"
I am sure that the intent is that the DM can choose to allow this NPC to be raised, if it allows the PC's mission to continue. However, if it makes things more interesting, the DM can mandate that the NPC stay dead. As you say, no different from 3e. So, this is not where your criticism of 4e lies.

"More importantly, how is that different than how it was handled in 3.x? I hear all kinds of people talking about how NPCs can be raised by high level clerics, but no talk of DMs simply saying "No, they can't be raised". I didn't seem to have a problem with NPCs getting raised behind my back when I was DMing."
Agreed. You maintain that 4e raise is no different from 3e raise dead - it's up to the DM. So this is not where your criticism of 4e lies.

I hope you'll understand my confusion and excuse me from the charge of being disingenuous. It seems to me that you are criticizing 4e, but I can't find any specific charges you level at it - except that it's unclear whether NPCs participate in the "dying" rules. Is that your problem with 4e?

NOTE: I just noticed that you clarified that the heart of your problem with 4e was my wilful misinterpretation. OK, fair enough. I'm not bundled with the 4e rulebooks*, though, so your dislike of me shouldn't affect your enjoyment of the game.

*I do, however, come with DDI, via the Virtual Rex Table!

 

[Kordeth]

How is that different, mechanically, than 4e? I was referring to the difference. In 3.x, any character can be raised unless the DM decides otherwise, and you are saying that in 4e, any character that the DM decides can be raised. I am pretty sure that 'as long as they want to come back' is one of the fluff elements in 4e also. So, you used 4e fluff, but you exactly described how things work in 3.x now.

How is that different, let alone improved?

Are you talking about in-game or out of game? Out of game there is no difference--it's the DM's call. In-game, though, the rationale behind why it's DM Fiat has been improved.

There is one condition on raise dead in 3.x (barring the specific rules-related issues, of course): the target must be willing to return. This can create problems if the DM doesn't want a character to come back, but the character should be willing. The obvious example is the benevolent king who gets assassinated by his wicked cousin who usurps the throne. Why wouldn't the king be willing to come back to relieve his people's suffering? Sure, you can say the afterlife is so wonderful most people just don't want to come back, but that can feel like a betrayal of the character.

In 4E, it doesn't matter whether the character wants to come back or not (well, it might, but it's the secondary condition): If the Raven Queen/Kelemvor/Other God of Death doesn't allow you to come back, you're not coming back--at least, not with the raise dead ritual. It's still DM Fiat, but it's DM Fiat that can be more easily explained by characters in the world than "Good King Daxall doesn't love us anymore."

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

I am going to address these bullets here:

- Poison doing ability damage causes poisons to be much more dangerous than they need to be.
As opposed to poisons that arent' very dangerous at all? I mean, of the poisonous substances in the world, a good many of them are simply lethal. No saving throw. Certain spider poison will cause necrosis of tissues for months or years after the initial bite.

Sword Chucks and Arrows in your chest are also very lethal. Many people used to die to this when such weapons where still commonly applied. And then there was tetanus and similar unfriendly things that could kill or debilitate you even if you were just wounded, not killed.
But that doesn't mean it's a good idea to use such stuff in a game where you do combat more then the few times regular humans do or did it...

- Grappling giving a size bonus meant that large creatures would nearly always succeed on grapple checks since they would also have very high strength values and a CR appropriate Bab.
So, an Ancient Dragon should have roughly the same chance to grapple as a Kobold?

As an extreme opinion: Why not? In turn, he deals a lot more damage, and can fling grappled targets around? And even if his chance is better, does it need to become auto-success? Why aren't his normal attacks auto-success? I mean, if he'd jump on a heavy armored Fighte,r that guy could move the required distance to evade the attack?

- Ability bonuses being tied into so many different things that changing a score via a buff or a poison / ability drain would require a bunch of recalculation.
Only when you used them. I understand 4e has a crapload of overlapping auras and such that need to be adjusted and re-calculated during combat. Much higher handle time.

I'd say that's plain wrong. A +2 bonus to attacks is a +2 bonus to attacks. It might change from round to round, but it's only a single change. But a +4 enhancement bonus to Constitution means +2hp/level more hit points, a +2 to your fortitude save, and a +2 bonus to your Concentration Checks. But wait, didn't you already have another +2 enhancement bonus item that you already calculated in? Oh, and then you did get 1d10+Con temporary hit points from Heroes Feast. Did you remember that?

- Monsters playing by exactly the same rules would often result in more book keeping than would be ideal.
DMs who are forced at gunpoint to stat out every goblin child in the game world will be faced with a great deal of bookkeeping. DMs who wisely stat out major NPCs only will not have a substantial task ahead of them.

Such DM brains are doomed to explode. But what is with DMs that just like to run a 10th level group against a Yuan-Ti Temple. Did you consider how many stats you have to create just to have enough Yuan-Ti in the apporpriate level range, without every encounter being a rehash? Considered how much effort it is to stat-up the Yuan-Ti High Priest alone?

- Monsters getting abilities that make sense flavor wise but are meaningless in actual game play.
Such as?

Spell-Like abilities of considerably lower level then typical for the CR. Or spell-like abilities plainly inferior to any other options. Dragons with full sorceror spell-casting that was usually inferior to their regular attack routine. (But at least two buffs could totally break them - Mage Armor & Shield)

- A skill system that guaranteed it would be impossible to have a skill based challenge that would be reasonable for everyone in the party to have to attempt.
How is that bad? Is Rope Use really applicable when negotiating with a sphinx? Will Diplomacy really help you detect a trap better?

