Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Eldritch_Lord" data-source="post: 6049062" data-attributes="member: 52073">First of all, +1 to everything Kamikaze Midget said.  You made this post a heck of a lot shorter. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />I'm going to spoiler my replies since this post is a bit long-winded.  Warning: massive wall of text, work was slow this afternoon.  Please don't think I'm trying to hammer away at your arguments or I have something against your argument personally or anything like that, I just tend to get a bit verbose and example-heavy when talking about this sort of thing.pemerton[sblock]No, Come and Get It as you describe it doesn't begin from flavor or fiction, fighter powers in general do.  No one disagrees that a fighter's set of powers work together to define the fighter's flavor, just as a wizard's spells in aggregate determine his flavor, but in your description of CaGI you have said nothing about the power's flavor at all.  The fighter is a weapon master, the fighter is in the middle of the action, the fighter can pull enemies and then hit them...that's great, but as Kamikaze Midget said, you're missing the how for CaGI that describes how you accomplish the flavor of "always in the center of battle."An attack roll is certainly somewhat effects-based, as any abstracted mechanic will be to some extent, but I disagree that it's the same extent at all.  An attack roll, unlike CaGI, can be given an explanation based on the mechanics: AC is composed of Dex, armor, and other factors, so if you miss by X where normal AC > X > AC minus armor you can point to that and say that the blow bounced off the armor.  Being flavor-based doesn't mean each mechanic has to have one and only one explanation (again, abstraction renders that infeasible) but it does mean you should have something to point to that says "this mechanic maps to something in the game world." Also, an attack roll, unlike CaGI, is composed of fairly flavor-based components and is opposed by a fairly flavor-based defense.  Your attack roll is composed of factors that observably change in-world (Str, proficiency, etc.) and AC is composed of the same (armor, Dex, etc.).  Take Str damage, your attack bonus drops; use a nonproficient weapon, your attack bonus drops; take your armor off, lose your armor bonus to AC; be unconscious, lose your Dex bonus to AC; and so forth.  AC is also composed of nebulous factors like "the enemy is actively parrying" that don't always work, but there's always something to fall back on.For an attack roll to be equivalent to CaGI, the attack roll and AC would have to be singular values, i.e. you get BAB to attacks and BDB to AC with no differentiation or attached flavor, so when you roll 1d20+abstract value vs. 10+abstract value you have no idea why you missed or even why you hit.Again, unexplained ≠ metagame.  Action points are a metagame mechanic: the player spends an action point, the player improves his character's attack roll, the character and his target notice nothing different and it doesn't affect their knowledge or behavior in any way.  Targets of a mark explicitly know that they're marked, so there's got to be something observable that gives them that information--and it's not even "Hey, DM, run your NPCs as if they notice something threatening about Joe the Fighter," it's "the NPCs know they're marked."As you noted, things like level, HD, and such have measurable in-game effects and are less metagame than you'd expect.  If you want to research how many HD the BBEG has so you can use soul bind on him, you can explicitly find that out.  In AD&D levels have names that can be used, and level-based effects like followers, caster level, and such can be measured in-game.  3e provides several means of directly identifying HD/CR (Sense Motive for threat assessment, the Urban Savant's abilities).  HP have some aspect of luck and skill, but it's still partly physical, and PCs can estimate if jumping off a cliff has a guaranteed chance to kill them, a so-so chance, or none at all.The transition to 4e both changed the amount of metagame mechanics in the system and made some of them more obviously metagame by their interaction with other mechanics.  A lot of people have a certain threshold of metagaming in their mechanics below which they're fine with it (even if they might prefer not to have it) and above which they have a problem.  There are people who accepted the crusader's Devoted Spirit "nonmagical" healing very grudgingly, but accepted it nonetheless because the crusader has a pseudo-magical paladin-ish veneer.  They accepted per-encounter ToB maneuvers because the existence of a refresh mechanism could let them sorta kinda justify them as needing the right placement and such, but Martial Study maneuvers that didn't refresh left them cold.ToB maneuvers were right at many players threshold of "how metagame-y do I want my mechanics to be?" and when 4e both removed the tenuous "divine inspiration" justification for martial heaing and the tenuous "combat rhythm" justification for per-encounter mechanics with the removal of the refresh, that put them over the edge.  It's hard to tell where peoples' lines lie exactly and they're all over the map, which is why some people loved ToB but hated 4e, love 4e but hated ToB, sort of liked both, and so on.Well, that's mostly because they have different flavor motivations--Come and Get It is about convincing people you left an opening, Karmic Strike is about actually leaving yourself open.  Robilar's Gambit is a similar feat that resolves the attack at the same time rather than afterwards, letting you trade blows rather than react.  Karmic Strike could just as easily give you the attack first, interrupting the original attack like an AoO does, if the flavor were that you were faking the opening and waiting to pounce on their mistake.  