The Power System, Combat, and the Rest of the Game

[Ariosto]

Why does having the player make choices imply the character must also know those choices?

It's called role-playing.

"Old school" players are less likely to require that a player "forget" what he knows (about monsters, math, literature, etc.), while the "new school" is more likely to put a premium on the theatrical sort of "playing a role".

Forcing what is sometimes called "meta-gaming" onto players as a barrier between them and their roles tends in both quarters to be seen as bad form (more in actual play than in generating "stats"). By contrast, it is widely acceptable in, indeed fundamental to, "story-telling" games.

 

[Victim]

It's called role-playing.

"Old school" players are less likely to require that a player "forget" what he knows (about monsters, math, literature, etc.), while the "new school" is more likely to put a premium on the theatrical sort of "playing a role".

Forcing what is sometimes called "meta-gaming" onto players as a barrier between them and their roles tends in both quarters to be seen as bad form. By contrast, it is widely acceptable in, indeed fundamental to, "story-telling" games.

Players make all kinds of decisions about their characters that wouldn't be choices that an person in the game world could reasonably make.

Metagaming can be a problem. OTOH, it also prevents problems - "but that's what my character would do" isn't a good excuse for ruining other players' enjoyment of the game.

 

[Ariosto]

Such ruinous extremes get a bit more support with the voguish "thespian" approach. Of course, when the problem gets solved with rough justice in-game, the other players can say just the same!

 

[Starfox]

As a long-time Feng Shui player, these issues are not new to me. And I must say I greatly prefer cinematic combat.

 

[Umbran]

I've participated in several discussions on this topic, and I think I understand a major part of the reason behind why some people have so much trouble with "Vancian" 4e martial powers while they didn't have trouble with 3.xe.

Minor nitpick - 4e powers are not "Vancian", which means somewhat more than "limited in the number of uses per day".

 

[Alex319]

Another reason I've heard is that it means that characters don't understand what's going on because there's no way to explain why martial abilities have use restrictions in a way that the characters would understand, but that's not it either. That was also true of 3.5e magic - there was no "underlying reason" behind Vancian magic - that's just the way magic works. (And it's hard to see how any other explanation would even be possible.) And of course, that's also true of real-life phenomena - imagine explaining to a medieval person the "underlying reason" behind how a television works - he would surely think it something that you just made up.

Now that I think of it, I could have been a lot more clear on this point.

The argument I was responding to is the argument that because there is no way to explain the use restrictions in a way that characters would understand, the only options are to (1) houserule in an explanation, and make modifications to the rules to fit the explanation, or (2) accept that the use restrictions have no corresponding reality in the game world.

In this essay: The Alexandrian - Misc Creations , which advances this argument, the author writes:

Of course, you can sidestep all these issues with house rules if you just embrace the design ethos of 4th Edition: There is no explanation for the besieged foe ability. It is a mechanical manipulation with no corresponding reality in the game world whatsoever.
At that point, however, you're no longer playing a roleplaying game. When the characters' relationship to the game world is stripped away, they are no longer roles to be played. They have become nothing more than mechanical artifacts that are manipulated with other mechanical artifacts.
​

My point is that there is a third option: accept that the use restrictions are a real in-world phenomenon, even though that phenomenon has no known (by the characters at least) explanation. It's simply the way the world works, and characters will adjust their tactics to accomodate it.


And, or course, having an in-world phenomenon that the characters do not know the underlying explanation for poses no problems whatsoever for "role-playing." In fact, it's perfectly realistic: before the advent of modern science, the underlying explanations behind most real-world natural phenomena were not known.
​

 

[Alex319]

By the way:

Gizmo33:

poison affects me if I'm "hit" but not "hit"

What so you mean by this?

 

[Mephistopheles]

What really bugged me starting with 3E (never got into 2E supplements) was how cumbersome the rules became. There were other things as well (how opportunity attacks worked, for one) -- but that was the big one, and it's much worse in 4E. The pace of the game is much too slow. Other aspects simply turn me off more.

