And here's where expectation comes into it. Players will only bomb an encounter with Daily powers if they are confident that they won't need them later. You don't need or require 3-4+ encounters per day, just the threat of 3-4+ encounters per day. If you the DM are letting the players know that they won't have to hold back, you're just bringing back 3.5E's 5-minute workday, with all the problems that entail
I don't think thats true, players are pretty clever they can deduce more or less if there is more encounters coming or not and besides in order to build this uncertainty you have to be ready to pull the trigger on running multiple encounters periodically, or even consistantly to get the message across and I just don't think sacraficing story to prove a point as a GM is a very good approach to the game. I don't want to create story's that ensure I will be able to mechanically force decesions. I want to write story's as part of a creative process and I expect the game to allow me to do that without forcing me to run "tricks" on my players to get them to hold back their powers or not.
I think this has a lot to do with the style of writing that 4th edition expects. Instead of writing story's, it assumes you are going to create encounters. I find that qutie unattractive. I like to write storys, that means that I run combat when its appropriate for the story and I don't when its not. I don't pre-deterimine the hiarchy of encounters the players will follow along, I create a story and if a combat takes place then so be it. I don't want the game to force me to manage my story in a way that makes the story feel unatural.
What I want is a D&D that lets me create a fight at any time and I want to be able to make it a challenge to the group. Thats the mechanics job. I don't want it to specify how many encounters I should have to make in order to acomplish "challenging" the players.
You don't seem to have much personal experience with 4E then. Are you basing your statement solely on what you overhear on the forums?
Alpha-Striking and focus fire are different tactics. Focus Fire is killing enemies efficently one at a time. Alpha-Striking is nuking the encounter on round 1 before it begins. Anyone can focus fire, but Alpha-Striking is very specific, requires a lot of work, and while a favorite of the CharOp forum is beyond the abilities of casual-moderate D&D players. Only a few select classes are really capable of contributing to an Alpha-Strike, and only if built in very specific ways(high buffs to attack/damage combined with attacking multiple times in a specific turn.
I know the system well enough, but noteably my players know it very well.
Alpha Striking and Focus Fire have a lot in common. You do them in concert and Alpha striking while certainly certain classess and combination of classes do it better than others, everyone has daily powers and encounter powers that can take out key players in an ecounter to ensure that at- will powers are enough to wrap up the rest. Thats not some phenomenon that is all that specific.
Focus fire is just a less effective way to Alpha Strike. Assume you use the rules for balancing encounters you always have only a limited amount of XP per encounter to spend as a GM to maintain balance. Certainly you can break that rule and put in extra things beyond that balance but its easy to let that kind of thing get out of hand and frankly 4th edition D&D is so specific about everything that its not hard for the players to do the math on monsters to determine whether or not I "cheated" on the challenge rating table. Its unfortunate that D&D has ensured that the DM is no longer the master of the game and its rules, but rather a participant subject to the rules just as the players are but that is how 4th edition is designed. In order to maitnain that impecable balance of the game you (even the GM) have to follow the rules. As such, focus fire becomes the direct route all players naturally take and they focus fire on the greatest threat of any given encounter taking it out quickly (which to me is no different then alpha striking) because once the main heat in any given encounter is removed, again the game devolves into a walk through, going through the motions kind of a game.
Im not saying the game isn't challenging for the players and there are a lot of methods a good GM can use but personally I think the Daily Powers need to go (they are just too good and allow for the alpha striking mentality to be executed too easily) and Encounter powers need to be trimmed back a bit. This would ensure combat is really combat, a fight between advisaries and that when you have a leader in a encounter he doesn't get wiped out on the first round and can actually serve a purpose in both the encounter and in the story.
And here's where expectation comes into it. Players will only bomb an encounter with Daily powers if they are confident that they won't need them later. You don't need or require 3-4+ encounters per day, just the threat of 3-4+ encounters per day. If you the DM are letting the players know that they won't have to hold back, you're just bringing back 3.5E's 5-minute workday, with all the problems that entail
I don't think thats true, players are pretty clever they can deduce more or less if there is more encounters coming or not and besides in order to build this uncertainty you have to be ready to pull the trigger on running multiple encounters periodically, or even consistantly to get the message across and I just don't think sacraficing story to prove a point as a GM is a very good approach to the game. I don't want to create story's that ensure I will be able to mechanically force decesions. I want to write story's as part of a creative process and I expect the game to allow me to do that without forcing me to run "tricks" on my players to get them to hold back their powers or not.
I think this has a lot to do with the style of writing that 4th edition expects. Instead of writing story's, it assumes you are going to create encounters. I find that qutie unattractive. I like to write storys, that means that I run combat when its appropriate for the story and I don't when its not. I don't pre-deterimine the hiarchy of encounters the players will follow along, I create a story and if a combat takes place then so be it. I don't want the game to force me to manage my story in a way that makes the story feel unatural.
