Martial Dailies - How so?

[GnomeWorks]

Basically, if you're taking a simulationist tack to 4E, then accept that 4E does not support martial power as skill, training, or talent; it is as unnatural as turning undead with a holy symbol or burning them with eldritch fire.

I guess I may have been missing the forest for the trees, here. I'll admit that I have gotten a bit hung up on the terminology used - calling the power source "martial" brings to mind skill and nothing more. No mojo, no supernatural-ness.

In whatever game I will be playing, anything called "martial" will rely upon nothing but awesome skill. I am aware that 4e may not have this interpretation, but I don't particularly care - I'll play the game how I want. If sense can be made out of martial abilities being daily and such, without breaking my interpretation of the martial power source, then neat! If not, then I won't use them. It really is as simple as that.

Play your game however you want. You can't believe in once a day martial abilities? Oh well thats your problem. It makes sence to an entire multi-million dollar company, I'm going to go with the people who are probably smarter than all of us here.

Wow. Just... wow.

Yes, it is my problem, and I'm fine with that. 4e's designers do seem to know what they're doing, I'll grant you that - the at-will / encounter / daily power paradigm is a pretty darn good one. However, they are not gearing the game towards my style of play - they do not have the same priorities I do, which is fine.

However, I'm not going to accept their ideas just because they're backed by a large company. Sometimes two guys in a garage can have great ideas, too, you know.

Basic economics is not something open to change. Supply/Demand is actually an unalterable rule.

3e "economics" /spit was utterly, utterly broken.

Yep, and I don't know if 4e will change it. I imagine not; while the economic system was stupendously stupid in 3e, if you followed the wealth guidelines, it did its job. The economy was meant, I think, as a gamist balancing tool.

I don't think that currency should be used as a balancing factor, and that's not just as a simulationist: balancing game mechanics by using currency just seems like poor design, IMO. It works, sure, but it's clunky. Admittedly other and IMO better solutions require more work, but it's worth the effort, because I like simulationism.

My humorous summary of the thread so far...

Well, I suppose I should be glad that people aren't taking things way too seriously around here, for once, eh? I don't see if that way, but if the argument amuses you, so be it.

Frankly, I don't think you'll be able to find an answer here. This topic has gone through 7 pages and about 200 posts and there hasn't been an answer that satisfied you yet Gnomeworks.

Actually, yes, there has: here. I'm totally fine with that explanation, and it works for me.

 

[pemerton]

Everyone tells a story. Some lay it out ahead of time (traditional narrativism) while others allow the story to develop tabula rasa (without outside interference).

I'm not sure what you mean by "traditional narrativism", but in narrativist play as the Forge uses that term, the story is not laid out ahead of time (this would be railroading), and nor is it developed without outside interference (this would be ouija-board roleplaying). Rather, it is deliberately brought into being by the players during the course of actual play.

With the attempts at explaining things taken that far already, everyone is making an effort to serve the rules, rather than let the rule serve ourselves...

On the contrary, the 4e rules seemed to be written first and foremost to serve (at least a certain proportion of) us, by delivering a satisfying play experience without sacrificing that play to simulationist priorities.

 

[Li Shenron]

On the contrary, the 4e rules seemed to be written first and foremost to serve (at least a certain proportion of) us, by delivering a satisfying play experience without sacrificing that play to simulationist priorities.

Just as much as I could say it has sacrificed believability to deliver a satisfying gamist-oriented experience.

 

[LostSoul]

Just as much as I could say it has sacrificed believability to deliver a satisfying gamist-oriented experience.

I'm not so sure it has sacrificed believability. I think it has moved away from the "game rules are the world's physics" idea, but I don't think that has much to do with how believable the actual fiction is.

 

[SteveC]

Interesting thread. This is definitely a reason that I like 4E, as it's bringing it more in line with fiction and movies. If you don't like that sort of thing, I imagine that 3X or GURPS or another system will be more to your liking.

If you watch a film like Lord of the Rings, or most action movies, the heroes do some amazing things ... they're stylistically interesting, and devastatingly powerful. They usually are also punctuated with the characters' witty catch phrase.

Typically these abilities only happen once in an entire story or movie, and they only happen at the most dramatically appropriate and necessary moment. That happens because it makes for the best story. Chuck Norris only uses his signature kick against the boss at the right moment, after all. For an example of the "splitting the tree power," see the end of Die Hard where Bruce Willis only has two bullets left to kill two bad guys ... and does it with style.

So a Martial Daily power works a lot like that, except that it serves the player, rather than the need of the story. As a player you can try your best to make the game the most interesting you can, or you can simply use your powers right away, hoping that you'll more efficiently get through the adventure ... it's all up to you.

What you won't get to do is use your Super Mega Attack all the time. Why? Because it would, by necessity, no longer be either Super or Mega.

If that makes no sense to you, I suggest that 4E might not be the game for you, and also that there's nothing wrong with that: 2E wasn't the game for me, but I came back when the game came back to me.

--Steve

 

[I'm A Banana]

The problem I think you're having is you can't quite see this game as the STORY its supposed to be. The reason you can't do your "Super special awesome mega attack" to every single bad guy is because it's supposed to be climatic.

That's a pretty amazingly lame way to put it. If D&D is supposed to be a story, why does it matter if halflings are 3/4ths the size of people (in 4e) or 1/2 the size of people (in 3e)? Certainly, the narrative force of the game is more important than simulating a pseudo-realistic height for a creature with human-like strength, right?

