Community

Martial combat is extremely taxing and a skilled fighter will only go all out when he sees an opening or is desperate. And the longer the fight drags on, the harder it is to deliver even those short bursts of extra effort. In such a ridiculously abstracted system as D&D, limiting a particularly powerful action to once a battle makes a ton of sense. To complain that "it isn't realistic" when HP isn't realistic, when AC isn't realistic, when even movement is greatly abstracted, is baffling. D&D is not about reality, it is about fantasy and there are tons of elements that are as bad or worse as encounter powers when it comes to realism that are accepted by just about everyone who plays D&D so I don't understand why people would make an issue of realism in this case.

Its a valid point but I think when people talk about realism, it comes from the practical application of the game system to their games and what your talking about here is the abstraction on paper.  Another words, practical experiance vs. concept.  Conceptually I agree with you, this makes perfect sense and is no more or less realistic than any other sub system of the game.  In practice however the experiance is very different and as usual the devil is in the details.  I guess one could say Encounter Powers where very unrealistic in 4th edition D&D, the concept itself was fine, but how the different types of encounter powers where implemented, what they represented, how those events played out in a typical game and other such finite details is what the "unrealistic" camp is basing there opinion.  Its worth saying that most of the issues of realism come from the Martial Classes.


It comes down to defining what impact the player creative narrative should have on the game and how the GM should respond.  Just an example (that came up in my own game).

I had a very strong Dragon Born who thought everyone in his party was a whimp and needed "experiance".  He would often try to shove his fellow adventures into the thick of combat to "toughen them up".  I had another player who was a fighter, who had the "Get Over Here" utility power that effectively allowed him to slide a friendly two squares which is an encounter power (aka he can do it once during a fight).

Being put into the percarious position of differentiating mechanical results from one player doing something narratively and another doing the same thing using a power was difficult.  The problem is that it happened constantly, pretty much every round of every fight because players where constantly creating "narrative actions" for which they did not have powers for that did exist in the form of encounter powers.  It was a constant headache and the realism of scenes suffered for it.  I could not allow a narratively defined actions to have mechanical effects equivilant to someone elses (or any existing) Encounter Power.


Simply put, there are too many powers that define narrative actions that players want to take in the game as a natural product of running a scene.  Players don't want to "execute abilities", they want to define their actions narratively which is perfectly reasonable and is really as far as Im concerned how players should define their actions.  I don't want to here "Im using my encounter power" at the table, it breaks the scenes narrative component, but in the end this is what ended up happenining in 4th edition games which is where the "Less role-playing in D&D" comes from.   By defining so many narrative actions mechanically via at will, encounter and daily powers you close the door on those narrative actions to players who don't have the power.  


The problem is to that if a player defines a narrative action, he expect mechanical results whether he has the actual power or not.  Another words if a player defines a "Im going to put my sword and sheild up and brace myself for the charge", he expects some sort of mechanical benefit from his action, but this action is really defined by several different types of encounter and at will powers like "No openning" for example.  So you, as a GM, must know what "effects" are covered by powers and make sure you don't give those benefits to a player who doesn't have them.  With literly hundreds of different powers narratively defined, this is a nightmare.


The end result is that realism suffers, realism in the narrative sense as the connection between the narrative and mechanical are wishy washy unless players simply accept that they can only take the types of action for which they have powers.  Players generally don't want to do that, they want to believe the game world is free and that they can take any kind of action they want to describe and have it results be mechanical.  In a sense, by definition this is role-playing.

Does that make sense?                      
          

    

Nov 19, 2012 -- 12:57AM, edwin_su wrote:

You could disconec the powers from their use, still having the limit of 4 in a encounter to show you are getting tired.
but not stoping you from using the same power more then once as long as you don't use more then 4 in one encounter.

Seems perfectly reasonable to me.