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Feb 24, 2012 -- 8:59PM, Backspace wrote:

Feb 24, 2012 -- 2:22PM, AbdulAlhazred wrote:

This is a wonderful idea except you have to eviscerate the game in order to do it. Plus it gains you little. There will always be some resources, and there's NO incentive inherent in the game for PCs to continue adventuring. Never has been and really isn't ever likely to be. It is pure story. The only reason to press on has ever been and ever will be to fulfill some sort of goal within the story arc of the game. No amount of chopping the game down will remove that. All it will do is destroy tension, pacing, and resource management subgame. IMHO what you propose is not even close to worth the cost.

What is the 'cost'? Complexity? You already have a system where combats take an exorbitant amount of time to complete and the adventuring day can be reduced to a 5 minute workday. Acknowledging a problem exists and saying it has always been there and you can't think of a solution is not an appropariate response.

Resource management should take place in an encounter. Decision making should take place during combat, not as a subgame in the adventuring day.

First of all YOU'RE the one calling the system complex and saying that 'combats take an exorbitant amount of time to complete', NOT ME. Don't solve your problem on my back. I just did a level+3 Solo encounter with my main group the other night. This was a major encounter and it still took 45 minutes (and actually was remarked on as being one of the longest we've done in this campaign). Now, I think 4e combat can be streamlined and I've posted plenty of ideas on that subject over the past couple years which you're welcome to look up. I've designed a couple of basic homebrew systems and tested things out with my online group too. I think I have as good a handle on what might be improved in 4e as anyone, and IMHO you're just far offbase.

Resource management is half the interest of the game. You're removing a lot of fun when the player can't ask himself questions like "Hmmmm, should I use my daily right now when it is maximally effective and end this encounter, saving us some surges? Or should I save it and assume there will be a much harder encounter later and hope that my HS will last out?" THAT is a lot of what an ADVENTURE is about in this sense. Lobotimizing it all down to everything is an encounter resource is terrible. You've removed an entire dimension from the game. Even if you imagine managing HS still, you've removed the main tradeoff!

Beyond that HOW DO YOU PROPOSE to have really significant "plot bending" sorts of power available to the PCs when every power they have recharges after an encounter? It simply won't work. All you can give them are basically more ways to do damage. Wow, that's going to create an AMAZING amount more diversity!!!!

Feb 24, 2012 -- 2:22PM, AbdulAlhazred wrote:

I don't agree. You don't seem really super (at all maybe?) familiar with 4e I guess. 4e is not 'rote' any more than it was rote for the wizard in 3e to cast Sleep all the time. Of course he did, that was the main thing (maybe even the only thing) he could do. No 4e character is even close to this limited. A 1st level 4e PC will have a daily, an encounter power, 2 (or more) at-will powers, and is almost assuredly going to have at least one more power and maybe as many as 5-6 more depending on class, theme, race, and build choices. There's very little likelyhood (especially since you can only spam at-wills) that the PC will do anything 'rote' at all. By 5th level the variety of things that any one PC can do that are ON HIS SHEET is going to be much greater (he'll surely have another 3 powers, 2 more feats, and probably several other things like item powers). The 'roteness' of 4e is negligible. Honestly the primacy of daily powers is pretty marginal too. As I said before, you're beating on a molehill here. Even a wizard can (and they regularly do) go on without their daily powers and do perfectly well. It is just not a big deal.

Giving each character a laundry list of options does not produce interesting decision making, it produces system mastery. The player learns what effects, bonuses or conditions are valuable and priorities power selection to favor those powers on high value target(s). The decisions are obvious and marginal, in other words, rote.

OK, let me rephrase that, you have no knowledge of 4e whatsoever, clearly, lol. This is just rubbish. There are no rote optimum things in 4e (OK, recently you could accuse charging of that, but it has nothing to do with the issue we're talking about and isn't even a power). The reason it is rubbish has several aspects:

1) Character effectiveness is only a fraction of the story. Party effectiveness is much more important in 4e. This can be achieved in such a vast number of different ways that there is nothing even close to a consensus on a 'rote' way to build a party or a 'rote' way to run it or the characters that compose it.

