Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="mneme" data-source="post: 5705703" data-attributes="member: 59248">Doesn't even have to be positive things.  I was getting ragged about my 1st level 3.5 rogue falling out of a tree for well over the next two years; that kind of experience crosses editions, and people remember the unusual things.Big numbers do have a lot of appeal; when someone manages to hit those numbers, particularly at a level where they're unusual, they will leave an impact.  But the substantial impact is story level; "remember when bob rolled two crits in a row?" will certainly stick as a gambler story; "remember when fred rolled two crits in a row just when he needed to" even more, but to some degree it will be remembered as "remember when fred took the displacer from damaged to dead in two hits?"Different roles/classes -do- have different things they do that will get remembered, and dramatic necessity matters a lot.  I mean, if the wizard basically owns an encounter by dropping Visions of Avarice and the party escapes without a scratch, that will probably not be remembered.  But if the monster shows up, bloodies half the party on its first action, and -then- the wizard owns with with VoI, well, -that- will be remembered; it's just gone from "not much of an enounter" to "omg, the wizard just saved our bacon".  Similarly, I remember (and it's not hard to set up in 4e in essence, though the details would change)  the time when, playing 3.5, the party was facing off against a solo -- the "snow queen", and her army of frost wolves.  The 3rd level wizard made her caster level check to read a scroll of wall of fire -- and dropped it across half the throne room, isolating the party, the queen, and a couple of the wolves from the rest of the wolves; the party then managed (barely) to defeat the queen before the wolves were able to rejoin the battle (and once the queen was gone, the battle was over, as this was the classic "evil snow queen is stopping the seasons from changing" setup).  What do we remember from it?  Not my wizard/rogue tumbling over the queen's head and shocking grasping her from the back (though that was awesome) -- but that wall of fire, that turned an impossible fight into a suddenly possible one.In the end, it's all about two things (if you're talking memorability):1. Is it unusual?  Even if it's awesome, if you do it every day, or worse, every fight, nobody cares.  The avenger who starts every fight with tempus/oath/charge?  Sure, It'll do a lot of damage, but nobody will care unless he crits (and even then, probably not so much if he's using Dice of Cheese to do so).  But double-crits, or enemies getting pushed into traps, or clever uses of attacks that suddenly change the battlefield -and- do a lot of damage will start to hit.2. Do we care?  This is more about dramatic timing; if the party hasn't learned to fear the enemy, they're not really going to care if you knock the enemy's kneecaps out.  This is true for any role; whether it's strikers killing, controllers or defenders nullifying, or healers reversing, or battle healers inspiring.</blockquote>

Verification