TwoSix said:
Yea, but I'm not making it up out of whole cloth here. It's written into the rules.
If you're referring to "page 42," then I'm given to understand that this is a shorthand for setting the DC of skill checks, rather than attack actions. Even if it's not, however, it's still a very inelegant design to have two completely different mechanics to resolve the same action "just because." It's also still dissociated that one use of that action in an "encounter" is somehow more effective than all the other times.
TwoSix said:
They do, and they should stick to trad RPGs.
Trad being "traditional RPG", with all of the characteristics of "associated mechanics", "process first", and "DM Rule 0" that go with it. Contrast with "indie".
They're trying to stick to them, but suddenly the "trad" RPGs are trying to reinvent themselves as some sort of hip new indie game. People tend to feel upset when the rug is yanked out from under them.
TwoSix said:
But they do work that way. That's the point I'm trying to make. I didn't "fix" anything. No Rule 0. Powers give authority to the player to have X happen. Anything else is resolved via player-DM negotiation and use of the skill/attribute system and page 42. Full stop.
See above. That doesn't make it better (nor does it undercut that the intent in the rules is pretty clearly to limit those actions that can be performed, rather than limiting the mechanics by which they're performed with).
TwoSix said:
With the caveat that spells can be restricted to X/day because magic is its own justification.
That's not a caveat - magic
is it's own justification.
TwoSix said:
All games co-opt player's agency. By genre restriction, if nothing else. I don't know of too many RPGs that let you do anything you want, as often as you want. (maybe Chuubo's?)
But not all games co-opt the player's agency
of their character which is the point. The character can try to do anything they want, unless they play 4E.
TwoSix said:
Well, yes, if and only if you expect all powers to be "associated". I'm not suggesting that 4e is "associated". It (rightly) didn't make it a priority. So again, it's only a problem if that's you wanted to be the game to be. It's not inherently problematic, which is the point I'm continuing to make.
Except that it is inherently problematic, because the first time the players try to exercise the character agency that's implicit in the 4E rules, they're going to run into completely artificial restrictions. You can argue that these are "soft" restrictions that are meant to be discouraging, rather than outrightly banning, certain actions, but there's still no in-game justification for why that is. 4E (wrongly) failed to make that a priority, limiting the character's options in the name of "only the
fun options remain," which presumes far too much about what the players think of as being fun.
TwoSix said:
Who says he can't? He might get a crit. He might roll high. Maybe his ally inspires him to fight harder. But you (as a player) don't get to make that happen again.
That last sentence is key - you, the player, are given that agency for your character...and then it's suddenly stripped away for no reason whatsoever.
TwoSix said:
I gain exciting battles with badass fighters with a myriad of special techniques, and inspirational heroes who can get even the wounded to fight on. I'll take that over losing chain trippers and disarmers, thanks.
Except that for everyone else, it's a boring grind fest where they can't use their best attacks more than once for no particular reason - or if they can, then they're suddenly not working so well anymore because...stuff?
TwoSix said:
Come and Get It, the power emeritus of the dissociative discussion. And again, it's not "clear", since I think the action economy is abstract and easy to narrate over. Come and Get It is those few seconds where the fighter realizes three orcs are charging him, and readies his blade for a counterattack.
Again, being able to Rule 0 the problem doesn't mean it's not a problem. He's spending an action, to use a power that apparently only fighters can do (since it's limited to being a class power) and...it's not
really something he's doing? That's not a very good explanation no matter how you slice it.
Balesir said:
Speaking for myself, divorcing hit points from physical wounds increases the space for immersion and plausibility hugely. Hit points in 4E work for me because they relate to exactly what the character I'm playing knows - which is how they feel. The idea that a creature is minutely acquainted with the wounds they have sustained in the middle of a fight seems bizarre to me. In hazardous, punishing and damaging circumstances what you know is how you feel, not what abrasions, lesions and biochemical imbalances you have. 4E hit points, better than any previous D&D version of hit points, give me that.
