Speculation about "the feelz" of D&D 4th Edition

[Parmandur]

Does it? Conan, Grey Mouser, Fafhrd, (can't name a Salvatore character, sorry) are all nigh invincible in combat, except maybe against some really nasty and usually magical beast or other. I don't recall any scenes that wouldn't play out interestingly in 4e. Certainly it is MUCH better than 3.x with its 'full round actions' boat-anchoring fighters. Ready stunting and built-in tricks of various kinds seem to make it ideal for highly dynamic fights with lots of crazy stuff going on. I don't think AD&D combat is BAD for that kind of thing, but it doesn't handle some things very well, like disengagement (which is usually impossible) or any sort of 'non-standard' tactics.

Most of the fights take a sentence or two, and the other guy is dead because Conan cut him in half, or stabbed the giant in the unmentionables: it moves quicker than any edition of D&D combat, and isn't super stunt heavy. Actually, I am seeing people playing martial PCs in 5E stunting like crazy, just narrating the results of the die rolls creatively: 4E is more...narrow...in dictating the stunting, from my experience?

I also like DCC RPG for stunt rules for fighters...

Sent from my BLU LIFE XL using EN World mobile app

 

[Parmandur]

How many times did Conan die? Not so swingy, then.

That's the inverse of what I was thinking. An untrained person with a rifle has little or no chance of making a shot that a skilled sniper could make consistently, which BA fails to handle well.

OTOH, the way BA makes numbers tell overwhelmingly is 'realistic' - in the sense that it's less like the very unrealistic myth/legend/genre tropes of lone heroes defeating hordes of enemies.

Far more accurately than it simulates RL is still pretty faint praise (nor terribly deserved, considering counter-genre oddities of D&D combat like clerical healing), but yes, hps do that, for instance, modeling 'plot armor.' 4e took the game further in the direction of modeling genre combats like that.

Conan rolled 12's each level for HP, and clearly has 20 in Con; also never waits to be hit.

HPs as a mechanic abstract most of this sort of action, and leave it for creative narration and description.

Sent from my BLU LIFE XL using EN World mobile app

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

It is when one person doesn't really know what they're doing, one person is the best in the world at X, and the weapon is not a gun. The difference between a 1st level Fighter in every edition of D&D and a '0' level NPC is usually a +1 to +2 to hit and maybe a couple of extra hp.

The myth of the expert is more a middle-level talent being unable to touch best in the world, which is the fantasy trope.

Eh, I don't think so. I think the idea that the best of the best is 'untouchable' is a myth that was raised up by martial arts masters and whatnot, not something THAT realistic. Musashi reputedly won a significant number of duels, but we don't really know exactly how accurate that tally was, nor how good his opponents were (or weren't). Heck, maybe it was basically all PR except 1 or 2 fights. Swords are damned lethal.

 

[cavalier973]

Slayers are awesome, aren't they?

I tried a slayer build whose achtick was that she used her bow until the enemy for near, at which point she pulled out her big honkin' sword and started thrashing.

Unfortunately, I only got to use her once, and the adventure required that a character had arcana for the skill challenge.

 

[Parmandur]

I just don't know what it is about AD&D combat that makes you consider it more "pulpy old school", aside from its more D&D-traditional and thus there may be that association in your mind. I can't find any outright reason why it emulates the literature better.

*shrug* I've played maybe two or three sessions of AD&D because one friend was feeling nostalgic, so can't comment too much on that other than I am given to understand that 5E is closer to it. Reading lots of old pulp recently, and it just feels like D&D combat to me? Salvatore has commented that he tried writing 4E style combat, but gave it up for more classic combat almost immediately...

Sent from my BLU LIFE XL using EN World mobile app

 

[S'mon]

That's the inverse of what I was thinking. An untrained person with a rifle has little or no chance of making a shot that a skilled sniper could make consistently, which BA fails to handle well.

I don't think that's right at all. Police snipers usually miss (I recall Met police data put their hit rate at 30%) while anyone who knows how to use a rifle at all may well hit the same shot. I think Bounded Accuracy far more accurately reflects the vagaries of battlefield conditions than older +1/level versions.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Most of the fights take a sentence or two, and the other guy is dead because Conan cut him in half, or stabbed the giant in the unmentionables: it moves quicker than any edition of D&D combat, and isn't super stunt heavy. Actually, I am seeing people playing martial PCs in 5E stunting like crazy, just narrating the results of the die rolls creatively: 4E is more...narrow...in dictating the stunting, from my experience?

