So, who's still playing the objectively best edition of D&D?

>>51896910
Bait thread, but 4rries will still argue that their beloved garbage is good, despite the facts that:
1) It allowed Pathfinder to emerge
2) Everyone has forgotten it the moment 5e was released.

>>51896939
Well, there is bait here, that part's correct at least.

>>51896939

> 2) Everyone has forgotten it the moment 5e was released.

That's so true. Look at how many retroclones 1e and 2e have spawned. Even 3e has continued to exist as Pathfinder.

What is the legacy of 4rries? Strike?

>>51897062

The issue with creating 'Another 4e' is that 4e worked on highly individual class powers rather than 'Here are some spells that fit into spell lists and classes that just hit stuff/have minor features'.

It's a shit tonne more work. Same reason why you saw so much less 4e homebrew even when it was majorly about. 5-10 class features is easy. 100+ powers is hard.

>>51897083
This.

Making an OSR is fucking easy, which is why there are so many brews for it.

A 4e clone will be either basically rules tweaks, or change so much stuff that it's more 4e inspired than a 4e clone.

>>51896939
>tfw 4e is to blame for the existance of Pathfinder

I really like 4e but I wish it was never made

>>51896910
DM-ing one game, playing in another

The group I'm playing in is an all-arcane party, the sole survivors of a destroyed arcane academy. It's hella fun

>>51896939
Please tell us where the bad system touched you.
Please share some more of why you don't have any friends.

I've been thinking of getting back into it, of late. I tried using 5e to do some small dungeon crawls, since I don't have the free time for a full campaign, but it doesn't quite fit.

Now I'm trying to find out more about "Fourth Core", and how to run it. Supposedly it is a fan-made style of 4e adventure that takes advantage of the good things about 4e, but makes it much more brutal, in line with old-school tournament dungeons.

Playing in three games of it at the moment. Although I do think 'Objectively the best' is a shitty way of putting it.

4e is the only edition of D&D I actually like, and I like the stuff that 4e added more than I like the D&D default stuff it was saddled with, which seems to be the reverse of most of the systems detractors.

Other systems might be better for other play styles, but the sheer degree of focus and strong design concept really gives 4e a place in the library of games I play, as opposed to most D&D styles systems which are just a bit broad and unfocused for my tastes.

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>>51896910
Not you.

>>51896910
Why is it the best?

>>51896910
Playing in an Eberron game, we've house-ruled a lot of the math problems away and we're using inherent bonuses because the magic item progression is a bit goofy.

Sure the system has flaws but it's one of my favorites. I'd play it more if there was more interest in my time-zone.

>>51900043

'Best' is always couched in personal preferences, but there are distinct elements of 4e that appeal to people more than the D&D default. For an RPG system dealing with tactical combat in a high fantasy setting, it's unsurpassed. It's far from perfect, with a lot of tweaks needed and some content that doesn't work, but compared to its contemporaries its content rich, mechanically engaging and despite the complete disaster that was its intended online integration the fanpatched character builder is still one of the best chargen programs available.

>>51897367
>I really like 4e but I wish it was never made
Heh, Here here.

>>51900043
I'm a 4e fan, (although I think calling it the best is just baiting because it is pretty subjective), and I really like it because it has the most interesting combat rules.

I like having cool things to do as a melee fighter that doesn't rely on playing "Mother May I?" with the GM and if you get a cool idea, you still can try it, and the DMG even gives advice on how to adjudicate those actions.
Related to above, I like having interesting decisions to make in combat, and I like how the party synergy works together to make those optimizations involve team work.
I fucking love Warlords.

As for the non-combat stuff, I both honestly don't see a substantive difference between the various editions of D&D (besides 4e having a reduction of the "Wizard solves all the problems" issue). And, while I CAN recall times where the rules for outside of combat in an RPG have added to my fun instead of the GM just handling it, those times have never* been in D&D. So even if any other given edition is "better" for the out of combat stuff, it's not substantially enough so to make a difference, and, for me, I like 4e's combat (which is what D&D is basically about anyway) best.

*Okay, there was ONE time, but that was due to a "skill checks explode on a 20" houserule, where I rolled 2 20s followed by a 19, and suceeded on my stupid plan to pass myself off as an iron golem just by being in really heavy armor. But again, that was a houserule, and it could have happened in any D&D system.

>>51900368

>I fucking love Warlords.

This seems to be a very common opinion, and one I share. I feel like you could learn a lot by analysing what makes Warlords such fun to play, as it generally seems like they're the most popular Leader class in that respect.

I guess they're the most proactive Leader class? Doing the whole lead from the front thing, with their form of support being very aggressive and active as opposed to passive and reactive.

>>51899775
If you want to make 4e more dangerous, go for a funhouse type dungeon. 4e shines when there are traps and falls and all sorts of environmental hazards everywhere. You can make the game harder and more interesting without necessarily trying to kill your characters.

>>51897062
Also Valor.

I guess we could also count Gamma World?

I only wish the wizard had more interesting spells like polymorph or whatever

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>>51900612
Rituals mang, that is where the crazy shit is at. All you need is a GM that hands out ritual components as "extra" treasure above coin and magical items to make the system work. The existing "spend money on a temporary effect" just irritates players.

I thought about having a BBEG using this ritual to create a disaster by raising an underwater tract of land to create a big ass tsunami.

4e's biggest problem, for me and my group at least, is how tremendously compartmentalized everything is.
Skill challenges, normal skill use, rituals/martial practices, AEDU abilities: all explicitly stratified. We found that taken together it's too awkward and distracting from actual plot/character/narrative considerations, as each subsystem is entirely preoccupied with its mechanics. Other moving parts get put on hold as people have to navigate what is actually happening in the game world when things are actually executed or failed.

>>51901281

I don't really get this. Could you try to explain/go into more detail?

Figure I might as well ask it here. I'm yet another person working on a 4e successor, thought I'd see whether our ideas for where combat should end up.

Our ideal is combat lasting 3-5 rounds, 4 on average, so each round the PCs will be do on average a quarter of a standard encounters total HP in damage. Of that damage, 1/3 comes from the Striker, with the remaining two thirds split equally amongst the Leader, Controller and Defender.

Meanwhile, in order to make them threatening, enemies will deal between two thirds and three quarters of a single PC's HP on average, split amongst the group. Obviously tuned differently with single large enemies to avoid unavoidable one shot kills and such, which aren't fun.

We're pivoting it all around a base hit chance of 65%- Weighted slightly in favour of hitting.

Do those numbers sound roughly right? We're still fiddling with stuff and running some test combats with basic mock ups of characters and monsters to make sure it all feels right.

Can anyone recommend any good 4e prebuilt campaign stuff? I kind of want to give it a try, but am too lazy to create my own stuff.

>>51896910
Remember the one anon that got roasted?

>Duur u cant water walk!
>4+ examples later
>Urr, U r wrong bye! *runs away like a bitch*

>>51900415

Well, if you compare it to how people saw clerics in prior editions (Ignoring how 3.5 clerics just preferred to self-buff) I think it shows a bit of why people like them. Warlords are never just sitting about (Lazylords excepted) letting other people do stuff for them. They are moving and fighting and helping at the same time. So people get to feel like they are doing stuff personally, rather than just patching up allies/making them do stuff.

>>51896910
Still here, still the best. I also prefer much of the fluff.

>>51906187
They also just got really cool thematic powers that also tended to be very powerful

Like Vengeance is Mine, or Hail of Steel

>>51903245
I think you should boost the hit rate for PCs

I would generally say missing more than 1/4 of the time feels like ass

>>51896910

I just really wish there was a way to easily compile all errata and rules together and show it to new players.

Most groups around me play the shit system known as Pathfinder mainly just cause all the rules and options are easily available for free.

4e requires getting a shitload of books and errata pdfs, pirating and downloading the old character builder, or paying for the official compendium.

4e isn't really shit. It's just (1) a huge break from previous D&D in that it dropped hit dice, 9-alignments, and similar sacred cows, and (2) suffers from overly-gamist design.

It wasn't bad, it was mediocre. It had good numbers balance, somewhat-interesting combat, and was well-balanced. It also was an improvement on normal 1-9 level Vancian casting. It lacked customization in the same way 3.5 had it, mostly due to its inherent structure, but the encounter design was good and it was hard to make a shitty character from what it sounds like. I only played the game for a couple of years, so I'm not an expert, but I liked that it balanced AC versus attack bonus. It also had a nice format.

What kills 4th edition for me is the stupid fucking resource-tracking. I don't want once-a-day abilities as a fighter. I don't want healing surges, which were made even shittier in 5e. The dissociated mechanics of daily powers and encounter powers for non-casters destroyed the game for me. It felt like League of Legends. 4rrys always bitch about vidya comparisons but it's there, so fucking refute it or else fuck off. There was no sensical reason for them besides game balance. Which could have been accomplished without shitty powers.

Overall it gets a 5/10 in my book. Honestly, other editions had other shit that was just as bad if not worse, but 4e particularly annoyed me with some design choices. Had it kept the good ideas it honestly would have fixed at lot of what was wrong with 3.5 (boring-ass auto-hitting, dependency on magic items, and caster supremacy) but the stupid powers system fucked it up. It was a cop-out and it was such a radical divergence from previous editions that it made a lot of players feel betrayed.

Again, not horrible, and definitely DM-friendly. It's not like 5e is much better.

