Would stacking Combat Advantages work as a way to implement players' Clever Plans?

[WarpZone]

I can see why people keep saying 4E kills the RP aspect, or that it's too much like a video game now. It's tempting to fall into that mindset, but I really do like some of the simplicity and features of 4E.

I think once we all get used to the new tactical system, the roleplaying and dynamism we love so much will re-emerge. It'll just take some grinding to get there.

A major obstacle to our usual style of play is the fact that 4E seems to want to treat everything the players are capable of doing other than attacks as a single +2 combat advantage. So if you know the lay of the land, you research the creature's weaknesses in advance, you drug their drinking water, you gas the area, you turn invisible, you throw sand in their eyes, you lure them into a spider-web and THEN you flank them, the net effect is STILL just a +2 modifier.

I guess for us, the main draw of D&D has always been that, unlike a video game, you can think outside the box. You can attempt to do ANYTHING that's physically possible. But 4E so limits the potential reward for any such experimentation that it hardly seems worthwhile when you have all those awesome attacks up your sleaves.

So. This is the question. How can we preserve that spur-of-the-moment in-combat roleplaying, without adding so many house rules that we lose that 4E simplicity?

One idea I had was to simply allow multiple Combat Advantages to stack, in certian cases, when they are the result of careful planning or role-playing on the part of the characters. (I.E. not built into the mechanics.)

I think this would tip the penulum from pure tactical engagements punctuated by NPC conversations back towards true interactive storytelling. I don't know if that would unbalance gameplay too much, though. I haven't really played 4E enough yet to grasp what the rammifications of this change would be.

Any thoughts?

 

[Fredrik Svanberg]

Combat advantage is not the only kind of bonus you can get.

A DM can hand out bonuses or penalties for any reason he deems adequate. So if the characters have done their research and prepared well before a fight, the DM might consider giving them a bonus for the first few rounds before their enemies figure out what's going on. Or penalize the enemies. Or both.

 

[reff42]

most of those things are on a case-by-case basis, and as such should be adjudicated by the DM on a case-by-case basis.

Some of those things do the same thing, such as being invisible and throwing sand in their eyes. Gasing the area and poisoning their drinking water might do the same thing as well. Depending on the particulars of the poison/gas, they would probaly get penalties rather than players getting combat advantage. Stuck in a web usually is a slow or immobilize, helping the party make sure they can't get away. And finally, lay of the land and creature weakeness wouldn't give direct combat bonuses, but knowledge is a power in and of itself.

So,
invis/sand in the eye- combat advantage/blindness/invis bonuses
gas/poison- DM chosen penalty to enemies affected
Web- slow/immobilize
Lay of the land- knowledge of the area lets you know where they might run, how far they can get, etc.
Creature weakness- it's weak against fire? Great, I'll whip out my fire spells or a fire weapon.

Combat advantage is a general term designed to simplify the rules for flanking, flat-footed, invisible, prone, and any other condition where you have the chance to get sneak attack.

 

[Surgoshan]

The thing is that preparation can now be implemented and rewarded tactically rather than by simply declaring bonuses. The players know they'll be facing a really tough fight with a hill giant, two lieutenants, and a horde of minions, they set up a distraction. They cause a ruckus of some kind that makes one of the lietuenants peel off with a bunch of minions. Then the players attack! But, no! The real attack is causing the destruction of the lieutenant and his minions, and now the two strikers who just pissed off a hill giant have to run away! But in so doing, they lead the giant, his remaining lieutenant, and their minions into a trap that damages the big guys and kills half their minions. Then the remainder of the party, having killed the lieutenant and his minions show up and the rejoined party now takes out what's left.

In that way what would have been an incredibly difficult fight turns into two regular fights. Tactically interesting and no need to lay out bonuses. The bonus is in that when you cut a group of foes in two you now have a fight that's greatly reduced in difficulty. Once upon a time, you'd cut the fight in half and end up with two fights that were almost as tough as the original or you'd have a fight that was pathetically easy combined with a fight almost not at all reduced in difficulty.

In other words, by doing some planning ahead of time, the reward is now a tangible sense of accomplishment. You tell them what they accomplished and they know that they turned a tough as balls fight into a medium difficulty set of encounters.

 

[GoLu]

A major obstacle to our usual style of play is the fact that 4E seems to want to treat everything the players are capable of doing other than attacks as a single +2 combat advantage. So if you know the lay of the land, you research the creature's weaknesses in advance, you drug their drinking water, you gas the area, you turn invisible, you throw sand in their eyes, you lure them into a spider-web and THEN you flank them, the net effect is STILL just a +2 modifier.

Any thoughts?

