WoTC Rodney: Economy of actions

[small pumpkin man]

Precisely.

I do not think your opinion represents the majority, otherwise, we would have been talking about this over and over again for decades instead of days.

I think you are in a tiny minority.

People have been complaining about the Druid's menagarie since 3e came out and Leadership gets banned extremely often, just because the term "action economy" wasn't used, doesn't mean it wasn't part of what the problem was. I realize you think Rodney and Sora Justice are exagerating the problem, and that's possible, but that doesn't mean the basic idea is flawed.

 

[Hussar]

Was perusing my Tome of Magic and I noticed that this concept was touched on there. In the PrC Fiendbinder, the character can summon a demon/devil to do his dirty work. However, in order to give orders, the fiendbinder had to make a truenaming check as a standard action. The fiend would then complete that task, but, if the fiendbinder wanted the fiend to move on to another target, say, then he would have to make another check as a standard action.

Seems like a way to possibly go. You don't lose your actions all the time, but, when you want your pet/cohort/whatever to do something, you have to give the orders. Depending on the what exactly your pet is, the pet could possibly disobey those orders or simply not act at all.

I kinda like that idea.

 

[KarinsDad]

People have been complaining about the Druid's menagarie since 3e came out and Leadership gets banned extremely often, just because the term "action economy" wasn't used, doesn't mean it wasn't part of what the problem was. I realize you think Rodney and Sora Justice are exagerating the problem, and that's possible, but that doesn't mean the basic idea is flawed.

One of the issues about 4E is that elements in previous game systems had to be flawed in order to buy into the concept that the new game system is bigger, better, badder.

And, no doubt about it. Earlier editions of DND had issues. So will 4E.

But, a single cohort per player was not one of them.

Is it too many actions in 3E for Claw/Claw/Bite for the monsters?

The DM can play many NPCs in a combat. Is the DM taking up too much time when he throws 4 monsters at the 4 PCs?

The one player called the DM can take over 50% of the time at the table. We should ban DMs from DND!

I still think some people are over-exaggerating this issue. Sure, the Druid menagerie could get out of hand. But, not a single cohort or companion per player.

 

[Hussar]

One of the issues about 4E is that elements in previous game systems had to be flawed in order to buy into the concept that the new game system is bigger, better, badder.

And, no doubt about it. Earlier editions of DND had issues. So will 4E.

But, a single cohort per player was not one of them.

Is it too many actions in 3E for Claw/Claw/Bite for the monsters?

The DM can play many NPCs in a combat. Is the DM taking up too much time when he throws 4 monsters at the 4 PCs?

The one player called the DM can take over 50% of the time at the table. We should ban DMs from DND!

I still think some people are over-exaggerating this issue. Sure, the Druid menagerie could get out of hand. But, not a single cohort or companion per player.

I think we should distinguish between different cohorts or companions as well though. A single Barbarian cohort likely isn't soaking a whole lot of time. But, that cleric cohort (one of the most common IME) certainly can between buffs and debuffs. That's not a cohort issue, but a caster issue, true. But, adding in a caster cohort can make a huge difference in the time spent by one player doing his or her turn.

 

[small pumpkin man]

One of the issues about 4E is that elements in previous game systems had to be flawed in order to buy into the concept that the new game system is bigger, better, badder.

And, no doubt about it. Earlier editions of DND had issues. So will 4E.

But, a single cohort per player was not one of them.

Is it too many actions in 3E for Claw/Claw/Bite for the monsters?

The DM can play many NPCs in a combat. Is the DM taking up too much time when he throws 4 monsters at the 4 PCs?

The one player called the DM can take over 50% of the time at the table. We should ban DMs from DND!

I still think some people are over-exaggerating this issue. Sure, the Druid menagerie could get out of hand. But, not a single cohort or companion per player.

It's not like this is some kind of crazy new idea, it's just something from other games that previous editions didn't really look into. Can you make a good RPG without it? sure. But as D&D becomes more "engineered" the makers start to look more and more at this kind of thing, and go "how exactly does the affect how the game is played".

I think the most obvious place the actions economy has been used IS monsters, high level non-Elite monsters do have less options and actions, (specifically, there seems to be less "lets give this monster 3 natural attacks just because") and there are monsters specifically designed to be extremely quick at the table because sometimes running the twenty something monsters takes far more time than it's worth, and making it so that if a GM wants to run 4 or more monsters it doesn't take longer than everyone else put together, conversly Solo's are designed in the other direction, for the purpose of balance and to make it that "stacks on" combats are more cinematic and flavourful. When from our position it looks like Rodney's thinking of taking something WotC have been doing to monsters and applying it to summoned creatures and "PC allies which are class abilties" and you turn around and laugh at the idea of applying it to the GM implies to me you're not really "getting it".