Again, it all comes down to what flavor you want to represent.If you're talking about Karmic Strike, you don't forfeit any actions, you decide as a free action on your turn whether to be in Karmic Strike stance or not.I'm going to bold this to make sure it gets through this time: I'm not advocating for making the fighter succeed at more rolls than the casters to do his thing.  Look at the way Feint works: you don't roll against Sense Motive and then against an attack roll, you add BAB to Sense Motive.  Combat maneuvers work the same way: grapple adds BAB and Str, bull rush is just Str, trip is opposed by the higher of Dex or Str, etc., because each has a certain feel they're going for (training with hand-to-hand combat vs. pure physical force vs. dodging or out-leveraging).See, I also want mechanics that deliver the fiction that I want, but I want there to be a justification behind the mechanics.  Metagame mechanics that make the fighter the center of the action "just because" are merely <a href="http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/InformedAbility" target="_blank">informed ability</a> as far as I'm concerned.All the Men and Elves pile on Sauron because he's practically invulnerable and can kill a dozen soldiers with one sweep of his weapon.  Stormtroopers focus-fire Jedi because they can deflect a single stormtrooper's blaster fire without difficulty and they can run circles around single troops.  The free humans send a whole team after Agent Smith because he's an dodges bullets like a pro and can take on any human one-on-one.  All of those examples have two things in common: They're very deadly in single combat, to the point that you need to outnumber them because single opponents have zero chance against them, and they have a very good defense against common attack forms, to the point that only sheer quantity can really do anything about it.Joe the Fighter isn't the most lethal guy on his team; Bob the Ranger is much more dangerous offensively.  Joe the Fighter isn't very much more resilient than his teammates; his defenses are probably 5-6 higher than Dave the Wizard including the mark and he has around double the hit points, but that doesn't make him harder to kill the way damage mitigation or non-AC defense does, it just makes it take longer.  So Joe isn't the most immediate threat on the battlefield, and even when he is (the party has no ranged attacks except fire spells when fighting fire-resistant enemies, say, and only the fighter is nearby) there's no reason to dogpile the fighter with all the enemy forces when you only need 2 or 3 enemies to get through the fighter's HP as fast as 1 enemy gets through the wizard's.So, given that, I would argue that the fiction shouldn't put the fighter in the center of the action!  There is no logical reason for the enemies to swarm him when they can just avoid him and go after his teammates.  The fighter has ways to stop people from running past him, but no reason to draw in enemies from farther away than that.  If you don't make him intimidating enough to make him seem like the most dangerous enemy, or tactical enough to entrap enemies, or some other justification for the mechanic, then that mechanic harms the fiction, I'd argue, rather than helping it.Fiction and gaming have different expectations.  In a Batman movie or comic, the bad guys get locked in Arkham Asylum and everyone acts surprised when they break out a month later; in a dungeon crawl, the second time a bad guy escapes the party is going to decapitate him, burn his body, and trap his soul to make sure he never comes back.  In a James Bond movie, the bad guy leaves 007 in a slow, escapable death trap; a party of evil PCs would never take that chance and would just kill their captives on the spot.  If you want your mechanics to "deliver the fiction you want," give one villain an item of 1/day dimension door for use in escaping the party and give another villain a mechanic that lets him escape the party regardless of dimensional lock, manacles, or any other restraints and see which one your party likes better.So...yeah.  The point of that rant is that if you can't tell me why and how your fighter is the center of attention in the battle, he shouldn't be the center of the battle, simple as that, and any mechanic that makes him the center of battle and lets you fill in any ol' justification after the fact is highly unsatisfying.Moving on to your other posts:As mentioned above, there's a big difference between "the fighter class supports the concept of a soldier who can survive in the thick of combat" (which it does and which no one is disputing) and "this fighter power provides an unexplained way to put the fighter in the thick of combat" (which it does and which is unsatisfying to plenty of players).To use a magical example for a moment, the wizard is a master of magic.  No one disputes that.  The wizard can cast magic somehow in a manner that is internally consistent.  People are fine with that.  The wizard can conjure magical fire.  That's fine.  Now, let's introduce a spell (or a feat, like, say, Searing Spell) that lets the wizard burn magical creatures made of magical fire, which doesn't make much sense even with the "but it's magic!" excuse.If I object to Searing Spell on the grounds that "the wizard can burn fire with fire because plot, he doesn't need any other reason, because the fiction is better if a pyromancer keeps using fire spells when fighting fire elementals!" is a stupid conceit, that doesn't mean I'm objecting to any other aspect of the wizard class or even to other fire spells that don't share that same problem.  