Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
ShortQuests -- individual adventure modules! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed to plug in to your game.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5573783" data-attributes="member: 82106">Yet 4e is blessed with an excellent system in this regard, almost too good. However I'd just like to point out one thing. RPGs are fairly abstract. Remember the post about the guy with all the detailed rules for fighting with greatswords, only to find out when he talked to someone knowledgeable on the subject that his theories were simply wrong. Likewise, who's to say that jabbing your spear at a Kobold is going to prove advantageous? A lot of things could happen. A character who's a real expert on using a spear (Maybe Using say Polearm Momentum to depict this) might well be expert enough to guarantee the result you describe. Other characters? Not so much. For instance what stops the player of the Kobold (the DM presumably) from describing his action as grabbing your spear and moving inside your reach to gut you with a nasty uppercut?Nor does it seem to me that using powers precludes or inhibits one from using them in creative ways. It seems to me that the powers simply give you a baseline of things the player understands his character is good at. He can still undertake other actions. I'd also say that hit points are a big thing here. The example of grabbing your opponent's sword arm illustrates this. You're simply not going to neutralize a skilled and determined (IE non-minion opponent with substantial hit points) THAT easily. Again, the DM would be perfectly reasonable to describe the response "Your opponent skillfully shifts the sword to her other hand, jabbing at your face!"I'm coming to understand that people have certain ideas about the style of description being used at a table. Yes, it is more colorful to describe your attacks in detail. In a sense this comes back to the earlier "immersion" thing. Colorful descriptive language is not RP. Ryan's actors can no more improve a bad plot than a player describing a creative use of his sword is RPing his character better than the player of the other character who's dwarf unleashes a daily because he hates orcs even if it isn't the most clever thing he could do.Mostly I just don't see this hypothesized decoupling thing at all. That gets really at the heart of LostSoul's position. I guess we probably talked this through a few threads ago though <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> Anyway, carry on...</blockquote>

Verification