D&D has always, and will continue to, make nods like that. "It's supposed to be a story!" is a defense, but it's not one that works all that well for this, because D&D in many ways is not a storytelling game. It has been a role-playing game, and a resource-management game, and a dungeon survival game, but the storytelling has, for the last 30 years, been something that happened organically, not deliberately. D&D hasn't told you to set up plot points or climaxes or boss monsters or character arcs, D&D hasn't tought you the basis of character development or Checkov's Gun, of fantasy metaphysics as physics, or of speculative symbolism. Novels and movies based on D&D have cheerfully, and, presumably with the blessings of those who control the game, subverted the rules for narrative purpose, because the rules weren't there to tell a story.

Now, also for those 30 years, storytelling has happened alongside D&D, and it's been a big shame that it hasn't been more supported, though I doubt it will ever be a focus of the game. 4e comes along and is giving us more storytelling game devices -- solo monsters, for instance, that can serve as boss monsters. Perhaps we'll see more talk about episodic structure and pacing in the DMG, too, which would be even more of a nod.

D&D is not supposed to be a story, any more than it is supposed to be a realistic model of medieval warfare. But swords are swung and plots are resolved nonetheless.

The story of a game has never been a trump card in D&D so far, and there's no quote from 4e that says it now is. So "because it makes a bad story!" is a fine example of a good excuse for something in a home game (where a more intense focus on story is all part of making the game your own), but it's a tremendously limp excuse for the core D&D rulebooks (which, so far, hasn't ever had to use that excuse to make for some fun games).

What HAS been a trump card, and what I suspect is closer to the actual reason, is game play. Namely, the idea of having a powerful uber-attack that you can unleash is fun, and having to save that attack or limit that attack is part of that fun, because using it over and over again would make things too easy and be tremendously boring for both sides.

For what it's worth, I think the logic given in the thread is pretty good, and I can rationalize martial dailies with all of them at different points -- a combination of your skill in being able to notice the opportunity for a tremendous attack, and the luck of that opportunity presenting itself, and the effort you have to put into it, all can explain away most daily martial powers for me, just as a tremendous effort can explain away most encounter martial powers.

However, I do think there will be some exceptions, like the "trip being an encounter power" thing, that don't fit that rationalization very well. Not really sure how those are going to go until I see the whole game, myself.

 

[JohnSnow]

I think the real problem is that people always bring up the gamist/narrativist/simulationist garbage as a way of disparaging either the game or someone else's playstyle.

If you regard yourself as a simulationist, you have to either decide how the martial daily powers work. They're in the game for gamist (i.e. balance) reasons. If you want player decisions to be character decisions, then the rationale that they're based on some external power source, like magic or mojo, works fine. If you want them to be based purely in skill and luck, you have to invent a rationale that works - for some reason, martial daily powers can only be used once a day.

A pure so-called "narrativist" has no problem with the "for the good of the story" argument.

Someone who doesn't mind anime has no problem with the "martial magic" explanation.

Drawing a distinciton between a "player decision" and a "character decision" works if you prefer a more "realistic" explanation for how the powers work.

If you want a "realistic explanation" (style preference) for a gamist element (daily martial powers), you can use either a gamist (it just is), narrativist (for the good of the story), or various combination (wuxia magic, occurrence of rare circumstances determined for character by his player) explanations. All of them work perfectly well for different people. Personally, I don't like "it just is" and "wuxia magic" so I adopt a combination of 'rare occurence determined by player' and 'for the good of the story.' As a martial artist and swordfighter, I can accept that your best moves are hard to execute reliably. As someone who likes to use D&D to emulate my favorite fiction, I can accept that, for dramatic purposes, certain things shouldn't happen all the time. This is the rationalization that works for me (and for Ari, I think).

It's not that you can't come up with rules in the game for how often these things happen that aren't quite as "gamist" as "once per encounter" or "once a day." It's that the added effort of tracking all the variables that determine the frequency just isn't worth it for the vast majority of gamers. Especially not when a much easier, more fluid system is just a slight shift of mindset away.

If you can't come up with your own explanation, you have to expect that many other people's explanations won't work for you. If something doesn't, the only response is "sorry, can't buy that." But then you shouldn't be surprised when after 50 or 60 suggestions, someone says "maybe finding a rationalization that works for you is like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole."

You also shouldn't hide your personal preference behind fancy-sounding phrases like "Sorry, that's not simulationist enough for me." Because, in the end, since everyone has different defintions of what constitutes "simulation," that means nothing.

My (slightly more than) two coppers.

 

[Remathilis]

I'm not sure what you mean by "traditional narrativism", but in narrativist play as the Forge uses that term, the story is not laid out ahead of time (this would be railroading), and nor is it developed without outside interference (this would be ouija-board roleplaying). Rather, it is deliberately brought into being by the players during the course of actual play.

Ah, my mistake. I was using traditional narrativism to mean "there is a plot with a beginning, middle and end, but which the details of are created during play" (most modules uses this as a matter of course: there is a backstory, a villain, a villainous plan, and usually some manner of resolution, but the details of getting from point A to point B are left to the players to devise).

the other style of play is that of "There is no main plotline, there is a keep, a dungeon, and you guys. Go." And the story that follows comes not of a DM creating a narrative, but of the actions of the PCs retold in a cohesive format. In essence, its the opposite of a module: there is no defined beginning, rarely is there an ending; just a story about the PCs and what they did on a particular day of adventuring.

 

[Remathilis]

For what it's worth, I think the logic given in the thread is pretty good, and I can rationalize martial dailies with all of them at different points -- a combination of your skill in being able to notice the opportunity for a tremendous attack, and the luck of that opportunity presenting itself, and the effort you have to put into it, all can explain away most daily martial powers for me, just as a tremendous effort can explain away most encounter martial powers.

Gotta say I love it when we agree KM.

 

[MichaelSomething]

Actually, yes, there has: here. I'm totally fine with that explanation, and it works for me.

Well then Huzzah! I hope you roll high on the craft (Home brew RPG system) check!