I'm not sure how you don't get this from hit point loss as physical damage, since a character is presumably going to feel it when they take wounds. The idea that they wouldn't be aware when something damages them, let alone have a sense of how bad the damage is, strikes me as exceptionally odd. When you're in a fight, you're going to know how your wounds feel. 4E, with its insistance that hit point loss could be wounds, or fatigue, or loss of luck, or loss of divine providence, etc. seems to fly in the face of your character knowing how they feel.
balesir said:
P42 allows you to try to "trip" or whatever to your heart's content. It won't be as effective as a power, but that is because you are not working "with the flow".
Presuming that you can use the skill rules for a combat power, there's no reason for it to suddenly be less effective - "working with the flow" doesn't have any meaning regarding why the character's agency is suddenly curtailed.
Balesir said:
What's perhaps more important is that the (abstracted) limitations at least take some account of psychological and circumstantial limitations on the use of skills. If you want a "true" simulation of a creature's resources, they should include limited span and capacity of attention on the surroundings, will to win, capacity to focus and concentrate, biochemical limitations on muscle use and energy conversion, limitations due to emotional balance (or lack thereof) and so it goes on. It sometimes seems to me that the biggest fantasy element that objection to "dissociative" mechanics betokens is that the (player) characters are devoid of all such tedious limitations. How this is believable or even "associative" I really don't know. After all, it's saying that your character can't even attempt to get tired without any really good reason why they cannot...
You're mistaking associated mechanics for some sort of "perfect" simulationism, which has never been what they are. Rather, associated mechanics are those where the metagame nature of the rules has a corresponding equivalent to what's happening in the game world; these are of paramount importance with regards to character actions, because the central nature of playing an RPG is that anything can be attempted. If there are some limitations on what can be attempted, these need to be correspondingly associated, which doesn't require a perfect model of reality down to the finest detail.
Balesir said:
Powers in 4E grant the opportunity to pull a stunt that might result in a defined outcome. Different classes have more or less aptitude at certain types of outcome. The techniques they use to achieve those outcomes will be many and varied, but a fully accomplished fighter - just like a fully accomplished general - should certainly have in her repertoire an array of psychological and deception-based tricks and methods.
Presuming that the stunt in question is purely physical in nature, then you already have that opportunity without requiring any "powers," otherwise the association is lost and you suddenly find yourself not being able to repeat an action for no in-game reason.
Now, when this is associated the problem goes away - higher-level fighters receive multiple attacks because their attack bonus has gone up, which is associated with their martial prowess; they can conserve their economy of actions enough to squeak out another attack in the same amount of time, not because they're moving faster (likewise, that this iterative attack is at a lesser bonus reflects that it's happening as something rushed and therefore with less technique). But being able to use a particular maneuver once, and then only being able to sloppily recreate it later lacks that degree of in-character sense.
Balesir said:
There is always an in-game element. It just may not be defined by the power. I really fail to see why this is a problem; the game is supposed to be one of imagination.
That's not the case where the power places an arbitrary limit on how many times it can be used in a fight (even if you amend this to say "well, you can try it again, but it won't work nearly as well this time because...stuff.").
Balesir said:
Pretty much any action in a combat will rely on a whole bunch of circumstances and resources (as mentioned above). The actions of the opponent are at least as influential in what a fighter does as is their own intent. An attack is almost never simply a matter of "taking a swing" and either connecting or missing; it is a whole sequence of counters and counter-counters partly anticipated and partly done by reflex or fast response. A "power" in this sense is not a specific "move" or "trick" but rather a thorough understanding of combat such that circumstances can be moulded towards a specific outcome. Sometimes this moulding will fail - but sometimes it will succeed. Once per fight (or once per "day") a combination of opportunity, focus, mental balance and determination will give an optimal chance for this outcome to be reached for. The specifics will vary every time, but the result will be of the same character, because it's one of the character's "signature" effects.
This "molding" fails far and away more than it succeeds, to the point where I don't believe it's a viable excuse for the restrictions you're proposing. Saying that miscellaneous circumstances will
always serve to limit a character's agency except for the times when they just so happen to use their powers is highly arbitrary, as much as the GM saying "and now you've stepped on
another pit trap, that's ten in a row!" to prevent you from going down the dungeon corridor he doesn't want you to go down.
balesir said:
In other words, as Neonchameleon has said before, it makes perfect sense from an immersive "fighter's" point of view, if you are prepared to let it.