>>51906598
I fucking hated the 4e fluff. I loved Fallcrest, though, which is what our current campaign takes place in (we converted 4e to 3.5)

>>51896910
That doesn't look like the 5e PHB.

>>51906834

> 4rrys always bitch about vidya comparisons but it's there, so fucking refute it or else fuck off.

It's a narrative conceit. Think about how fight scenes in movies or TV shows play out.

Most of the time, people just trade blows, back and forth without much real impact- These are your At Will powers, simple but reliable effects you always have access to.

A few times in a fight, one fighter or another will bust out something stronger, taking an opportunity presented to them or using some sort of technique that looks really effective, and it'll have a significant impact on the fight.

And then, even more rarely, someone involved will do something really huge and significant, ending a fight or turning the tide in a single blow.

The power of the option is directly relevant to how scarcely it's used, because that's key to creating an interesting and compelling fight scene. If one guy just spams his best thing over and over and over it's kinda dull. While this is focused on the experience of the audience in non-interactive media, in RPGs the same principle can be used to create interesting and engaging combat mechanics which give people a variety of interesting and enjoyable options to make use of.

>>51896910
I run games of 4e quite regularly. It's my go-to game as a DM. I also run SR, and some hyper-lite games when I need a break, but 4e is very much the default for my group.

>>51897218
>>51897083
Very much agree here. Making 4e homebrew is much more difficult than making 3e OGL homebrew, and more importantly, it's less rewarding. 4e already works out of the box, and the rules/fluff separation makes it possible to run most concepts with simple re-fluff and MAYBE minor house-rules for something REALLY out there.


>>51897367
The problem here is that, yeah 4e is indeed responsible for pathfinder.... HOWEVER, 3e already existed, so how does the creation of PF add any shit to the shitpile that wasn't already fully present?

>>51906834
Why don't you want resource tracking?

Without resource tracking, you can't have big things. Powerful, game-changing features, because such features would shatter the game if you could spam them, so you're stuck doing boring shit all day every day.

>>51906707

You think so? I realise I might've missed some important context. 65% is the base rate, not including circumstantial modifiers, accurate powers and things like that. A basic At Will with no combat advantage or other bonuses.

Making it higher would make Encounter/Daily powers or situations where you leverage an advantage almost a sure thing, which we thought could damage the tension a bit. Even if whiffing a daily does suck.

I'll talk to my team about it.

>>51906971
A 75% hit rate isn't a "sure thing", Try playing a Pokemon game to see this in action.

>>51906834
Martial encounter or daily powers have been explicitly related as being dramatically governed, rather than being a specific magic spell with inherent limitations like in casters. It's exactly like watching a conventional sports game. Those dudes are playing hard all the time, but sometimes the stars align and something insane happens. Those are encounter or daily powers for fighters, warlords, rogues, etc.

>>51906990

I more meant that Encounter/Daily powers or advantageous situations can give you +10/15% on top of that, making hitting a 90% hit chance relatively easy, which seems a bit much.

>>51906998
That's a rather drastic change from 4e, most 4e encounter or daily powers aren't more accurate. They're either good for action economy, more powerful in terms of effect or damage, or target more enemies at once

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Hello, I'm a richfag borrowing this thread.
I don't play tabletop RPG games, but I like morrowind & gothic.

My autism is enjoying reading about lore & stuff, also enjoy beautifully drawn pictures, study different races & different monster-races, my favorite book is a fine leather edition of Vampire Masquerade.

Could you guys give me other different RPG books that could satisfy my need for this stuff?

>>51907029

Things like Combat Advantage are the more common stuff, but more accurate powers are also a thing so I included them for completeness sake.

>>51906690

There is that too. I've never quite gotten the whole 'There is no flavor'. So many powers oozed flavor in the mechanics themselves.

Like the Void Gensai racial power Void Assumption. Useful and just fun flavor-wise.

>Effect: Until the start of the user's next turn, the user ceases to exist.

>>51906834

>. I don't want healing surges, which were made even shittier in 5e. The dissociated mechanics of daily powers and encounter powers for non-casters destroyed the game for me. It felt like League of Legends. 4rrys always bitch about vidya comparisons but it's there, so fucking refute it or else fuck off.

...how the hell is Healing Surges like League of Legends? League of Legends has infinite healing available per match and people constantly regen health.

>>51906960
That's what spells are for. I'm sorry if this makes me sound like a 3.5 caster munchkin, but that's why you play a caster. To set off giant bad-ass explosive spells once per day but that's it. And 4e did that kind of well. Whereas fighter? Ranger? I'd rather have interesting attacks I can use at will. I don't want to float a bunch of tokens around my character sheet for what's used up and what's not. The rest cycle was built around casters and now the martials have to suffer for it as well. No, martials get to do their awesome shit constantly, but it's not as good as a caster's spell which is limited to a few per day.

The solution is, casters get their at-will powers, then they can do a number of daily spells per day equal to their level. That's it. At will spells are literal cantrips, like a blast of fire attack roll for 1d8 damage that might increase a bit at higher levels to be inferior to fighter damage. The rest are basic cantrips. That's it. Then, one big-ass spell per level per day. None of this triangular spellcasting bullshit where a wizard has forty spells and a psion has 300 fucking power points.

>>51906997
>Those dudes are playing hard all the time, but sometimes the stars align and something insane happens.

Except in your case it's literally your character deciding to use the maneuver. So no, it's not the stars aligning.

I don't entirely hate the 4e combat system, either. It works for what it is. But the core conceit of its maneuvers/exploits/powers system is fucking retarded.

Try reading this article and refuting anything in it. It even uses the exact example you presented.

http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/17231/roleplaying-games/dissociated-mechanics-a-brief-primer

>>51907116
That is true, but other powers had a distinct lack of flavor to them

Like, there's a bunch of paladin powers which are just hit, radiant damage, mark. And even if it is rather thematic, the Ranger's "just hit them more" powers are pretty dull

>>51907127
i'm talking about "daily" and "encounter" powers that refresh, with dramatic-ass names that make it feel like I'm supposed to click one to set it off. Not to mention minions and the whole vidya-esque way the encounter building is set up (which is actually well-done, if you're the kind of DM who actually builds out encounters).

And no healing surges were just a way to structure health because for some reason wands of cure light wounds were a fucking sin, and in-combat healing didn't exist so there was never any reason to cast cure critical or heal, if we're talking 3.5. There was zero reason to put them in except to create more dependence on a stupid, artificial, constraining structure for advneturing.

>>51907132
Try 13th Age, sounds closer to what you want.

Personally though, I like having my fighter being able to pull off animu super-moves once per day

>>51907132

And if someone wants to play a character that uses resources and is martial?

>>51907150

Minions are more an action movie thing than a video game thing unless you play Dynasty warriors.

>>51907150

>i'm talking about "daily" and "encounter" powers that refresh, with dramatic-ass names that make it feel like I'm supposed to click one to set it off.

That's literally just you getting too wrapped up in layout and formatting. Not the systems fault.

I am.

I see D&D as 100% the combat system. That's what D&D is. The rest you can get better from other systems. And 4e has the best combat, at least for over the top heroic stuff. When I run 4e I run god of war shit, with huge monsters, crazy set-piece battles, all that kind of shit.

When I do a more subdued RP-heavy or gritty dark fantasy setting, I don't use D&D. If I did, I'd use 5e or 2e.

I will never go back to fucking 3.X. Fuck 3.X

>>51907162

I like having my Barbarian have really impressive Daily power throw downs that involve Warp Spasming and destroying everything about him with rage strikes.

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>>51907214
>When I do a more subdued RP-heavy or gritty dark fantasy setting, I don't use D&D.

Then what do you use, O Wise Wizard?

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>>51896910
I learned the d20 system on 4e and I admire it for what it is, entry level D&D. Sometimes its good to have cheap garbage to give to your kids instead of a $350 investment item.

>>51907150

What video games have daily powers? The only ones I can think of that work that way are ones based on D&D and the REALLY old JRPGs when they still had spells per day.

>>51907132

That article seems to miss that disassociated mechanics have always been part of D&D.

Heck, tactical grid combat is in itself a disassociated mechanic. The ability to know the exact position of everyone involved at every moment, regardless of whether they're behind you or obscured by others, effectively means that the players decision making can never be directly lined up with the characters without the kind of rationalisation he claims doesn't make it not disassociated.

4e didn't add those mechanics. It just stopped obfuscating them.

>>51907246
Not him, but I play Burning Wheel

>>51907132
>I'd rather have interesting attacks I can use at will.
4E had these and they were 100% shit so what you want can go fuck off forever. They were less interesting than the classes they were based off of in every single way.

>>51896910
It's my favorite edition of DnD because it's the least like DnD. But I rarely play it because it's still DnD.

>>51907132
>No player, after making an amazing one-handed catch, thinks to themselves, “Wow! I won’t be able to do that again until the next game!” Nor do they think to themselves, “I better not try to catch this ball one-handed, because if I do I won’t be able to make any more one-handed catches today.”
Don't like that shit ever again, the writer is an idiot.
It's STATISTICAL. The "one-handed catch" is a statistical ability. If you keep trying it over and over more times than not you're going to fail. Occasionally you're going to try and succeed.
The encounter ability is the character being aware the opportunity of succeeding in the ability is particularly likely to occur and executing it. The reason it's once an encounter is they realize the opportunity to do that action is rare and to keep trying regardless of opportunity of circumstance is only going to be met with failure.
Instead of thinking of it as "man I can only do this once during an arbitrary time period" think of it as "The opportunity to do this successfully is rare, happening about once per encounter" this is abstracted into being a once per encounter ability. It's like instead of rolling to do the unlikely action constantly you get to decide when that roll turned out to be a success. The evidence that this is preferable to rolling for abilities constantly is casters. Even if you can cast spells whenever no one like spell rolls where you're risking failure all the time even if it doesn't cost a spell slot because when you cast a spell you want the spells effect for that specific situation rather than randomly rolling to cast the spell and it working sometimes but failing when you actually needed it.

