D&D 4E The 4e rogue: Good power names!!

[Callikah]

thousand hand megahippetyhoppety superduper killajigggerypokery deft silver ubermega strike of the purple monkies perhaps?

 

[Daniel D. Fox]

Honestly, I don't care how flowery they are as long as they remain two word combinations. Three word powers are too cumbersome.

Either way, I like the ones I've seen thus far for the Rogue.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Not bad. I'm sure they could've been better, but not bad at all.

 

[kennew142]

I actually think they didn't go far enough in simplifying the names. Tortuous strike or Deft Strike still sound clumsy artificial compared to Lunge or Gouge.

They could have just called them Striker Power I, Striker Power II, Striker Power III, etc....

Personally, I don't care what they call the powers. I got over the druid class having nothing to do with historical druids. I can get over Chibi Manticore Kick.

 

[BadMojo]

"I'm Batman !" power name, you will be missed ...

That was a good one. I'm still going to randomly scream it out during games.

I do like the new rogue power names.

 

[Deep Blue 9000]

I'm cool with basically anything.

The real problem that no one on this forum really wants to deal with is this- can YOU come up with ~500 names for melee attacks? I know, there probably aren't 500 in the PHB, but there will be expansion books, and there are a lot of characters that use physical attacks in melee. And if you use up "Lunge" then eventually you're going to be stuck with abilities named "Brutal Lunge" and "Dire Lunge" and on and on, because there's more than one thing that can happen during or after a lunging attack. And in the end you'll be stuck with big fancy names anyways, because you used up all your single word names halfway through the first book.

Better to just pick multi word names up front.

That's an interesting criticism but I believe your situation is not supported by evidence: feat names were as simple as I'm asking for in 3.0 and we didn't have splat books full of the names you predict.

Take a look at the 3.0 feats. There were simple maneuvers in the PHB such as grapple, dodge, sunder, trip, etc. And there splat book abilities that worked off of them like knockdown, multigrab, ranged sunder. But the splat book ability names were rarely copies of the PHB abiltiy names with an additional adjective stuck in front. And the few were had good reason for being so, ranged sunder for example. Nothing like splat books full of dire sunder and brutal sunder happened.

There is an explanation for this besides the breadth of the English language. Once you make a power that does the lunge effect, any new power you make must be distinct from it. This is because no one will buy a splat book that is just rehashing the PHB.

 

[Cadfan]

That's an interesting criticism but I believe your situation is not supported by evidence: feat names were as simple as I'm asking for in 3.0 and we didn't have splat books full of the names you predict.

I disagree. I believe we very much DID have feat name problems in 3e. We didn't have them with martial attacks, because feats did not grant martial attacks. But now powers do. Heck, we ran out of decent descriptive names for metamagic right in the core rules. Enlarge Spell and Widen Spell really ought to do the same thing. And in some cases, feat names were flat out reused.

There is an explanation for this besides the breadth of the English language. Once you make a power that does the lunge effect, any new power you make must be distinct from it. This is because no one will buy a splat book that is just rehashing the PHB.

That is true in 3e where combat tactics have mechanical effects with no flavor implications except what you invent, and where there's generally no more than one way to accomplish a task. But take a look at Positioning Strike. It is an attack that moves an enemy a few spaces, with some effects included to theme it after offbalancing a foe through trickery. Suppose we wanted to make an attack for a fighter that pushed an enemy a few spaces. It would be nearly identical in outcome (hit enemy, do damage, knock them a few spaces), but it would have some other, different details- different damage, maybe attacking fortitude instead of will, different weapon requirements, who knows. The upshot of it is that unlike 3e where we'd just call this "bull rush," we are now likely to have several different methods by which to accomplish this task. Each will need their own name. Maybe the fighter gets the easy name- "Shove" or something. But that means other classes need different names for their similar ability.

Classes that probably deserve an ability that knocks someone a few spaces on a hit:

Fighter
Rogue
Barbarian when he comes out
Monk when he comes out

You get the idea.