And for the Record? Leadership broke many a game, for reasons already explained.

 

[KidSnide]

And, no doubt about it. Earlier editions of DND had issues. So will 4E.

But, a single cohort per player was not one of them.

Is it too many actions in 3E for Claw/Claw/Bite for the monsters?

The DM can play many NPCs in a combat. Is the DM taking up too much time when he throws 4 monsters at the 4 PCs?

The one player called the DM can take over 50% of the time at the table. We should ban DMs from DND!

I still think some people are over-exaggerating this issue. Sure, the Druid menagerie could get out of hand. But, not a single cohort or companion per player.

This conversation may have lost track of the fact that economy of actions isn't just about player time. It's also about player power. A party level - 2 cohort doesn't just give one player extra time to resolve the actions of both characters, it also makes that player more powerful than the other players because a second full set of actions by a remotely interesting character is fantasticly more powerful than anything else you could get with a feat.

Sure, the cohort's attacks will probably be weaker than the attacks of a full PC, but since they don't "use up" any of the master's actions, they are essentially free. That makes the cohort extremely *powerful*, not just time consuming.

(KarinsDad is right, of course, that a GM can compensate for powerful PCs. But that doesn't change the fact that a single feat will make you much more powerful than practically any other feat choice.)

 

[KarinsDad]

(KarinsDad is right, of course, that a GM can compensate for powerful PCs. But that doesn't change the fact that a single feat will make you much more powerful than practically any other feat choice.)

One could consider that Leadership should have been a 3 level PrC instead of a Feat. Or if a feat, that the Feat should have had other downsides to it.

Balance is something that is not always obvious, but I think that is because WotC did not have metarules on how to design feats and PrCs in 3E (or if they did, the metarules were either poorly designed or violated a lot).

Hopefully, 4E does have metarules for feat/talent design. We do see some inklings of it, but at the same time, there also appears to be some fairly broad allowances within them (if they exist).

 

[DM_Blake]

I think everyone here probably agrees that Leadership is broken. I never allowed the feat in my games. If a player asked me about it, I would tell him to take some other feat, then roleplay his character hiring or otherwise enticing NPCs to join the group. The benefit was that those NPCs could walk away or die at any time without leaving the player stranded with a wasted feat (Leadership with no cohorts isn't very useful).

The Leadership feat becomes really overpowered when someone munchkins it cleverly. For a party of 10th level characters to acquire a 6th level fighter cohort, that cohort will be fairly weak. He won't hit nearly as well, or for as high damage, as a 10th level PC fighter. But, get a 6th level cleric instead, and the party's overall healing and utility will skyrocket. Get 6th level wizard who mostly prepares utility spells, buffs, etc., and now the PC wizard can drop most of his utility and focus on death-dealing combat magic. That kind of use of Leadership made it extremely overpowered for just a feat.

If 4e includes a similarly silly Leadership feat, or any other non-feat version of it, I will probably replace it in the same way.

 

[DM_Blake]

As for handling druids in 3.5, he basically has two choices for an animal companion:

1. Pick the biggest, nastiest, scariest, baddest animal he can find, but he only gets one. This animal is fairly tough in combat, and can make a difference in the outcome of a fight.

2. Pick an assortment of weaker, smaller critters so that their total HD adds up to the HD of one big, nasty, scary, bad animal - this can lead to having a menagerie that destroys the action economy and expands their turn to where it takes a half hour for a single round of all those actions, but these wimps will be ineffective in combat.

I've had several PC druids over the years, and some went for #1, some went for #2.

Invariably they druid player who chose a menagerie will try to have his weasels, hawks, toads, snakes, and owls charge into battle. They die fast.

In fact, I will let them have a fight or two where they bog everything down and accomplish nothing. During these fights, it's not uncommon to hear "Oh, my ferret rolled a 20! He hit finally. Lemme roll damage... He bit the troll for 5 HP!" at which time the wizard pipes up and says "Big deal, even I can hit something with my staff and roll more damage than that..."

Then I follow up with a fight where I add an extra monster or two for the sole purpose of splattering this menagerie around the battlefield. Don't want to do it with the actual encounter as written, or those big old trolls will lose valuable actions that could have pounded the fighter into a grease stain when instead they were doing that to otters and chipmunks and hawks. So, by the end of that combat, our menagerie is back to nothing.

