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Message: <blockquote data-quote="spinozajack" data-source="post: 6647196" data-attributes="member: 6794198">One can definitely say that 4e's approach to strict balance in improvised actions fundamentally misconstrues the point of improvisation and makes it on par (or weaker) than just using your default attacks. It makes improvisation a waste of time. That's not a sound design principle. I don't like wasting my time, or having my time wasted, or other people's. We've seen countless times people try to improvise and then, yay, I did the same thing as my optimised at-will. Or even less. It was definitely an inferior system, poorly thought out from the beginning.There should be no limits on how much damage you can achieve with an improvised action, or what effects it can have both in and out of combat. It should be DM call, ending there. You can have table estimates of damage many types of things do, but they should be proportional and sensible, and not require a strict balance with weapon attacks. Pushing a boulder that weighs a ton off a cliff and onto the enemy wizard shouldn't do the same damage as a non-striker encounter power. That's totally unbalanced and really dumb too. While 4e designers thought they were being clever, they were actually making it so that improvisation is an exercise in complete futility.In 4e, you use your powers, or you are wasting people's time. Your powers give better results anyway. This also goes back to the status conditions. You might think that using the table there to knock the enemy over is a sound plan, or throwing a net over the enemy, or disarming it, until you realize that you're mechanically better off just attacking and killing the enemy. This was often true in 3e as well, for those trick builds, which required a ton of investment and then you were a one trick pony. In 4e, your class features, feats, and powers all combined to make your character be good at what it is supposed to be good at, and improvising was almost always completely outclassed by the lackluster damage potential of p42. So yes, one can indeed claim that some improvisation rules in some D&D editions are objectively better. Spending extra effort to achieve worse results means it's not only not worth it to even try, but your team will tire of these antics. The game was rigged in favor of using your powers all the time, and so that's what people did. That's an objectively bad set of improv rules, by any standard.</blockquote>

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