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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5888874" data-attributes="member: 42582">I understand the general character of the concern with martial dailies, but I think that your examples highlight, for me, why I have trouble getting my head entirely around it.Let's take Conan first. I assume that Conan is swinging his sword with all his might every blow. REH tends to write him that way. The point of a power like Brute Strike isn't that the PC swings harder - rather, it's that the player gets to choose that this will be a strike that hits hard!And when we look at a power like Stop Thrust - within the fiction, it is just another instance of the fighter doing what s/he does all the time - attacks people, including moving people, and gets in their way and stops them moving. It's nothing special.Of course, mechanically it is something special: it's off-turn damage, and it let's the fighter control movement without having to hit with an opportunity attack. But I'm sure that no one thinks that the world of 4e fights is a strange stop-motion world. The whole idea of "immediate reactions" and "opportunity attacks" is just a mechanical abstraction, intended to introduce some sort of mechanical fluidity to mirror, however inadequately, the ingame fluidity of attacking and moving. And Stop Thruts is just one of the mechanics that achieves this.So, in the fiction, there is not Stop Thrust technique. There's just the fighter doing what s/he always does, attacking things aggressively, including those who try to move away or move past, and thereby dominating and controlling the melee.I don't see how the "why can't you do it again?" objection can even get off the ground, unless someone really does think that the world of the fiction is a stop motion world, and hence really does think that Stop Thrust is an observable technique that defies the reality of those bizarre stop motion physics!In some games, action points do not have any distinctive fictional content - they are just dice manipulators, that permit failures to be turned into successes, or successes to be increased. In HARP, for example, using a fate point can grant +50 to a roll. Turning a roll of 40 into a roll of 90 by spending a Fate Point doesn't change the fiction from if a 90 had been rolled. Likwise in Burning Wheel - spending artha to add dice is not inherently different from having those dice in your pool to beging with, from some other mechanical source.And most martial dailies are, in my view, not different from action or fate points at all. They do exactly what you say - permit the player control over the randomness of the dice (eg by giving more dice to roll, thereby tending to ensure a higher result) and/or permitting stepping out of the rigid timing mechanics. But as I've said, those timing mechanics only exist at the metagame level, unless you really think the fictional world of 3E and 4e D&D is a strang stop motion one.</blockquote>

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