But, what happens without such basic powers in place? Pretty soon, a player has their character try to bash an enemy into a pit. After all, it's a pretty obvious thing to try. The DM makes a ruling on what happens. Now, here's the trick; the next time a player wants their character to bash an enemy into a pit, hasn't that previous "precedent" set just as much of a yardstick as Bull Rush or Tide of Iron? As humans, we like system; we like consistency. If a system starts out with vague, hand wavey stuff about "improvisation" and "freedom for the DM to make rulings" then pretty soon the common "brilliant ideas" (i.e. most of the ones that are actually commonly useful) will be done in the game, and precedent will be set as to how such "innovations" are handled.
This actually is why I have a lot of problem with including things like Bull Rush (moreso its attendant feats) and Tide of Iron in the rules. Because the players can, will, and (in my opinion) should do it themselves.
So you're essentially redefining rules terms. Which, in the case of Bull Rush by itself, is totally fine. But when you start getting into feats and powers, starts stepping on class features, choices other characters have made, and screwing up feat trees.
At the end of the day, you get two contradictory systems for pushing people (powers and stunts). I'm going to let people use stunts to do it regardless of whether there are powers doing it, so why have an entire additional system with all this rules baggage? What other effects does it have on the game when I obsolete Tide of Iron or Improved Bull Rush?
I've said it before, but "innovating" by making up stuff not covered by the rules is not the only way to improvise or show creativity - it's just the easy, cop out way. The way I much prefer is to see improvisation and creativity inside the rules. With my current 4e players I see this a fair amount; they are focussed on the map, not on their power cards, and they are sometimes using At Will powers (when they have Encounter powers left) because they see an opportunity to make someone else's Encounter power more effective by doing so. Creativity to feed into each others' attacks as a party is great, IMO - I love to see it in 4e and I would love it if I saw it really encouraged in Next.
Why shouldn't we do things the easy way again?
I mean, I know that if we do things the hard way we can layer modifications on top of modifications. But, I dunno, it seems like we could also just go with the easy way. I hear it's nice this time of year
I understand the joy of working within the system, twisting it this way and that to do the best you can. That's one of my favorite parts of my job, actually. But if I have to trade that in for ease of handling stunts and faster combat, that's not even a contest. I can totally understand why you'd feel differently, though.
Oh, and someone mentioned that "some players seem worried to lose their "rights" to the DM, but it shouldn't be Players vs. DM". My answer would be that I don't think it's the DM such players are worried about; it's other players. Without good rules for all common manoeuvres, my experience is that it pretty soon comes down to who, among the players, can sweet-talk/double-talk/bluff the DM best into letting them get away with more and better "improvised" things. So often I have seen one player suffering relative superiority at the table because they can blag stuff past the GM, either because they are just a good persuader, or because their tastes and beliefs align closely with the GM's, or because they read the likes and dislikes of the GM well. I generally like some friendly competition between players (akin, perhaps, to the archetypal "orc counting" between Gimli and Legolas), but "skill based" play aimed at manipulating the GM to the maximum extent possible just makes my lips curl.
I agree players are worried about other players trampling on their characters moreso than any competition than the GM. Unless the GM has a confrontational style, which is a whole separate ball of yarn.
An open stunt system undoubtedly awards players for taking actions matching the tone of the world the GM is presenting. Some GMs will get totally steamrolled by players, but I've watched GMs lose narrative control in a dozen different systems (most painfully Shadowrun). Rules can't fix that.
What the rules can do is say "This is your group's game, not ours. You decide its tone, not us. Players that drive that tone and make the game more fun for everyone should be rewarded. Here's a mechanic for that."
Cheers!
Kinak
