The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

[Zogmo]

Cleric - Uh... no, wait a minute, Pelor has forsaken the fighter... uh... uhmm... I'll... shoot a Lance of Radiance out of my anus and kill the kobold instead!

4e is gonna be awesome! I can't wait to play a cleric now. They seem to have some very cool options!

 

[mmadsen]

Also, since when is the heavily armored archer a "fairly basic concept"?

 

[mmadsen]

It's an artifact of the system. The other option would be to constantly increase the minimum damage the PCs do every round, to the point where having "only" 20 hit points means every time the fighter hits you, you die.

There's more than one other option -- but, yeah, if you're wed to ablative hit points, and you want the PCs to take out minions in one turn, then the minions have to have very few hit points, or the PCs have to be guaranteed to do a lot of damage.

Of course, if you do that, what's a boss monster for heroic becomes a minion at epic, and I think they wanted to avoid that sort of thing.

Why?

 

[Keenath]

http://www.lyberty.com/encyc/articles/images/dnd_BasicRule_s.jpg

Sorry, fail. He's clearly wearing a shield on his back and a sword on his hip -- he's a heavily armored sword-and-board fighter who happens to be making an attack with a ranged weapon, not a heavily armored archer.

 

[Keenath]

It's far worse... capping healing surges per day completely guts any ability to use the combat system of DnD in a role-playing game.

When the conversation in the game goes like this, your game system is retarded:
Cleric - I'll use Healing Strike on the kobold and allow the fighter to use a surge.
Fighter - I don't have any surges left.
Cleric - Uh... no, wait a minute, Pelor has forsaken the fighter... uh... uhmm... I'll... shoot a Lance of Radiance out of my anus and kill the kobold instead!

Forsaken? No. He's just too tired and wounded for that little dribble of divine healing to do him any good. You'll need to use something more substantial, like Cure Light Wounds (2nd level daily utility -- target heals HP equal to his Healing Surge amount without spending a surge).

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

Careless or bad DMing would be my guess.

I would have said "First Edition Feel."

Along the lines of "Don't go down the well."

That's a startling dismissal of verisimilitude coming from a Necromancer rep.

Seriously, all snark aside, how do you see the philosophy of 4e impacting the design philosophy at Necromancer?

 

[Storm Raven]

Quite frankly, Vancian is here even stronger then ever.

The flaw with vancian magic wasn't that casters had to memorize spells, it was that they always made you rest. Well hey, now it's not just casters, but EVERYONE that constantly wants to rest after every encounter (or two, should you push them hard).

The one thing that seems to have consistently been the source of complaints in D&D, through all editions, has been the Vancian magic system. These complaints were never universal, but there has always been some people who have disliked it, tried to replace it, or otherwise modify it.

And the new edition basically says "Vancian stuff is so good, we'll give it to everyone". So now, instead of people just complaining about how spell casters are Vancian, we get the opportunity to complain about every class.

As a result, I can only say to the designers: "Good going, smart move, I'm sure there weren't any other options that would have worked and avoided this".

 

[Scarbonac]

Sorry, fail. He's clearly wearing a shield on his back and a sword on his hip -- he's a heavily armored sword-and-board fighter who happens to be making an attack with a ranged weapon, not a heavily armored archer.

Double fail; He's obviously a heavily-armored archer who has a back-up weapon and a shield for when he runs out of arrows.

 

[Voadam]

One of these things is not like the others

Warlord "We've smashed through the sublieutenant's gang this morning and our ranger spent the day tracking down the cult leader who is ahead over that ridge now with his succubus sidekick and the troop of kobold cult followers. We need to decide tactics, whether we press on now or wait until tommorrow to strike."

Wizard: "As you know the way magic works I shape my raw magic into charged spells in the morning and discharge those individual spells releasing the prepared magic. I used a bunch on the gang before but I still have some individual targeting magics left prepared if we go in now. If we wait until morning I can prepare all of my magics again for the assault including battlefield control spells."

Paladin "My god empowers me to call on his name thrice per day to channel divine might to smite evil doers. I called on him once when we fought the toad demon of the sublieutenant. I will use this power upon the succubus or the leader as I charge among them. If we rest until morning I can call upon my god the full three times for our confrontation, but my sword arm is ever ready to strike at these villains."

Fighter "I can strike really really hard once today for a powerful blow and chop at single enemies and do some defense for the wizard and a few more really powerful individual maneuvers but they are all single target. I already did my killing field exploit maneuver earlier today on the earlier gang chewing through their kobold minions, so I can't do that again today, but if we rest up overnight I expect I would really mow down those kobolds if they are about the same type of follower. That is to say I'm kind of tired from swinging my sword fast in one way but not another and a good night's rest will fix that. Or I guess I have a feeling the conditions will not be just right again for my killing field moves if we do it tonight, but tomorrow morning I expect the conditions will work out just right for me and I can be in the zone for doing so then if we need."

Warlord "Right. So if we can punch through to the leaders tonight we should do it, if we need to cut our way through the minions we should wait until morning if there are too many of them."

 

[Toras]

Voadam is quite correct. I think it becomes as much a logical issue as it is an "Uncanny Valley" scenario. If you are to think about the various power sources, it is only really martial that we have a proper frame of reference for in our world. We know that muscules work a certain way, and while I will admit you can use different groups for different things, like jumping vs swinging a sword, the encounter/daily largely stretches the concept.

If the manuevers were simply grouped and you could only do a certain number of the more difficult ones before you got to tired to do them that would be one thing. But 4th ed, in the effort to make fighters nifty and keen have robbed from it one of the truly grand things about a fighter. The fighter is scary no matter where and when he is, as is the rogue.

He's the kind of guy that can fight for three days and then drink you under the table. If Shale the 20th Fighter is locked in a dungeon without weapons or equipment, she is still dangerous. Deprived of any aid they can burst bonds, break down doors, and killing guards with their broken chains. Antimagic might shutdown casters, but there was no true anti-violence field.