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Why is the Vancian system still so popular?
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<blockquote data-quote="Eldritch_Lord" data-source="post: 5889155" data-attributes="member: 52073"><p>Well, most of the late-3e material couldn't reach T1 simply because they had only 1 book of their resource system (or 1/3 a book in the binder's case), while psionicists had 2 books and a smattering of powers elsewhere and Vancian casters had spells in every frakking book. If the PHB, all of the Completes, and all of the setting books had new martial maneuvers, they could do quite a bit more. Again, it's the power and number of individual options that make the difference, not the resource systems used.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Another assumption on your part. There's nothing inherent in non-daily systems preventing people from nova-ing. If you had a fatigue-based systems like 4e psionics, for instance, where you could boost encounter-equivalent powers into daily-equivalent powers, you can nova just as well as the casters; if you have plot points or the equivalent which you spend to activate powers and otherwise exert narrative control, you could spend more points for a bigger effect.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>So if you can practically guarantee a one-hit kill on enemies with your Swarm of Arrows strike, why would you limit yourself to Twin Strikes when they'd be less effective? It can't be bow strength, since you can pull off your Swarm of Arrows strike and Horizon Distance strike and Pin Them To The Wall strike once each day, so surely your bow could handle two or three Swarm of Arrows strikes. It can't be a matter of tiredness, since you can do Twin Strikes for a solid 2 minutes in combat without any loss of effectiveness.</p><p></p><p>If equipment maintenance were a thing, if there were penalties for spamming moves, if combat fatigue rules were implemented, if there were situational requirements for certain maneuvers, those would be sensible limitations. 1/day/maneuver, though, just doesn't work for many people. If you absolutely <em>had</em> to go with daily power slots, I'd at least prefer being able to mix-and-match powers to fit the tactical consideration--the 5e fighter would be the 3e spontaneous sorcerer to the 4e fighter's Vancian wizard, as it were--but I'd obviously prefer something not daily slot-based at all.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>This isn't actually an argument for martial dailies, since the martial types would be either nova-ing or running short of dailies just like the casters. A martial fatigue system would be better in that instance, since powers could be rationed out for longer days just like how in AD&D dungeoncrawls--at least in my experience--wizards just spread out their casting to accommodate the less-frequent spell preparation, and for shorter days they could afford to take more risks/go all out/whatever (depending on how exactly fatigue worked) because they knew to expect shorter days.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Of <em>course</em> there are misses. This is WotC we're talking about. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink ;)" data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>The difference between HP and martial dailies is one of granularity. If all attacks dealt 1 damage and people had a handful of HP, HP would be much less acceptable, regardless of whether you personally view HP as physical health, luck, morale, divine guidance, or whatever else; the system would be far too rigid and unrealistic even compared to the very-abstract current system ("Why can I take exactly 2 dagger hits" etc.). The randomness, range, and other aspects of the HP system help take the edges off the glaring abstraction and allow it to be more easily rationalized.</p><p></p><p>Likewise, if you take the 1/day/power martial power system and spread it out using a fatigue system or stunt system or plot system or whatever, the ability to use multiple different powers different numbers of times per day based on the circumstances helps people swallow the abstraction and obscures the fact that, at the end of the day (no pun intended), you're still restricting a certain kind of sword swing to limited uses for balance reasons.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>It's fine to use narrative/metagame mechanics to balance in-game abilities. Plot points, action points, whatever you call them are fine even in mostly-simulationist systems. The problems come in when the narrative/metagame nature of those resources impinges on the game world generally, and on believability specifically.</p><p></p><p>Action points affect die rolls; characters can only get a vague sense of "I'm lucky that important attack against the BBEG hit!" from use of action points. Plot points affect the narrative; characters might find it a bit coincidental that they keep finding conveniently-placed hay bales to fall on, but that's all. Daily powers take a metagame reasoning (we need to restrict use of this power for balance reasons...) and use it to create powers with metagame restrictions (...therefore you can use each one 1/day only...) that are visible within the game world (...so it's impossible to use the same trick more than once a day even if the situation would call for it, for no logical in-game observable reason).