D&D 4E Verisimilitude IMPROVEMENTS in 4e

[Tewligan]

Everyone No one knows what happens when you fall in lava. It breaks all the laws of physics. Maybe You die. Maybe you're transported to another plane. No save.

FIFY.

 

[ZombieRoboNinja]

To avoid being nitpicky, granted. Or conversely, why can't he prepare and cast 80 odd magic missiles instead of tiring himself out preparing and casting that one fantastically hard 9th level spell?

I think the 4E version of this question is going to be something along the lines, "How come if I know several spells, must I use the same one every round? If I can cast this puppy 10000 times a day without tiring, why can't I just swap it out occasionally for that spell I cast 10000 times a day yesterday.", or else, "I'm a 30th level wizard, how is it that I still just know 12 different spells?"

Like someone said, at-will spells don't seem to be Vancian, but point taken. My basic point with this thread is that the "believability" points people are harping on for 4e (like per-encounter abilities) aren't any worse than what we had in 3e, and if anything, the fact that they're somewhat unified in 4e means that you can come up with a unified handwavy explanation for all of them.

Some personal favorites:

-If you try to use a per-encounter ability twice in the same encounter, the enemies will see it coming and avoid it.

-Per-encounter abilities are tiring in specific ways. For example, a specific martial exploit might be a strike so powerful it requires all your strength to drive it home, and if you tried to do it again too quickly, you'd cramp up all the muscles in your arm. By the same token, a per-encounter spell might stress certain particular chakra points / mental faculties / etc. for spellcasters, so it can't be repeated too quickly. (Warlocks are easy to justify here - you can't call on the fey lord's power more than once per five minutes because that's what's in the contract you signed!)

 

[ZombieRoboNinja]

I never, ever knew that the ability of so many people to pretend to be elves was so critically impacted by how well the game approximates the square root of 2.


Hong "now dragonborn bQQbies, that's DIFFERENT" Ooi

I'm actually an elf roleplaying as a human, you insensitive clod.

Is... is it true that some of you don't know how to use a longsword OR a bow?




*shudder*

 

[glass]

For example, the OP makes a cogent argument about how the same magic heal has widely different simulationist effects based on its target in 3.X, and 4E (presumably) avoids this. (Has anyone actually tried to use a Healing Prayer on, say, a peasant?) OTOH, 4E is certainly less simulationist with the by-now oft-heard refrain of 'new day, full hps' (with the attendant implicit statement that you have no wounds)..

Getting all your hp back quickly is part of the versimilitude improvement -in previous editions you weren't really injured but it still took you days to recover?


glass.

 

[Darth Cyric]

*crosses fingers*

Those patently retarded Darth Maul-inspired double weapons from 3e gone.

Again, wishful thinking ... but it could happen.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

No one knows what happens when you fall in lava. It breaks all the laws of physics. Maybe you die. Maybe you're transported to another plane.

Maybe you exist in a quantum state and need someone else to look at you, hard.

 

[VannATLC]

We've seen a distinct lack of TWF so far.. AFAIK, anyway.

Although I quite liked some of the double weapons.

Anything functionally similar to a quarterstaff should be fine. A Dire flail could be.. interesting, mind you.

Personally, in 3.5, my major complaint was that these weapons were too easy to master. A feat is expensive, but not half as expensive for the fighter, who was most likely to utilise it.

I houseruled that Exotic Weapon Proficiencies requried a normal, non-bonus feat.

Off Topic though.

To be honest, I've never intended DnD damage to be representative of actual wounds. Several people have remarked that DND damage was considered to be 20% physical and 80% endurance or equivalent.

Personally, the only time I ever house-ruled damage to be something remotely sensible, I have all the PC's a static 10hp+Con+HD for first level, and from that point on, they got normal HD.

Those 10Hp+con healed at a rate of 1 per week, and they suffered consequences should they fight while impaired. Magic Healing did work on that, however.

I do like the suggestion of using Healing Surge amounts as wound points, however.

