The Pixie is up!

[Nemesis Destiny]

Climb, I suppose. But, while /some/ monsters do have ranged attacks, not all, or even all that many do.

A key difference between a monster ability and a PC ability is that the PC ability will be there in every single encounter. Relatively low-level monsters can fly, because some PCs'll have ranged attacks, and there won't be flying monsters in every encounter. PCs don't get to fly at low level - don't get to hover out of range even at Paragon - because a flying PC turns /every/ encounter into a 3D flying encounter, and that's a complication DMs don't need...

Yes, and here's the thing - that complication is just as bad when monsters don't have ranged attacks and one of your PCs does, especially long-ranged ones - like Rangers with Longbows and a penchant for stealthing *every round*.

I've learned from this to *always* use monsters with ranged attacks, and if they don't have one, to give them one (usually equal to their melee basic). Still, that doesn't help that much when your 3rd level PC is stealthing at ~25 or so every round and most monsters at that level don't have a perception high enough to reliably hit it.

I guess I need to start using more bursts and blasts.

Pixie flight seems not so bad. YMMV of course.

 

[tuxgeo]

I'll take a shot at a reasonable explanation for the altitude limit;

The pixie's wings are not what keeps it aloft - they are actually used mostly for stability in flight, much how a human on a tightrope might hold out their arms, or how boats often have fin keels. The real thing keeping it aloft is its pixie dust, and that can only lift the pixie so high without giving out (it's magic!). Pixie dust, when used on another, is an encounter power because the pixie can only syphon of so much of it's magic at a time before it would fall out of the sky.

I like that (i.e. pixie flight's being due to pixie dust, not to air pressure) because it directly addresses the issue of the altitude limit: the flight is effected by the pixie dust instead of by the air pressure, so we can view a pixie's flight ability as being a result of magical rejection of mundanity as embodied by the ground. (The strength of the rejection effect might be proportional to the inverse square of distance from the ground, but that's an insignificant detail.)

This way, a pixie can exceed the altitude limit briefly; but that is a simple matter of momentum, which is always used up in one turn.

 

[Incenjucar]

I disagree that this is good as is possible.

It would be improved with some limitiations to the flight.

For example,
"A character who hits the pixie while it is flying can push it 3 squares in any direction, even vertically"

or

"A pixie finds flight quite tiring. It cannot fly as a double move action and, after a round spent partly or fully in the air, it must remain on the ground for the next round"

This would go under the "fiddly and obnoxious highly-specialized rules" column. This is why I say "good" and not "balanced." Altitude limit already exists in the game, and doesn't require a lot of memorization or checking up on rules. To even attempt to balance at-will flight would take extremely obnoxious rules that would become really silly as soon as flight-granting magic items became available.

--

As for "goal posts" I have pointed out that animals have altitude limits, and hovercrafts work more or less the way a pixie does, aside from using fans instead of magic. Someone wanted me to find a real animal that had the exact same flight limitations as the pixie IN THE GAME, which is simply an absurd request - you can't find HUMANS who work the same way in real life in regards to movement as humans in the game.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I'll take that as an admission that you can NOT come up with a living creature with these restrictions.

And the ground effect of hovercraft doesn't let one go up 60 ft in the air every 6 seconds.

There are no exact hard and fast rules like D&D uses that will describe what a flying creature can and cannot do. Under the right conditions insects can reach altitudes of 10's of thousands of feet. OTOH they rarely fly far above the ground.

As for hovercraft, one might wish to do some research on that, but it is pretty irrelevant to pixies. I think you'll find preconceived notions of what ground effect craft can do and how they work is largely not accurate however.

You can like pixes or not like them. That doesn't change the fact that they don't resemble any living creature in their flying ability.

I also can't think of any (non gaming) fictional creature that they resemble either but there is a lot of fiction out there that I haven't read and so might well be missing something there.

I agree entirely, pixies don't resemble any real flying creature. If real flying creatures were our model they would have an altitude limit of 0 because nothing built like that could fly at all, or probably even exist period.

I don't know about fiction. I don't recall any particular fiction where the ability of pixies to fly high up in the sky was particularly defined. So I don't see it as a big problem. The standard descriptions of pixies don't seem to particularly deal a lot with the limitations of their flight, but more just depict them as being able to buzz around like Tinker Bell. Thus I don't see any big reason to go out of my way to dislike the provided implementation. It is a mixture of practical rules balance and interesting race concept. It seems like it will work reasonably well in the game, so what's to complain about?

Basically it just seems to me like people go into looking at any new 4e material with a chip on their shoulders looking for whatever reason to complain about it instead of looking at what the material lets you do in the game. Problems are what you make of them largely, unless they're really serious balance issues, which I don't see any of here.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Basically it just seems to me like people go into looking at any new 4e material with a chip on their shoulders looking for whatever reason to complain about it instead of looking at what the material lets you do in the game.

