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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 7024211" data-attributes="member: 6696971">Great post.  I'm going to elaborate a bit on the "feelz" of AD&D1e vs Basic vs 2e vs 3.x vs 4e vs 5e in a future post.  I'm sorry, but this idea that each system doesn't have a distinct, systemitized (either due to tightness in design or incoherency) play experience is not true.  While 5e harkens back to AD&D2e with a mash-up of some 3.x/Castle and Crusades (and a smidgen of 13th Age indie tech), they're all pretty different.  I think there are a lot of people that use a WHOLE LOT of GM Force and Illusionism to impose metaplot and/or maintain genre coherency (because the system produces a lot of genre incoherency when deployed naturally) and bridge the gaps of rule absence or wonky interactions.  Because of this they feel "system doesn't matter."  Well of course you're going to feel that system doesn't matter if you're just going to (typically covertly) override the system by disregarding the resolution mechanics outright or by disregarding their outputs!The amusing irony here is...system still matters even when "its not mattering!"  (1) If the system "just worked", you wouldn't have to apply (covert or above board) Force and (2) while your Force is almost assuredly an arbitrary process which is arbitrary applied...it is still shakily erected scaffolding/bubble gum/paper clips to stand-in for system architecture (albeit rife with incoherency)!Great post.  I know the narratives of "4e failed (at all)" and "4e failed because (not D&D, not an RPG, not other reasons" is very important to people who dislike the edition.  Its important to keep context (and this isn't even all of it...the groundswell of immature, many of them 50+ so no excuse...I know some, fruit loops endlessly unleashing their jilted lover ire such that their teapot tempests seemed a great noise indeed) front and center...even in the absence of all kinds of legitimate quarterly report numbers.Great point.  The moment I saw that "4e can't do smaller combats", this is exactly what came to mind.4e's encounter budgeting system is extraordinarily robust to all manner of budget load-out.  You can trivially reduce the HP proliferation of the bad guys while retaining the encounter threat level.Fill out the encounter budget with things like:1)  Large number of up-leveled Minions.2)  Minion Soldiers + blocking terrain + hindering terrain + Y axis protected Minion Artillery.3)  You can give some of the Minions an Encounter Utility Power that turns them into "2-hit Minions" (Imm Int + 4 defenses).4)  Give the bad guys a single down-leveled Leader Standard that force-multiples (who is also protected, perhaps by a punitive aura).5)  Fill the encounter budget out with one or more Hazards/Traps that either block, control, just do damage, or interestingly change the situation somehow when they're triggered/interacted with.6)  Give the PCs terrain/battlefield effects to stunt/interact with that will give them an advantage but can also hurt them.7)  Lesser enemies flee (Skill Challenge ensues) or surrender at Bloodied.Its trivial to have small, quick combats in 4e (ones where HP ablation and status effect induction don't have primacy).  The system has so many tools to facilitate it.  What 4e doesn't have...what it doesn't support...is Rocket Tag.  That is because (a) Save or Suck basically doesn't exist, (b) NPC capacity is front-loaded, and (c) PCs have so many abilities to "come off the ropes/get off the canvas."  This is by design.  I'm calling that a FEATURE all day...not a bug. I'm not interested in anticlimactic rocket tag which only exists because of the artificial system architecture of turn based combat governed by initiative (with squishy participants on both side or encounter ending Save or Suck).</blockquote>

Verification