No full attack option?

[Celebrim]

Sorry, your brusque tone doesn't convey the air of unimpeachable authority that you seem to think it does.

I wasn't appealing to my authority. I was appealing to your personal experience. If you don't have personal experience with melee combat, then, ok.

[Melee] Combat does often happen over broad spaces with significant separation--then again, in the context of 3e, anything more than five feet is massive.

So, in your experience as a sport fencer, martial artist, boxer, MMA, historical reinactor, or whatever, melee combatants often and generally have more than 5 feet of separation between them?

Upon consideration, I think that a ruleset that create a world of difference between a five foot and a ten foot step is a bad ruleset.

Then you better play video games, because this sort of distinction is an evitable feature of turn based games in general. If its not 5' and 10', then its going to be a distinction between 10' and 15' or 30' and 35'. Or the distinction between 6 seconds and 7 seconds. Or whatever.

If anything, I have the opposite problem with the system that you do. It's annoying that the system lets two combatants choose to take a huge 5' step away from someone, do something, and then wait a whole huge 6 seconds for the opponent to then take a five foot step to close the gap before he does something. But, this is a turn based system and fixes to that problem that would make the combat more realisticly continious would be 'hard' (either in bookkeeping or resolution time or both). The last thing I want is a system were someone takes a huge 30' step away, does something, and then waits for the opponent to take his 30' step and do something.

A ruleset that rewards characters for being sedentary and penalizes them for being active is a bad ruleset.

A full attack action + 5' step is hardly sedentary. And even if it wasn't, I stand by belief that the alternative system which exagerates the turn based nature of the game is even worse.

That's pure presumption on your part. The guys at D&D have seen as many games play out as you have--likely more. You brand their design as haphazard, but you have no basis for that.

Let me restate something that I admit is often unclear. I'm not really attacking the as yet unrevealed design of 4e. Rather I'm attacking some of the claims made by certain groups about 4e.

For example, suppose there had been a blog that said in part, "We've been striving to make 4e more balanced than 3e...One of the things you'll see in 4e is we've done away with the sacred cow of classes.", and suppose that a faction had arisen on the boards that was, "OMG. They've done away with classes! That's so sweet. Classes were always unbalanced anyway. Point buy would be so much better!" I couldn't really attack 4e, but I certainly could attack the logic of the faction in claiming that point buy is more balanced than classes, or the logic of the corporate blogger that tried to link the two ideas. Maybe the design isn't haphazard, but 'point buy' doesn't imply 'more balanced' and in fact probably means the opposite.

 

[Celebrim]

Your reasoning is very circular.

I'm not sure how you demonstrated that. But I'm not even sure how what you posted addressed anything I said at all.

Horde combat doesn't work well in D&D for several reasons, some of which the recent design & development articles have gone into.

I agree. And in agreeing, I don't see how it undermines what I've been saying.

Any kind of drawn-out battle can get tedious, regardless of number.

Again I can agree without it undermining my point.

OTOH, a fight where you are facing a horde that can overwhelm you rapidly if you don't do something about immediately is not going to be a drawn-out encounter.

Which maybe true, but it would then be a very different looking scene than most of those sidonunspa said D&D should be able to recreate. My point was that D&D can already recreate those scenes he mentioned. If D&D has a hard time with different sorts of scenes (like being overwhelmed by a mob, a prolonged chase, fighting house cats) - something I said in the first place - it doesn't undermine my claim that it can reproduce the sort of scene he wanted to to reproduce. Likewise, if different kinds of drawn-out battles can get tedious in the game, regardless of number, that admission doesn't undermine my claim but rather enhance it. That in fact was my point. The same prolonged action sequence played out on the big screen gets tedious much less quickly because your experience of the action is much different. On the one hand is imagination plus dice rolling. On the other is viceral visual fast moving action. Naturally scenes exciting in one could be boring in the other. Again, that's my point.

I guess with all this mook talk that you're assuming a warrior who's moving around has to be dropping his foes from full to negative HP. That need not be the case. He may be topping off opponents who were scorched by a firebrand. Conversely, may be softening them up for a firebrand.

I don't see how that has anything to do with anything. All I can say in responce is, "Ok. So what?"

 

[Plane Sailing]

Celebrim, you may not have noticed but you seem to be taking an increasingly adversarial position in this thread. Line by line quoting of people is never a good sign, so please dial it down a little.

Thanks.

 

[Kaffis]

This is very important to remember. Two weapon fighting may actually have more to do with being able to use two weapons effectively by having access to both sets of manuvers at once. Somebody hefting a rapier and a main gauche without two weapon training may only be able to use the manuvers of one of the pair, while a two weapon fighter would be able to use the main gauche's defensive manuvers as well as the rapier's offensive speed.

This is actually a very nice solution, I think. I've always been annoyed that TWF is presented (in 3.x and earlier, as well as MMO's, which are particularly guilty of it) as a style that is used to achieve very high damage. It's not, that's the domain of the two-handed weapon. Dual wielding is a compromise made between offense and defense, chosen for its versatility. 3.x does a lousy job of reflecting this -- it tries to make the damage attractive and almost comparable to that of two-handers, and rarely, if ever, offers even a token defense, and usually only at the cost of several more feats.

 

[Puggins]

Two weapon fighting in Star Wars SEEMS to be a pretty effective alternative to 2H-weapon fighting. It's certainly better than it is in 3.5e.

Consider:

(1) Every class in SW:SE gets a number of feats equal to the 3.5e fighter, making feats much easier to acquire.

(2) For three feats, a 2H weapon fighter can choose to take a full-round action to attack once at no penalty, twice at a -5 penalty to all attacks, or three times at a -10 penalty to all attacks. Such a hefty penalty means that stacking Power Attack with double or triple attacks is going to be problematic.

(3) For three feats, a dual weapon fighter can choose to attack with both of his weapons with no penalty whatsoever. I don't know if power attacking is such a smart move in that situation (it will depend on the rules for power attacking), but the lack of penalty can't hurt.

(4) With so many feats, it's entirely feasible to take Quick Draw as another feat. The dual-wielder will be able to charge in and hit almost as hard as a 2H-weapon wielder, then use a swift action to draw his second weapon for close-in combat.

 

[D.Shaffer]

A melee combat guy takes more than 5’ and he gets only one attack..

I know i'm coming into this very late (I must have missed the thread earlier), but I think a worry based on an assumption of no more 5' movements is a bit premature.

There's been no mention of them removing it.
If they do, I'm fairly sure it's a popular enough fighting style there'll be something in there to let you get that extra attack in when you want it, but at a penalty.

How does SWSE actually handle fighting with dual weapons anyways? Does it still have 5' steps?

 

[drothgery]

How does SWSE actually handle fighting with dual weapons anyways? Does it still have 5' steps?

There are no 5', err 2m, no make that 1.5m, okay, for the last time, 1 square steps in SWSE.

Normally fighting with dual weapons lets you, as a full-round action, take two attacks at -10/-10 (there are some rules about light weapons and such here). There's a chain of three feats that eventually wipes out the penalties (dropping them to -5/-5, then -2/-2, then zero).

The multiattack feats (both the dual weapon mastery chain and the double attack/triple attack chain) are much more useful to ranged comatants than to melee guys; in melee, the other guy's likely to just move and render you incapable of multiattacking him.