>>51907407

He also asserts a baseless definition for roleplaying games and draws arbitrary lines to make things outside his preference not 'real' roleplaying games. The idiocy is pretty clear.

>>51907407
>The opportunity to do this successfully is rare, happening about once per encounter
But you still have to roll for it.

>>51897062
Stop shilling Strike!

>>51907557
Aw, c'mon, you gotta do the whole thing.
Can't forget the
>Why does /tg/ keep shilling Strike!?

>>51896910
Why didn't you make a 4eg faggot?

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>>51896939
>>51896910
4e is a great game and I love it, but releasing it under the DnD franchise label was a mistake.
It's a really solid game that has tight game design, but it alienated itself from everything that is expected from a DnD game.

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>>51896910
But of course.

>>51907248
The closest I can think of is FFXI had abilities that were on a 2 hour cooldown. Which was about the equivalent of two days in game, as a Vana'diel day was just under 1 hour.

>>51907251
It's like magician's tricks: dropping the obfuscation makes the whole thing lose its fun.

>>51907041
That's my favorite brand of autism too desu
If you haven't already read it, Volo's Guide to Monsters is essentially just that, it's a literal bestiary that focuses on the lore of some D&D creatures rather than the stats.

>>51907248
>>51908993
Neither of you have ever played a TES game?

>>51909978
Not really, because D&D depends on it's players and DMs being able to see through the obfuscation in order to function, while a magician depends on their audience NOT being able to see through it

>>51910407
If I ever start working on my Legend/4e/Strike/5e mishmash of a heartbreaker, there'll be a "no bullshit" and a "fluffy" version of books.

>>51910270
Games with spells that could be cast a certain number of times per day? Geez, you're right, that doesn't sound anything like D&D!

>>51907132
>thealexandrian

Quickest way to have your entire post disregarded.

4E is great, and I would love to see a 4.5 that's simply a tightened up and revised 4th. It's my go-to system.

>>51908263
Arguable. I've had people I've played with calling it closer to "real" D&D than 3.PF ever was, and these were people who've been playing since at least 2e.

I only play 5e because I'm somewhat familiar with it and it's the most recognizable one.

>>51907322
>4E had these and they were 100% shit so what you want can go fuck off forever.

>4e did it wrong therefore it is shit forever.

Fuck OFF you are using the EXACT WotC design ideology that has fucked up the game over and over.

>>51907407
You can't confuse statistics with willful choice and expect to be taken seriously.

>
Instead of thinking of it as "man I can only do this once during an arbitrary time period" think of it as "The opportunity to do this successfully is rare, happening about once per encounter" this is abstracted into being a once per encounter ability

Except, I can choose to succeed at it whenever I want. Therefore, that's a fallacious way of explaining it.

>>51907430
It's just my opinion, man.

>>51907430
I never said 4e isn't a "real roleplaying game." So stop putting words in my mouth. At least the other guy is having an argument you're just being a dismissive cunt because you have a victim complex about 4e.

>>51913031

The article you linked did

>>51907171
Put in some book of nine swords shit, I don't care. Or, just play 4e.

Monk had ki points, I guess. Those worked well and had a decent in world explanation.

>>51907251
There's a difference between partially dissociated, and totally dissociated. The grid is a way of solidifying combat positions into something discrete and easy to use. There isn't any explanation as to why daily powers can be used once per day, except "muh statistics" which is fallacious because you can choose when you get to use them.

So if anything it's metanarrative bullshit which has never been in D&D's design portfolio previously.

It's basically metanarrative currency at best, and from a game design perspective it adds pointless book-keeping for no real benefit. Why can't martials just do good things all the time? Oh, because Wizards had to put all the characters in the same design structure because that was the only way they could balance martials and casters. That is where 4e's "every class feels the same" argument comes from. It isn't true but it is close to true because they all function mechanically similarly.

inb4 you dismiss all of this out of hand because you can't stand to recognize any flaws in your precious fucking system.

I don't even think 4e is a BAD game by the way, it just isn't a GOOD game. And if you like it, more power to you. I played the system for 2 years and hated it but liked parts of it.

>>51913017
>Except, I can choose to succeed at it whenever I want.
YOU are choosing to succeed, not the character.
It's a narrative device where the group and DM collectively decides the stars align for that action to be successful.
It's similar to how the player decides the characters backstory, despite no mechanical basis nor the character having any choice in what their backstory is.

>>51913048
Well that's just going into the wankery of game devs and the distinction between a roleplaying game and a storytelling game.

Unless you concede that fighters have some sort of inborn mana they can call upon, consciously, to fuel their daily moves, then you as a player are making that decision that your character would have no concept or awareness of.

It's a fine distinction, and again, most of my beef with it comes from the bookeeping aspect, not the RP aspect.

I don't even entirely hate the video-gamey feel of it either, it's unparalleled for letting you start out as "Big Damn Fantasy Heroes" and get better from there. In some ways starting at 1st level in 4e actually lets you have a backstory with combat in it because it makes sense your character could win a fight with some measly 1 hp orc minions.

Also damage is well-balanced between the classes and it's hard to make a shitty character.

So there are good things about 4e, and I want to reiterate what I said above because I don't think it's a bad game. I just don't like the daily/encounter/at-will structure for martials and think it is bad game design.

>>51913107

>The grid is a way of solidifying combat positions into something discrete and easy to use.

How is this any different to Martial Daily and Encounter powers, representing opportunities presenting themselves that you can make the best use of in discrete, easy to use ways?

The reason I argue isn't that I want to aggressively defend 4e, it's to understand the complaint. Engaging in debate with those who disagree with you is an excellent way of learning more about your own views and the potential flaws in something you like.

The reason I refute or counter your points is to make you support them, so I can better understand them. Currently, I can't really see much legitimacy in your argument, but by inquiring and going deeper I might find a key point which will let me understand where you're coming from, while at the moment it all still strikes me as highly arbitrary and not founded in anything real.

>>51913177

>Unless you concede that fighters have some sort of inborn mana they can call upon, consciously, to fuel their daily moves, then you as a player are making that decision that your character would have no concept or awareness of.

I guess I've just never noticed this as a problem because it always existed in every edition of D&D. As mentioned earlier in the thread, all 4e did was remove the obfuscation, not make the mechanics any more disassociated.

>>51913170
>It's similar to how the player decides the characters backstory

That is done out of game, before you start roleplaying your character. Once in play, you are locked into that backstory. You are now your character.

> It's a narrative device where the group and DM collectively decides the stars align for that action to be successful.

So it's a meta-game narrative device. If you are fine with that in your group, then that is fine. By Alexander's definition, you are no longer playing an RPG, but rather an STG, because of that level of metagaming built into the mechanics.

And it's not too much different than "luck" points that 3.5 had, to be fair.

>>51913218

>So it's a meta-game narrative device. If you are fine with that in your group, then that is fine. By Alexander's definition, you are no longer playing an RPG, but rather an STG, because of that level of metagaming built into the mechanics.

His baseless, arbitrary, meaningless definition, yes.

>>51913177
>and think it is bad game design.
You'd be wrong because it directly solves the issues it was meant to solve: different scaling rates of power leading to some classes rapidly overtaking all others, some classes being resourceless in a game where resource management is the name of the game, and some classes being worth less than shit when they were out and standing around doing nothing because they couldn't afford to spend their resources.

>>51913218
Who fucking cares about what that retard has to say? He actually thinks 3.5 is a realistic game.

>tabletop WoW
>good

>>51913218
>Once in play, you are locked into that backstory.
Nope. Retcons happen.
>You are now your character.
You are never your character. You are playing the character, because it's a GAME. Big difference.
>So it's a meta-game narrative device. If you are fine with that in your group, then that is fine. By Alexander's definition, you are no longer playing an RPG, but rather an STG, because of that level of metagaming built into the mechanics.
I guess 5e isn't an RPG either, because it's chock full of arbitrary limitations. Why can a druid only wild shape twice a day?
Why does a wizard have an arbitrary number of spell slots?
Why does every class seem to have once per short rest features?

They are just as "meta-narrative", the only difference is time scale per action allowed.

>>51913179
> How is this any different to Martial Daily and Encounter powers, representing opportunities presenting themselves that you can make the best use of in discrete, easy to use ways?

Because the space in the grid actually exists in the game world. All that it is is a formalization of character's actual positions. When you decide to flank a character in 3.5 as a rogue, for example, it's because you, as a player and as a character, know that that can let you get in a nice backstab (sneak attack) while he is focused on his enemy. The grid is just a way of facilitating that. You don't even need it, really. It just makes the game flow a bit better.

Basing the daily moves / encounter moves on probability is different. The character doesn't know that. He knows, maybe, that sometimes he can get in these really epic strikes.

The opportunity isn't presenting itself, you as a player are choosing to alter the narrative outside of your character's actions to present an opportunity.

