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Message: <blockquote data-quote="robertliguori" data-source="post: 4161817" data-attributes="member: 47776">I cheerfully await the possibility of an exotic weapon talent tree, which gathers all of the nifty things we've seen monsters do with nonstandard weapons in one place, and gives rules for how to access the talents and what this access represents in-game (I.e.: whether the talents represent simple training and practice, or are themselves fueled by the martial power source).I'm just worried about things like trip being an encounter power.  This does not jive with the above design pattern.  We see monsters performing powerful, useful maneuvers with harpoons, garottes, and the like, and nothing about these maneuvers being encounter powers.  It may well be that trip is just different than what we've seen, there is a pile of exotic martial powers, and trip appears as an encounter and harpooning and garotting are both at-will.  This is the only real way to reconcile what we've seen statted with the ability of monsters to perform certain tricks.I would disagree.  To me, the fun comes from putting together a world out of discrete, understood elements, combining the elements in interesting ways, and watching the players respond in kind.  I like a ruleset well-designed enough to be turned up to eleven, that can handle extreme creativity and being pushed to the limits of its well-defined boundaries and still produce comprehensible results.  Most of all, I like a ruleset which doesn't produce suboptimal results when the results of it are observed and analysis applied.  For example, the design we've seen so far in 4.0 suggests that setting up a dungeon with individual, discrete encounters is a horrible strategy to defend against adventurers, and that a much better strategy would be to provide a warning system, so that when adventurers were discovered, every minion in the dungeon could rush in, denying the all-important five-minute recovery period.Really, my problem is that fun is often the opposite of smart.  The ideal tactic, which should be chosen by PCs and NPCs alike, is often one that results in trivial encounters, or no encounters at all.  I like rule systems that get around this by having both sides be a bit desperate, so that the fun game elements can be more easily lampshaded.  I might design a dungeon to provide appropriate, interesting encounters, but I need an in-game reason why the makers of the dungeon didn't put brutally effective ones instead.  Generally, resource economy and solving a different problem are my watchwords.  Dungeons are primarily built to delay armies; when you're three weeks away from performing the Ritual of the Falling Sky, you retreat to a dungeon, load up on minions, and hope your defenses against the Alliance of Light hold.  Meanwhile, the Alliance, knowing that a direct assault not only has a large chance of failure to succeed before the ritual will be complete but will devastate their armies and leave them vulnerable, instead send five to go where five thousand may not.The corollary of this, of course, is that later on, when the party faces a dangerously genre-savvy dungeoneer who builds a fortress utterly unassailable to an adventuring party, returns to the Alliance and says "We'd like to borrow a company or two.  We'll give them back when they're done."Pure intellectual tactical puzzles are interesting, as is the visceral thrill of slaying evil and claiming its loot.  But, to my mind, games are superior when they combine complex tactical challenges, action and adventure, and a world consistent within its explicitly-stated premises with potential for unexpected and interesting emergent behavior.  I'm most definitely in favor of the changes we've seen in 4E that increase the first two; I simply disagree that you need to sacrifice the third in order to acheive them.</blockquote>

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