Why is flight considered a game breaker?

[Celebrim]

The other solution is to dispense with immunities and give everything a number. Anything can be overcome with a big enough number. This how the HERO system does it. This can result in confusion as to how much one needs to be 'immune'. Immunity isn't a thing in itself, it's dependent on the rest of the world. Everything is relative. So to properly build a PC, a player actually needs to have a good understanding of the whole world.

This is the path I'm trying to take. I'm trying to write all of the immunities out of the game and replace them with numbers. For example, Mindblack gives you a bonus vs. mental attacks and additionally causes you to not fail a save on a 1. Death ward works the same. So does Freedom of Action. Creature that previously have immunity tend to have very high levels of resistance. I'm striving toward a situation where a powerful fire elementalist could with the right feats actually burn a fire elemental.

I'm also working toward scaling down DC's so that immunities are nice, but not as essential as stock 3.X. I'm trying to emulate the experience of 1e where, as you leveled up, you could be more and more confident of passing a saving throw. My experience of stock 3.X is almost the reverse - as you got higher level, the less likely it was you'd pass a saving throw because DC's ramped up faster than saving throw bonuses. For example, spells no longer add their level to the DC of the saving throw. Monster HD no longer adds to the DC of the saving throw either - its enough in my opinion that the abilities that the attack is based on are already going up.

Of course, none of this is rigorously play tested (well, certainly not at the high levels where it really matters), but on paper it certainly looks like the math works better.

As far as 'understanding the world to build the character goes', I'm not sure I quite follow that argument except how it pertains to HERO system where starting characters can choose to have 'immunity'. It seems to me that Fire Resistance 20 is always less than Fire Resistance 40. If it was really necessary to do the math, I think a good rule of thumb is that spell effects tend not to do much more than 1d8 damage per character level. So, from that its pretty obvious to see that 5 energy resistance per expected challenge rating is quite high resistance, and anything much more than that is going to be effective immunity. After that, it only remains to ask what the limit of natural fire is in terms of damage, which is probably something like 'In direct contact with molten lava or (in absence of rock) heat which would melt metal and stone'. A creature which has high enough resistance to withstand that would be percieved as 'immune to fire'.

As far as saving throws go, I'm working from the theory that '+20 to saves/doesn't fail on a 1' is 'hard immunity' in as much that under my revisions DCs much above 20 are very rare and that at no time does a balanced encounter require a save more than 20 higher than the anticipated base save bonus to succeed. I'm actually unlikely to translate immunities like that into 'hard immunities' though because its almost as bad as what it replaces, and my tendancy is to move more to 'soft immunities' which are '+10 to saves/doesn't fail on a 1'. The obvious justification here is that in an average balanced encounter, the player generally shouldn't have to throw much higher than a 10 to succeed at something. Thus, a 'soft immunity' wouldn't represent absolute immunity, but rather near or complete immunity to typical hazards faced at the character's level, and signficant resistance even to hazards somewhat above typical for the characters level. Because the anticipation under my revisions is that save bonuses will go up faster than DC's, as the players increase in level 'soft immunities' would tend to act more and more like 'hard immunities'.

One of the theories I'm hoping to prove about my rules revisions as I continue to play test them is that they improve the balance between non-casters and casters and reduce the necessity of reliance on items (especially for non-casters). Of course, this isn't the entire picture as I've made other revisions as well (and some are still being refined), but the math seems to work at first blush.

 

[pemerton]

The lack of meaningful difference in PC abilities in a skill challenge severely restrains how interesting having a skill challenge is. It's just not fun to do the same thing that everyone else does when I'm supposed to be different.

One solution to this, I think, which is consistent with keeping and developing, rather than abandoning, the skill challenge mechanics, is to place greater emphasis on the difference in ingame situation resulting from checks by different PCs on different skills. Unfortunately, the published rules don't help very much with this.

 

[Celebrim]

One solution to this, I think, which is consistent with keeping and developing, rather than abandoning, the skill challenge mechanics, is to place greater emphasis on the difference in ingame situation resulting from checks by different PCs on different skills. Unfortunately, the published rules don't help very much with this.

In fact, the published rules very much get in the way of this.

When the 4e design team first started talking about 'skill challenges', I said, "I've been doing this for a while now." An example for me would be a chase, in which the PC's are expected to accumulate a certain number of success to catch their quary, and if they accumulate a certain number of losses they lose the quary. (Not coincidently, one of the better 3e third part supplements, 'Hot Pursuit', has mechanics that boil down in their essence to exactly that.) That sounds like a skill challenge on the surface, but in practice its something very different from what 'skill challenge' has come to mean.

When the 4e design team talked about running a 'Temple of Doom' style mining cart chase, not only did I think, 'alright!', but I felt there was a direct correlation between how I would have ran such a such a scene and what they described.

But the key difference between that and what the 4e team ultimately came up with is that the 4e design team came up with the idea of what amounts to a subsystem with an entry point and an exit point, and, while within the subsystem the rules no longer seem to interact with either the game world or the rest of the game rules themselves. Running a 'skill challenge' for me meant running a situation where skill ranks were important, but for which there was many entry and many exit points and each die roll equated to some quantifiable game state. The 4e skill challenge seems to only have quantifiable game states at the beginning and end of the skill challange, and everything within is simply a mechanical state of the challenge.