Character positions present opportunities organically within the rules of the game. And they can be reconciled with "real life" so to speak.

Now, if the daily powers required a certain set-up (and for all I know some of them do, I only played two classes in 4e so I don't know all the powers), like some of the 3.5 tactical fighter feats did, then that would perhaps be better.

But if they did, why once per day? Why can it never be twice per day? It's a hard abstraction that really doesn't even make sense within it's own argument. If it's based off of probability of there being such an opportunity, isn't it likely that opportunity would show up more than once?


>>51913209
> I guess I've just never noticed this as a problem because it always existed in every edition of D&D.

Give an example of this.

>>51913233
In a roleplaying game you are playing a role of your character. Nothing outside of that. By affecting the narrative in a way outside of your character, you are now playing a storytelling game. There is a clear line there.

>>51913243
That's a fallacy, that just because an aspect of a game was "fixed" that that means it is good game design.

>>51913287
Accepting arbitrary limitations on magicals is easier than on martials because all magic rules are arbitrary by definition.

>>51913255
Where did I imply this??

>>51913259
It's not necessarily bad.

>>51896910
I play oD&D still every now and then

>>51913287
>Why can a druid only wild shape twice a day?
>Why does a wizard have an arbitrary number of spell slots?

Because they are spending mana / magical energy to do those spells, and they need time to "recharge their batteries," so to speak.

This exists within the fiction of the game and the characters are aware of it.

The fighter is NOT aware of his daily powers and how they work because there is no real reason why he can only pull off an epic cleave once per day. Probability does not work as an excuse... if so, why is it never twice per day, or zero times per day?

I suppose with the straight extra-damage powers you can say he is exhausting himself. But some of the others just do not make sense as to why he can only do them once per encounter or day.

>>51913337
>that just because an aspect of a game was "fixed" that that means it is good game design.
>mechanic does exactly what it was intended to do
>NO IT'S BAD DESIGN BECAUSE NOT SIMULATIONIST
Fuck off retard.

>>51913351
And martials who supercede anything a real life human could do is supernatural itself.

Please kill yourself.
>Magic is arbitrary made up bullshit so it can do anything
>But martials have a vague analogy to real life so it my be constrained by reality

>The fighter is NOT aware of his daily powers and how they work because there is no real reason why he can only pull off an epic cleave once per day.
Because the enemies only cluster themselves close enough together for the epic cleave to work on average of once per day.
>Probability does not work as an excuse...
Yes it does. Your problem is you're thinking of the probability from the in character perspective and not from the perspective of the players and GM who dictate the circumstances in the world.
Stop thinking "CHARACTER wanted to use cleave, and so they did. But for some reason they can't anymore?" and think from the player/GM perspective of "Character did an attack, the circumstances were right so it cleaved through multiple enemies at the same time."

Your problem is you're inserting yourself into your character and pretending it's role playing. You are the PLAYER, not the character. You DICTATE what the character does and the circumstances of why and how. The character isn't real you moron, they don't decide anything.

That, and game balance. Because it's a role playing GAME. Why the fuck is this so hard for you morons to understand.

>>51913287
And I don't disagree with your assertion about 5e. I actually hate that is brought back hit dice and one-per-short-rest features.

> You are never your character. You are playing the character, because it's a GAME. Big difference.

For the purposes of the game, you are taking the role of your character. Therefore if you make decisions, it needs to be based, as much as possible, on what your *character* knows and sees. If you make decisions because of things your character doesn't know, it is metagaming. And yes some metagaming is unavoidable.

> Retcons happen.

And when they happen there is a conflict of interest if the player is involved because, why would you not retcon things to make life better for your character? But since you are supposed to be playing as your character, and be immersed in their role, why would you not? That's why I avoid retcons and I certainly avoid them within the session. Outside of the session you can do what you want.

>>51913462
Dude you're confusing three different things together here.

Yes, the mechanic did what it was intended to do. (1) it's intentions are unknown because there is no 4e mission goals document that isn't needlessly vague, so you can always just re-fit your definition of it's "goals" to fit what the game actually accomplished. Thus, the game doing what it meant to do, is a completely worthless argument.

>NO IT'S BAD DESIGN BECAUSE NOT SIMULATIONIST

When did I ever say or imply this? If you think not having metagame mechanics means your game is simulationist then you seriously need to revise what those terms mean.

No one is saying D&D needs to be more realistic. The issue is with characters' abilities making no sense in the game world. If you think anything involving consistency and sense means you need to jump to beating on your "realism gurps fag" strawman, I seriously think you need to reevaluate your views because that's a bit ridiculous.

>>51913481
>>51913505

Different styles of roleplaying exist, and that's fine. Do what's fun for you.

The stupid side is acting like only one style is 'real' roleplaying, or that any style is more or less valid than any other. Or acting like a mechanic that doesn't appeal to your preferences is innately bad.

>>51913557

> The issue is with characters' abilities making no sense in the game world.

They make no sense to you. A lot of other people don't have a problem with it.

>>51913505
>For the purposes of the game
>Therefore if you make decisions, it needs to be based, as much as possible, on what your *character* knows and sees.
There are no mechanics to enforce this, therefore it's not part of the game aspect of RPG. It's strictly role playing.
>If you make decisions because of things your character doesn't know, it is metagaming.
Yes, it's metaGAMING because you're GAMING in place of role playing.

>, why would you not retcon things to make life better for your character?
Same reason people don't play D&D and roleplay being a common baker with no magic or political intrigue involved.
> But since you are supposed to be playing as your character,
Yes.
>and be immersed in their role
There is no part of role playing that requires you to be immersed in the role. Only dictate what you believe the character would do given the circumstances. Otherwise you would be acting. And while there are aspects of acting in role playing, it's not the central focus.
Games require rules. You play games. I don't know how to play non-games. Therefore play is inherently intertwines with games which is requires rules.
Those "once per day" powers ARE the role playing rules. Your character is a bad enough dude to cleave, but not do it all the time. There must be rules to dictate why, when, and how you cleave. Because developers aren't omnipotent and have limited time, they simply this rule to "whenever the PLAYER decides, once per in game day"

>>51913557
>it's intentions are unknown because there is no 4e mission goals document that isn't needlessly vague
Confirmed for not following 4E development.

>>51913598
Then explain in-universe, from billy-the-fighters point of view why he can only greater-cleave once per day, without bending the narrative of the cosmos to justify this (because having to bend the course of your story to patch bad rules is a sign of a bad rules system, a good rules system supports an internally consistent narrative)

>>51913563
I mean, you can always fall back on the badwrongfun justification. Nothing can be proven to be objectively bad or good, not even FATAL.

And I would still define 4e as a "roleplaying game" even though it has storytelling game elements to it. Because by that definition, FATE, Savage Worlds, and loads of other games would not be RPGs either.

My issue is that D&D has had a strong history of associated mechanics. Each mechanic and each character decision based on that mechanic, could be justified by something the character actually knows. Lots of HP? It's an abstraction, sure, but your character knows he is a competent fighter and likely won't go down in one swipe. Spell slots? your wizard knows he only has the mental power and magical energy to cast X spells a day before needing to rest and recharge. Even something like flanking or combat positioning are based off things your players would know to do.

Whereas daily powers for martials are more of a narrative decision. Which is fine, but you should at least recognize that exists and understand why their additon pissed off a lot of the D&D fanbase (though I think the restructuring and resource management was what annoyed people most).

I take back anything I said saying 4e isn't a real RPG. The Alexandrian article claimed it wasn't and had legitimate reason to do so, but I think the distinction between RPG and STG is blurry and it's a soft border so it's based on intuition where you draw the line.

>>51913664
>from billy-the-fighters point of view why he can only greater-cleave once per day
Because he only gets the chance to do it once a day.

End of discussion.

>>51913682
5 minutes later those exact same enemies stand in the exact some position around billy. why can't he repeat his feat?
>Because 4E is shit

>>51913598
>They make no sense to you.

They make no sense to the characters, either. You have constructed a narrative reason for their existence, and somewhat an ingame one. But it is retroactive. You are deciding to use the ability, so it can't be based on probability UNLESS you separate yourself from the game world. So you are making a narrative decision outside of the bounds of your character. if that's fine with you, then fine. But at least understand why a huge swath of people don't like the mechanic, and for a legitimate reason.

>>51913625
>too stupid to reading comprehension
The player is not the character. The player still makes decisions as the player. The problem is you think the player is making decisions as the character. But the player dictates what the character wants. So in effect you're still making decisions as the player.
ALL decisions made for the character are stained by the desires of the player. You can not stop this.

>because having to bend the course of your story to patch bad rules is a sign of a bad rules system, a good rules system supports an internally consistent narrative
Then we might as well stop talking about D&D because the narrative bends to the rules all the damn time. Why doesn't everyone learn a few cantrips at least? DURR BECAUSE THE RULES SAY PEOPLE JUST CAN'T
Why does the party escalate in powerlevel over the course of a few weeks/months? Why is there no one else doing this, consider all the wealth and power it brings?

>>51913675
I understand exactly why they didn't like it but I still think they're total fucking retards over it.

>>51913682
> Because he only gets the chance to do it once a day.

And why is that?

"Because he can only do it once per day."

So circular logic, therefore there is no reason for the mechanic to exist. You can claim "game balance" but that is based on the fallacious assertion that the daily/encounter power structure is the best and only way to balance martials against casters.