</p><p></p><p>There's a difference between mechanics which attempt to abstract the simulation (such as ToB's encounter-maneuvers-with-recharge, which try to model the ebb and flow of combat) that lend themselves to a particular rationale and accomplish their goal more or less elegantly and mechanics which don't have a particular in-game goal in mind and don't attempt to model a particular rationale. Encounter powers are a much simpler alternative to tracking stances, openings, momentum, and that sort of thing; the single explanation of "you can't use it again immediately because you're out of position/the enemy has his guard up at the moment/similar" works well enough, even though there are corner cases (e.g. surprised opponents) that make it not work as well. Daily powers have no such single explanation, and even if they did there's no in-game rationale daily powers serve that couldn't be better served by a different resource system.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>The <em>lack</em> of verbiage differentiates them, actually. All of the powers' fluff describe in-game occurrences that seem mundane enough (e.g. Reaving Strike, Fighter 19: "You swing your weapon in a terrific arc, hitting with such force that your foe stumbles backward."), the powers aren't significantly different thematically from at-will and encounter powers (that is, there's no distinction along the lines of "encounter powers boost your attacks, daily powers negatively impact opponents because plot" or the like), and all of the other powers in the game are treated as if they are actually being used that way in-game.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>You mean aside from the definition of HP provided in each edition's DMG? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink ;)" data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>So the fighter is always doing fighter-y stuff, and is always attempting to control enemies' movements. Why is Stop Thrust only ever successful once per day? Why is any other daily power only ever successful once per day? Why can a 17th-level fighter only push a target 3 squares and follow immediately (Mountain Breaking Blow) once per day, why can't he follow up every time he pushes someone? Why is attacking and moving away again (Harrying Blow, Fighter 17) not something you can keep doing over and over again? Mechanically, we know that being able to continue pushing someone away from the party or being able to keep out of range of an enemy's attacks is abusable, but narratively why <em>wouldn't</em> you, say, keep away a squad of soldiers by continually attacking the nearest one and moving away so as not to be surrounded, or keep pushing soldiers away to keep them separated?</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>And that point is a key difference between the two. If you spend an action point to change a roll of 7 to a roll of 13 and thereby turn a miss into a hit, not this event could have happened anyway--there is no observable aspect of it in-game to make it different from any other lucky roll. If, however, you have this really cool move that would be really handy against the goblins you're facing, but can only use it once, there's a disconnect between the metagame and the fiction. That's what makes the one more acceptable than the other.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Eldritch_Lord, post: 5889155, member: 52073"] Well, most of the late-3e material couldn't reach T1 simply because they had only 1 book of their resource system (or 1/3 a book in the binder's case), while psionicists had 2 books and a smattering of powers elsewhere and Vancian casters had spells in every frakking book. If the PHB, all of the Completes, and all of the setting books had new martial maneuvers, they could do quite a bit more. Again, it's the power and number of individual options that make the difference, not the resource systems used. Another assumption on your part. There's nothing inherent in non-daily systems preventing people from nova-ing. If you had a fatigue-based systems like 4e psionics, for instance, where you could boost encounter-equivalent powers into daily-equivalent powers, you can nova just as well as the casters; if you have plot points or the equivalent which you spend to activate powers and otherwise exert narrative control, you could spend more points for a bigger effect. So if you can practically guarantee a one-hit kill on enemies with your Swarm of Arrows strike, why would you limit yourself to Twin Strikes when they'd be less effective? It can't be bow strength, since you can pull off your Swarm of Arrows strike and Horizon Distance strike and Pin Them To The Wall strike once each day, so surely your bow could handle two or three Swarm of Arrows strikes. It can't be a matter of tiredness, since you can do Twin Strikes for a solid 2 minutes in combat without any loss of effectiveness. If equipment maintenance were a thing, if there were penalties for spamming moves, if combat fatigue rules were implemented, if there were situational requirements for certain maneuvers, those would be sensible limitations. 