The problem is that it's only immersive if you accept that arbitrary set of restrictions on your character's agency. If you want to go anywhere that the game doesn't funnel you, then suddenly the entire concept falls apart.
That reasoning is much like running with your eyes closed - there might be one particular path where it'll work just fine, but if you veer off that path just a little you'll slam into an obstacle.
pemerton said:
I'm one of those who find the healing spells, and their labels, nonsensical. I think the same is probably true for many of those who migrated from classic D&D mechanics to systems like Runequest and Rolemaster. Proportionate healing is one of the features of 4e that made it attractive to me.
As I said, I'm one of those who finds those to be a minor problem, right up there with "when's the last time your character actually ate some of his rations?" Up-ending an intuitive system of hit point loss being physical damage to solve one minor issue of proportional healing spells is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
pemerton said:
I am really having a lot of trouble with this.
My fighter PC prays for divine intervention, and the GM tells me that I receive no answer. The GM's reason for doing this is that I'm not a cleric, and the rules say only clerics can wield divine magic. Isn't that a metagame reason.
Not even slightly. For one thing, clerical training is necessarily in-character. More apropos is that praying for divine intervention is not the same as divine spellcasting, and is not governed by the same mechanics (if divine intervention has mechanics at all).
pemerton said:
Or, I declare my PC's attack against an adjacent goblin with my bow - but the goblin gets an OA, so attack first, and hits, and kills me because my PC had only 2 hp left. So my action declaration fails. That's a metagame reason - the reason I died was because of the action economy, which is metagame (the fact that the goblin is always quikcer than my archery is not some inherent property of the gameworld), and because I had only 2 hp left, which is metagame. (In the fiction, how was I different at 2 hp from when I had 10 hp?)
It's not metagame - you made the attempt, and failed. You still got to make the attempt in the first place; you were simply pre-empted before it reached completion. How is that at all similar to the GM answering "you don't have enough hit points to attack, despite being otherwise fully aware and able to act"?
pemerton said:
Of course narrative material can be introduced to support all these outcomes, but that is equally true for an encounter power.
You keep confusing having the ability to
attempt to do anything with actually succeeding in that attempt. It's not a question of being able to hang flavor text off of something - it's a question of having an in-game narrative for why you can or cannot try to do something, regardless of how it turns out.
pemerton said:
And of course the player of a character with encounter powers is free to have his/her PC try whatever s/he wants. It's just that the attempt is likely to be unsuccessful (subject to stunting considerations of the sort that TwoSix and others have mentioned).
Except that you've curtailed their agency by hampering their character's chances for success (which is somehow supposed to be better than denying it outright), and then invented a fig-leaf reason of "no, I don't care what you say, your fighter's mental focus
isn't good enough to try that maneuver with that same level of efficacy again" to justify it.
Quite simply, you're attempting to limit the character's agency without
really having to do so in an attempt to force (or at least coerce) them into taking the "fun" options. That's railroading by another name.
pemerton said:
By Alzrius's standards, attacking is dissociated because a player can't attempt multiple attacks in the same round, for purely metagame reasons.
See above. It's not metagame if there's an in-character association with that limitation, which is the character's awareness of how much they can do in a certain amount of time (which, in this case, is how quickly they can attack).
pemerton said:
Gyagx's AD&D has multiple sets of mechanics for resolving movement - there are the dungeon exploration rules; the engaging in and withdrawing from melee rules; the evasion and pursuit rules (which are themselves different indoors, where movement rates matter, and outdoors, where movement rates mostly don't matter).
You do realize you undercut your own point here, by mentioning that there are in-character circumstances for these, right? That's very different from saying "you suddenly realize you don't have the same focus to repeat the maneuver you just did six seconds ago, at least not with anywhere near the same effectiveness."
pemerton said:
3E has two different mechanics for inflicting hit point loss: damage to hit points, and damage to CON.