>>51913725
>I still think they're total fucking retards over it.

and why is that?

>>51913693
Because he's too fatigued to do the exact same thing again, because the enemies are on their guard against it and attempting it would be pointless, because they're not actually in the same position and so he can't do it again?

You know, anything other than "HURR Y CAN'T I USE SAME ABILITY ALL THE TIME?" Fuck off and play an Essentials class, or better yet go play another game entirely because Essentials killed the fucking game full stop specifically to chase after people like you.

>>51913742
You know, except for the part where AEDU is still the only mechanical framework that actually balanced casters against martials in the entire history of D&D so it's not actually fallacious.

>>51913707
>You are deciding to use the ability,
You are ALWAYS deciding to use an ability
THERE IS LITERALLY NEVER A POINT WHERE A CHARACTER DECIDES TO USE AN ABILITY ON THEIR OWN
Fuck, are you legitimately retarded?
>so it can't be based on probability UNLESS you separate yourself from the game world
Because the players, the onces deciding what happens in the game, are not part of the game world?
> So you are making a narrative decision outside of the bounds of your character
This happens all the time you retard. But due to gameplay reasons, this decision is for the most part is placed as the DMs responsibility.
Hell, you do this EVERY TIME the character attempts an action and succeeds or fails. Someone has to describe why and how the character failed/succeed at an action it was entirely possible for them to succeed/fail.
Oh. I see. You probably don't even do that. Just say "you pass/fail"
>But at least understand why a huge swath of people don't like the mechanic
Then they must not like role playing GAMES because that's what they do.
>>51913742
GAME: He can only do it once per day due to balance reasons
PLAYER: I decide when the narrative allows him to do so
CHARACTER: Wow I have the opportunity to hit multiple enemies at once, this chance doesn't come up often. I'll do so.

>>51913758
Why would they need to be in the exact same positioning? Why would he be that fatigued? Something like Brutal Strike I can actually see making sense for that, but why isn't that based on constitution if it's fatigue related?

Why can't he use steel serpent strike (the one that stops a target from shifting) more than once? Especially against a far-less skilled opponent? If you're fighting someone you really outclass, why couldn't you use that maneuver over and over to keep them completely locked down?

The answer is game balance.

>>51913716
>ALL decisions made for the character are stained by the desires of the player. You can not stop this.
>WAH WAH how dare you want to roleplay your character instead of playing an abstract combat simulation

>Why doesn't everyone learn a few cantrips at least?
Because most people spend their time studying other stuff like hitting really hard, or moving evasively to not get murdered (taking other feats like Power Attack or Dodge) instead of taking the time to learn magic (any feat that gives cantrips)

>Why does the party escalate in powerlevel over the course of a few weeks/months?
Because the DM hasn't read the encounter section in the DMG.

>>51913758
>Because he's too fatigued to do the exact same thing again, because the enemies are on their guard against it and attempting it would be pointless, because they're not actually in the same position and so he can't do it again?
He got healed up the the literal god of positive energy, the enemies' minds were wipedand they are literally in the same position.

This shitty rule literally prevents the universe from repeating situations more than once a day, just because some retard couldn't into balance except by making every class a fucking wizard.

>You know, anything other than "HURR Y CAN'T I USE SAME ABILITY ALL THE TIME?" Fuck off and play an Essentials class, or better yet go play another game entirely because Essentials killed the fucking game full stop specifically to chase after people like you.
You seem awfully mad, just because someone has legit criticism to level against the objectively worst edition of DnD, an Edition so bad a company ran by drooling retards like paizo managed to flourish next to it.

>>51913791
This. If you ever played a game where you don't have direct control over what characters do you'd know exactly how this works, but apparently everyone else here has downs and autism at the same fucking time.

>>51913779
>the entire history of D&D

That's the fallacy right there. It's basically equivalent to the anecdotal evidence fallacy.

AEDU worked but it was the easy way out.

>>51913675
Well personally, I've always just considered martial daily/encounter powers to be Kamen Rider-style special moves

Sure you CAN spam them all day TECHNICALLY, but doing so would remove all the excitement and tension around using them. So for plot-reasons you can only use them once per encounter/day.

>>51913836

Gone into more detail in >>51906919

>>51913803
>The answer is game balance.
Which is a perfectly fine and reasonable answer if you aren't a total moron.

>>51913836
If the game is supposed to be run in a narrative-focus anime-inspired shonen way, why is it advertised as a grounded western-fantasy centric RPG?

And for over the top narrative action there are much better games.

>>51913843
Oh... yeah, that guy said what I meant in much better words

>>51913808

Except you can try to repeat the same action. It'll just function by the Improvised Action rules instead of as a power.

>>51913854
>why is it advertised as a grounded western-fantasy centric RPG?
It's not, you're only assuming it is because of the name D&D.

>>51913847
game balance does not take precendence over internal logical consistency, as these are RPGs and not abstract boardgames.Go play fucking GO if you want balance

>>51913854
I don't think 4e was ever advertised as "grounded"

>>51913854
>If the game is supposed to be run in a narrative-focus anime-inspired shonen way
Your problem is that you think being anime-inspired shounen stops it from being fantasy.
>why is it advertised as a grounded western-fantasy centric RPG?
Because it's not?
>D&D
>grounded
lmao

>>51913791
>THERE IS LITERALLY NEVER A POINT WHERE A CHARACTER DECIDES TO USE AN ABILITY ON THEIR OWN

In the fiction, yes they are. Because you have an in-fiction link to the world. It makes sense for both you as a player and you as a character to make that decision, and is based on information that you and your character both know. (I hate using PbtA terms but they work here).

Whereas there is nothing in the fiction to justify your CHARACTER making that decision, because he has no idea the ability exists. Worse, he has no idea the in-fiction result of the ability exists.

Like I said above with hit points, your character does not know how many hit points he has, but he knows he's a skilled warrior who can take a few hits. He also might know that if he swings extra hard he's less likely to hit but he might deal more damage (like 3.5 power attack). The exact amount is abstracted but it's based on how reckless he chooses to be, something his fighter intuition decides, based on how hard he guesses the enemy might be.

But there really isn't any reason why the character would decide to use this power. Because it isn't a character's decision. Also his willingness to hold back on using it, is based off of something he wouldn't know, either (that it is limited to once per day use).

>>51913854

Since when has D&D ever been that?

>>51913868
>game balance does not take precendence over internal logical consistency,
Bullshit it doesn't.

>>51913886
It's not even a competetive game. Whyare you so autistic about balance? You're can't "win" it, there's literally no contest.

>>51913836
>Well personally, I've always just considered martial daily/encounter powers to be Kamen Rider-style special moves

That's fine. But when you said "plot-reasons" you touched on exactly why it pisses people off.

I don't even really mind it that much, because 4e works for what it does. I even like it for certain tones and flavors of game.

What I would prefer? I actually liked the ideas behind the tactical feats in 3.5, where you could use them as much as you wanted but you needed to be in the right situation to use them. That eliminates bookkeeping and makes tactical decisions more interesting, in my mind. Sure the 3.5 tac feats might have been terribly executed, but I liked them in concept.

I'm trying hard not to shit on 4e because I don't actually hate it. I like it in ideas, and when I think about the system it feels nice in my head.

>>51913854
>advertised as a grounded western-fantasy centric RPG?

It isn't. D&D has a history of being such, but 4e was not advertised as such.

The problem was that the narrative-focus anime-inspired shonen game was a huge break with previous editions, hence why people got pissed off because their expectations were betrayed.

>>51913847
>Which is a perfectly fine and reasonable answer if you aren't a total moron.

Not by itself. If you want a perfectly balanced RPG, play chess and ignore all the roleplaying elements. That's the reductio ad absurdum of that argument. That's why other elements need to be taken into account.

>>51913897
>Whyare you so autistic about balance?
Because unlike you, I've actually played games and ran into shitty balance face first multiple times. There is nothing worse than playing a character who cannot do what the game advertises their class/archetype as doing - except for maybe playing a character who starts off competent yet rapidly descends into shit because of bad balance.

>>51913868
>game balance does not take precendence over internal logical consistency
Then why are you playing a role playing GAME and not just
role playing?
>In the fiction, yes they are.
Nope, the writer/narrater decides the character will use that ability at the time and dictates so.
Fiction is fiction. You seem to be under the impression that fiction is some sort of simulated world with real characters and people and not just the whims of the narrator.
>Because you have an in-fiction link to the world.
It's not real and it doesn't exist you autist. This is why players and rules are needed

To make it more clear, Harry Potter is not using Patronum. Harry Potter and magic are not real. Rowling is dictating the fiction, and in that fiction Rowling decides Harry uses Patronus. Harry never deviates from the authors decision and unexpectedly uses Patronum without the authors consent. Because Harry is not a person, and not real.

>>51913897
Because people played through 3.5

They experienced the pain of being a rogue with a utility wizard around, or a fighter when the druid has a bear for his animal companion.

Nothing feels worse in D&D than feeling useless

>>51913897
>>51913886
Quit arguing over balance being good or bad and realize that you can have both balance and in-world consistency. They are not diametrically-opposed. 4e sacrificed one for the other. It didn't have to.

>>51913897

Because balance is equally if not more important in cooperative games, because it's no fucking fun if one person is relegated to be a cheerleader with no ability to influence the game while someone else is a living god.

Team based games thrive on teamwork, which requires a decent level of balance.

