WoTC Rodney: Economy of actions

[DM_Blake]

I think summoned monsters should replace your actions, if not all, then at least some of them. For example: If Skamos the Wizard summons a small elemental, his choices are as follows:
-use his minor action to sustain the elemental
-use his minor action to sustain the elemental and his standard action to make it move and/or attack.

Ouch.

If you do that with D&D, then that elemental better be really powerful. Powerful enough that Skamos the Wizard would say "Well, I could cook those orcs with an At-Will fireball spell, or I could move my elemental over there and let the elemental cook them. Eh, it's sixes. I'll get about the same benefit either way".

If the elemental's attack is weaker than its controller's at-will combat abilities, then it would be a tactically unwise decision to downgrade from one's own at-will actions to substitute a weaker elemental attack.

Arguably, you gain a little benefit from the fact that the elemental is risking its own HP instead of yours, so that advantage can allow the elemental to be a little weaker than your own at-will abilities. But not much, or it becomes ill-advised to use the elemental at all.

Companions and familiars should be very weak in combat, like minions.

Aren't minions pretty much one-hit-dead guys? Or is that only applicable to kobold minions since kobolds are really weak to begin with?

Because, as a wizard, I would really hate my familiar to be killed by taking any damage of any kind. I would probably just never get a fimiliar if that were the case, especially if there were penalties for the death of the familiar, and/or 1-year waiting periods to get a new one.

As for the companions combat contributions, their strength/weakness in combat should be appropriate for their purpose for which they were hired.

Hire a porter to carry your stuff - don't expect him to slaughter the dragon along side the heroes. Hire a guide to track the kidnappers - he might very well be weak in combat and prefer not to engage the scary monsters.

But hire a mercenary to stand beside you in combat - he better be able to face challenges of the same level you can face, or your money was wasted.

A spell like haste should be single target and perhaps higher level than it was in 2e and 3e.

Which then doesn't address the issue with Economy of Actions.

Letting a level 30 wizard haste himself and get to cast extra level 30 powers every round is no more or no less ideal than letting a level 10 wizard do that. In theory, regardless of the level of the haste spell, the person casting it gains extra actions, breaking the Economy of Actions, and he can use those actions to use extra abilities of his level (which are very likely to be abilities of a level appropriate to deal with the encounter in which he cast the haste to begin with).

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

From a player's perspective, the extra actions can be more problematic for other players if the player controls the NPC follower. If the DM controls the NPC followers, then each player gets the same number of actions and their shouldn't be an issue.

Instead it creates HUGE amounts of work for the DM who not only has to run the turns of all the followers but running all the extra monsters to make up the balance for the fact that the PCs all have followers.

The DM is a player just like all the rest and HE shouldn't be taking that much more time than everyone else either. Thus why there are simpler monsters in 4e.

However, some players enjoy controlling their PC's NPC followers when appropriate. So, either the other players should not have an issue with it, or the other players too should try to acquire followers, or if a player really has a problem "sitting on his hands" while another player runs his PC's NPC follower, the DM should control the NPC followers.

So you are telling my my only choices are "Shut up and stop whining" or "Play the game the same way we are whether you like it or not." I'll take option 3 where I only want to play one character and I don't want to wait for 10 minutes for another player to finish running the end of his 10 turns.

The author's solutions make the problems worse instead of better. That's bad game design IMO. Fine for a board game, totally awful for an FRPG.

Everything in a FRPG is artificial. It's all made up. As I've pointed out in other threads, in the end we are all sitting around a table for a couple of hours because we plan on having more fun playing D&D than we would watching TV, playing a computer game, playing baseball, or watching paint dry.

Making an artificial distinction between "board game" and "roleplaying game" is rather silly. If a mechanic works fine for one then why not consider it for the other?

Some people REALLY need simulation in their roleplaying. To them the fun is in knowing that they are playing in a realistic world that works in 90% of all ways like the real world does. D&D has never been that game. It won't be in the future. I'm not even sure it SHOULD be a design goal. The more simulation you add to the game the more likely I'm going to be forced to spend 8 hours rolling each hammer hit against the anvil to simulate my day job as a blacksmith since ancient caves filled with treasure haven't been spotted in centuries.

 

[Saishu_Heiki]

Be honest. Has this really happened in your games? Has one player monopolized the time to such a great extent?

Yes, but it is a corner case caused by an explosive mixture of class abilities and the Leadership feat.

However, the more common scenario is that almost everyone has followers/pets/summons and while no one person is taking 75% of the round by himself, the time between a given player's chance to act grows to ludicrous lengths.

 

[Wormwood]

Be honest. Has this really happened in your games? Has one player monopolized the time to such a great extent?

*raises hand*

Twice with druids and once with a ranger. The druids were far worse (thanks, 3.5!)

I wouldn't have bitched about about it for as long as I have if it hadn't been so amazingly annoying.

 

[ruleslawyer]

Be honest. Has this really happened in your games? Has one player monopolized the time to such a great extent?

It has in mine. Maybe not 75%, but certainly to the extent that the druid has the overwhelming plurality of actions.

In any event, I'm not even worried about "fairness," TBH; I'm worried about speed of gameplay. The moment that I started using some shortcuts for handling allies, companions, etc in combat, things started moving a lot faster.

