WotC Mailbog Podcast up

In a rpg, you can bet that one of your players will shout "he dropped his weapon! Let´s cut his TONKERS of! Or roast them over a fire!"

:angel:

I want to watch THAT movie!

I think there are a couple good ideas in this thread, from using the state of prone as a pseudo unarmed, to flavoring the enimies defeat as a disarm, and my favorite, using an opposed check.

I'd be OK with any of those. But I've never had disarming as a characters shtick.
 

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The basic problem is that there are several ways you can handle someone being disarmed, and they're all bad.

1. Its hard to do, but it ends the fight. He has no weapon! You do! That means he loses now. What's he going to do, bite you? Punch you? You've got a yard of steel. He's screwed. The problem with this approach is that it completely bypasses hit points. Its essentially "save or die" in a new form.

2. Its not that difficult to do, and the disarmed opponent suffers a small penalty, either by drawing a different weapon, or artfully recovering the original weapon. This has a couple of problems. First, disarming stops being a meaningful penalty if everyone has multitudes of replacement weapons, or if everyone can just regain their original weapon without meaningful inconvenience. It may even be completely pointless if a replacement weapon is just as good as the original. Second, it makes fights seem like a farce, where everyone is continuously dropping their weapon but no one can manage to capitalize on it.

Obviously the other two possible combinations (its easy to disarm, and ends the fight, and its hard to disarm, and causes only a minor penalty) are even worse.

To design rules for disarming, EVEN BEFORE you consider how to make those rules mesh with monster design, you need to figure out what the penalty should be for being disarmed, and then to decide whether that penalty is reasonable in the overall context of the game, and how difficult it should be to inflict.
 

Did you listen to the podcast? Did you hear the parts where there were differences of opinion between the two? For example, one thought that the value of accuracy was to high and the other thought it was correct, just not appreciated.
Yes, I listened to the entire podcast and I know they weren't exactly completely in agreement, but that was their solution for disarming your enemy. I'm not saying it's good or bad. I'm just saying you cannot do it like it was 3.5, because that's not the way the system was built this time around and it does put more emphasis on DM fiat and less on the mastery of all sorts of rules.
 

Cadfan said:
The basic problem is that there are several ways you can handle someone being disarmed, and they're all bad.

Dude, I dunno, the suggestions in this thread are really pretty good. I hope that any Coasties reading this are slapping their foreheads and going "OF COURSE!" at the moment. ;)
 



Dude, I dunno, the suggestions in this thread are really pretty good.
The best sounding initial suggestion was making Disarmed like Knocked Down, requiring a move action to recover your weapon.

One problem I see with this is, what if, before the Disarmed party can recover their weapon, another opponent says on their turn "I pick up his sword and throw it into the lava!" or even just simply pick it up/kick it away? Then it becomes more than a move action to recover the weapon, if it can be recovered at all. It's still fairly easy to make Disarm into an encounter ending ability, unless one rules that only the owner of the weapon can touch it, which is even a worse gamist solution.
 
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Answers to disarm ...

Well ... if you have a backup weapon, then you waste an action drawing it.

Certain weapons (w/lock gauntlet, 2H, and/or reach) should be hard to disarm.

Implements with bonuses could carry that bonus on disarm checks.

Disarm doesn't have to be a full disarm: Your hands could be jarred/stung, or you could be left with an insecure grip.

I was thinking, being disarmed, then chasing your weapon and having it kicked, then chasing it some more, could be quite hilarious (although annoying).

Disarm gives you a reason to have variety in combat: Unarmed attacks (or a mailed fist!) Or, lets say you try to pull a weapon out of your opponents hands, that would provide an opportunity to have a "tug of war", which has lots of opportunities by itself.

Ultimately, I can imagine disarming my opponent. 4E is explicitly about "more options". So not being able to disarm is a lot of fail.
 

Ultimately, I can imagine disarming my opponent. 4E is explicitly about "more options". So not being able to disarm is a lot of fail.

The whole thread is about ways to do it in 4e. If all else fails 42 is your answer, built into the game, as it were.

Edit: Ooops... not the 'WHOLE' thread...
 
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