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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5707695" data-attributes="member: 82106">Yeah, I'm not especially buying it. Teleport being 'more magical and thus must be higher level' than fly is simply a conceit. There's IMHO very little difference in how 'non-physical' a flying humanoid is than a teleporting one. Both situations substantially violate the known laws of physics, and there aren't physical laws that are 'more important' than other ones. You take the whole thing kit-n-kaboodle or none of it.Game mechanically the type of tactical short-range teleportation allowed at low levels IS tactically less disruptive than full-on flight. Teleportation doesn't let you hover over the battlefield choosing who and when to engage, and how, flight does. In point of fact you CAN get forms of flight or other effectively similar things at low levels. They have roughly the same mechanical tactical import as low end teleportation does. You can access terrain that is hard to get to, quickly escape from a bad situation, or bypass some enemy to get to another one, etc. The same thing goes for warlords having healing powers. The gods are the BEST way to access healing mechanics. The cleric has healing potential warlords only dream of (or MC into another leader class to get, usually cleric). There are just alternatives for them that work pretty well and fit with their concept fluff-wise. The only issue here is one person's conceptions of how the game should be, not any consideration based on game design. As for the general commentary on 4e design... I think what you have to understand is game design isn't some simple process. It is particularly tricky when dealing with a game like D&D that has over the years built up a large weight of previous precedent and has had almost every imaginable sort of material added to it at one point or another.When you design a game it is VERY difficult (far more than you imagine) to bring all the various possible elements together perfectly so that they both work in a game sense perfectly and provide people with all the options they want, and at the same time thematically fit together in a reasonable way. It is especially difficult to do that in such a way that the result plays with a certain feel and provides the type of game people want. You really don't know how all that is going to fall out until you release a game. You could playtest for 100 years and once you reach a certain point there's just not that much more value in it.I think if you look at 4e you will find they DID provide a pretty systematic concept of which things should and shouldn't be doable at different levels, within specific roles and power sources, etc. I think those guidelines were developed pretty early on in the design process. OTOH when it comes to adding material it is very hard to balance all the different competing considerations and hit it perfectly every time. Clearly there are certain things like Twin Strike that would probably be done differently with 20/20 hindsight. That doesn't mean they were clearly and obviously flawed from day one. Internal playtesting is also a funny thing. All the people in a given community of gamers may well play in similar ways and do similar things. They establish a culture. Even when you go out to some people outside to playtest that A) usually only happens after most things are fairly set, and B) often the people you recruit end up sharing your approach. Then when your game hits the street you suddenly find out that there's some, in retrospect, fairly obvious loophole or flaw that people out in the field home right in on. Other subtle things can happen too. 99% of the design of a game has to be complete by the time you get to a lot of the detailed elements, like say feats, powers, monsters, and items in 4e. Each individual item etc is fine in isolation, and the few that were used as test cases during development probably provide an overall feel to the game, and power level, balance, etc that seems right to the developers. Then you farm out all the 1000's of follow-on variations of those things you need, and the people writing them up can stick right to your guidelines, but yet the way they all tend to work and the way the editors tend to edit things, etc can lead to a collectively different result than what you intended. So for instance the bulk of MM1 monsters can feel like underpowered punching bags, yet in development the specific monsters that were used as test cases worked perfectly well. It is just that the people coming in to do the grunt work on that stuff tended to see it differently, maybe because your guidelines didn't quite capture what you wanted, or misrepresented it slightly in some subtle way. Perhaps the monster authoring guidelines for example slightly overemphasized insuring that monsters weren't 'swingy' and able to down characters with a single lucky shot in round 1. So the people authoring the monsters tended to undershoot, not being completely familiar with exactly what would make a perfect monster. No one monster falls drastically outside the damage guidelines but collectively they're just generally not offensively powerful enough. You have to remember too that there's a really long pipeline of content. Stuff usually takes a year or so to go from project approval to delivery. MM2 is probably a perfect example. Once MM1 was out there and people were playing with it, it rapidly becomes clear that monsters should on average do more damage. By that time MM2 is practically finished. Maybe some superficial corrections get made, like MM2 tweaks solos and elites a bit, but mostly the issue is already built-in, and making a radical change requires another 6 months of R&D to get right, so it isn't until MM3 that we really see monsters that are dead on, and it isn't until MME that we see items being dead on, etc.</blockquote>

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