2) Even within individual characters there is such a vast number of possible ways to build a character that no one element is really 'optimum'. There's no best power or combination of powers, etc. Not even close. For every person who will tell you that X is the ultimate way to build your fighter someone else will show you Y which is equally good, but has different strengths and weaknesses.

3) Effectiveness of 4e characters is STILL quite situational. You can build the ultimate charger build spam nonsense you want and a simple flying creature will still eat your lunch. There is simply nothing rote about the game, NOTHING.

About dailies, in one of your previous posts you agree that dailies allow the party to go nova. This is a problem. This is the 5 minute workday. If the system does not address this problem, then you leave a lot on the DM's plate. He has to balance out encounter(s) across the day to provide a challenge. And as I mentioned before, this implies a lack of inherent complexity in encounters. If combat is mostly about fighting trash mobs then why even bother. You waste game time to produce a result which is known beforehand.

You aren't even making sense here. Nor are you following my argument at all. The 5 minute workday is inherent in a certain play style, not in a rule set. It will exist in ANY GAME that has any resources AT ALL. It will ALWAYS BE UP TO THE DM (or the players themselves in which case the problem doesn't exist) to provide reasons for pressing on if that's what he cares to have happen. Otherwise he can simply make an encounter challenging enough to make the party sweat regardless of how loaded they are. I don't have any real idea where you got the notion that lack of inherent complexity in encounters is in any way shape or form related to resources. My 30+ years of DMing and gaming experience says this notion is simply baseless.

In fact what YOU propose is what would make 'trash mobs' worthless and unimportant. If the PCs will simply recover all their resources at the end of the encounter then of course any encounter that isn't near-lethal is basically just set dressing. You're apparently pointing the finger at the wrong person here on that one. Daily resources ALLOW FOR a variety of levels of encounter challenge because you can be assured that each encounter will have meaningful resource use significance. 

Feb 24, 2012 -- 2:22PM, AbdulAlhazred wrote:

All these fatigue point and charge-ups and blah blah blah are just not needed. Remember, there is a LOT of 'setup' stuff that already exists in 4e. You can set yourself up (especially with an AP, but even without one) and other PCs are EXPECTED to set you up and vice-versa. The game is extremely dynamic that way. In a well-designed adventure the whole environment and situation will likely be quite dynamic and encounters will have a whole variety of different goals and situations in them. If your game is coming out 'rote', well, 4e's design isn't at fault for that. It may be that the presentation lead people to play that way, but I don't know. It didn't have that effect on me.

The dynamic nature comes in the variety of approaches available to jump into the molasses of bonuses, effects and conditions.

This is entirely not what I am saying at all. When I build an encounter (and I use the term loosely as you will probably have some trouble delimiting them at the table playing in my games) they are rarely static situations. Things are ongoing and dynamic etc. This means that even if you were using one or two powers often you will find that you're not going to be using them under the same conditions for long, and you'll probably quickly find that other options are going to be useful quite often. The 2nd level pixie wand of accuracy wizard in my Tuesday group has what, 7 powers IIRC (5 wizard powers, a racial and a theme power). How often do you think this character is spamming or fishing for bonuses? In the last fight they had she was using her daily to force the enemy out of a tactically favorable spot (and damaging it a bunch over several rounds) and then using encounter and at-will powers to limit the bad guy's options (this was a fairly customized moss monster that created its own minions ala the Obliviax from MM3). I think she used Magic Missile twice in 8 rounds, closest thing to spamming I saw. The only 'bonus fishing' there was was the rogue flanking and the paladin maneuving to get the pixie's owlbear in the right spot so they could gang up (which gives a damage bonus). Those were all logical bonuses that made sense and why would they not be appropriate? 