Or in other words, each individual action within a skill challenge is meaningless. It renders the whole system nothing more than meaningless dice throwing. Rather than a skill challenge meaning 'every few rounds you must make a skill check that has an important effect on the current game state', they... I honestly don't know what they think that they are doing. I don't believe it would have been possible to design a worse system if you'd set out to try.

A skill is nothing more than a mechanic for determining whether a risky player proposition succeeded or failed. The results of either should be more or less immediate and each result should lead to some clear game state that the PC's can interact with and which is the obvious result of their choice in the prior game moment. A series of these cases is a 'skill challenge', but it lacks all the completely arbitrary system first, game second, artifacts of the 4e rules set.

If you actually abandon the 'skill challenge' mechanics, you actually get much closer to making skills matter than if you had them. To place great difference on the results of choosing one course of action over another is to abandon the skill challenge mechanics. The solution is to just drop the damnable things and frame them, stick them up on a wall in the RPG hall of shame, along side FATAL and Spawn of Fashan as an example of how to do everything wrong, as an example one of the worst designed game mechanics of all time having completed failed in every single one of its stated objectives, and not just failed, but having somehow moved beyond failure to a state that is worse.

 

[thecasualoblivion]

@Celebrim

Oh, come on now.

I've been playing 4E since launch, and I've used, adapted and ignored the skill challenge system. I've played an run many a RPGA adventure as well, of which almost universally contain at least one Skill Challenge. The Skill Challenge system has its good points and its bad points, but it is most definitely not the travesty you make it out to be.

 

[StreamOfTheSky]

Yes, but there is the Superman effect:

Superman is all powerful, but gets his ass kicked by kryptonite. When every enemy the PCs face has to have krypotnite to provide any sort of challenge, the game becomes lame, and flight/teleport/whatever becomes boring instead of amazing.

Its the issue with giving players trump cards. Everything that is trumped by a trump card turns into a non-encounter, and the game loses a lot of its flavor.

There's a difference between kryptonite and "able to pose a challenge." When a DM includes archers in the enemy ranks ot shoot up the wizard who's typically in the back trying to stay safe, the archers are not the wizard's "kryptonite," unless you use that term very loosely. A wizard's kryptonite would be a grapple monkey with an AMF emanating from himself. Something that utterly shuts the wizard down and makes him basically powerless.

A game with a flying party can be fun if the DM is willing to run it. 3D combat can be complicated to figure out, but once you get the hang of it, could make fights much more dynamic, especially if you limited access to good and perfect flight (so that creatures can't just securely hover in one spot) or had rough weather conditions lower effective maneuverability.

And not every enemy has to fly, and not every area has to have environmental hazards/dangers/annoyances. IMO, a simple group of skilled foot archers could probably be big trouble for a flying party. More access to cover and ability to hide and ambush. If they're using crossbows (light, with Rapid Reload) they can drop prone for a basically free +4 AC. If the PCs can't hover, they'd just be plainly outmatched in such a shoot-out, unable to full attack while the ground-based foes can. If they can hover, the enemies can still amass the benefits I outlined above. And certain spells and abilities to stun, daze, etc... someone could potentially cause a flying PC to drop to the earth rather painfully.

Similarly, as long as they have ranged attacks, burrowing creatures remain a nuissance, since they can dive underground to recover and wait if things go south. And again, any classic dungeon type environment with small corridors and tight corners (and since it's a flying party, complete flooring is less of a necessity, and there might be more fun potential for exploration or fight scenarios) will limit how safe they are and how far away they can put themselves from nonflying enemies.

There's plenty of potential for a "flyer" game with the game system. Really, especially by high levels, the PCs are practically demigods anyway, fighting appropriately dangerous monstrosities. I still don't see why flying is such a stretch.

 

[Noumenon]

place greater emphasis on the difference in ingame situation resulting from checks by different PCs on different skills.

Like, make the first player's choice binding on the whole party. "I fly to the top of the cliff" means the next roll of the skill challenge becomes about getting to the top after the boulder rollers are alerted. "I go the long way around" means the next roll is about enduring the hot hot sun and prickly bushes. "I climb" means the whole party hits the cliff face and needs Insight checks or Use Rope to keep making progress.

 

[Votan]

There's a difference between kryptonite and "able to pose a challenge." When a DM includes archers in the enemy ranks ot shoot up the wizard who's typically in the back trying to stay safe, the archers are not the wizard's "kryptonite," unless you use that term very loosely. A wizard's kryptonite would be a grapple monkey with an AMF emanating from himself. Something that utterly shuts the wizard down and makes him basically powerless.

A game with a flying party can be fun if the DM is willing to run it. 3D combat can be complicated to figure out, but once you get the hang of it, could make fights much more dynamic, especially if you limited access to good and perfect flight (so that creatures can't just securely hover in one spot) or had rough weather conditions lower effective maneuverability.

