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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5630601" data-attributes="member: 82106">OK, I'm not sure I'm closer yet to the nuts and bolts of what you are missing. There IS drama in an SC where the player is trying to figure out if they can solve the challenge with a good skill and make that final toss when there are 2 fails on the table. I'm ready to believe there are refinements of course. Just haven't really managed to find someone who's clearly been able to articulate exactly what aspect of the system they're saying should work differently to refine it. Eh, you call them 'a few corner cases', but I haven't found that to be really the case. There are a number of types of rituals and they contribute in different ways, but many of them can do things that in a lot of situations are quite beneficial. You can buy a horse, if there's one around and if you have time, and if you don't need to cross water or go really fast, but in ALL of those later cases you can cast Phantom Steed and it is not expensive to do. I mean I can obviously give examples all day, and you can respond with cases where something else is better. OTOH ritual casting in general has both a lot of utility and can offer quite a number of unique capabilities. I actually think it is a strength of the system that it isn't the ONLY way to get from here to there in an overwhelming number of cases. It is still a hugely useful capability as my utility wizard has demonstrated many times.I guess it is the same question. How do you see non-combat conflict resolution mechanics as inferior? I've not figured out why everyone wants to relegate these things to the 'shadowland' by making them trivial parts of the adventure instead of making them central parts. I realize people seem determined to do that. I haven't yet discovered a reason why you can't. In fact, I do. I'd refer people to Pirate Cat's campaign threads as well, where all sorts of central issues seem to be worked out using a variety of 4e mechanics. I'm not sure what he would say about this and I sure haven't tried to add up how many combats there were, how many SCs, etc, and I can't really tell what level of drama they each involved at his table, but it does provide a pretty good narrative summary of use in a campaign by someone capable of seeing all the possibilities that are out there. I always feel like the problem isn't bad mechanics, it is lack of someone finding a way to articulate them that all of the community identifies with.Yeah, again, I'm entirely interested in hearing what things people believe are lacking in order to do that stuff. I know I've had intrigue, and exploration that worked well and seemed not to be particularly unsupported. I'm not all that strong on the mystery thing, but I think investigation using skills for basic 'do you know this fact' and 'do you spot the clue as you look around' kinds of things. The rest is probably narrative? I dunno, maybe there's a whole branch of RPG mechanics that I've just missed. Aside from very specific mechanics for specialized areas of knowledge (how to get a fingerprint kind of stuff, or knowing obscure forensic knowledge say) what are you looking for? I would argue that in a fairly generalist game where lots of possibilities exist that very specific mechanics probably belong either in the adventure that uses them (like the way Courts of the Shadow Fey uses illusions and social standing) or possibly in sub-genre supplements. I mean it is fine if the core books have room for some of that too, but the designers have to guess which ones to include or leave out.But I just don't understand at all how 4e's mechanics are just a coin flip. Sure, there are dice involved, but the whole POINT of the SC is to draw out the situation and move it away from the single toss of a d20 that was all 3.5 really offered for mechanics. And really an SC SHOULDN'T be mostly about rolling dice. It should be mostly about working through what the situation is, and figuring out how to apply your skills, strategizing, trying things, seeing how the situation evolves and adapting to it, etc. I'm SURE the basic SC mechanics by themselves don't always do everything you want, but they're a really good start and work fine. Rituals? I think of them as lower level resources usually. You need to make a success in an SC and a ritual can accomplish it, bam. Well, the thing is in a sense what are extra resources going to do? They're going to be bonuses (situational or otherwise), enablers (rituals or powers, etc), or they're going to be some kind of added resource tracking/spending thing of some sort. Unless we get into "personality mechanics" like the aspects in BW or something which are working on the level of motivation or goals and not means. I'm kind of thinking that the issue here may be that some people like complex rules intensive mechanics and others like lightweight rules, sort of like the 'grid' vs 'imagination' combat debate. If a person like a good chunk of mechanics, then they'll really find 4e combat interesting, but they are likely to see non-combat mechanics as sketchy and incomplete. The reverse happens with people that like rules-light, they're likely to be OK with the 4e non-combat stuff and find combat slow, dull  and overly complex.So, reducing the rules heaviness of combat and trimming back its time requirement some seems key to me. The contrast between the two is reduced and since ALL D&D always has combat it will please the 'want more story' people. It will be a more balanced game. I'm leery though of non-combat rules in general. I like to play that fast and loose.</blockquote>

Verification