>>51913931
>The problem was that the narrative-focus anime-inspired shonen game was a huge break with previous editions
The problem is that it's not a huge break. It's a direct growth out of late 3.5 mechanics and concepts - you know, the ones that actually worked as intended more than half of the fucking time because the designers started to get an idea of what worked and what didn't. And really, even in Epic tier it's actually functioning at a much lower power level than the flying shapechanging Wizards shooting laser beams at each other that was high level 3.5.

>>51913949
I do not care about one of the two and I do care about the other. Why should I care when one only bothers people with autism and the other can directly lead to new players having a shitty time?

>>51913945
And that resulted in balance being fetishized above all else, and the D&D developers COMPLETELY misunderstanding the reason behind caster supremacy. So they they made a system they thought was brilliant when in reality it was just an easy way out. And they unconsciously stumbled on solutions for other 3.5 issues (like relying on magic items to buff your AC, which ended up futile anyway because attack improved while AC never did, classwise) but then threw them out in the next edition.

It's been one step forward, two steps back every time. Actually more like two steps sideways.

>>51913978
Are you talking about in-world consistency or game balance? Asking for the world to make a bit of sense, is autistic? And it certainly doesn't need to result in new players having a shitty time, where are you getting that from?

>>51914013

>Asking for the world to make a bit of sense, is autistic?

It certainly shows a lack of mental flexibility.

>>51896910
4ed was a Ok wargame, get out a map and mins combat table game. It was never D&D as seen by everyone going Pathfinder and 5th going back to 3,5 for rules, Also it lack of sells

>>51913996
>and the D&D developers COMPLETELY misunderstanding the reason behind caster supremacy.
That one class type had resources to spend in a game that is, again, fundamentally about resource management, while the opposite one didn't? I'd say they understood that perfectly.

>>51914013
>Asking for the world to make a bit of sense, is autistic?
>He says this while playing his dragons and magic games
1+1=3 can makes sense, even though your artistic mind would probably flip shit despite 1+1=3 being just as logically invalid and makes just as little sense as magic.

>>51897083
>>51897218
Not to mention 4E was not released under the OGL or any similar license like 3.PF, so it's much more difficult to get a comprehensive understanding of the material and directly copy it.

Meanwhile OSR games are mechanically simpler and therefore easy to recreate, especially now that there are so many.

>>51913964
The developers found something that sort-of worked and piled it upon a flawed system. Most of why people hated Book of Nine Swords is because of the extra bookkeeping it required, not the "power level' issues.

You're not wrong, though, especially about the last sentence. But a lot of people hated late-game 3.5 for a reason and that's why when 4e came out they saw more of the same.

I find it amusing that I can line up my 3.5 supplements in chronological order and find the pieces of 4e cropping up one by one, slowly building up to the new edition.

>>51914071

The Tome of Battle was one of the best books of the 3.5 line.

>>51914054
Except magic actually works as an excuse because it's magic. It's a designated bullshit tool. However unlike Harry Potter magic or other YA-lit magic, D&D magic actually has rules. Whereas fighter does not have magic.

You are confusing realism and consistency. Your argument of "dragons exist, therefore we don't need any consistency because look at the dragons why would anything make sense lol" is just stupid.

>>51914071
>Most of why people hated Book of Nine Swords is because of the extra bookkeeping it required
Except they required way less bookkeeping than any spellcaster or 6th level caster did.

>>51914051
I think part of the problem was Wizards were supposed to be balanced by resource management, but then got too many ways to bypass that issue, like Crafting scrolls and wands.

That and they have so many resources they basically never risk running out after level 5 or so. Any day long enough for a Wizard to risk running out of resources is going to end with the non-caster party members dead from running out of HP.

>>51914071

I wish more of ToB popped up in other systems

I liked the power recovery mechanic, it was something cool that apparently no one ever wants to use again.

Also the setting sun maneuver school was so much fun to use

>>51914102
>Except magic actually works as an excuse because it's magic
And 1+1=3 actually works as an excuse because it can have just as much DM fiat and handwaving behind it as magic.
> D&D magic actually has rules.
And 1+1=3 has a rule too: 1+1=3
>You are confusing realism and consistency.
But 1+1=3 IS consistent you fucking moron. While 1+1=3 in this hypothetical setting, 1+1 will never equal 1,2,4, etc..
That is totally consistent.

>>51914102
>Whereas fighter does not have magic.

Fighters are also capable of consistently surviving falls from orbit with zero side effects aside from HP loss, can swim in lava, and take solid hits from a lizard the size of a large house, while killing it with something that said lizard would consider a toothpick.

Fighters don't have magic, but they aren't in any way "realistic" either.

>>51914136
Even if you took out T1/T2, classes like the Fighter still fucking suck compared to any given T3 class, with the most obvious example being the Psychic Warrior, for the exact same reason.

File: 1474148817551.png (615KB, 750x900px) Image search: [Google]

615KB, 750x900px

Obligatory

>>51914173
I like the 3.5 psychic warrior

I basically used it to play any martial character I wanted to play (using tashalatora if I was playing a monk) because a lot of the psionic powers can be interpreted as "just being that good"

>>51914194
While we're on the subject, does anyone have the "What people think minmaxing is/ What minmaxing actually is" image? I could have sworn I had it saved but I couldn't find it.

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>>51914207

>>51914165
Sure. I agree. But in cases where 1+1=3 does not apply, then 1+1=2. Or some other equation. The mathematical example doesn't really translate well.

>>51914194
What the hell does "4e was balance and terrible" have to do with Godwins Law? Is that meant to be some sort of implication that hitler was good?

>>51914170
So they have unrealistic toughness in an unrealistic setting. Fine. That is consistent. Again, this doesn't explain why they can only trip someone once per day.

>>51914228
Thanks
Actually had someone argue the other day that doing damage was more efficient than simply polymorphing the enemy and putting them somewhere where it couldn't return from.

>>51914256

But they can try to do so as many times as they like. The first attempt is a power, any following attempts are improvised actions.

>>51914320
Or combat maneuvers.

>>51914265
>>51914228
See, this was the issue with 3.5 casters. The Save or Dies in combat, and certain spells that could replace others' class features, based on the idea that they were there as a crutch if the rogue got knocked unconscious. Except, with wands, you could replace your rogue for about 2000 gp.

THAT was the issue. SoDs for combat supremacy and broken utility spells that can make other classes obsolete. Followed by items that remove the X spells per day limitation.

The solution to that, was to remove those exploits. Give SoDs downsides to casting. You don't even need to remove kill spells, just give them huge negative consequences that cannot be mitigated, or make them really hard to cast. You don't need to remove utility spells either, just make them really weak substitutes so that a wizard CAN fill another class' role, but so poorly that it is not viable to do except in a real emergency situation (which was their original purpose).

>>51914320
>>51914340
So why do they get worse at it after doing it once? Why do they get one automatic success at it, then have to roll after that?

>>51914341
>ou don't need to remove utility spells either, just make them really weak substitutes so that a wizard CAN fill another class' role, but so poorly that it is not viable to do except in a real emergency situation (which was their original purpose).

That's what 4e did. Rituals can do things you could otherwise do in many cases...except they take a good bit more time so they are not as efficient.

>>51914341
No, they'd still be wildly overpowered without SoDs and SoLs. It's not just a power issue.

>>51914359

Why is that relevant to the original point?

>>51914359
We've already explained it, you refuse to accept the answers. Not my fucking problem anymore.

>>51896910
Played since AD&D 2e, I stuck with 4e essentials. Tired of buying new books that add nothing after 22 years.

>>51907041
You already have the best.

Hello DnD thread, I don't have the Slav Drow immigrant pic on this device please assist.

>>51913854

Dungeons and Dragons has always been closer to Thundarr the Barbarian than Tolkien.

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>>51906919
>The power of the option is directly relevant to how scarcely it's used, because that's key to creating an interesting and compelling fight scene. If one guy just spams his best thing over and over and over it's kinda dull.

Try explaining this to the Millennials that make up 4e and 5e's fanbase, though.

>>51915341

...What?

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>>51907263
And why should I give a shit about that, cockbreath?

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>>51915341
I don't think the post you quoted is agreeing with what you're implying in the least. Are you mentally deficient?

>>51915580

Given that he's the kind of person who bitches about millenials, it's pretty likely.

>>51914407
How.

>>51914365
Yeah I did like rituals.

>>51914476
Because the entire structure doesn't make any sense. Why are fighters able to do certain things only once per day, premeditated?

>>51914507
Your explanation doesn't work.

>>51915341
That doesn't even make any sense. No one is saying daily powers should be at-will powers. The issue is that fighters in 4e are basicaly spellcasters, but without the magical energy explanation for the limitation.

>>51916579
Because you fucking retard it's not the fighter premeditating to do it only once a day.
It's the player deciding that the fighter had the opportunity, and the player is restricted by the rules in only being allowed to say the fighter had that opportunity once a day for balance reasons.

>>51916579

Because you're so locked inside your own interpretation of how things work you can't seem to grasp that other people don't see things the same way you do.

>>51897367
>>51900233
You're a fucking retard.

>>51911897
Did you respond to the wrong post or something? They both said they could barely remember any games with per-day casting and I pointed out a very popular one

>>51916701
I do see it how you do. It's also fucking stupid explanation. It's a badly-designed mechanic and it just makes casters and martials mechanically identical. It's fucking lazy design. 4e isn't a bad game but the design behind it is lazy and boring as fuck and that's why people hate it. I don't hate it but I sure don't like it either.

