Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="ironvyper" data-source="post: 4097457" data-attributes="member: 59739">But thats not whats neccesarily happening when u trip someone. Sure u might be trying to  trip another warrior or a fanged and or clawed monster. But u might also be trying to trip a drunk apprentice wizard in a bar fight.  Or a grieving peasant who blames your character for some real or imagined loss, or any number of other situations where you are NOT trying to knockdown a highly trained and armed individual. The rules need to be able to accurately reflect both situations.      Thats true, but its an excercise in limited imagination that u can only picture a trip that way, its called trip, not sweep. It could just as easily be a judo trip, where the big heavy armored knight steps forward and to the side of his opponent, plants his forward foot behind the opponents ankle and uses that big slow, armored, and nigh immovable leg as a More powerful lever to throw his opponent down then the fast unarmored man would have. And the rules need to be able to reflect that as well. Because once again, its called trip, not sweep. When u try to pidgeonhole an ability to much u just wind up limiting it and reducing the variety of combat, which ultimately makes it a less varied and interesting system for fighting, which is pretty much the opposite of what 4e is claiming to do.     Again thats the realm of the sweep, not the trip. The basic trip i described above requires almost no power, all the force comes the opponents heavier upper body being pushed backwards while his legs have to stay forward. The force comes from his own body wieght not the attacker.  And any move thats tought in the first week or so of martial arts is not the realm of the specialist.  Now some sort of spinning combination kick that both did normal damage and knocked the opponent down, thats specialist realm. A trip that also imposes some penalty to an ability like strength or dex, say described as grabbing an opponents wrist or ankle and rotating it down as hard u can to force him to the ground and doing 1 or 2 pts of temporary ability damage along with the knockdown, thats the realm of the specialist.   But a basic trip is not the realm of the specialist. Not even the realm of the barely competent really.      The idea of any human being tripping a grizzly bear is laughable. Thats why the bears greater size category penalized the hell out of you if u tried it before and his greater strength gave him a huge bonus to his strength roll, actually giving a total of 11 pts of advantage over a normal human tripper +4 for size, and +7 for the bears STR.   Two points here, First off u admit more people should have the ability to try, and they dont. Rolling an attack vs thier ability score is one option, not a very good one in my opinion, but workable, just makes that ability of the fighters not really a fighter ability at all.      secondly, as i have shown tripping someone is by no means a highly specialized skill, a well executed karate sweep might be, (which is debateable but pointless to do so) but thats not neccesarily what your doing, your just tripping them, You could be pushing them over something to trip them, u could be sticking your foot behind them to trip them, Hell u could be knocked to the ground and trying to grab thier ankle and twist it to pull them down, and that would be tripping them too.   However lets not let it be said i complain without offering a solution. Put it back to where everyone can trip an opponent with an opposed attack roll to represent how different levels of skill make a successful trip more or less likely to succeed and give fighters an ability where they get a free attack against anyone who they successfully trip. Which avoids a problem i saw in 3e where you would use your turn to trip an opponent, do him no damage and then have him use a move action on his turn to get up and then hit u with a standard attack. It was basically a null move before unless u wanted to get away. This would still be the case with most characters, but thats okay, thier not combat specialists so if they're tripping someone its probably best they use a move action to get away from him anyway. And the actual specialist can have his super-badass combat trip ability validated as he goes around knocking down and stabbing people.</blockquote>

Verification