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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Felon" data-source="post: 4478629" data-attributes="member: 8158">Here's the net result: in 4e you can grab a swarm and you can shove a ghost with a physical attack. To go with this approach you're proposing, every power that shouldn't work on incorporeal targets would have to include a caveat "doesn't work on incorporeal" along with a list of other things it doesn't work on. That's cumbersome design, since it's a lot easier just to say it once. More to the point, they didn't do it at all. Not top-down, not bottom-up. Wherever that exemption for tripping Casper ought to have been made, it wasn't. Conversely, the rules for the grab maneuver don't allow for things you and I could do to a person without the benefit of martial powers, much less heroes. I'll try. Characters have a smattering of powers, and they're pretty much stuck with their choices until they can level and respec. If I throw an amorphous/incorporeal foe at them and then put my foot down and declare that it can't be knocked prone or slid around, or tell them that they can't use a sleep spell on a zombie, then I'm not really making them innovate new tactics. Anything they do that isn't using one of their powers isn't going to be very effective, and they can't just get new powers on the fly. All I'm basically doing is stepping in and vetoing 4e's implicit promise that the small repertoire of powers at a hero's disposal will be reliable because monsters powers work on everything equally well, whether biped, quadruped, big, small, alive, dead, solid, liquid, gas or ether. That's working against the grain. In 4e, homogeneity is a feature, not a bug.</blockquote>

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