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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Felon" data-source="post: 4601711" data-attributes="member: 8158">Well, first point of order: it sure seems like you missed a lot of stuff I was saying in my posts, otherwise you wouldn't be explaining to me why granting monsters their signature defenses is problematic in 4e, as you're basically just paraphrasing stuff I've already said. All that stuff about classes offering few powers, all that stuff about a player with effect X being "buggered"--that's all stuff I said. Really. Go back and check it out.If powers were a little more robust, then they might have more than one possible effect. You'd pick a power knowing that not everything under the sun can be shoved around or knocked over, so you aim for a different effect. But powers aren't like that flexible, so we get to shove everything. Secondly, I'm left wondering if you abjectly refused to play previous editions. The rules for swarms were very much as stiff as what you described: believe it or not, no monk worth his tofu expected his stunning fist to send a swarm of killer bees reeling. Pretty much no spell or effect that targeted a single creature would affect a swarm. Weapons did half damage against some swarms, no damage against others. AoE's were the main form of offense, but there were some tactics that non-spellcasters could use: you could light a torch or use a similar weapon, for instance. But for certain, they were hard if not impossible to fight using straightforward attacks. Sounds pretty rough, huh? Well, here's the question you migh want to ask yourself: why throw a bunch of killer bees at a party in the first place? Is it so the ranger pulls out his bow or the rogue pulls out his dagger and proceeds to kill the swarm like it was a goblin? The 4e solution that you seem to condone is just that: homogenize monsters to ensure that whatever weapon a player uses will work against anything they fight so they don't have to ever feel "boned". My spin on it is this: if a swarm is an inappropriate monster for an encounter, then use the goblin or some other monster. There are plenty of monsters that die to cold steel. Personally, I know when I want to use a swarm and why.As to your refusal to play a martial class because you feel "gimped", "boned", "buggered", and so on--well, there were certainly plenty of monsters that put spellcasters in a bind, and encouraged them to rely on the boys with big swords. If a player has a sense of entitlement that precludes his hero ever being in a situation where he really has to think "ho-lee crap, what am I going to do now?", then I can certainly see why he would feel monsters should be sufficiently watered-down that he never need worry that his sense of total empowerment is slipping away. Diatribe against all of that as badwrongfun if you wish, but you have to do so in the face of D&D working that way for a long, long time and lots of people having tons of fun sweating as they endeavored to deal with it.</blockquote>

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