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<blockquote data-quote="The Crimson Binome" data-source="post: 7726757" data-attributes="member: 6775031"><p>I wish I could find it. Someone mentioned it on these boards, in one of those interminable thread which keep popping up, and I remembered it because it actually made sense (as opposed to most of what Gary said). I'll let you know if I can find the reference.</p><p>If you want to argue that dropping a ceiling always does 2d85 damage because it's a heroic tier stunt, and dropping a building always does 3d8+10 damage because it's a paragon tier stunt, then that's a little bit more tolerable. I only played 4E until midway through paragon tier, and we were still at the point where we were dropping ceilings on people rather than entire buildings (albeit we were dropping those ceilings on giants rather than on orcs), but I don't know if that was just a failure of the game to convey the assumed escalation of stakes.</p><p></p><p>The sense that I got while playing 4E was very much like the feeling I get from high-level 5E, in that they were trying to flatten character growth (in some ways, if not others) so as to facilitate basic dungeon crawling adventures across an expanded range of levels. You might be wandering through some demon lord's castle in the Abyss, rather than some random goblin tunnels, but you still just kick down the door and fight whatever is in the room. That's why they removed the more open-ended spells from 2E and 3E that tended to make the game go weird. But again, that could have been a failure of the game to convey the tone they were going for.</p><p></p><p>Because the force generated by a sword thrust stays relatively consistent regardless of how experienced the wielder is, but the ability of an experienced warrior to withstand trauma does not. To contrast, a thief or assassin actually <em>does</em> get better at learning how to disable a helpless opponent, which they study at the expense of direct combat training. The warrior goes toe-to-toe with enemies, and learns how to strike at enemy weak points while protecting their own, while the thief or assassin spends relatively little time doing that and instead practices getting their blade at exactly the correct angle against an unaware foe to maximize the effect of the consistent force which they generate.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="The Crimson Binome, post: 7726757, member: 6775031"] I wish I could find it. Someone mentioned it on these boards, in one of those interminable thread which keep popping up, and I remembered it because it actually made sense (as opposed to most of what Gary said). I'll let you know if I can find the reference. If you want to argue that dropping a ceiling always does 2d85 damage because it's a heroic tier stunt, and dropping a building always does 3d8+10 damage because it's a paragon tier stunt, then that's a little bit more tolerable. I only played 4E until midway through paragon tier, and we were still at the point where we were dropping ceilings on people rather than entire buildings (albeit we were dropping those ceilings on giants rather than on orcs), but I don't know if that was just a failure of the game to convey the assumed escalation of stakes. The sense that I got while playing 4E was very much like the feeling I get from high-level 5E, in that they were trying to flatten character growth (in some ways, if not others) so as to facilitate basic dungeon crawling adventures across an expanded range of levels. You might be wandering through some demon lord's castle in the Abyss, rather than some random goblin tunnels, but you still just kick down the door and fight whatever is in the room. That's why they removed the more open-ended spells from 2E and 3E that tended to make the game go weird. But again, that could have been a failure of the game to convey the tone they were going for. Because the force generated by a sword thrust stays relatively consistent regardless of how experienced the wielder is, but the ability of an experienced warrior to withstand trauma does not. To contrast, a thief or assassin actually [I]does[/I] get better at learning how to disable a helpless opponent, which they study at the expense of direct combat training. The warrior goes toe-to-toe with enemies, and learns how to strike at enemy weak points while protecting their own, while the thief or assassin spends relatively little time doing that and instead practices getting their blade at exactly the correct angle against an unaware foe to maximize the effect of the consistent force which they generate. [/QUOTE]
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