 

[Bandreus]

First of all, I'd like to say anyone should stop using "D&D was never for Verisimilitude". this is really a poor argument, and a very wrong one too. You could say that D&D never trully pushed for deep simulation, wich is something really different, and you can argue that D&D always had it's flaws on the verisimilitude side, I agree.

Also, when talking about simulation, you just can't assert that something is verisimilar because I can easily explain it. I could be able to find very strong end verisimilar points for a chicken to fly high in the sky, but that wont turn chickens into howaks regarding the flying capability.

Now, I'm not saying I think 4E will just suck because of a lack of verisimilitude. Mechanics abstraction and balancing are core to the value of a good rule system, so 4E could possibly end up being a great game even if it lacked simulation at all. But if you want to discuss the degree of simulation around...

Consider we are talking about a lot of potential verisimilutude flaws in 4E. Well, actually we know only a very small portion of the actual 4E ruleset. So there's no point in counting 3.XE's (a game you have been playing for 8 years) vs 4E's number of simulation flaws. 3e would just win for the sake of statistic's laws, at the moment.

Also, designer explicitly said "If something was not fun, we've removed it from the game". Now, in my experience, simulation always needs, layered, hard to remember, case by case rules (grapple enybody?), and usually simulation is not fun at all.

So it is pretty simple. Streamlined rules, more fun, less verisimilitude. I'm not in the mood for lenghty digressions on every rule of the game, sorry if I could look like rude, not my intent

 

[Just Another User]

Hopefully I'll be excused for inviting an educational derailment of my own thread - what, exactly, is the complete explanation of Vancian spellcasting as it exists in 3.5 for the base classes - wizard, cleric, paladin, and ranger?

I think I understand the basics (something about preparing each spell 95% of the way to completion and only needing a trigger-word to complete the casting in combat), but even that seems weird. Why does a paladin or cleric need to perform complicated procedures to get his god to help him out, and how are those procedures based on how "wise" he is? If a wizard is smart enough to prepare one 3rd-level spell, why can't he just prepare 99 copies of it every morning? Etc.

FWIW, this is my view of it.

what the wizard do every morning is to do into his brain what normally he do when he create a scroll, he charge the power of the spell into his brain ready to be released (I think to it like a 4 dimensional sigil/rune when the wizard activate it the power of magic pass throught it and is shaped by it (in the form of a fireball, for example) but in doing so the sigil is destroyed, (exactly like with the scroll). The wizard can create a limited number because his brain have a limited space, when he grow in level he learn how to prepare spells more efficiently and he can prepare more of them.

About the cleric/paladin/ranger it is even simpler, he pray/meditiate for the necessary time and ask his god for the spells he want, his god give them to him, whiy he can't ask them on the moment? Because (In the classic interpretation of D&D) a god have million of clerics and followers sparse in the multiverse, even him can't pass all his time waiting for someone to ask him a spell and give it to him, in D&D even a god have limits and beside he have other godly thing to do. (in AD&D it was also specified that 1st and 2nd level spell where not given directly by the gods but by their "minions" so if for some reason you were cut out from your god (in a deep layer of the Abyss, for example) you could ask only for 1st/2nd level spells. But that is another story).

And I disagree on the abstract HPs, too.

 

[Just Another User]

Okay, this was my basic understanding too. But why can't (say) a level 20 spellcaster just prepare a dozen level-9 spells instead of like 4 level-9 spells and a dozen level 2-3 spells? I don't think this is a nitpick; it's actually pretty common to see a high-level wizard say, "Gee, I'm too tired to cast another Firebal, but I can cast Magic Missile 135 more times!"

You have a point , and still beyond a certain level of detail my answer is "because it just works like that" why I can't fly swapping my arms up and down? Why I can't start a nuclear reaction beating to pieces of rock together? Why I can't pass thorught walls? because things don't works like that, but saying that vancian don't make sense it is like to say that gravity don't make sense. But even if it don't make sense I can still use it to build what I think is a "realistic/believable/that it make sense (to me)" world. I'm still not sure I can say the same of the 4e system.