Celebrim
Legend
Felon said: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.