I don't think a chip on the shoulder is the reason.

I think the reason has more to do with the fact that what the material lets you do in the game doesn't satisfy the needs of some people. It's a legit complaint, even if there's no feasable way that 4e, as designed, could actually meet some of these needs. It's not just irrational anger, though, it's an actual criticism. And, of course, it just isn't equally important to everybody.

On a slightly different track, it strikes me that the pixie's equipment problems are part of what is solved by Monte Cook's proposed "magic items are not part of a character's power" concept. The reason a pixie has to shrink items is so that it can use found stuff. If found stuff doesn't NEED to be used, it's not a problem if the pixie can't use 90% of it. Okay, so it wears a magic ring as a belt, and gains the power therein, and no one cares, or it can't wield the magic longsword, and no one cares, because magic items don't HAVE to be used.

Combine cinematic combat with no necessary magic items at a game-system level, and suddenly a tiny flying creature doesn't operate in a dramatically different way from a Frost Giant character, leaving pixies as valid a racial choice as anything else, complete with unlimited pixie flying and no need to kludge items to fit.

 

[Incenjucar]

Magic items are just part of the issue. Mundane items are just as difficult for a pixie to find. Tiny longswords really aren't that common in most weapon shops outside of the feywild.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Mundane items are just as difficult for a pixie to find. Tiny longswords really aren't that common in most weapon shops outside of the feywild.

A character doesn't have to rely on finding weapons, though. Your weapon is practically never destroyed, so if you don't have to "upgrade," you can reliably keep the tiny longsword you had at character creation.

Even if the game were to occasionally destroy weapons (via rust monsters or something), paying a skilled blacksmith to make you a Tiny longsword special, or picking up a tailor's needle and wielding it like a tiny longsword, seems like a "Fun Failure" part of the game, highlighting how the pixie can't just pick up any ol' orc sword. I'd imagine a game that destroyed weapons would look pretty different from 4e as it stands, though (such as by providing a thick proficiency base for every character, without the loss of skill that comes in 4e if one were to loose their weapon).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I don't think a chip on the shoulder is the reason.

I think the reason has more to do with the fact that what the material lets you do in the game doesn't satisfy the needs of some people. It's a legit complaint, even if there's no feasable way that 4e, as designed, could actually meet some of these needs. It's not just irrational anger, though, it's an actual criticism. And, of course, it just isn't equally important to everybody.

Eh, except I see the same people voicing complaints again and again about things. Seems more like an "I'm not going to accept anything from this system that isn't perfect for me, everything else is bad design" bug.

On a slightly different track, it strikes me that the pixie's equipment problems are part of what is solved by Monte Cook's proposed "magic items are not part of a character's power" concept. The reason a pixie has to shrink items is so that it can use found stuff. If found stuff doesn't NEED to be used, it's not a problem if the pixie can't use 90% of it. Okay, so it wears a magic ring as a belt, and gains the power therein, and no one cares, or it can't wield the magic longsword, and no one cares, because magic items don't HAVE to be used.

Combine cinematic combat with no necessary magic items at a game-system level, and suddenly a tiny flying creature doesn't operate in a dramatically different way from a Frost Giant character, leaving pixies as valid a racial choice as anything else, complete with unlimited pixie flying and no need to kludge items to fit.

Well, I'm not entirely sure I follow you. I see what you mean about gear shrinking, but of course even if a pixie would work with no magic gear I imagine the player would find that less than totally satisfactory.

As for the flying thing, or a huge giant, etc. The issues with that transcend any kind of edition or whatever. Sure, if everyone can pretty much fly anytime they feel like or grow to be 42' tall, then it is largely irrelevant, but in a game where there are limits on what PCs can do anyone that can avoid one of those limits raises some level of issue, even if it is fairly trivial. Flying PCs gain certain advantages for instance. I'm not one to think those advantages are huge, but they exist.

Now, maybe there could in theory be some sort of system where you can balance and trade off inherent racial/class/whatever abilities vs magic items. Boons are a bit like that, though they'd have to be allocated differently to make a way to start characters off with something like flight. Still, I could see how a system for that might be designed. I guess it would probably not be THAT different from something like the Hero system where you can build up most any kind of effect with a point buy. Probably D&D wouldn't quite go that route, but at least it is somewhat possible.

 

[MarkB]

It occurs to me that an Immovable Shaft is going to be a useful item for a ranged-specialist pixie to carry. He could fly up six squares, activate it, and just perch there. At Tiny size, he'd probably not even need Balance checks to stand on it.

When not in combat, repeated uses would allow him to eventually reach any height he liked.

 

[keterys]

Yep - non-flying PCs can do some similar tricks with two immovable shafts, or one and a temporary flight or jump power (available around that level range).

Immovable shafts are pretty fun