Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 5623015" data-attributes="member: 2067">Not a huge amount of difference in 4e between killing them and knocking them out. You can try your social skills, but your typical NPC or monster isn't set up to have much in the way of social skills, so it involves a lot more DM winging-it. OD&D had plenty of noncombat stuff, mostly in the hands of the cleric and wizard. Invisibility, charm person, cure disease....the "Fighting Man" had less, but the fighting man was supposed to be the one to overcome the combat challenge. The "magic user" was there to overcome most of the other challenges, with the cleric there to help the party recover (and contribute a bit in both challenges).This "noncombat magic" remained a feature of every spell-using class up until 4e, where it was located in the poorly expensed Rituals system. I think this was an effect of loosing sight of the larger context in which the combats occur in. Earlier editions were balanced around the idea that some classes were "good at combat," some classes were "good at exploration," some classes were "good at interaction"...(and a few were good at everything, potentially...). I'm not so sure this was as true in 3e (except maybe for the bard), but it was certainly true up until then. Again, not that this is the best way to handle it, just that it's probably a better way to handle it than the rituals system. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />I am fully on board for this!It's true, some people will want to be simple no matter what.But some people who want to say "I hit it with my sword" will also want to make an elaborate speech, and some people who just want to roll a Diplomacy check will want to choose powers and engage tactically. And that's part of why the complexity needs to be a "dial," and not a "switch," ideally.</blockquote>

Verification