Now, I think 4e can get somewhat bogged into more gamist type bonuses and such than is really justified, but I see no reason to consider that an issue with the AEDU power system specifically. Nor would removing Daily powers 'fix' it. In fact you'd almost surely have to make up even more intricate and gamist (see Kalnaur's suggestions for gamist) bonus rules in order to get something remotely like the big powers you sometimes need.

Yes, good adventures are good, fun encounters are fun. What about simple combat situations? Four adventurers walk into a room and see four monsters, what happens? Your post implies such a situation will be boring because the goal is simple. The implication that combat does not have inherent complexity is a fault of the system. The system gives you mountains of options through class features, equipment, feats and powers and when it comes down to the most basic expression of the system the game is lifeless. This is a problem.

LOL, OK, so refresh my memory, which edition of D&D (or any other FRPG) was it where the "4 orcs in a room" was NOT crap?

OD&D) Nope... deadly perhaps, but utterly boring. Nothing to do but roll dice and pray.

1e) Nope... deadly perhaps, in fact exactly like OD&D, lol.

2e) Hmmmm, are we repeating ourselves here? Methinks so...

3e) Yeah, no, chances are the wizard will have Sleep x3 now and will just burn one, or maybe just leave it up to the fighter and cleric.

4e) Sure enough, this encounter is silly.

So, we've now established that 4 orcs in a room is a silly pointless encounter. This is not news. In 4e I would recommend either A) making the orcs minions, now if it is just a fight it is negligible and can be dismissed. RP can still take place, the orcs could try to quickly flee and change the overall situation, etc; or B) get rid of the 20x20 room nonsense. All you need to make this a worthwhile encounter is some decent terrain. Make the room a little bigger, put a balcony somewhere and stick an orc up there with a bow. Add a pit trap and a stairway so if someone goes for the archer something interesting might happen. Put some furniture in the room that can provide some terrain and flanking situations. Make it possible for the orcs (or the party) to outflank each other via an alternate route into the room. Stick a ballista in there and let one of the orcs crank on it, if he gets it cranked up he can unleash a nasty attack. NOW its interesting. That took me all of 45 seconds to work out. ALL of these options will be far more interesting tactical situations in 4e than in any previous edition.

The framework of D&D is strong. Feats and powers are systems that address the needs for both passive and active abilities of a character. Saying that the game system should remove dailies as we know them and develop resource management mechanics for encounters is not a revolutionary idea. I want fun combat. I want fun to be inherent to combat, not a byproduct of the adventuring day.

Clearly we have different agendas. IMHO I, speaking for myself, have NO desire to see the game changed in that direction. I don't think it will be more interesting, nor do I think such changes will accomplish what you think they will to any appreciable degree. Daily powers are a far simpler and more intuitive, and largely proven successful, technique when you understand their strengths and limitations. I can't imagine how combat could be any more 'inherently fun' than it is in 4e, which already provides a pretty cool and interesting set of BOTH encounter and daily resource management. I think it is unlikely we're going to find a solution that comes closer to pleasing us both.

Feb 25, 2012 -- 2:33PM, Mellack wrote:

I find it odd that people are argueing that wizards are proper to cast a spell once, but fighters are wrong to do a power once.  That is pure perception.  I find that a wizard forgetting a spell once cast is easily as rediculous as a fighter doing his big swing only once.  Who forgets things because they remembered them?  "I can't remember how to do magic missle, because I remembered it this morning.  I will have to remember my lightening bolt instead."  Really?!?

The whole "forgetting a spell" after casting it was strictly for game mechanical reasons.  The same as for fighter exploits.  I feel that what is a reasonable explanation of why to someone is due to your preconcieved expectations from your past game and story experiences.  In other words, you think fighters can do physical stuff all day, because you can do physical stuff all day.  You think wizards can do stuff once, because the old game wizards could do stuff once.

Sure...but that should have been brought up 30 years ago before it became part of the D&D canon. All of the mythology built upon D&D has fire and forget spells. Does that mean it is sensible? No. It DOES mean it's D&D