What I want is a D&D that lets me create a fight at any time and I want to be able to make it a challenge to the group. Thats the mechanics job. I don't want it to specify how many encounters I should have to make in order to acomplish "challenging" the players.
I'm not really sure where you're coming from here. There are a lot of factors on this, like whether combat tends to be infrequent and epic, or whether you for story purposes generally only put out one(maybe two) combats per session, or whether combat takes 30 minutes or 2 hours.
The fact is, the mechanics of the game do assume 3-4 encounters per day. Now, depending on your game this is or isn't an issue. I play a lot of RPGA, and RPGA usually has a fairly consistent framework of a 4hr session and three(rarely 2 or 4) combats. RPGA can usually pull off 3 combats with 1-2hrs of noncombat play pretty consistently. It also bears noting that the new RPGA epic adventures address the problems you state by removing the option to rest, and forcing the PCs to fight 5 or more encounters without resting, spread over multiple sessions.
If you don't want to fight 3-4 combats per game session, change it to making the PCs have to fight(or having to face the thread of fighting) 3-4 combats between being able to take an extended rest, spread over 2-3 game sessions if you want to focus more on story. Make the extended rest something you can only do between adventures.
You don't seem to have much personal experience with 4E then. Are you basing your statement solely on what you overhear on the forums?
Alpha-Striking and focus fire are different tactics. Focus Fire is killing enemies efficently one at a time. Alpha-Striking is nuking the encounter on round 1 before it begins. Anyone can focus fire, but Alpha-Striking is very specific, requires a lot of work, and while a favorite of the CharOp forum is beyond the abilities of casual-moderate D&D players. Only a few select classes are really capable of contributing to an Alpha-Strike, and only if built in very specific ways(high buffs to attack/damage combined with attacking multiple times in a specific turn.
I know the system well enough, but noteably my players know it very well.
Alpha Striking and Focus Fire have a lot in common. You do them in concert and Alpha striking while certainly certain classess and combination of classes do it better than others, everyone has daily powers and encounter powers that can take out key players in an ecounter to ensure that at- will powers are enough to wrap up the rest. Thats not some phenomenon that is all that specific.
Focus fire is just a less effective way to Alpha Strike. Assume you use the rules for balancing encounters you always have only a limited amount of XP per encounter to spend as a GM to maintain balance. Certainly you can break that rule and put in extra things beyond that balance but its easy to let that kind of thing get out of hand and frankly 4th edition D&D is so specific about everything that its not hard for the players to do the math on monsters to determine whether or not I "cheated" on the challenge rating table. Its unfortunate that D&D has ensured that the DM is no longer the master of the game and its rules, but rather a participant subject to the rules just as the players are but that is how 4th edition is designed. In order to maitnain that impecable balance of the game you (even the GM) have to follow the rules. As such, focus fire becomes the direct route all players naturally take and they focus fire on the greatest threat of any given encounter taking it out quickly (which to me is no different then alpha striking) because once the main heat in any given encounter is removed, again the game devolves into a walk through, going through the motions kind of a game.
Im not saying the game isn't challenging for the players and there are a lot of methods a good GM can use but personally I think the Daily Powers need to go (they are just too good and allow for the alpha striking mentality to be executed too easily) and Encounter powers need to be trimmed back a bit. This would ensure combat is really combat, a fight between advisaries and that when you have a leader in a encounter he doesn't get wiped out on the first round and can actually serve a purpose in both the encounter and in the story.
I will say that the players having a signficantly better grasp of the system than the DM isn't a happy place for a 4E game.
The game master not being the master of the rules predates 4E, as it was introduced in 3E by system mastery giving players power over the DM. 3E was so bad in this regard that the DM had to fight back against it or lose all control over the game.
It seems your issue is more with focus fire than alpha-striking(though if your players expect only having to fight one battle before resting, Daily bombing an encounter will result in alpha-striking). Its just basic tactics in a cooperative game. I've run enough bad RPGA tables to see what 4E looks like without focus fire, and its real ugly.
The fact is, the mechanics of the game do assume 3-4 encounters per day.
Ya this is part of the problem. A system shouldn't be designed assuming that characters in the story will fight at least 3 times every day. It makes designing a story very tough, if you have 1 fight, now you have to make sure that their will be at least 2 more that day or that 1 fight becomes .. meaningless.
I also think that 4th edition D&D assumes to much about the play style and forces it mechanically, and your right that has always been a problem with D&D and one I would think they would correct with Wizard having a second go at it, but its actually gotten worse. D&D shouldn't be piegon holding players into the category of hack and slash. I just think they can do better design wise to allow for a larger variety of play styles.
