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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TwinBahamut" data-source="post: 4301908" data-attributes="member: 32536">There are very few things in videogames that activate an automatic effect with no chance of failure. In many respects I would consider this to be a serious departure from videogames, rather than a movement towards them.There is a reason that there is a general rule when playing videogame RPGs that it is much better to focus on boosting allies rather than weakening enemies. For the most part, the latter is too unreliable to count on, and more often than not is nearly impossible.I think this harkens back to my point about hiding complexity in videogames. Forcing a Will Save to activate a Mark is something that slows down a tabletop game with more rolling and confirmation, but making that kind of check takes the computer less than a nanosecond.Oddly enough, the idea of each character having a large number of "at-will" powers is an incredibly rare idea in videogames, or at least any videogame that can easily be compared to D&D. If such an ability exists in a particular game, it tends to be the exception, rather than the rule. In fact, most videogames tend to under-utilize such ideas, and ever since I got that information about 4E I have been hoping that 4E will influence more game-designers to use that concept.Also, your claim that unlimited resources eliminate challenge or reduce them to the point where they are not fun seems like an odd jab to make... Let me use a videogame example. Look at the videogame Metal Gear Solid 3. After you beat the game once, you unlock a special weapon called the Patriot that, unlike every other weapon, has unlimited ammo and never needs to even reload, which obviously makes combat a bit easier. However, because the Patriot doesn't do anything to improve your defenses, and there a very large number of ways a battle can go bad in that game, just having the Patriot is no guarantee that you will win every fight. More often than not, you will still get killed if you make a mistake and get ambushed by enemies.This argument is based on two things: that "needing friends to win" is a videogame concept, and that 4E D&D makes solo play impossible. I find both claims rather sketchy (you need friends to win a game of baseball, and most videogames are single-player...), but since I haven't had the chance to run a solo game of D&D myself (I intend to, though), I can't really comment.That is a terrible simplistic way to look at it... I mean, aside from the implication that every character in a fighting game is just a different look on the exact same set of abilities (an implication that many fans of that genre would get really angry about), your implication is based on the idea that all videogames enforce this kind of symmetry, just like 4E does. Some do, sure, but not most of them.Look at the game I used in my big example, Fire Emblem Radiant Dawn. Sure, it treats magic and weapon as exactly the same thing, so it seems a bit like 4E in that regard, but at the same time it two very different races, the Beorc and the Laguz, who use completely different subsystems and don't even use the exact same experience growth systems (Beorc have 60 levels split into three tiers of 20 level classes, while Laguz have just 40 levels of a single class).Also, am I the only one who is bothered whenever anyone brings up the "if everyone is special, then no one is" quote? It is a quote from a deranged villain character that is meant to be an insight into how his envy and hatred for "supers" has lead to his desire to remove them from existence. I don't think it even supposed to work as a greater statement of truth, and it has never rung true for me.I can understand that you don't like the fact that the game has change drastically over the years, but nothing you mentioned here has any necessary connection to videogames. "Balance" has nothing to do with videogames (and I can quote the videogame developers who lament the way fans demand everything be balanced), and I don't think it has much to do with roleplaying either.Well, a great many videogame RPGs don't even keep track of grid movement, so that doesn't work well as an argument. Even more importantly, the idea of an "attack of opportunity" is completely foreign to videogame RPGs. There are certainly games where you take a risk of being hit by a counter-attack whenever you attack an enemy (the one condition where D&D doesn't trigger OAs), but I have never seen a game where you can be attacked just for trying to move around or drinking a potion. Opportunity Attacks differentiate D&D from videogames, not make them more like videogames.I am sorry that you don't like recent trends in D&D. However, just not liking the change is hardly proof that it is a "videogamey" change.</blockquote>

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