I also like DCC RPG for stunt rules for fighters...

I don't think AD&D combat between Conan (clearly a high level fighter) and some equally high level monster would be that fast. It would minimally require 6-7 rounds to chew through one or the other's 50+ hit points, I'd think a 10 round fight would be easily expected. Maybe 3.5 would do it closer to what you're talking about, as there's little chance anyone would move etc, and 6 second rounds full of iterative attacks would be over reasonably fast.

I'm thinking of things like Conan leaping on people, escaping grapples, charging, dodging, etc. Those are all mostly kind of implicit in AD&D action, but more spelled out in 4e. Its been 20 years since I last read any of those S&S stories, maybe I remember the fights being more elaborate than they were, but it seems like your depiction wouldn't fit 4e or 1e very well.

 

[Tony Vargas]

*shrug* I've played maybe two or three sessions of AD&D because one friend was feeling nostalgic, so can't comment too much on that

Don't worry, plenty of us here played it for years, if not decades.

other than I am given to understand that 5E is closer to it.

5e is a lot like 2e AD&D (and to a slightly lesser extent, since they weren't that different, 1e and the early game) in a lot of ways. Combat, oddly, not so much one of them, in significant part because of bounded accuracy. No wonder you weren't making much sense, if you thought BA was a feature of the classic game. BA is actually closer to the 4e 'treadmill' than to any prior editions' scaling mechanisms.

The similarity is more in the classes, and the swinginess at low level, and - most importantly - the degrees of freedom left to the DM.

 

[Ratskinner]

May those expectations never be tested - especially not by a sniper. I'd hate for you to have to find out just how apropos 'dead wrong' can be.

Not that I want to dig into the bigger argument, but...guns aside, the IRL hand-to-hand experts that I have known (including Olympic-level martial artists) seem to vary quite a bit in their opinion on this sort of thing. Some of them seem to feel like "anyone can get lucky" is much more of a thing than the others, and weirdly it seems to go in the opposite direction wrt what I perceive as their actual peak ability. (That is, the most capable amongst them seem to be more likely to hold the Bounded Accuracy opinion.)

Now, with guns. It seems to me that the evidence supports "how willing are you to kill?" being the more important question.

D&D combat has never been remotely RL-realistic. It's far too abstract for that, even as turn-based combat engines go. It does a terrible job emulating genre combat, as well - but orders of magnitude better than it does RL.Which is the actual point, in a way. 4e is the 'outlier' among editions, in that it emulates genre combat noticeably better. Since genre is unrealistic, that must mean 4e is 'more unrealistic.' See how that works?

I definitely agree that D&D isn't close to realistic. I'm not sure "realistic" would make a very satisfying game, and the closest I think D&D ever gets is "representative".

Same for genre-combat, IMO. (A far more Narrative-central system would be a necessity, IMO.) However, that's confuddled by the fact that D&D (including all its derivative media) has become a source for a great deal of what people consider to be genre combat.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

*shrug* I've played maybe two or three sessions of AD&D because one friend was feeling nostalgic, so can't comment too much on that other than I am given to understand that 5E is closer to it. Reading lots of old pulp recently, and it just feels like D&D combat to me? Salvatore has commented that he tried writing 4E style combat, but gave it up for more classic combat almost immediately...

Sent from my BLU LIFE XL using EN World mobile app

I'm not sure what Salvatore wrote in terms of its genre. I seem to recall that it didn't match up well at all to AD&D fights though. AFAIK his stories are all D&D pastiches in any case, which is not really S&S is it?

I think LOW LEVEL 1e might do what you're talking about modestly well, but I don't think high level will. Thing is, nobody would do that stuff at low level, you'd be crazy. Characters hire a wall of footsoldiers or find some way to 'cheat' unless they have a death wish, so really its only 4e where you'd normally find out. I think low level 4e plays out 'heroic action' combat pretty well. Maybe Conan shades more to a grittier level though.