That's an outright false equivalence. Damage to your Constitution score affects your hit points as a side-effect; it's not another mechanic for dealing hit point damage.
pemerton said:
Many tables use multiple mechanics for resolving social interactions: CHA or Diplomacy checks; and freeform. Gygax, in his DMG, suggests the suitability of multiple mechanics for discovering secret doors - die rolls, and freeform narration of PC attempts to manipulate elements of their physical environment.
All of which are either up to the player to utilize, or have an in-game reason for why one is used rather than another
without impinging on the character's freedom of agency. Saying that you'll need to use Bluff instead of Diplomacy on a guard is because of how the guard feels, not because suddenly your character lacks the mental focus to be able to try and be diplomatic...and even then, you can try and make a Diplomacy check anyway, if you feel so inclined.
pemerton said:
Almost every D&D table uses at least two different mechanics to handle the passage of ingame time - the tracking of combat rounds in intimate detail; and the hand-waving of time spent resting/waiting for the next mission.
Which is completely irrelevant to the issue of character agency, which raises the question of why you'd bother mentioning this in the first place.
pemerton said:
There are all sorts of reasons for using different mechanics to model different things, from considerations of pacing, to simulation, to distributing agency across different participants in the game. I think all three of the considerations I just mentioned motivate 4e's decision to have multiple mechanical pathways to the same outcome.
None of the reasons you outlined impinge on a player's agency for his character, or at least they don't without a viable in-game reason for why a certain action can't be attempted. None of the ways you mentioned justify 4E's decision to arbitrarily impede a character's ability to attempt to do anything.
pemerton said:
Well, that is what the rules are trying to do - page 42 of the DMG says as much.
See above. This is a very poor excuse that doesn't deal with the heart of the problem.
pemerton said:
Actually a whole page of the DMG is devoted to this, suggesting appropriate DCs and damage ranges. When it comes to imposing conditions, WotC initially left this up to GM intuition, but later published a web column on the topic.
Which doesn't speak to the issue. You're still telling the player that suddenly there character can't do something they just could - saying "well, you can do it, just not as well because you've suddenly become a weak-willed ninny" isn't any better.
pemerton said:
The whole action economy is an "artificial set of restrictions" - it is a product of human artifice, for resolving turns in a game. It does not correspond to anything in the imagined reality of the gameworld.
Utterly false. While the characters don't see the use of turn-based combat in-character, there's still a sense of how much they can act in the course of a round, and whether or not they'll complete an action before someone else can complete their's.
pemerton said:
For me, this is as absurd as the high level fighter having more physical robustness than an ancient dragon, simply because his/her hp total is higher.
The idea that you'd conflate the two as equally impossible to imagine is astounding. Do you have an idea how many seconds it'd take you to move thirty feet and swing a sword? So does your fighter. 'nuff said.
pemerton said:
The idea that the action economy is a reality of the gameworld is just too silly for me to contemplate. It implies that the whole world is a stop-motion one, like the set of a Wallace and Gromit movie. It implies that peasant rail guns are actually possible in the gameworld. It implies that initiative, and the boundary between rounds, is a measurable natural phenomenon as opposed to part of the real-world rationing devices used to make the game play work.
The idea that you can't judge how long it'd take you to perform a task, and how fast you're accomplishing it compared to the people around you, is too foolish to be taken at all seriously. It would require not only an unintuitive break from the world as we understand it now, but an inability to equate even the most self-evident comparisons between the real world and the game world that the game asks you to make.
pemerton said:
Night and day are natural realities. The seasons are a natural reality. The six-second interval by which we measure the passage of time in combat, however, is mere artifice. It's a device. The characters in the gameworld have no conception of it. As TwoSix says, they just act.
The structure of the round is artifice, but it's used as a measurement for the passage of time of which the characters are entirely aware. Your fighter knows that in the time it takes him to move twenty or thirty feet and swing his sword is roughly the same amount of time that it'll take the orcs to each do the same thing, for the wizard to cast a spell, etc. Your idea that somehow nobody knows how long it's going to take to do anything at all is something that can't be taken seriously.