Sounds like people want WHFRP3; you don't miss, you go mad/die of disease/have missing limbs, (snip), you never get magic items.
Thank you for ensuring that I will never go near WHFRP3.
Well, you can thank him for mischaracterizing WFRP anyway. This is coming from a playtester for the game. You can indeed miss, madness is temporary, easily avoidable and usually only an inconvenience and there are indeed magic items to be had.
The only complaint I have about it is the steep pricetag but you do get a lot for your money with this game. It was designed to be a premium product.
Instead, these deptictions sound like the worst games of 1E I've ever played. And I liked 1E.
I will say this, though. WFRP3 is "dark and gritty." That's Warhammer for you. Characters die frequently unless the GM wants a lighter campaign and that's by design. So if you don't like that much yeah, it may not be for you.
OD&D, 1E and 2E challenged the player. 3E challenged the character, not the player. Now 4E takes it a step further by challenging a GROUP OF PLAYERS to work together as a TEAM. That's why I love 4E.
"Your ability to summon a horde of celestial superbeings at will is making my ... BMX skills look a bit redundant."
I thought you were listing things that are still sacred enough that they probably couldn't be dispensed with in 5e.
Nope. i was just listing the things I personally consider sacred cows not to be slaughtered.
I have no problem seeing enhancement bonuses go away. I have no problem seeing Reflex get folded into AC. I have no problem seeing the daily reset done away with.
I also agree with those who said they'd like to end the first-round nova. I disagree with those who think this is due to DMs who don't schedule three encounters a day. I think it's actually worse when a campaign follows the guidelines.
If you think you are going to have, say four encounters a day, most players know their PCs have four dailies, so they use only one per encounter. Then you have between four and six encounter powers, but only about half are useful for any specific encounter. So you basically have three or four powers you think are going to be useful. Every other combat you also get to use an action point, given how the milestone mechanic is supposed to work, so in those combats, you can use all your good powers in two or three rounds.
That means you have two or three good rounds. After that, you are either dipping into the dailies you wanted to save for future encounters that day, you are using encounter powers that really don't make the best use of their features, or you are spamming your at-wills, which often feels ineffective. If you're lucky, the DM has placed a lot of nice terrain powers or other combat features that you can employ to keep it exciting, but I find that to be the exception rather than the rule, and even that often only increases the number of exciting rounds of combat by one.
There needs to be a better way to ensure players have fun things to do every round.
I thought you were listing things that are still sacred enough that they probably couldn't be dispensed with in 5e.
Nope. i was just listing the things I personally consider sacred cows not to be slaughtered.
I have no problem seeing enhancement bonuses go away. I have no problem seeing Reflex get folded into AC. I have no problem seeing the daily reset done away with.
I also agree with those who said they'd like to end the first-round nova. I disagree with those who think this is due to DMs who don't schedule three encounters a day. I think it's actually worse when a campaign follows the guidelines.
If you think you are going to have, say four encounters a day, most players know their PCs have four dailies, so they use only one per encounter. Then you have between four and six encounter powers, but only about half are useful for any specific encounter. So you basically have three or four powers you think are going to be useful. Every other combat you also get to use an action point, given how the milestone mechanic is supposed to work, so in those combats, you can use all your good powers in two or three rounds.
That means you have two or three good rounds. After that, you are either dipping into the dailies you wanted to save for future encounters that day, you are using encounter powers that really don't make the best use of their features, or you are spamming your at-wills, which often feels ineffective. If you're lucky, the DM has placed a lot of nice terrain powers or other combat features that you can employ to keep it exciting, but I find that to be the exception rather than the rule, and even that often only increases the number of exciting rounds of combat by one.
There needs to be a better way to ensure players have fun things to do every round.
I think you're talking about a slightly different issue here Wrecan, that being having something interesting to do every round instead of running out of the fun powers and being forced to spam boring at-wills until things come to a merciful end.
When I think of alpha-striking, I'm going by the CharOp concept of it, where the party bombs an encounter to kill enemies on round one before combat really has a chance to begin. People on the CharOp forum pride themselves on building Strikers that can reduce a standard enemy from full to zero hp in one turn. At Paragon tier, assuming they hit, a fully optimized Striker can threaten to do this in every fight, even if you fight 3-4 per day.
Sounds like people want WHFRP3; you don't miss, you go mad/die of disease/have missing limbs, (snip), you never get magic items.
Thank you for ensuring that I will never go near WHFRP3.
Well, you can thank him for mischaracterizing WFRP anyway. This is coming from a playtester for the game. You can indeed miss, madness is temporary, easily avoidable and usually only an inconvenience and there are indeed magic items to be had.