It occurs to me that a lot of the things which grant combat advantage in 4e used to be things which prevented you from adding your dex modifier to your AC.

 

[Saeviomagy]

I can see why people keep saying 4E kills the RP aspect, or that it's too much like a video game now. It's tempting to fall into that mindset, but I really do like some of the simplicity and features of 4E.

...
...

One idea I had was to simply allow multiple Combat Advantages to stack, in certian cases, when they are the result of careful planning or role-playing on the part of the characters. (I.E. not built into the mechanics.)

Any thoughts?

Erm...

You think D&D is too videogamey, so you want to simplify down what would currently be "the DM uses his discretion and applies modifiers to the NPCs, and the PCs use their brains and use some sensible tactics" to flat modifiers to attack rolls.

What??

So if you know the lay of the land, you research the creature's weaknesses in advance, you drug their drinking water, you gas the area, you turn invisible, you throw sand in their eyes, you lure them into a spider-web and THEN you flank them, the net effect is STILL just a +2 modifier.

Well, no. In the hands of a sensible DM and intelligent players:

knowing the lay of the land probably gives you surprise and some patches of bad terrain that the monsters don't know are bad terrain.

Knowing their weaknesses means that... you target their weaknesses. At a bare minimum, this means knowing what defense to target. For more unusual monsters, it can mean not triggering their powers, hitting vulnerabilities or simply not triggering their regeneration.

Drugging their drinking water and gassing the area could slow, weaken, stun, blind, deafen, hurt or kill them.

Being invisible means they can't target you (and a +2!)

Sand in their eyes won't change much if you're already invisible.

Luring them into a spiderweb means they can't move.

At that point closing to melee and trying for flanks isn't a prime tactic anymore. Pick them off with ranged weapons and a zero chance of being hurt.

 

[Contents May Vary]

I can see why people keep saying 4E kills the RP aspect, or that it's too much like a video game now. It's tempting to fall into that mindset, but I really do like some of the simplicity and features of 4E.

I can't see why people say that at all.

Simplifying things makes it LESS like a video game! Video games can do all sorts of horrific number-crunching for determining combat and other results - have you ever looked at the formulae used for WoW?

It's crazy to suggest that simplifying rules makes things MORE like a video game; it's precisely the opposite of the truth!

 

[WarpZone]

Oh, I see now. I thought Combat Advantage was intended as some kinda catch-all condition because that's what the words "combat advantage" sound like. Any advantage relating to combat.

But I can see now that the various status conditions do different things, and have different uses. It's also good to know that the DM can still hand out bonuses arbitrarily. (This DM won't feel comfortable doing so until he groks the balance of the game, of course, but it's good to know the potential for sideways-thinking mischief is still there.)

CMV: What I think people mean when they say that is, the player has a finite number of pre-defined ways in which they can interact with their environment. You can't argue with an NPC in a video game. You can't take out a support beam to collapse a structure on top of your enemies. You can't climb over a wall instead of going around it. All you can do in a video game is move through the environment the way the programmers intended, and combat in a video game consists of choosing which of three special moves to do. In that sense, on a continum of how much a game emphasizes storytelling over mechanics, it goes WoW < 4E < 3.5 < White Wolf or something.

But that's just the out-of-the-box experience. I'm confident there's potential here to have every bit as much fun as we had under 3.5. It's just WotC didn't make that route so obvious, because they were focused on nailing down the mechanics.

I hope that by asking these questions in this fourm, I'll be able to get around the preconception that 4E is somehow less of an RPG than 3.5, and learn from other players how to mesh 4E with our style of play.

 

[Danceofmasks]

Being invisible gives you total concealment, too.
They gotta figure out or guess where you are, and get an additional -5 to hit you.

 

[Saeviomagy]

Oh, I see now. I thought Combat Advantage was intended as some kinda catch-all condition because that's what the words "combat advantage" sound like. Any advantage relating to combat.

Combat advantage is what being flat-footed used to be. In other games it's often the result of being surprised or sniped.

In that sense, on a continum of how much a game emphasizes storytelling over mechanics, it goes WoW < 4E < 3.5 < White Wolf or something.

I'd have to disagree on that - While the average computer game is definately bottom of the heap, typically a roleplaying system has nothing to do with how much roleplaying or storytelling occurs unless the game mechanics specifically interact with roleplaying.

Incidentally the last time I played a white wolf game, it had specific rules that interacted with storytelling (rewards for playing to a set stereotype and such). Personally I find that antithetical to storytelling, but others find a reward framework improves it.

4e pretty much restricts its rules to things that are outside the player's direct influence. If you fall in a hole, it hurts. That's sort of thing is not going to hamper storytelling at all.