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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8757898" data-attributes="member: 4937">I don't either.  As I noted though, I don't like disassociated mechanics even when they occur in spells where you can always appeal to "magic" as a general purpose explanation.  I find they are bad for the game in a lot of ways, some subtle and others more overt.I don't want to get into edition bashing so I'm not going to get into examples where 4e designers just assumed no one would care about the fiction if the game was balanced, even though some exist.  What I am going to say is that there are usually ways to make martial mechanics feel distinctive and gritty that gives you both the advantage of giving martials more to do in combat without sacrificing the fiction and making the game have priority over the thing it is trying to simulate.  If a fighter learns a combat trick (whatever we are going to call it be it maneuver or feat or whatever), that says so something like "Whenever you hit an opponent with a bludgeoning weapon twice in the same round, you may shove them as an immediate action that doesn't provoke an attack of opportunity" or "Whenever you perform a shield bash attack, if you hit, you may choose to either clench or shove the opponent as free action" then I'm OK with that sort of thing.There is an aesthetic going on here, but I don't think you are really capturing the aesthetic that is going on.  D&D spells explicitly change the fiction because of "magic" without a further in game need to explain why.  So you can have a spell that conjures 5 daggers out of nowhere as an at will ability and allows you to throw them in an arc in front of you.  But if you do that, and you don't have magic as part of the explanation, then at some point after the character has thrown 40 daggers over the course of an extended combat, you are going to be like, "Where is she keeping all those daggers and if these are mundane daggers why aren't they piling up around the room?"  You get to the point, and I know this sort of thing would happen because I've seen it with at will cantrip abilities in some systems, where the player is going to declare, "I climb out of the pit by spending the next two hours throwing daggers into the corner of the room until they make a pile tall enough to reach the lip of the pit".It's not that mind a martial maneuver being able to replicate a spell.  It's that I mind when mechanics are introduced because at the meta level they are perfectly balanced, but aren't in fact paying any attention to the fiction.  It's not even that I mind if the thing the martial class does is 'unrealistic'.   I'm perfectly fine at some level with an at will maneuver that lets you throw a small shield like you were Captain America.  I haven't done that, I feel Cap has what is basically a magic shield even in the fictional space, but I wouldn't hugely object if in fact the maneuver was written like a physical object was actually moving through the fictional space (for example on a miss shield might not come back to you or would land some distance away depending on if there was something to ricochet against).</blockquote>

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