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Message: <blockquote data-quote="robertliguori" data-source="post: 4092285" data-attributes="member: 47776">Let us sum up.1: Tripping should always be a possibility in combat.2: Tripping should rarely be the optimal combat action, on the order of once a combat barring specific circumstances.OK, then.  Not seeing a problem here.  We design a set of rules akin to those of Third Edition, in which tripping is difficult (requiring both a successful attack and an opposed check) and leaves you open to retaliation of the painful kind.  We can even throw in the possibility for the retaliation (the OA) to be focused on counter-tripping.  All things totaled together, tripping is not a good idea in the general case.Then, we can negate the opportunity attack in cases of combat advantage, and allow trained trippers bonuses.  Finally, onto this framework, we can add a trip special attack, possibly akin to 3.X trip and attack.  A focused tripper with the power can hurt someone trippable hard once a combat, and if he can get combat advantage, then he has a good chance of dropping others to the ground.Bottom-line is that if I try to win a fight by repeatedly trying to trip an equally-trained opponent, I should lose, but I shouldn't be prevented from being able to try it.Well, yes, you do; a succession of nicks, forced sudden dodges, and the like do make it more likely for you to catch a heavy blow.Next, in 3.5E, hp were only partially a measure of luck; at the end of the day, you could send a high-level martial character to the chopping block and have a decent chance at them laughing at you.  Characters with massive amounts of HP really were that tough; absent attempts at precision and CdGs, you can generally chop wood more easily than you can high-level character flesh.  This is often considered one of the more awesome points of hp: you can take a blow that would have, for anyone without your unmatchable ability to shrug off injuries, severed a limb or three, quote Monty Python, and mean it.  Of course, you probably can't keep doing so forever, but hey, you can imagine trying to kill a wooly mammoth with a sword, and map it over.It is not believable that a person made of ordinary flesh and blood is as hard to kill as a giant pachyderm.  It does, however, provide a consistent explanation for the events of the world; you experience things that should kill you and don't, in numbers and regularity that make luck the less believable option than a radically-abnormal universe.You know, I think that's another issue right there.  The rules should be able to model ordinary people accurately, and it should be able to model the heroes.  If the ordinary people do not resemble ordinary people as we understand them, this is a flaw.  If the heroes are unable to do things the ordinary people can (or reasonably should) be able to do, this is also a flaw.  Ordinary people can engage in boring-but-effective tactics; heroes should be able to do so as well; if this is not a desired outcome, then change the mechanics of the universe to support heroism (with Hero points from M&Mm, for instance).And everyone knows that the reason that you can't use Decapitating Blow is that it's impossible to decapitate people without special training that breaks the expected behavior of the universe akin to zapping your enemy with magical energy.  You can't use it because you've used up your chi, or badass points, or whatever you use to bend the universe to let the unnatural happen.Of course, if you get a player asking why it is that the universe requires badass points to trip multiple people in a five-minute window, that would be a different problem.</blockquote>

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