Trip is an Encounter Power now

[Falling Icicle]

Here's how I would do it. Trip is an attack option available to anyone, by default, just like grapple. To trip you make a melee attack against their Reflex Defense. You can't trip an opponent that is 2 or more size categories larger than you are, and they get a +4 bonus to their reflex defense if they have 4 or more legs. Simple. Easy. Realistic.

For the fighter encounter power, here's what I'd do:

Overpower
You strike your opponent with such overwhelming force that is he is knocked on his ass.
Fighter Attack
Encounter * Martial, Weapon
Standard Action, Melee weapon
Target: One creature up to 1 size category larger than you
Attack: Strength vs. Reflex
Hit: [W] + Str damage and the target is knocked prone.
Miss: [W] + Str damage.

 

[Pale Jackal]

Can you still move and attack in the same round anymore?

I swear I read, at some point, you can only move or attack... which would make sense since iterative attacks no longer exist.

If that is true (and I want to say it's not, but whatever), I can easily see trips your martial types locking down opponents with a re-usable trip.

 

[Falling Icicle]

Can you still move and attack in the same round anymore?

I swear I read, at some point, you can only move or attack... which would make sense since iterative attacks no longer exist.

If that is true (and I want to say it's not, but whatever), I can easily see trips your martial types locking down opponents with a re-usable trip.

Everyone gets a standard, move and minor each each round. So yes, you can still move and attack.

 

[Bishmon]

Okay, so its really hard to trip someone, so hard it requires an encounter power, but grappling them, that's easy?

Sorry, I'm just not seeing it.

Actually, yeah, you've summed it up pretty well.

There's two common ways to 'trip' someone in a mixed martial arts fight. A fighter can try and shoot for the legs, essentially almost diving head-first towards his opponent's legs trying to gets his arms around a leg or two and trip him up. What makes this impractical is that it's relatively easy to defend with a sprawl, like so:

http://www.budoseek.net/articles/double_leg/image023.jpg

What makes it even more impractical, though, is that it leaves the attacker open to follow-up attacks, most notably chokes, punches, strikes, and devastating knees.

The other way to try a takedown, probably the more common way, is to first grapple the guy. The attacker closes the distance usually behind strikes of his own in order to get next to the defender and he clinches with him (http://www.grapplearts.com/Images/PhotoOfTheWeek/KOTC-rebecca1.jpg note: this isn't the exact clinch an attacker would work for a takedown from, but if gives you an idea). From that clinch, he can try a judo hip toss, a simple trip, or grabbing a leg before dropping down for a safer shot on the defender's legs. The point is, for these 'trip' attempts, the attacker is already grappling the defender.

So yeah, grappling a guy is easier than tripping a guy. In fact, fighters often have to do the former just to try and do the latter.

 

[Saitou]

Here's how I would do it. Trip is an attack option available to anyone, by default, just like grapple. To trip you make a melee attack against their Reflex Defense. You can't trip an opponent that is 2 or more size categories larger than you are, and they get a +4 bonus to their reflex defense if they have 4 or more legs. Simple. Easy. Realistic.

For the fighter encounter power, here's what I'd do:

Overpower
You strike your opponent with such overwhelming force that is he is knocked on his ass.
Fighter Attack
Encounter * Martial, Weapon
Standard Action, Melee weapon
Target: One creature up to 1 size category larger than you
Attack: Strength vs. Reflex
Hit: [W] + Str damage and the target is knocked prone.
Miss: [W] + Str damage.

Dude, automatic weapon damage? In an encounter power? Seems a bit unbalanced. The only powers that deal damage on a miss are dailies, and even then only half, with the exception of the Fighter's reliable daily.

Which is actually not a bad idea. Take out the damage on miss, make it Reliable?

 

[Pale Jackal]

Everyone gets a standard, move and minor each each round. So yes, you can still move and attack.

Thanks.

 

[Ahglock]

So a skilled, high-level fighter or martial artist finds it a simple matter to trip an untrained mook, but no matter how easy he finds it and no matter how numerous and inept his enemies might be, he can still only trip one per encounter. Bruce Lee is surrounded by 3054 blindfolded 1-legged drunks with middle-ear problems, and he can only trip one of them.

That's my main concern about 4e combat. Arbitrary limitations on the martial classes' actions because of the at-will/encounter/daily paradigm, with no in-character justification. Really eats at the suspension of disbelief for me. I suppose there may be a way of getting extra uses of a limited-use power through action points or similar, but it's still pretty suboptimal in my book. Here's hoping there's some way of converting daily powers to encounter powers or encounter powers to at-wills, as the PC levels up. That'd make a bit more sense as far as I'm concerned.

While I wouldn't go quite so crazy in my examples of situations it doesn't make sense, this is the exact reason some people will be dissatisfied with the core 4e combat mechanic. Why is a perfectly mundane maneuver per encounter?

I can come up with excuses, but will I have fun under some net of bad excuses? For me, probably not. I like the idea of per encounter and per day abilities, I just hoped the per encounter abilities would be things so fantastic they were basically impossible to perform by an ordinary human and therefore the per encounter mechanic didn't jar with the setting too much.

I don't know if I have the energy or inclination to rewrite all the abilities so the flavor text works in my mind for aper encounter ability.

 

[The_Fan]

I hate to drag the old "you can house rule it" argument kicking and screaming into this, but here it is:

They have mentioned that the new defense system makes it easy to make new maneuvers, you just have to make sure you aren't making them TOO easy and stealing the fighter's thunder. But trip IS in the rules, so we can't make a new maneuver, right?

Wrong.

All you have to do is make sure that it's worse than the power. If the fighter power also does weapon damage, remove that. Give it an attack of opportunity. Have it use your unmodified attribute instead of 1/2 your level. Make it an at will standard action. Bam, there you go. Now anyone can do it as many times as they want per encounter. It's just that the special, tricky version only works once.

 

[Bishmon]

I can understand why people are disappointed about trip being a per-encounter power. I mean, theoretically, someone in real life could try a 'trip' whenever they wanted.

But they've already tried the 'theoretical' approach in the 3E rules. What we ended up seeing is fighters that either never tried a trip, which is unrealistic, or fighters that built their skills around tripping and did it nearly every round, which is also unrealistic.

So for 4E, they're trying the more 'practical' approach. Due to a number of overly complex reasons that they don't want to replicate in the rules, in real life you only get trip attempts every few minutes. So they're replicating that by making it a per-encounter power.

Like I said, I think that's a pretty elegant solution to a tricky problem. There's a million reasons why that theoretically shouldn't work like that, but practically, if you're willing to fine even one reason why it does work, I think it'll be a good mechanic. Not perfect, but good enough, and certainly better than what was in 3E.

 

[fafhrd]

I hate to drag the old "you can house rule it" argument kicking and screaming into this, but here it is:

They have mentioned that the new defense system makes it easy to make new maneuvers, you just have to make sure you aren't making them TOO easy and stealing the fighter's thunder. But trip IS in the rules, so we can't make a new maneuver, right?

Wrong.

All you have to do is make sure that it's worse than the power. If the fighter power also does weapon damage, remove that. Give it an attack of opportunity. Have it use your unmodified attribute instead of 1/2 your level. Make it an at will standard action. Bam, there you go. Now anyone can do it as many times as they want per encounter. It's just that the special, tricky version only works once.

That's a really good idea. I could see it requiring the tripper to have combat advantage in place of a really crummy modifier.