I have to agree with you on this; the amount of real time that is spent resolving combat is significant, as a result a large proportion of table time is taken up by resolving combats and as the game as a whole tends to move very slowly.

Case in point: last night's session with a group running Thunderspire Labyrinth. It was the second session of our assault on the

Spoiler

deurgar stronghold

, and the session before had ended with us about to begin a combat so it was straight into initiative rolls when we started up. The combat took 1.5 hours to resolve. We were then drawn into a second combat which took 2.5 hours to resolve. Aside from a half hour break we'd spent the entire night in combat, covering maybe 10 minutes of game time. The previous session was much the same: the whole night taken up by two combats.

This was the kind of bog down that killed the interest of my 3E group when we hit about 10th level; I'm frustrated to see it appearing in 4E at 4th level.

 

[Dausuul]

Agree with the OP. I like an awful lot of stuff about 4E, but... my suspension of disbelief crashed out suddenly and severely at some point during the game I was running last night.

It might have been around the time the fighter ran up to three cult necromancers - ruthless and intelligent combatants who are deadly at range but suck in hand-to-hand, who have no reason to voluntarily step into melee ever - and said, "Come And Get It!" And they all crowded around him so he could beat them down.

Or it might have been when the bard yelled insults at a guy and he fell over dead.

Maybe it was when one of the players said, "Oh, that's so cute, you're still trying to narrate 4th Edition combat."

Here's the thing about 4th Edition combat and 3rd Edition combat. They both contain bizarre rules artifacts, places where the simulation breaks down and makes no sense. But in 3E, when stuff makes no sense, the DM generally steps in and says, "Dude, you can't make a trip attack against an ooze. It's already as prone as it can physically be. Doesn't matter if it's technically rules-legal. It makes no sense and you can't do it."

In 4E, the DM is expected to shrug and let the ooze be tripped. "Trip" and "prone" are no longer defined concepts with a concrete meaning in the game world. They're just abstract mechanical terms, subject to redefinition on the fly. And the DM trying to figure out and narrate what the hell just happened? Shut up and play the board game, pal.

...Sorry. I'm ranting. I think I hit some kind of threshold or breaking point or something.

By the way:

poison affects me if I'm "hit" but not "hit"

What so you mean by this?

It's one of the reasons that narrating "the monster hits for 10 points" as "he swings and just barely misses you" doesn't work for a lot of players. When you attack with a poisoned weapon, if you hit, the target is poisoned. That makes no sense if your attack just barely missed; a poisoned weapon can only deliver its poison with an actual physical hit.

(Although that is not, for me, the primary reason. My primary reason is much simpler, and is at the heart of a lot of my problems with 4E: I have no patience for RPG systems that play Humpty Dumpty with the English language. A word's meaning in-game should be a reasonable approximation of its meaning in real life. If I make an "attack" with a "sword" and it "hits" resulting in "damage," then the guy I "hit" damn well ought to be bleeding. If that isn't what you mean by "hit," call it something else.)

 

[Alex319]

I'm coming to realize that what I really want out of RPG combat is an open, flexible system that encourages players to think up clever improvised stunts and provides robust tools with which to do so. The power system is going in the exact opposite direction.

A few questions:

1. How does the power system make improvised stunts harder? Powers just give you additional options. There's nothing that says you can't do improvised stunts just because you have powers. If you could do stunts in 3e, I don't see why you can't do them in 4e. (Or, to be specific: can you give an example of an "improvised stunt" you could do in 3e but not in 4e? And, e.g., disarming doesn't count, because disarming was an explicit rule in 3e, so not an "improvised stunt.")

2. Does page 42 give you the tools you need to create clever improvised stunts? Does 3e give you the tools you need to create clever improvised stunts?

Note: I'm not in any way saying there's anything wrong with preferring 3e over 4e, or vice versa. I'm just trying to understand in more detail what the issue is here, so we can possibly come up with ways to solve it.