Why is Use Rope a skill at all? How many situations do you need it, compared to, say, Spot or Diplomacy? What are the in-game effects of a typical Use Rope skill compared to that of a typical Spot or Diplomacy check? How do I even know what DCs are appropriate for a party (without becoming to difficult or becoming a unintented cake-walk). I can use CR to eyeball monster encounters. Why isn't there anything that allows me to do the same for skills?

- The implementation of Disarm / Sunder / BullRush essentially being crappy.
In your estimation. Much like Grapple, some have problems, others don't.

Oh, the mechanics do what they are intented to do. But they are usually so much inferior to regular types of attacks, why bother?

 

[Xyl]

Now, it might be that the flavor of a Con-18 dwarf shrugging off a blow with his 30 hp is much different than the flavor of a highly-leveled 30-hp Con 10 nimble elf doing the same. It is almost certain that the fluff of a 30-hp door experiencing the same hit will be different than both. But if the rules are physics, then despite the difference in fluff, you will need to apply about the same amount of violence to each in order to break it.

HP make a lot more sense when you think of them as a way of determining how many rounds a PC will last against a set of opponents. The 30 hp dwarf can take more physical punishment than the 30 hp elf, but the elf is better at dodging and lessening the effects of blows, so they both last about the same amount of time against the same angry orc (if you control for AC).

 

[Storm-Bringer]

You can keep on healing them until they run out of healing surges. Just like a PC.

As always, that's up to the DM.

So, no real changes to either, then. Meaning that NPCs sometimes play by the same rules as PCs, but sometimes not. Which means, internal consistency is rather compromised.

No one outside NDA knows just how raise dead is described to work in 4E. Keith Baker leaked a bit about needing a destiny to be raised but later said that 'destiny' was his word and not necessarily in the rules at all.

But, it still describes the philosophy. PCs only. Unless the DM says otherwise. Which is not a change at all. Everyone seemed to breathe a sigh of relief because those pesky NPCs aren't getting raised all over the place now. Except, they weren't before either, unless the DM allowed it.

The rules may be as simple as saying that nobody below Paragon tier can be raised without direct divine intervention. It fits the available data reasonably well. (Supposedly, when Heroic tier PCs die, the typical response is to roll a new character, whereas Paragon tier characters can be resurrected with the expenditure of monumental effort, and Epic tier characters see death as a "speed bump". Since the vast majority of NPCs wouldn't make it to Paragon tier, and even those that did would still need some pretty major work done to resurrect them, most NPCs just won't get raised, even if they technically could be).

Which is more or less precisely how it works now. Access to a high level cleric and 5-10 thousand in diamonds isn't exactly a common graduation gift for first level adventurers in any previous edition. Until 'Paragon Tier' in previous versions, it was pretty difficult to get raised also.

 

[Spatula]

Let me restate the matter clearly. Many high level monsters in 3e grapple, because a huge monster that picks up your PC and bashes him into the floor is kind of cool. Your primary defenses against having this happen to you are, first, your touch AC,

While the larger point of high-level monsters being impossible to beat in a grapple is mostly true (there are a few feats for fighter-types that enable them to hold their own), it should be noted that grappling monsters are not targetting your touch AC. They have to hit your real AC, which is much easier to pump up. They also have to know where you are, which makes concealment effects (blur, displacement, or blink/darkness/cloud spells if you don't mind giving the monster concealment too) yet another defense against getting eaten.

 

[Umbran]

if the rules give a clear model of how events are be judged in the rules I don't care if its a physical model or not

Hr. I was using a particular well-known physical model as an example, but this has nothing to do with requiring game-rules to be physical models. Let me try it another way...

The complaint I was responding to was about how the rules don't really cover everything, and the question was how "the rules aren't physics" somehow excuses that.

My point is that it doesn't - even in the real world, it is understood that the "rules of physics" as we understand them, have holes, edge cases, and things that otherwise don't behave as intuition or logic tells you they would. Ergo, the rules having holes is just like physics.

 

[billd91]

- Poison doing ability damage causes poisons to be much more dangerous than they need to be.

Poison was dangerous because it ruined your character in no time, It was TOO dangerous, a simple poison witch does 1 to 3 con damage were realy dangerous, a little less danger would be a good thing, not no danger at all, but now that poison does damage AND can have carier efects i think we can have the better of the two worlds.

Poison doesn't "ruin" any character in 3E. It temporarily debilitates them, which is far less dangerous than outright killing them if they blow the save. Plus, there are more spells that can fix the problem than there were in previous editions including Lesser Restoration and Restoration.
In my opinion, the shift in poisons in 3E is, I think, one of the most welcome changes they made.

- Mounted combat that leads to a 'kill the horse' strategy always being the best.


but the only problem its that make the battle boring, you have a cheap shot, a charge, and thats it the players kill the mount, and the knight is toast because every single one of his abilities are about making him a beter knight. This is a case where playability trumps reality!

Then the knight shouldn't be built so that "every single one of his abilities" is based on being on a horse. I have a player in my game who has maxed out her mounted abilities and she still kicks ass and chews plenty of bubblegum on foot. She just kicks more ass on the horse because her charges are better.

If we get into the playability vs reality debate too much, what's the dividing line between appropriately playable and just plain dumb? If the knight is really effective on his horse and is relatively neutralized without it, then the smart tactic is to deprive him of his horse by any means necessary. But if the knight whines about losing his horse too much, then what's to stop other players from whining about any tactic that neutralizes their powers? Do the rules then have to remove the ability to grapple with spellcasters? Remove the possibility of setting up anti-magic zones? Remove the possibility of energy resistant defenses because that would neutralize my fire-specializing wizard?

Does the penalty have to shift to the side defending against the cool powers and builds by making them unmootable rather than hitting the side that overspecialized in their cool powers and tactics?