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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5737011" data-attributes="member: 82106">Personally I would prefer to see attacks relegated entirely to either standard actions or some sort of OA/interrupt mechanism. I don't know of anything good that ever came out of minor action attacks. The few cases where it works OK like dragonborn's breath can either just be a free action on your turn or in a few cases might be best as an 'OA'. In fact one might even question if db breath even needs an 'on your turn' restriction, though it probably does keep things simpler. The goal is to minimize the number of special cases and such. I think anything that is an attack that can happen as a free action can simply state "only on your turn" if that's appropriate. I don't see it as a problem. In fact I think it is a tactical opportunity kind of thing. There's nothing unrealistic about it, and in point of fact plenty of characters can accomplish it anyway with various items or powers right now. It would CHANGE tactics slightly, but so what? As long as the tactics are engaging and fun it doesn't matter exactly what the details are if they're within the acceptable range of what will seem sensible to players. I think the actual implementation could be done a couple different ways, that would certainly be amongst the things to figure out in development. Again I think the important consideration is to eliminate and consolidate existing rules. Another goal is to cut back on the flood of out-of-turn action taking without removing it from the game. It is also of course always possible for a specific game element to use 'free action with some use limit' to specifically add a new capability. It should be quite rare and thus not really something that requires a general rule. One more consideration here is that developers tend to look at the 'list of goodies' they have available and use them, and then use them some more, and then even more, until they're overused. You can see this with the ranger, where a character having ONE minor and/or immediate action attack power isn't too big a deal, but the developers had that tool in their arsenal and just kept pumping them out. No one individual power of that sort is bad, but the net result is preposterous where your average knowledgeable player running an archer ranger can set up a character that can unleash 8-10 attacks in round 1 trivially at high heroic. Given that supplements WILL be added to the game the better approach is not to even have that avenue open as a standard part of the rules. Then if a developer REALLY still wants to do it they have to spell it out in the power, which at least makes it very plain that they're doing something extraordinary.Yeah, again there are probably various ways to actually accomplish the simplification, and I don't even know that all my ideas would make the cut. You could be right, and there IS some distinction between the two rules that was clearly intended to provide answers to different situations (IE being set with weapon ready to unleash an attack vs a character simply needing to wait because of the turn structure).Right. I think in a lot of these cases what you'll find is that things matter because they exist and people have designed within that framework, but that if you go back to clean slate and look at it from the high level perspective of the whole combat system in a lot of cases an entire feature of the rules could go away and its function can be taken up by other elements, possibly with a bit of generalization or restriction. The result can be slightly different but overall it is 6 of one and half-a-dozen of another. Gritty things like encumbrance, weapon drawing mechanics, etc could simply be optional rules I suspect. Or you have the general and very high level rule like the existing one and if someone wants to make formal rules for detailed encumbrance it can be optional.</blockquote>

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