1/day/maneuver, though, just doesn't work for many people. If you absolutely [I]had[/I] to go with daily power slots, I'd at least prefer being able to mix-and-match powers to fit the tactical consideration--the 5e fighter would be the 3e spontaneous sorcerer to the 4e fighter's Vancian wizard, as it were--but I'd obviously prefer something not daily slot-based at all. This isn't actually an argument for martial dailies, since the martial types would be either nova-ing or running short of dailies just like the casters. A martial fatigue system would be better in that instance, since powers could be rationed out for longer days just like how in AD&D dungeoncrawls--at least in my experience--wizards just spread out their casting to accommodate the less-frequent spell preparation, and for shorter days they could afford to take more risks/go all out/whatever (depending on how exactly fatigue worked) because they knew to expect shorter days. Of [I]course[/I] there are misses. This is WotC we're talking about. ;) The difference between HP and martial dailies is one of granularity. If all attacks dealt 1 damage and people had a handful of HP, HP would be much less acceptable, regardless of whether you personally view HP as physical health, luck, morale, divine guidance, or whatever else; the system would be far too rigid and unrealistic even compared to the very-abstract current system ("Why can I take exactly 2 dagger hits" etc.). The randomness, range, and other aspects of the HP system help take the edges off the glaring abstraction and allow it to be more easily rationalized. Likewise, if you take the 1/day/power martial power system and spread it out using a fatigue system or stunt system or plot system or whatever, the ability to use multiple different powers different numbers of times per day based on the circumstances helps people swallow the abstraction and obscures the fact that, at the end of the day (no pun intended), you're still restricting a certain kind of sword swing to limited uses for balance reasons. It's fine to use narrative/metagame mechanics to balance in-game abilities. Plot points, action points, whatever you call them are fine even in mostly-simulationist systems. The problems come in when the narrative/metagame nature of those resources impinges on the game world generally, and on believability specifically. Action points affect die rolls; characters can only get a vague sense of "I'm lucky that important attack against the BBEG hit!" from use of action points. Plot points affect the narrative; characters might find it a bit coincidental that they keep finding conveniently-placed hay bales to fall on, but that's all. Daily powers take a metagame reasoning (we need to restrict use of this power for balance reasons...) and use it to create powers with metagame restrictions (...therefore you can use each one 1/day only...) that are visible within the game world (...so it's impossible to use the same trick more than once a day even if the situation would call for it, for no logical in-game observable reason). There's a difference between mechanics which attempt to abstract the simulation (such as ToB's encounter-maneuvers-with-recharge, which try to model the ebb and flow of combat) that lend themselves to a particular rationale and accomplish their goal more or less elegantly and mechanics which don't have a particular in-game goal in mind and don't attempt to model a particular rationale. Encounter powers are a much simpler alternative to tracking stances, openings, momentum, and that sort of thing; the single explanation of "you can't use it again immediately because you're out of position/the enemy has his guard up at the moment/similar" works well enough, even though there are corner cases (e.g. surprised opponents) that make it not work as well. Daily powers have no such single explanation, and even if they did there's no in-game rationale daily powers serve that couldn't be better served by a different resource system. The [I]lack[/I] of verbiage differentiates them, actually. All of the powers' fluff describe in-game occurrences that seem mundane enough (e.g. Reaving Strike, Fighter 19: "You swing your weapon in a terrific arc, hitting with such force that your foe stumbles backward."), the powers aren't significantly different thematically from at-will and encounter powers (that is, there's no distinction along the lines of "encounter powers boost your attacks, daily powers negatively impact opponents because plot" or the like), and all of the other powers in the game are treated as if they are actually being used that way in-game. You mean aside from the definition of HP provided in each edition's DMG? ;) So the fighter is always doing fighter-y stuff, and is always attempting to control enemies' movements. Why is Stop Thrust only ever successful once per day? Why is any other daily power only ever successful once per day? Why can a 17th-level fighter only push a target 3 squares and follow immediately (Mountain Breaking Blow) once per day, why can't he follow up every time he pushes someone? Why is attacking and moving away again (Harrying Blow, Fighter 17) not something you can keep doing over and over again? Mechanically, we know that being able to continue pushing someone away from the party or being able to keep out of range of an enemy's attacks is abusable, but narratively why [I]wouldn't[/I] you, say, keep away a squad of soldiers by continually attacking the nearest one and moving away so as not to be surrounded, or keep pushing soldiers away to keep them separated? And that point is a key difference between the two. If you spend an action point to change a roll of 7 to a roll of 13 and thereby turn a miss into a hit, not this event could have happened anyway--there is no observable aspect of it in-game to make it different from any other lucky roll. If, however, you have this really cool move that would be really handy against the goblins you're facing, but can only use it once, there's a disconnect between the metagame and the fiction. That's what makes the one more acceptable than the other. [/QUOTE]
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