I then offer advice to the druid player about how a dire grizzly bear, or something similarly powerful, would have avoided being splattered, and might have even beat the snot out of a troll.

By the next session, our menagerie druid has a single animal companion.

Menagerie solved.

As for druids with one animal companion, that one cohort has never been too big a problem. We put its stats on a 3x5 card and the druid adds an extra 20 or 30 seconds to some of his rounds.

"Move here, bite, rolled a 7 +6 = 13, does 13 hit? No? OK, next player." -- That doesn't take too much time. If it does hit, the player tells me the damage (I train my players to roll their attack and their damage at the same time, 1 roll of a d20 and a d8 (or whatever), tell me the attack roll, if it hits tell me the damage amount).

It's not like bears, or tigers, or dire lions, or whatever, have really all that much to do in combat. In 3e, it's move+1 attack or stand and roll 3 attacks. Maybe a rake or a bear hug or some such once in a while. Not a really big deal.

And it won't bother me at all to continue handling druids in this fashion.

 

[DM_Blake]

As for handling 3.5e Summon spells, I've never found any player who got too gung-ho with these.

First, Mr. Summoner spends a whole round summoning. I ham up the visual, and describe it as standing there for a whole round, chanting and hand waving, and mystical ectoplamic fog swirls around the target space for the summon spell, and wisps of this fog trail from your hands to the main fog in the target space.

In effect, anyone who isn't blind can see that some mage is summoning something. Any bad guys with enough intelligence to put that logic together will immediately fear that some horrible fiend from the depths of the Abyss will pounce out of the fog at any second. You can bet the summoner draws a lot of focus fire for the round he is standing still and casting. No amount of Combat Casting or Casting Defensively prevents your enemies from attacking you on their own round.

Assuming Mr. Summoner makes it to the start of his next round, we place the critter on the battlemat. Maybe he summoned a lower level spell to get a small menagerie (d3 critters).

Now I ham it up a bit that Mr. Summoner uses quick hand gestures and shouted commands to maneuver his summoned creatures. Sure, in 3.5, these are free actions, and Mr. Summoner is free to fire off his own battery of spells, wands, or crossbow bolts as he sees fit, but he is still directing the actions of the stuff he summoned. Which means all the enemies on the battlefield see him doing this, and he is still a target. These enemies assume that eliminating the summoner will eliminate the summoned threats, too.

After all, wouldn't your players run past the orcs in the front line, even taking a few AoOs, to wipe out an orc shaman who is summoning something wicked, or is giving orders to something wicked he has already summoned?

Those enemies who are intelligent enough even shout commands to each other like "Kill that summoner first!" and such things.

After drawing all this attention, the end result is that Mr. Summoner did nothing for a whole round but summon (-1 action). On the next round, he gets his actions and the actions of the thing he summoned (+1 action, so the net benefit is 0). By the end of round 2, the economy of actions is perfectly balanced. Starting on round 3, the balance begins to tip in the favor of the summoner.

By way of comparison, after 3 rounds, Mr. Summoner has gained a whole +1 action. He could have cast 3 cool spells. Instead, he cast 2 cool spells and his summoned mook did 2 minimal actions - lets face it, even a fiendish dire wolf is less of a threat to the enemy than a well-placed fireball or lightning bolt. In fact, I figure every 2 actions by the summoned mook is about as effective as 1 cool spell by the summoner. So I figure that at the end of round 3, Mr. Summoner is about even as to how much impact he could have had on the fight, and how much impact he really had.

So, 3 rounds to break even on usefulness, while only tipping the economy of actions by 1 action in favor of the PCs. That's not that big a deal.

Especially since it paints a big red bulls eye on his chest, far more so than most other spellcasting does.

It doesn't take long for players to figure out that they are not getting much bang for their summoning buck, and their willingness to prepare summing spells diminishes greatly, and then eventually vanishes all together.

If it doesn't, I've been known to have anti-summoning spells and areas. One or two times of having those summoned critters turn on the players usually is the final nail or two in the coffin.

I don't go out of my way to destroy these spells. I let players use them, and enjoy them. I just let them discover the consequences, and weigh the pros and cons. It doesn't take them long to find out that good opportunities for summon spells are rare, and they don't rely on them very much.

Even druids with their spontaneous Summon Nature's Ally spells rarely go that route.