Fighters == Casters in 4e. They are the same thing. End of story. It's NO different than metacurrency in any other game. If you like that in your games, fine, but there is a reason it wasn't ported over in 5e and there's a reason 5e doesn't have metacurrency bullshit (except for inspiration which nearly everyone hates).

>>51918158

And this is why you're an idiot and why people shit on you and dismiss your arguments. You are so wrapped up in your frame of reference that you refuse to even acknowledge it might be interpreted any other way.

>>51918158
>Fighters == Casters in 4e. They are the same thing. End of story.

>my squishy spellslinging nerd in a tone is exactly the same as your mountain man of a luchador.
>literally exactly the same
>no differences at all between the two
>why are you guys laughing at me?
>I'm serious, stop you guys

>>51918173
I acknowledge how it is interpreted, m80. I just think it's fucking dumb. I understand Scientology too but I still think it's retarded. It's metagame bull shit. You can go all "WELL IT'S JUST A ROLEPLAYING GAME SO WE CAN DO WHATEVER WE WANT SO YOU WANTING ANY FORM OF CONSISTENCY IS STUPID" but that's just post-hoc rationalization of a mechanical choice that was chosen for game balance reasons, not reconciling with the game's fiction.

>>51918372
>my squishy spellslinging nerd in a tone is exactly the same as your mountain man of a luchador.

They've got pretty close to the same number of hit points so yeah.

The rest of your post, is not an argument.

>>51918391

You say you acknowledge it, then loop right back to making it obvious you don't understand it at all. Man, you're hilarious.

>>51918457
You can understand something and still think it's complete bullshit, my friend.

Making a decision as a player based on information your character does not have, is the definition of metagaming.

There is no in-world reason why a fighter can only use a daily maneuver once per day.

You cannot refute either of these points.

>>51918829

I don't need to, because they're irrelevant. But you're so wrapped up in yourself that despite everything the thread has informed you of, you can't see past your own inherent bias and preferences.

>>51918391
>that was chosen for game balance reasons, not reconciling with the game's fiction.
If you're so concerned about Fiction First maybe you should try playing Dungeon World

>>51918829
There is no in world reason a caster has an arbitrary number of spell slots either you fucking tard.

>>51914058
More than any of the skub regarding the rules, or the settings, the REAL problem of 4E's legacy was the ruthless corporate attitude towards making stuff for it.
The complete absence of a useful OGL meant that only a few hardcore people tried making 3rd Party stuff for it, and even they pretty much all had to surrender about a year in.
Plus, the universal pulling of all licenses created a huge amount of bad faith, not to mention directly creating their biggest competitor. I'm sure Paizo would have happily supported the game mechanically had they not been so stingy with Dungeon and Dragon. (This is why I give 4E and Pathfinder a similar amount of crap when it comes to their aesthetics; they were born out of the same IMO bad decisions being made by Paizo and WotC together over the course of 3E.)

>>51918391
Except one uses weapon attacks and the other uses arcane implements, one's wearing heavy armor the other is wearing cloth or leather. One has powers that teleport and turn them invisible while the other has powers that mass-mark temporarily and let them shrug off debilitating effects.

I can't really go deeper unless I know specifically which "caster" we're comparing the fighter to. Because unlike previous editions, spellcasters actually have solid differences between them and how they play in 4e

>>51907150
>Not liking minions
Dude I steal those even playing 5e, having easy-to-kill hordes is sometimes what you want.

>>51896910
>D&D

>>51919819

I never really understand it either. Minions are a great way of filling out battles without over complicating things and really capturing the feel of massive battles without all the headache.

>>51918158
>It's a badly-designed mechanic and it just makes casters and martials mechanically identical.

Let me step in here and say something. The distinction between classes in 4e was not about "Spellcaster" or "Non-Caster". The primary distinctions between classes were based on "Role" and "Power Source". So it's fair to say that spellcasters and non-spellcasting classes were more similar, because 4e didn't consider that a meaningful difference as much as "Martial" or "Controller.

>>51919861
I personally prefer mob rules, but I recognize why that doesn't work for 4e's combat mechanics. Incidentally, "I prefer X, but I recognize why 4e did Y" summarizes my opinion of 4e pretty much exactly.

>>51896939
>1) It allowed Pathfinder to emerge

This is the most damning criticism desu

>>51914071
>But a lot of people hated late-game 3.5 for a reason

But that's retarded. Late 3.5 was where they started making classes that worked within in a similar power tier. Core only 3.5 is easily the worst way to experience the system.

>>51916579
Because it's a game, and D&D is at it's best when it's a game of attrition and resource management.

>>51920038
There are mobs in 4e

They're called "swarms" and they're groups of enemies that mechanically work like a single unit. They take half-damage from all single-target abilities and can't be pushed, pulled or slid by single-target abilities, they can enter the space and have their space entered by all other creatures, but their spaces count as difficult terrain for all other creatures and for the purpose of fitting into gaps, they count as being as big as any one individual in the swarm. (So a medium swarm of bats can squeeze through tiny gaps, while a huge swarm of ghouls can squeeze through medium gaps)

>>51920115
ALL games with an element of strategy to them are about "resource management"

>>51919005
>I don't need to, because they're irrelevant

Yeah, and so is your game.

4e's maneuver structure is a lazy way of achieving balance and literally everything else about it sucks.

Keep shoving your head deeper up your ass to convince yourself your crap edition is good.

>>51919655
I've never touched Dungeon World but the term it uses for in-game world is decent.

>>51919668
Yes there is, you stupid fuck. It's draining magical energy which is then restored by resting.

Whereas there is no mana or spell energy for fighters.

>>51920115
Actually that's when D&D is at it's shittiest, marking up your character sheet to stick to an arbitrary rest-fight-rest structure.

Fighters already have resources to spend. It's callled, their fucking hit points.

>>51920147
What's lazy about making about a hundred interchangeable powers per class? That's a lot of goddamn work as compared to cropping some spells or dramatically reducing slots, which either doesn't work or presents a new problem

>>51920147
If casting spells is "draining magical energy", why can't all spellcasters consume multiple lower-level spell slots in order to cast higher level spells outside of 5e sorcerers above level 2?

Don't get me wrong, 5e sorcerers work perfectly with your idea of how spellcasters work, but I don't think anything else does

>>51920147
>Yes there is, you stupid fuck. It's draining magical energy which is then restored by resting.
That's a rationalization for the mechanics of spell slots.
Spells slots came first.

>Whereas there is no mana or spell energy for fighters.
It's called luck and stamina. The game already supports this in explicitly stating hit points are not meat points. These luck points also allow a sufficiently high level fighter to survive a fall from orbit.

>>51919819
>>51919861
Yeah it must feel so great killing enemies who you have 30 times their hit points.

So fuckin brave.

I love how minions, RAW, could jump off a small 10-foot cliff to attack PCs..... and they would all die instantly.

1d10 falling damage per square, bitch.

All those minions instantly die.

Also a literal cat bite instantly kills an orc warrior.

This thread has provided us with an excellent pair of examples to compare and contrast.

>>51920038

>I prefer X, but I recognize why 4e did Y" summarizes my opinion of 4e pretty much exactly.

This is a reasonable opinion anyone can respect. It shows an understanding of what is being talked about and a level of respect for what it did, while still expressing the opinion of the poster.

>>51920147

>Keep shoving your head deeper up your ass to convince yourself your crap edition is good.

This is a stupid opinion being presented as fact. The poster obviously has little to know knowledge of what is being discussed, yet still feels the need to present their uninformed statements as facts and to call anyone who disagrees with them wrong.

This isn't about liking or disliking a game system. It's about doing so without seeming like a petulant little shitbag.

>>51920216

Wow, you are really damn stupid.

Can't you wrap your hand around a simple abstraction to make thing work better? Is that utterly beyond your ability to grasp?

>>51920216
>I cannot into abstraction because I have severe autism

>>51920120
I'll own up to not knowing that, on account of my only experiences being player-side and being guided through character building by someone more experienced with it. Also, those are some neat rules, although I'd go with area spells dealing more damage with single-target effects doing normal damage, but that's just to give the illusion of higher damage since big numbers feel good.

>>51920216
Minions don't "die" when they're hit, they're "taken out of the fight"

Maybe they're knocked out, or decide "fuck this" and leave, or they bounce back to their home plane.

In your case (somehow assuming minions without acrobatics decided to jump off of a cliff that could hurt them anyway, which is already a bit of stretch), they shatter their ankles and sit on the sidelines nursing their injured feet. They don't contribute to the fight, so by mechanical standards, they're effectively "dead"

>>51920312
Oh yeah, that's also a thing, I forgot to mention that all swarm creatures have varying degrees of vulnerability to AoE damage generally depending on their level.

>>51920216
This is actually why I like Minions, the
>A litteral cat bite instantly kills an orc warrior
doesn't work. The enemies still have AC and NADs of an appropriate leveled enemy, so the cannon-fodder aren't just enemies too weak to be any sort of challenge at all.

>>51920259
>>51920266
Nothing wrong with abstraction except when it absolutely fucks up the game's internal consistency.

Try just giving them low Hp where most people will kill them anyway. For fucks sake most 1st level characters still kill a 5 hp orc in one hit.