In particular, I am especially unhappy with the way in which 3e handles summoned and called monsters. I have yet to read a fantasy book in which the wizard summons a bunch of allies and then fights alongside them; or worse still, one in which the druid summons a bunch of allies, then fights with them AND his menagerie AND shapeshifts into some nasty animal. It just doesn't emulate the fantasy that *I* like well enough in addition to creating a situation in which one player monopolizes the action AND slows down combat.

In short, I think that:

a) Most allies/followers/companions should be run using some kind of shortcut, whether it be automatic aid another, roll to get combat advantage, some easy-to-run at-will power, etc.;

b) Having summoned/called allies with more significant contributions to combat should require the use of actions to direct them; and

c) The druid's menagerie, if and when that class is published, should be pared down to one significant animal companion.

 

[Dragonblade]

Ouch.

If you do that with D&D, then that elemental better be really powerful. Powerful enough that Skamos the Wizard would say "Well, I could cook those orcs with an At-Will fireball spell, or I could move my elemental over there and let the elemental cook them. Eh, it's sixes. I'll get about the same benefit either way".

If the elemental's attack is weaker than its controller's at-will combat abilities, then it would be a tactically unwise decision to downgrade from one's own at-will actions to substitute a weaker elemental attack.

Arguably, you gain a little benefit from the fact that the elemental is risking its own HP instead of yours, so that advantage can allow the elemental to be a little weaker than your own at-will abilities. But not much, or it becomes ill-advised to use the elemental at all.

One of the things that I never liked about prior editions of D&D is that summoned creatures were generally inferior to the PCs. This is the opposite of most fantasy literature where summoned creatures are really tough, usually able to go to toe to toe with the toughest party members, if not the whole party at once.

So I would be all for a system where the summoner basically gives up all their actions to control their summoned creature if it results in much tougher summoned creatures.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Idea:
All players get more actions, both from weak, low-level "hirelings," and from near-peer "followers."

For Instance:
At the time that the wizard is summoning elementals and pit fiends,
the Fighter is training his legionaires and recruits a veteran,
the Cleric is surrounded by acolytes and associated with a prophet,
and the Rogue is protected by mooks and has his bodyguard,
and the Druid has their little swarm and their dire bear.

The first are not very useful in direct combat -- more in the "ritual" sense of things that help you run errands and look cool. They are, effectively, PC-use minions: if the villain fights them, they fall quickly.

The second are useful in direct combat, and act as a second set of actions for the PC.

If EVERYONE gets these actions, then no one is especially ousted.

Except that this makes the PC group very powerful, right? But it should be easy/possible/simple to up the quantity of monsters to match (effectively, if the party size gets doubled, the challenges they can take on get doubled, too! Any system that can scale by party size should be able to scale like this).

Second Idea:
Combos. This is kind of what I do for FFZ (though FFZ also has all character gaining more turns in a round).

Generally, the ally just "ties up" other enemies. They can intercept, distract, and generally annoy an opponent. They do this automatically, and a quick level check decides who wins and by what margin (weighted in favor of the high-levels). At the end of a round, these "non-PC turns" are resolved quickly and abstractly

When the PC and the ally want to combine forces, they have some sort of special leader-like boost that they can gain by teaming up, such as using a Limit earlier, or combining the damage from their effects. Of course, in this case, the enemies that the DM added to the encounter aren't being 'tied up' and are more free to cause havoc in your party.

So basically:
The solution is to give EVERYONE more actions if you give ANYONE more actions
AND/OR
The solution is to handle allies in the background abstractly unless they choose to combine with the PC's actions at the same time, which doesn't give the PC more actions, but does vastly increase their effectiveness.

Both require adding more/more powerful monsters to the mix, but a sufficiently flat math curve should be able to handle that easily.

 

[Wormwood]

One of the things that I never liked about prior editions of D&D is that summoned creatures were generally inferior to the PCs.

Actually, I would *love* it if 4e gave us something where you could summon a real badass which shows up, smites your enemies, then goes away until the next day.

Effectively, I'd like to summining as pure special effects.

 

[DM_Blake]

From a pure power balance point of view, I suppose that Followers or Cohorts should be somehow cost you some XP. Maybe one approach would be to reduce the XP from a combat encounter by the XP the Follower/Cohort would give you if he was an enemy - or he just got his share like everyone else. But this doesn't solve the problem of different player participation, and it also makes Cohorts and Followers look like something "power-neutral". Sure, you can add more guys to the party, but you will get less XP, so in the long run, you get no real benefit form it. But maybe that's okay...

Now this is the model that D&D has always used.

If you have a party of 4 people and they get 1000 XP, then each one gets 250. If you brought along a mercenary, a hireling, a henchman, whatever, then you really have 5 people to split that 1000 XP so you each get 200.

You "pay for" the extra actions by a reduction in the XP reward. And, most likely, that extra guy wants a share of the loot, too.

There is the balance of the Economy of Actions - more actions means less reward.

What is out of balance is the combat itself - your "payment" of XP/Loot doesn't change the fact that your party of heroes has more actions than the bad guys. So the battle is imbalanced in your favor, but the rewards are compensated to penalize you for that imbalance.

This has always been acceptible to me, both as a DM and as a player.

 

[Dragonblade]

Actually, I would *love* it if 3e gave us something where you could summon a real badass which shows up, smites your enemies, then goes away until the next day.

Effectively, I'd like to summining as pure special effects.

So Final Fantasy style summons. The summoning is really just a special effect for an attack that does huge amounts of damage.