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Once per day non-magical effects destroy suspension of disbelief

What happened to us?

3.x kicked us in the junk and then stole our wallet.

Seriously, though, if encounter and daily powers kill your game-on, then don't play 4e. There are other fine systems out there that you can play that are more whateverist to suit your needs.

Personally though, I don't see the problem. It's an abstract representation of a difficult manoeuvre. If it helps you to justify the mechanic, then think of the character constantly looking for an opportunity to pull off the stunt, but because of the extreme difficulty of it, he only manages to do it once every encounter/day.

Call it luck, circumstance, the limits of skill and ability, or whatever it is that helps you sleep at night with 4e tucked under the covers.
 

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3.x kicked us in the junk and then stole our wallet.

In his best J.D. impersonation:

NUP_103005_0273.jpg


"That 3E is one baaad Seeed!."
 



It might be more accurate to characterise Dragon as adding more _detail_ to D&D, as opposed to more realism. This continues even to this day.

People confusing the two, however, has been a D&D tradition since Chainmail. It predates whining about Bards, if you can believe that.
 

If i were a truly good DM, I would follow through on this plan:

Create a small chart for each character, and keep it behind my DM screen. It would look something like this

Fighter
1-10, air
11-17, scale armor
18-19, shield
20+, check for temporary AC bonuses, otherwise hit

Then when an enemy attacked the Fighter, I'd look at my notes and know how to narrate what happened.

Actually... now that I look at it, maybe I will actually do that.

Urk.

Well.

I can honestly say that, if this seems like a good idea to you, 4E is not the game for you.
 

To be fair, daily powers in 4e aren't worse than daily powers in 3e or Pathfinder.

And hey, I am not saying daily power aren't good for beer&pretzel rollplaying. But for us other players, weho might want some immersion, it hurts verisimilitude really bad.

Do action points give you the ability to gain additional daily uses in 4e as it did in 3e/UA? Because for me, powers that had daily uses, especially ones that weren't magical in nature, troubled me in 3e, but I found that the action point workaround made it less conceptually troubling for me.
 

I've heard these sorts of discussions for a long time, for as long as I've been playing D&D (which has been over 30 years as I think about it, man I'm feeling old).

Here's the thing: whether it's hit point, armor class, racial class or level restrictions, the magic system, the saving throw system, healing or whatnot, all of these discussions come back to the same point.

D&D is, first and foremost, a game. It's a game with certain assumptions about what's useful, effective, balanced, too powerful and so forth. Over the years, a lot of those assumptions have changed, and 4E is just the latest generation of those ideas, from a new set of designers.

Why do hit points work the way they do? Heck if I know. I can come up with metagame/fluff reasons why they do, and if they work for me (and also for my players) then we're done. If not, we need to decide if this game is what we really want to be spending time with, or if there is another RPG that better fits our shared idea about what believable.

The discussions about daily powers make me think of an action movie and how the hero tends to use his one big power only that one time (remember Karate Kid? He tries to use the Crane Kick in every movie after the first, and it never works!) and that description resonates and works for me.

I'm sure there are many other reasons that you can come up with for how the martial dailys work, but they're all ultimately fluff for the game balance rules that are inherent to this edition of the rules, just like "wizards can't wear armor or use a sword," was a part of editions past.

So ultimately saying "martial dailys don't make sense!" opens up a discussion where other posters attempt to give fluff based answers that can make that part of the rules click for different people. At a certain point, however, it's time to just call it a day and move to another game that you can be happy with.


--Steve
 

Cadfan said:
If i were a truly good DM, I would follow through on this plan:

Create a small chart for each character, and keep it behind my DM screen. It would look something like this

Fighter
1-10, air
11-17, scale armor
18-19, shield
20+, check for temporary AC bonuses, otherwise hit

Then when an enemy attacked the Fighter, I'd look at my notes and know how to narrate what happened.

Actually... now that I look at it, maybe I will actually do that.

So, what you're saying is you'd really rather be playing Palladium RPG? Because, you know.. they've been doing that for over 25 years. Oh, and don't forget to give armor and shields SDC... er... HP so they're damaged when they get hit.
 
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Do action points give you the ability to gain additional daily uses in 4e as it did in 3e/UA? Because for me, powers that had daily uses, especially ones that weren't magical in nature, troubled me in 3e, but I found that the action point workaround made it less conceptually troubling for me.

No but you can use Healing Surges to do that for magic items...
 

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