And not every enemy has to fly, and not every area has to have environmental hazards/dangers/annoyances. IMO, a simple group of skilled foot archers could probably be big trouble for a flying party. More access to cover and ability to hide and ambush. If they're using crossbows (light, with Rapid Reload) they can drop prone for a basically free +4 AC. If the PCs can't hover, they'd just be plainly outmatched in such a shoot-out, unable to full attack while the ground-based foes can. If they can hover, the enemies can still amass the benefits I outlined above. And certain spells and abilities to stun, daze, etc... someone could potentially cause a flying PC to drop to the earth rather painfully.

Similarly, as long as they have ranged attacks, burrowing creatures remain a nuissance, since they can dive underground to recover and wait if things go south. And again, any classic dungeon type environment with small corridors and tight corners (and since it's a flying party, complete flooring is less of a necessity, and there might be more fun potential for exploration or fight scenarios) will limit how safe they are and how far away they can put themselves from nonflying enemies.

There's plenty of potential for a "flyer" game with the game system. Really, especially by high levels, the PCs are practically demigods anyway, fighting appropriately dangerous monstrosities. I still don't see why flying is such a stretch.

I agree, in principle, but realize that the game world changes (radically) from a lot of fantasy worlds if you take this route.

Now this is absolutely not true in an E6 environment. In the first six levels, access to flight is limited, duration is short and the only class that can have it one command (the Sorcerer) needs to pick it as their signature spell. Getting the entire party to fly is a major accomplishment.

Where this begins to be an issue is with medium to high levels. Starting at level 15 or so (well with-in the level range of the PhB), characters can start having perfect and silent flight for hours at a time while being invisible. There are counters (True seeing has too short of a range but see invisible exists) but they can't be up all of the time. Characters sleep in alternate dimensions and cross continents with a word.

Flying in high level games is more effective than modern methods of flight. It allows hovering, turning on a dime, doesn't create lot's of noise and there is no amplification of danger if you get hit. Compare that to the closest modern technological solution (the helicopter) where hits magnify danger tremendously and it cannot sneak up on you.

Despite these disadvantages (relative to D&D flight), aircraft have transformed the nature of warfare. Large and tight formations are a thing of the past. The idea of deploying melee weapon only troops is considered only for specialized (stealth) missions.

I think a high level fantasy game would have these features as well. Everyone would carry ranged weapons. People would move thinking about cover. Large formations would be abandoned. Units without enhanced sensory gear (see invisible) would be at a tremendous disadvantage and it would need to be available to nearly everyone.

Alternatively, clever players are (literally) superheroes. One annoyed wizard can smash an army with little risk (protection from missiles, overland flight, teleport and great invisibility -- plus ranged area effect attack spells).

It is certainly doable and can be fun but it's also a pretty clear arms race. Flight is simply straight good as opposed to being an interesting option. My main issue with 3/3.5 era flight is that it is riskier to fly via mount than via spell -- if the mount is killed you fall (fast) whereas if the spell is dispelled you feather fall (automatically). This is odd to me . . .

 

[Celebrim]

My main issue with 3/3.5 era flight is that it is riskier to fly via mount than via spell -- if the mount is killed you fall (fast) whereas if the spell is dispelled you feather fall (automatically). This is odd to me . . .

That's my main issue as well. My secondary issue is the vast scale up in power between Alter Self/Levitate and Fly. There is a lot of room for spells that are intermediate in utility between the 2nd level options and the all in one tool of Fly that is availabe at 3rd level. I believe Fly is a 4th level spell based both on the power escalation test (is there a viable spell design between Levitate and Fly?) and the pragmatic test (if Fly was 4th level, would you still cast it?).

 

[Leatherhead]

That's my main issue as well. My secondary issue is the vast scale up in power between Alter Self/Levitate and Fly. There is a lot of room for spells that are intermediate in utility between the 2nd level options and the all in one tool of Fly that is availabe at 3rd level. I believe Fly is a 4th level spell based both on the power escalation test (is there a viable spell design between Levitate and Fly?) and the pragmatic test (if Fly was 4th level, would you still cast it?).

Now that's a test I can't agree with. If Cure Light Wounds was a second level spell people would still cast it, but that doesn't mean it belongs at second level. There just isn't anything to replicate the lateral movement that fly has.
What you should do is bring Telekinesis down and see which one gets used more.

 

[Celebrim]

Now that's a test I can't agree with. If Cure Light Wounds was a second level spell people would still cast it, but that doesn't mean it belongs at second level.

Errr... wouldn't they just cast 'Cure Moderate Wounds' instead? I believe you are failing to understand the test.

There just isn't anything to replicate the lateral movement that fly has. What you should do is bring Telekinesis down and see which one gets used more.

Alter Self is a second level spell and gets you in the air. It stands to reason that there could be a 3rd level spell that was better than Alter Self (for example, average manueverability, higher speed, but still winged flight) which people might cast in preference to Alter Self. The only reason that they don't, is the jump between the options at 2nd level and Fly is enormous. Fly gives you good manueverability, high speed, and stable (wingless) flight. That's awesome.

It's too awesome. It's not in step with the logical progression, and it's level is not being capped by the introduction of something obviously superior soon after.