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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5632448" data-attributes="member: 42582">I agree with this.In the recent thread on kobold's Shifty power, <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/5610774-post105.html" target="_blank">I suggested</a> that the pact hag rather than the kobold offered a better starting point for those who want to argue that 4e's powers can't be given meaning within the fiction. Here is the flavour-text-to-stat-block comparison for a pact hag (MM3 pp 108-9):Many come in search of the power, knowledge, and rituals the [pact] hag possesses. However, such things come at a price, which is named in the pacts the hag forges. *Pact of Obedience (Aura 5): Any ally within the aura that misses with a melee attack can take 5 damage to gain a +2 power bonus to the attack roll. *Compelling Staff (charm, weapon) . . . 1d6 + 5 damage, and the target makes a melee basic attack as a free action against a creature of the hag's choice. *Pact of Choked Agression (charm, psychic) . . . The target is affected by a pact of choked aggression until the end of the encounter or until the hag or one of its allies attacks the target. While affected by the pact, the target takes 10 psychic damage the first time it hits a creature during each of its turns. *Pact of Shared Agony (psychic) . . . Until the end of the encounter, while the target is within 10 squares of the hag, the target takes 10 psychic damage whenever the hag takes damage.Whereas I find Trick Strike pretty straightforward (at least until used with a shuriken against an ooze - but that's the sort of corner case that can generally be handled when it comes up - one reason not to worry too much in advance is you won't know what your narrative resources are until the scene is actually being resolved), these are much more opaque.When I used a pact hag in my game, I did have a bit of a think in advance about how I wanted to run it's pacts - I decided to run them as spoken words of compulsion. I foreshadowed this by having the pact hag speak such words during a skill challenge - mechanically, this was the consequence of a failed skill check by the player of the fighter, and fictionally it involved the hag telling the fighter PC to move to a different place in the room, which he did: I spoke the instruction in character (as the NPC hag) and then, out of character, told the player of the fighter where he moved to (and that he had no choice). (Of course, not long after this, the hag pulled the lever dropping the fighter down into the spider-filled caverns below . . .)Of course, for a GM who isn't sure how to run a pact hag, there is a simple answer: don't use one. It would be tricker if a player chose to take a Mars Attacks (or similar) power but wasn't prepared to help with any heavy lifting that might be required. And a player who wants to play immersively is probably well advised to choose powers that, if they have metagame elements, don't require a lot of active metagaming to make them work (the paladin at-will Valiant strike would be one example, the fighter's daily Brute Strike another).I personally would be a bit annoyed if a player both chose to build a fighter with Come and Get It, and then complained every time that s/he used the power that it was ruining her suspension of disbelief! There are plenty of other 7th level fighter powers, after all.</blockquote>

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