Trip is an Encounter Power now

[glass]

That seems reasonable to me. I think tripping would be quite hard to do in melee, requiring special training.

Especially when you consider that trip (presumably) works on someone who still has full hitpoints -ie, someone who you couldn't land a sword blow on.


glass.

 

[AZRogue]

Also, GEE I DIDN'T KNOW SOME PEOPLE FOUND IT SO ESSENTIAL THAT YOU BE ABLE TO TRIP REALISTICALLY WHILE PRETENDING TO BE ELVES oooh no he didn't

Haha, I laughed out loud over that one, man. Turnabout is fair play. Well played!

 

[frankthedm]

Well, maybe this is a situation where how well the roll is should have bearing.

Attack vs reflex foe up to 1 size larger. +2 to hit if foe is smaller than you

Hit: Foe give opponents Minor bonus until foes next turn
Hit by 5: Foe falls prone
Hit by 10: Foe falls prone, suffers 1d10 damage.

 

[Li Shenron]

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.

Same feelings here.

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.

The problem is that for magic-type characters this is very easy to design. But the game also has characters whose concept is non-magical (at least at the start of their career and for a while). Fighters, rogues, barbarians are characters who do "normal" things, but much better than the average person. Spellcasters do "abnormal" things.

While there is no problem in making spells simply unavailable to everybody else (and limited daily, for arcane reasons), doing so for fighting or roguish skills is a big blow to suspension of disbelief. Some people can easily play with SoD in every case, but other people like me cannot go too far.

3ed had a brilliantly simple way to address special fighting manoeuvres. Everything you could possibly think about, you could do, but it was by default unconvenient unless you had special training. The -4 penalty to tripping, disarming, sundering is effective to make the manouevre not-worth. The specific feats which remove the penalty change it to worth it.

From 4e, I was expecting this very simple rules to be extended to many more manoeuvres. That would have saved both believability and balance. Then the 3e feat could have been turned into a 4e at-will power.

 

[KingOfChaos]

Another point toward hack and slash for 4E.

 

[Hypersmurf]

** Technically "cutli", oddly enough.

Technically, in the same sense as 'ninjae' and 'boxen'?

-Hyp.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

If the trip action is too good tactically, then it should be toned down.

But there's a million way to nerf something, and limiting it to 1/encounter (plus limiting it to only characters that have a special power) is just wrong to my ears. Much like forbidding to jump or grapple, if they were too powerful. I simply don't care if now is more balanced than before...

The idea is that if you want someone to do something every round no matter what class they are, you make it a basic combat action. Because if it IS a basic combat option SOME player will think its the best option and use it every round.

Unless you make it too weak to want to use it every round. Then no one uses it. There isn't a real middle ground.

If you think it is the sort of thing that only one class should do, you give it to that class as a power. If you can envision a member of that class using it as every attack against every monster you give it to them as an at will power(since, the rule applies that if it's at will SOMEONE will use it every attack).

If you envision it as something that, say a fighter type would use every once in a while, you make it a per encounter power. Which, I think, is the perfect place for a trip-like power.

The idea is the design the ruleset so that you get the results you want. This is rather different than the 3rd edition design of "Allow everyone to do everything you can possibly think of that they could do and make it a bad option for 90% of the people to do, then hope that players end up acting the way we hope they will."

Otherwise you have these options:

Trip is good for everyone - This is a good idea if you want wizards tripping your enemy fighters and ogres. If it is a good option in almost every circumstance then why attack an enemy with a normal attack?

Trip is only good for some classes - Why put it in the combat section if no wizard or warlock will ever attempt it? New players and even veteran players are going to read the WHOLE combat chapter or scan through the combat chapter on a regular basis when they look for rules. Why not make them short and filled entirely with options that apply to everyone?

Trip is not good for anyone except in special circumstances - Once again, why use up combat chapter space for something almost no one will use? Put the rules for the option into a power or feat so only those who want to use it need to read it. If it's a useless option for everyone else then don't even list it as an option to avoid distracting new players with options that might seem good but aren't.

 

[glass]

While there is no problem in making spells simply unavailable to everybody else (and limited daily, for arcane reasons), doing so for fighting or roguish skills is a big blow to suspension of disbelief.

Except, as several people in this thread have pointed out (including some with martial-arts experience), making it a per encounter power is much more like what happens in real life than tripping someone every round (or never). Does real life give you SoD problems?


glass.

 

[Derren]

What annoys me is yet another assumption that the people currently playing 3e are absolute morons. I can't speak for the players at WotC headquarters or their playtesters, but I know I needed to pull out the book exactly once to figure out how the 3.x trip mechanic worked. (For that matter, the basic grapple rules of 3.x are also quite clear, concise, and easy to remember--the big issues come with the monster grappling rules and that's primarily an issue of organization and clarification since there are seemingly contradictary rules scattered through several ability descriptions and a couple glossary entries.

You are reading it wrong. The only people who play 3E are fanatical geeks with an IQ > 200 because you need a master in quantum physics to understand the basic rules. 4E wants to make the game more accessible to normal people.

Or in other words, WotC wants that morons also buy D&D books, thats why every rule which requires more than one roll is being dumbed down.

 

[frankthedm]

While I can certainly understand people being annoyed by Trip (and, I suspect, Disarm) being moved from basic combat tactics to special per encounter exploits, I am glad they've gone and done it. While tripping and disarming actions are OK once in a while, I find a diet of them annoys me as a DM. It's actually a bit weird, but I find Trip and Disarm focused PCs very irritating. I guess it's because you don't really find those tactics that commonly in fantasy fiction outside of cases where one character completely outclasses the other or at the end of a long conflict. Characters able to Trip, Trip, Trip round after round just set my teeth on edge. It just doesn't simulate the kind of fantasy action I'd like to see at the table.

Using more monsters helps a bit with this. A lot of the overuse of feat-maneuvers were problematic if the DM used NPCs as foes too often.

Trip and disarm as combat options really can be punishing to the players since there are many more foes to go around in 4E. Maneuvers were one of the few things big groups of weak foes could do in 3E to bone PCs. If a 4e minion can trip a PC, players might as well kiss their move actions goodbye.