Why is it so important?

[gizmo33]

You're absolutely right. Tougher fights, coupled with more character options, which means it takes longer to create a high level character, will need a solution. Perhaps it will be harder for a PC to die. Maybe there will be fate points. Or raise dead wil become more common.

Yes. But I find that to be a slippery slope, because fate points, raise dead, etc. really make death not that much of a death. And so you increase the percieved risk of an encounter but then turn around and add things to mitigate it. Intelligent people, in short order, will recalculate their perceived risk. So the first time you encounter an orc and he does 80 pts of damage to you on a hit, you say "wow 4E is really scarey". But then you realize the party cleric can just click his fingers and raise you from the dead, and eventually you adjust your expectations. Hopefully my exaggeration at least indicates IMO the principle involved, and that I really don't think there is a "fate point" solution to this problem.

As RavenCrowking point out, I think sometimes what seems like a short terms solution turns out not to be one once everyone gets used to the new system. I think Action Points would work like this - they would sooner or later be taken for granted, and then an encounter that did not tax a significant portion of Action Points would be considered a push-over, for the same reasons that Wyatt considers a 25% resource expenditure encounter to be boring.

 

[Raven Crowking]

Well, you would say that.

Of course I would. Given that your zeitgeist statements are, essentially, an appeal to authority without any backing up that I am aware of.

RC

 

[Celebrim]

It is. I think that's a good thing.

So, it would appear, do the 4e designers.

 

[Doug McCrae]

I'm not sure that I accept that the zeitgeist is as you say it is.

Well, WotC do the market research. All we do is read the internet. Which is a filthy liar.

 

[gizmo33]

Does it matter if it's short, medium or long-term resource management? Resource management will still be there.

It matters IMO. There is a qualitative difference between the types of resources - as I tried to indicate with the WoW vs. TRPG comparison for example. It boils down to the amount of game world information you need to absorb to manage long-term resources. What Celebrim calls "operational" stuff - is something you need to make an assessment of the overall environment to deal with. Neither Wyatt's DM, nor Wyatt, apparently, give two hoots about this element of the game AFAICT, but it would have been nice if he would have acknowledged it's existence.

In fact it will be increased, assuming all classes now get limited use abilities. Previously 50% of the standard party, the fighter and rogue, had no operational resource managment.

They do, fighters and rogues have to manage their hitpoints. (And an occasional potion or scroll). None of the classes as currently designed are exactly the same in capability after an encounter. All suffer some form of attrition. I don't object to rebalancing things so that fighters and wizards have the same relative staying power. But I object to rebalancing by removing the issue entirely.

For non-casters, decision making in combat was highly limited prior to 3e, imo. 3e brought in lots of interesting options - sunder, grapple rules you could use, bull rush and so forth. AoOs were key, in my view, to making the game much more tactically interesting.

That IMO is a seperate issue from resource management. Increasing tactical options was interesting. At first it was very interesting. Now, after a few years of playing 3E, all of the "who steps where when" stuff really slows down battle. First of all, a high level fighter is going to have an intuitive sense not to step some place that's going to get him killed. Secondly, movement is relatively uninteresting and time consuming in 3E after you've done it for a few dozen battles.

So there are pros and cons to raising or lowering the tactical options available in combat. To speed up combat, I've been suspecting that they're going to reduce these options, but I don't know specifics.

 

[hong]

Of course I would. Given that your zeitgeist statements are, essentially, an appeal to authority without any backing up that I am aware of.

See http://www.enworld.org/showpost.php?p=3752743&postcount=212

Please provide evidence of the masses of people willing to defend the current setup (beyond those who have already posted, that is).

 

[gizmo33]

Well, WotC do the market research. All we do is read the internet. Which is a filthy liar.

Market research can uncover problems, but I am FAR more skeptical that it can propose solutions. 90% of people don't like having a headache, but that doesn't justify saying that you're drug company is going to proscribe candy for headaches (market research shows people like candy too).

So Wyatt describes a problem, and I'd believe that market research could show that it's a significant problem that needs to be addressed. But his reasoning about what causes the problem, and what fixes the problem, IMO is not something that market research would help much with.

 

[hong]

Market research can uncover problems, but I am FAR more skeptical that it can propose solutions.

... not that anyone was suggesting that market research was proposing solutions.

Why, if it was, I could make MILLIONS!

 

[Raven Crowking]

See http://www.enworld.org/showpost.php?p=3752743&postcount=212

Please provide evidence of the masses of people willing to defend the current setup (beyond those who have already posted, that is).

Not surprisingly, I didn't think that post sufficient to support your contention earlier, and I do not think it sufficient now.

You seem to misunderstand me here, also. I am not saying that you are wrong. I am saying that you haven't evidenced that you are right. You may be right; you have simply failed to provide sufficient evidence for a reasonable person to accept this as a given.

Thus, any reasoning that relies upon an appeal to authority must be regarded as fallicious (although the conclusion may still be correct, we don't have any means to know).

IMHO, of course.....and par for the course for the Interweb.


RC

 

[Geron Raveneye]

Yes, what you're proposing (the hour long availability of 0 level spells and such) is something I would really like to see in the new version. My issue has to do with Wyatt's stated design goals, and your suggestion doesn't really address his concerns AFAICT. So I think it's unlikely that 4E will stop at just the changes you're suggesting if Wyatt's stated goals are a part of that system.

Which is mainly because he and his colleagues are trying to design a D&D that feels different enough from 3.X to be called its own edition, while my idea is an easy implementation in nearly any edition, since it only requires the change on a few spells. It's a bit like what they did with 3.5, only not shortening but increasing duration for a few spells to be more useful overall.