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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7631028" data-attributes="member: 42582">The category of "special ability", like the category of "magic", only makes sense in some games or some contexts. Some systems don't really have "special abilities" at all in the D&D sense. And even where a system does feature special abilities, the fact that some statblock includes such a thing doesn't necessarily mean that the relevant infiction capability is gated behind such a mechanic.In Prince Valiant one of my players used a Story Teller Certificate that he'd acquired through earlier play to Kill a Foe in Combat. This didn't create an effect that he didn't already have access to. But it did enable him to kill a knight in a joust whom otherwise he had no realistic mathematical chance of defeating. The player narrated it as his PC's lance splintering on the NPC knight's shield and a splinter of wood passing through the knight's visor and into his eye and brain.Special abilities in 4e D&D are often like this: they don't make new things possible in the fiction, but they do change the mechanical likelihood of those things occurring.Hang-on: so a game in which you character concept resolute in the face of the most heart-melting winks is not sacrosanct is a game that threatens RPing; but one in which your character concept puissant warrior who never gets KO-ed by mere orcs is not sacrosanct is not a valid character concept in most game systems?What's the difference? Not from the point of view of aesthetic preference, but from the point of view of what counts as playing the character I envision?</blockquote>

Verification