The only complaint I have about it is the steep pricetag but you do get a lot for your money with this game. It was designed to be a premium product.
Instead, these deptictions sound like the worst games of 1E I've ever played. And I liked 1E.
I will say this, though. WFRP3 is "dark and gritty." That's Warhammer for you. Characters die frequently unless the GM wants a lighter campaign and that's by design. So if you don't like that much yeah, it may not be for you.
Yeah that was a pretty bogus representation of what WHFRP3 is about.
But honestly if you are a fan of the 4th ed gaming philosophy, WHFRP3 is probably close to its polar opposite so I wouldn't expect many if any on here to like it.
To see my campaign world visit http://dnd.chrisnye.net My music -> www.myspace.com/Incarna My music videos -> www.youtube.com/Auticusx
I thought you were listing things that are still sacred enough that they probably couldn't be dispensed with in 5e.
Nope. i was just listing the things I personally consider sacred cows not to be slaughtered.
I have no problem seeing enhancement bonuses go away. I have no problem seeing Reflex get folded into AC. I have no problem seeing the daily reset done away with.
I also agree with those who said they'd like to end the first-round nova. I disagree with those who think this is due to DMs who don't schedule three encounters a day. I think it's actually worse when a campaign follows the guidelines.
If you think you are going to have, say four encounters a day, most players know their PCs have four dailies, so they use only one per encounter. Then you have between four and six encounter powers, but only about half are useful for any specific encounter. So you basically have three or four powers you think are going to be useful. Every other combat you also get to use an action point, given how the milestone mechanic is supposed to work, so in those combats, you can use all your good powers in two or three rounds.
That means you have two or three good rounds. After that, you are either dipping into the dailies you wanted to save for future encounters that day, you are using encounter powers that really don't make the best use of their features, or you are spamming your at-wills, which often feels ineffective. If you're lucky, the DM has placed a lot of nice terrain powers or other combat features that you can employ to keep it exciting, but I find that to be the exception rather than the rule, and even that often only increases the number of exciting rounds of combat by one.
There needs to be a better way to ensure players have fun things to do every round.
I think you're talking about a slightly different issue here Wrecan, that being having something interesting to do every round instead of running out of the fun powers and being forced to spam boring at-wills until things come to a merciful end.
When I think of alpha-striking, I'm going by the CharOp concept of it, where the party bombs an encounter to kill enemies on round one before combat really has a chance to begin. People on the CharOp forum pride themselves on building Strikers that can reduce a standard enemy from full to zero hp in one turn. At Paragon tier, assuming they hit, a fully optimized Striker can threaten to do this in every fight, even if you fight 3-4 per day.
Char opted alphaing is well its own issue (not one I personally need to worry about given the low optimizing my group prefers) the anti-climactic fight because build up isnt encouraged mechanically is may be different but do you have a good word for it.. well other than just that - increasing cinematic rewards in this arena sounds like a good thing to me.
I think you and nightwalker were talkign past one another. nightwalker complained of "Combat should build to a climax, not climax and then drag out"
He isn't talking about people spamming dailies. He's talk about people using up the good stuff in the beginning and then having nothing cool to do for the rest of combat. People responded to this as if he was suggesting the problem was th five-minute workday in which everyone uses all their dailies and then sleeps, but I don't think he was. (He can correct me though.)
The five-minute workday is an issue and can be fixed by getting rid of the sleep mechanic for a story-based recovery mechanic.
The anticlimactic power usage, however, is a separate problem that requires more finesse. He is correct that combat should build to a climax, while right now, the big guns go off in the first round and combat slowly peters to a standstill. (This isn't unique to 4e -- it happened in all editions). One way to do that is to increase everyone's damage based on how many rounds they've been fighting. (This will have the side effect of really encouraging focused fire even more than the game does now.) This encourages people to save their power blasts for the end, while dreading the fact that your foes are likely doing the same.
I think that's a problem to be addressed in future editions. It is a problem I would like to see addressed.
A slightly-less bookkeeping version is to give things really annoying "while bloodied" powers. Then the incentive for the PCs is to bloody it nice and slow, and then once it's bloodied take it from bloodied to dead instantly.
But yeah, that's not a great solution either. A recharge mechanic might be nice.
"Nice assumptions. Completely wrong assumptions, but by jove if being incorrect stopped people from making idiotic statements, we wouldn't have modern internet subculture." Kerrus
Practical gameplay runs by neither RAW or RAI, but rather "A Compromise Between The Gist Of The Rule As I Recall Getting The Impression Of It That One Time I Read It And What Jerry Says He Remembers, Whatever, We'll Look It Up Later If Any Of Us Still Give A Damn." Erachima