Further, if I suggest making a small change that makes it slightly more palatable, like "Searing Spell can overcome the immunity of really really really fire-resistant creatures like red dragons, but not creatures that are made of fire like fire elementals," that doesn't mean I hate fire-blaster wizards and am favoring noncasters, it means that I object to that particular mechanic and think that a small concession to flavor and immersion would make me happy using a mechanic that I don't currently like.Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not hating on the fighter, whether 4e or 5e.  I love that the fighter gets lots of cool things to do in 4e, and I'd like to see the 5e fighter take some lessons from it.  There are plenty of things I dislike about the caster classes in 4e and 5e, particularly the sorcerer and warlock, though hopefully those won't be a problem in the next playtest iteration.  It just so happens that talking about the 4e fighter and warlock brought up the particular issue under consideration and I'm addressing that.  When my group plays 4e, we change the stats for some forced movement powers, change martial healing to temp HP, add an encounter power refresh, and a handful of other houserules and the group's objections are basically solved--in fact, given those changes, the most die-hard 1e fan in the group is happy to play a warlord.That's why I'm not particularly understanding the objection to making these small tweaks, I guess, just like the other side isn't particularly understanding our objection on immersion grounds.  You don't see why vague/metagame-y mechanics hurt our enjoyment, and I don't see why a page or so of mechanic alterations to better fit the flavor in our view hurts your enjoyment.[/sblock]Manbearcat/mlund[sblock]All of this is very accurate, and I agree that trying to simulate more granular parts of a battle in an abstract D&D framework can create some jarring contradictions.  However, you'll note that the outcry about forced movement isn't about a power that slides you 1 square to the side or something else that could be explained through unconscious positioning.  The power in question is one that convinces someone to run 15 feet towards you.  There are many powers that could be explained by reflex and instinct, but that's not one of them.It's like the Hurricane Strike monk maneuver in the latest playtest.  You can shove people a few feet nonmagically and people accept that just fine, but if you want to shove people 30 feet through the air, "I hit the guy really hard" just isn't a good enough justification anymore and the maneuver becomes supernatural to justify that.  Similarly, if Come and Get It involved moving 1 square back and having enemies adjacent to you follow you, that makes sense as luring someone in with a false retreat, while convincing people 1 square away to move toward you while you stay still makes less sense as a lure while still feeling somewhat off, and the RAW 3-square CaGI just seems absurd without some additional justification as to why it's doing that.Why are the Fort, Ref, and Will defenses separate from Dex, Con, and Wis?  Why is initiative in 3e not a Ref save, or a Spot check, or a Tumble check?  After all, your fortitude and your constitution are basically the same thing as far as poisons are concerned, and your mental reaction speed is much more important than your physical reaction speed to determine what you do in combat.The reason these and other stats are separated out are that, while they are all abstractions, they are abstractions of different things with different implementation purposes.  Sense Motive adds Wis + ranks + BAB against Feint but Wis + ranks against noncombat Bluff because BAB covers the abstraction of "is good at combat" and someone with equal training at reading body language and equally-good senses will have a better time identifying a feint if they are combat skilled themselves.  You could easily leave out BAB against feints, but that leaves a hole in the flavor: Joe the Fighter fights all the time, why can't he figure out feints better than Bob the Sage?Same with using Bluff/Intimidate/etc. for forced movement.  If Joe the Fighter is an actor in his spare time and Mike the Fighter is an accountant, Joe will likely be better at imitating body language and such to make a more convincing feint.  Thus, without any mechanics at all, one would expect just by comparing the two of them that, assuming equal combat training, Joe would be better at feinting than Mike and therefore better at convincing enemies to make those mistakes that forced movement represents.  If Joe and Mike both have an ability that makes them equally good at fooling people, that's unintuitive, the same way that being able to add the better of your stat and your ranks to a skill check--but not both--is unintuitive, because we know from our experience that someone who is both naturally good at something and trained at something is better than someone with training but no talent or talent but no training.There's a big gap between separating out Ref and AC or Tumble and Balance on the one hand and going full-on body trauma and hit locations on the other.  Abstractions should be streamlined enough to be simple to understand and easy to resolve, but detailed enough that they match our intuitions and understanding of the world.  If they're too detailed, you get grappling: accurate and satisfying for people who like that amount of detail, but clunky to use at the table and thus a waste of book space if people avoid using it.  If they're not detailed enough, you get CaGI: clean and tactically-enabling, but counterintuitive and thus immersion-breaking for some people.  If you have a mechanic that some people find insufficiently detailed, and you can fix that problem without making it much more complicated, why wouldn't you take that opportunity to satisfy them, particularly if you're trying to market your game to that segment?[/sblock]</blockquote>

Verification