Mechanics vs Description (Forked Thread: Disarm rules)

[FadedC]

And yet, parrying/locking weapons didn't happen in 3e. That's really not the point. The fact is that the wizard gets the same BAB as the fighter, which is ridiculous. However, that is not what we are talking about; we're talking about disarming. .

Parry and weapon locking did happen in 3e it was just assumed to be abstracted by the rules in the same way that disarm is in 4e. And if you had actually played 4e, you would know that the wizard having the same BAB as the fighter does not make him remotely as skilled with swords. It does however mean he can hit with spells about as often as the fighter hits with his sword.

They don't work mechanically. .

They do in fact work mechanically. In previous editions had very simple rules for called shots that 3e chose not to use because they didn't work well within it's strucutre. Just like 4e chose not to use disarm as a base power because it didn't work well within it's game structure.

Actually, it was for any character with sneak attack or sudden strike. Hamstringing should have been in Core 3e, though. I'm not even sure what your point is.
.

My point is that in 3e there were certain manuevers that only certain classes could do, and they could only do them if they took a power. In 4e there are certain manuevers such as disarm that only certain classes can do, and only if they take a power.

It's obvious that you have never really played or even spent much time reading the rules of the the game you are complaining about. If you planning to post about it on the message boards, it would probably help a lot if you spent some time actually learning about the game your posting about.

 

[IanArgent]

I'm not sure how being dazed = being disarmed, but if you want to pretend that getting conked on the head and being crippled in terms of the number of actions that you get is equivalent to being disarmed, then go for it.

Actually, I would, thanks. haven't come out and said it, but dazed is one of the conditions that could model what I'm looking for out of a disarm - target is less effective while he's getting his weapon back.

There's nothing mechanical is Dazed that says "conked on the head" to me. All it says is you grant combat advantage and have a limit in the # of actions you have.

OTOH, with both hong and Psychic Robot out of the pool, I think it's time this thread was put on a bus.

 

[The_Furious_Puffin]

Although you're obviously being sarcastic, you're actually more or less correct. The only real error is that you're expressing the relationship in reverse.

For the most part it's true that:

If it's got more positives than negatives, then it's in 4E.
If it's got more negatives than positives, then it's not in 4E.

One thing to remember when evaluating any new edition of any RPG, D&D included, is that the rules we, the players, finally see are the result of years of work by people who design these games professionally and understand them much better than we ever will.

I initally thought you were joking, but now I'm not so sure. I'd check your post history, but I have to be a community support for that.

Are you really saying that the entire, say, skill challenge system is golden, and everything they left out sucks?

Or are you joking. It reads like you are.

 

[AverageTable]

I initally thought you were joking, but now I'm not so sure. I'd check your post history, but I have to be a community support for that.

Are you really saying that the entire, say, skill challenge system is golden, and everything they left out sucks?

Or are you joking. It reads like you are.

No, I'm not joking at all. Nor am I being circular as Psychic Robot claims.

I'm also not making any particular claims about the goodness or badness of any particular aspect of the game (e.g. the skill system).

What I'm saying is that if someone is going to question the presence, absence, or quality of any aspect of a professionally developed system such as thing one, the onus is very much on the questioner to demonstrate that the system would be better off changed in the way he's suggesting. And, furthermore, if he does try to demonstrate this, the great majority of the time he's going to fail to do so successfully.

The developers do this stuff professionally, they've spent years building the game, and their livlihood, pride, and favourite hobby all rest on the choices they make. The result? They're not going to make any choices they don't truly believe to be good ones. So if we, the non-professionals who only first saw the system a month ago, want to question a decision they've made, we have a heavy burden of proof to overcome before we look like anything more than irrational curmudgeons.

My overall point, then, was that Psychic Robot hadn't managed to even nudge his burden. Every argument he made was so obvious that it goes without saying the designers had already considered it themselves. Ergo, the absence of a disarm mechanic in the final published rules is extremely strong evidence that none of its supposed advantages was sufficient to outweigh its disadvantages. In turn, anyone who wants to claim that the 4th Edition D&D game is better off with a disarm mechanic needs to offer much more novel and compelling reasons to include one than Psychic Robot has.

 

[The_Furious_Puffin]

Okay.

I guess I assumed you where joking because the skill challenges system is a glaring counterpoint to that statement. I mean presumably the designers would have considered the math is completely broken as they do it for a living and the game playing public only took 5 to 6 whole nanoseconds to determine it was indeed stupid. And it does occupy a very significant proportion of your hymnal compared to what disarm has got in any previous edition, or even this one as a fighter power.

Not that I'm in favour of a disarm mechanic mind.

Just that I'm not sure saying that designers probably don't actually any special insight or indeed have tested their system, given the issues with the skill system. Despite the claim to professionalism (though they did a good job with layout etc and I think the quality of the book as a physical object is reasonable), one might be given to assume that while they do have some insight, their insight does not apply to all cases and they may not have fully considered the implications or otherwise, as we have some reasonably solid evidence that they did not fully consider the implications or otherwise of some material that was published.

Edit: To give another example of balatant no consideration is careful attack being almost always worse than a basic attack.

 

[Celtavian]

re

No disarm in 4th edition. Doesn't surprise me. This is the simplified edition of DnD where you don't worry about having rules for various combat options that don't come into play all that often.

Not what I like. But I guess the majority of gamers prefer stream-lined rules where they use intimidate checks to perform "disarms" even though a disarmed indivdiual can still grab his weapon and have fun with it, especially disarmed PC who might want to keep fighting.

So how do we disarm PCs?

 

[Mort_Q]

So how do we disarm PCs?

Who is we? The DM and their NPCs or are you talking PvP?

Disarming PCs is less problematic, as the character is relatively completely statted out and can still do stuff unarmed.

A psychic attack power to make a PC drop their weapon, XXX vs WILL ?

A physical disarm... XXX vs STR ?

 

[Branduil]

So how do we disarm PCs?

By picking up their weapons after you kill them.

 

[Tigerbunny]

So how do we disarm PCs?

The same way we did it in 1979. You make a monster who's got a disarm power. Or you use Page 42 (okay, in '79 we called it "make s**t up).

 

[rumanchu]

No disarm in 4th edition. Doesn't surprise me. This is the simplified edition of DnD where you don't worry about having rules for various combat options that don't come into play all that often.

Not what I like. But I guess the majority of gamers prefer stream-lined rules where they use intimidate checks to perform "disarms" even though a disarmed indivdiual can still grab his weapon and have fun with it, especially disarmed PC who might want to keep fighting.

So how do we disarm PCs?

My problem with disarms in 3.0/3.5 was twofold:

a) players/NPCs who were optimized to disarm reliably did it *all the time*. I was in a game with a player whose first action against foes wielding weapons was *always* to disarm

b) disarming is too situational; a PC designed to be the Disarming King of Chicago is short-changed any time that there are foes without weapons. On the *other* hand...PCs are almost always vulnerable to being disarmed.

In *my* experience, disarming became just another metagame ability; the DM would throw something into the mix to disarm the players who *counted* on being armed every couple of fights, yet would ensure that any PC who relied on disarming to get an edge rarely had the opportunity to do so.