Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Argyle King" data-source="post: 5814538" data-attributes="member: 58416">Personally, I feel that paying for the ability has the benefit of knowing you can do it all the time; rely on it as a tactic or a tool.  Someone else may be able to do it using terrain and a clever plan, but they cannot count on the terrain and/or situation allowing it to be possible all the time.  I believe -if the game is built in a way that provides for a consistent game world- there usually won't be a problem.I do understand where you are coming from though.  It's one of the issues I have with page 42 in the DMG.  I think it's great that there is a way to allow a player to try something which isn't hard set in the rules.  However, because 4th Edition (in my opinion) is based on the idea of powers, feats, items, and all manner of other things being character resources, there's a tight line to walk in allowing someone to do something, but not allowing it to be so good that it makes a power obsolete.  Consistency is an issue also.  I've said elsewhere that one of the things which jars me out of the game is the inconsistent ways in which monsters interact with the math of 4th Edition's game world versus how the PCs interact with it.  I'm perfectly 100% fine with monsters and PCs being built differently.  However, it's a bit anticlimactic when I slap dimensional shackles on a monster, and it has virtually zero chance of escaping.  Likewise, it's a little strange when the monsters struggle to do things like break through doors or jump over chasms while the PCs are simultaneously breezing right through the same challenges.  It only gets worse at the higher levels when (personally I do) asking how some of the most feared creatures in the land are defeated by not being able to do something simple like climb out of a pit or jump high enough to hit a flying PC.  Meanwhile, I once had a halfling character who was capable to make a standing jump from the ground and leap high enough to land on a dragon and kill it with a rake.  Yes - a rake; I was challenging myself to see how far I could push my boundaries* as a PC and still be stronger than the monsters.  Also, I seemed to roll insanely well while wielding the rake as an improvised weapon.  It's still a joke among the group to this day. (*It's not normally my preferred style of play, but it seemed to bother my brain less -at the time- to engage the system in this way than it did if I held as tightly onto concepts of character and verisimilitude as I normally like to.  I'm currently at a place where I'm more at piece with the system, but -at the time- I struggled to reconcile my ideals with what I felt the ideals the system was founded upon were.)</blockquote>

Verification