But in 4e an orc who falls off a building is liable to explode into spaghetti sauce by taking an average of 10 times the damage needed to kill them.

>>51920613
I understand the point of minions, dumbass.

>>51920329
No, they don't leave. Otherwise you could chase them down and find them.

They die. They have 1 hit point. So at -1 hp (actually at 0 if you round down as per the 4e rules for dying) they die instantly. So 2 points of damage, or 1, instantly kills a minion. A punch from a human commoner INSTANTLY kills an orc warrior.

>>51920714

So yeah, you just can't deal with abstraction.

>>51920756
>Otherwise you could chase them down and find them

Is that so awful? Seems pretty inoffensive to me

>>51920714

This isn't actually a realistic gameplay scenario though. Because they're an abstraction, any sensible DM is going to arbitrate that problem if it comes up (Minion HP making them vulnerable to things like that has never come up in any of my 4e games, ever)

>Try just giving them low Hp where most people will kill them anyway.

Or, and try to bear with me on this one, we could give them 1hp and trust that anyone who can't navigate a corner case like that that might come up once in a hundred games is probably too busy rolling around on the floor and screeching to DM a game.

Sometimes I just feel like making a fanmade 4.5e. Or at least a system heavily based off of 4e.

Things to change would be replacing daily powers and magic items progression (inherent bonuses always felt like a better system), flesh out backgrounds, and if I ever feel really ambitious, change the scaling of levels (maybe to 15 or 20 rather than 30).

>>51921243

I'm currently working on one with a group of friends. We're going for five levels per tier rather than 10, better scaling for powers, a broader variety of mechanics and limitations for daily-tier powers, and more of a focus on out of combat stuff, with a dedicated category for out of combat powers.

Although we're currently crunching the very basic math numbers to make sure our ideal relationships are actually interesting and fun.

>>51903245 has some details of what we're pondering

>>51896910
How is a system that takes the worst element of D&D, that is Vancian casting, and smears it all over every aspect of the game in any way, much less of objectively, the best anything?

>>51920756

>They die. They have 1 hit point. So at -1 hp (actually at 0 if you round down as per the 4e rules for dying) they die instantly.

No, how they are removed from the battle is entirely up to the situation/choice of the person damaging them.

>>51897062
Open Legend's boon/bane system has always reminded me of 4e's powers. roll [stat] vs. [static defense], easily understandable template for reading/using the power.

And while they're not themselves attacks, you can get feats to fold them into attacks you make you're effectively working with a free-form power system.

>>51896910

That's not a picture of 1st Edition, though.

>>51921593
This.

Usually it's assumed dropping to 0 kills, but once they hit 0, they can decide to just knock them out, which removes them from the battle all the same.

>>51918158
What's that? Some classes don't even have dailies and rely on their at-wills and encounter powers?
What's that? These classes all play differently based on their role in game?
What's that? You haven't actually played 4e at all and are just talking out of your arse?

Keep pretending to only be retarded.

>>51896910
>Who still plays 4e
Basically nobody.

My one complaint is the enemies' ungodly massive hitpointses. It's ok after you realize that there need to be barrels of explosives or something everywhere.

>>51927783
Was this before or after the HP fix?

Although, stage hazards are always good.

>>51907132
The entire problem with this article is that it fails to recognize that spells are a dissociated mechanic as well. Yes, there is an in-universe justification for why magic works the way it does, but it's a conceit to game design and balance. The only reason spells get a pass despite being meta-narrative is that they were originally rooted in the works of Vance. But the Vancian Magic ignores all the dangers of spells, all the interesting narrative stuff, except for the one thing which can support a resource based gamist design-the per day limit.

>>51916593
Is lack of physical energy not a good enough explanation? I thought it was always implied that sure, the fighter can end the big bad with a single earth-shattering sword swing, but he's going to be too physically strained to do it again for a while.

>>51899977
If they kept the original art from the boxes, this would be the best RPG book of the genre ever.
Still, best one for gameplay.

>>51930270
It makes an arbitrary line in the sand saying "This much abstraction of exactly this kind is fine! Everything above this is story games!"

It's the same kind of "what's REAL art" crap that shitty people make up to feel better about themselves.

>>51930423
That doesn't work when you note he can do several other very exerting things immediately afterwards with no problem.

>>51930538
Well, speaking from experience, I can do 30 pushups after 30 pull ups, but I couldn't do another 30 pull ups... Just assume the fighter has a "hits really hard" muscle that gets tired, but his "swing really fast" muscles is still cool.

>>51930550
You can do 30 pull ups? Nice.

Indeed though, different muscles are a possible explanation.

I would think that repetitive exercise is a bit different from like, actual melee combat. I can't say to what degree so really it's up in the air, but it surely can't so easy as "I worked one muscle specifically, then swapped over to another muscle."

>>51930747
Well, D&D fights are nothing like real fights; they last a lot longer for one (especially in 4e and 5e; not dissing the games, but other D&Ds have shorter combats, if for nothing else then because the wizard ends it in like 2 turns).

Maybe 1 big hit would be like... powerlifting? Not sure.

But yeah, it's a shitty in-universe explanation, but that is okay because it's just one of the factors that contributes to it being a daily power, not all of them, so it doesn't really have to explain everything.

>>51930550
What if the character is a warforged?

>>51931188

Have you seen mecha anime? Robots never spam their special attacks. It's built into their essential identity.

>>51931188
Warforged also need to rest, so they have some sort of resource they need to renew.

(they are also more like a plant-person with some magical metal/crystal/whatever parts than actual gears-and-springs constructs)

>>51931312
>anime logic

>>51931338
>Warforged also need to rest, so they have some sort of resource they need to renew.
they literally don't

>>51931418
>they literally don't

They literally do. In 4e at least, but we are discussing 4e so...

>Unsleeping Watcher: You do not sleep and instead enter a state of inactivity for 4 hours to gain the benefits of an extended rest. While in this state, you are fully aware of your surroundings and notice approaching enemies and other events as normal.

>>51930524
Except it has been repeatedly explained to you why this kind of abstraction is completely dissociated from what the character knows. THAT IS THE LINE, dumb fuck. Every game mechanic is an abstraction, the point is that they are set up so that the decisions you make in game are reconciled with the decisions that your character would make as an independent entity. You are so full-on fucking retarded, or maybe intentionally ignorant, that you cannot see why a character would not know that he has "daily" powers available, whereas a wizard would because of his awareness of his magical energy / mana.

I don't even hate 4e. I don't even mind that you have the abstraction. I'm not even asking you to say it's a flaw. I'm just asking you to understand the distinction, and why it pisses some people off, and accept that a lot of people may not consider it a good design choice, for a legitimate reason.

But instead you are throwing shit around whining about how 4e was the most balanced edition and how the AEDU system was perfection.

>>51932033
>Except it has been repeatedly explained to you why this kind of abstraction is completely dissociated from what the character knows
Which means nothing to anyone who isn't throwing an autistic fit at anything that can be construed as metagaming, you goddamn retard.

>>51932033

Except you've been repeatedly shown examples that blur the line and stuff that you're apparently okay with which crosses it, so... Why do you think you still have a point?

>>51932033
Brah, I dislike the AEDU system. I honestly believe Dailies of any sort are cancer, a remnant of a bygone era where you were supposed to go down into a cave to die with your 1 spell that you hoarded like the thief was hoarding all the gems he found before the party in his body cavities, because the old grogs were obsessed with gritty a resource management minigame. But at least I understand why they were made and am not going to go ahead and call it "bad design" because I disagree with their intended goal (that they serve pretty well).

And here you are, 20 years later, being butthurt that a game abstracts more than what you are comfortable with. Calling a design decision "bad" because it doesn't appeal to your fucking sensibilities.

You, and all the other fuckers who keep deep throating thealexandrian need to grow the fuck up.

>>51927783
This was generally only true pre-MM3, whoch admittedly had fucked up monster math, and resulted in a lot of them just being HP sponges.

Using MM3 and Monster Vault math typically fixes this. If not, one houserule my DM used on occasion was "half HP, increase their damage by 1.5x or 2x." Made fights a bit quicker on both fronts, but didn't boost enemy damage to the point where healing wasn't worth it.

>>51932033
>play 3.5 with ToB with the exact mindset you keep talking about
>WOW WHY CAN'T I USE ANY OF MY ABILITIES AGAIN UNTIL I RECOVER THEM THIS DOESN'T MAKE ANY SENSE HAHAHAHAHA BUGGED IMMERSION MECHANICS
This is why I am not willing to give you any shred of the benefit of doubt.

>>51932691
>ToB is clearly presented as mystical weaboo sword magic, where you rely on ki, preternatural focus or plain divine inspiration, which by the way quickly recovers
>Meanwhile in 4E: "Yeah this guy may be a tough warrior demi-god akin to Hercules or Cu Chulain, but he can still only murder-three-people-with-one-strike once per day because his arms get tired!

>>51932762

>The warblade was born for conflict, Swift, strong, enduring. and utterly confident in his martial skills, he seeks to test himself against worthy foes. Battle is beautiful to him - a perfect moment in which life hang s suspended on the bright edge of a sword. Sheer combat skill is important to a warblade, so he trains intensely with his chosen weapons But
even more important are his athleticism. endurance, daring, recklessness, and joy in the hour of danger. Warblades, often called sword princes, live for the chance to test themselves
in battle - the stronger the foe, the greater the glory once an enemy is defeated.

>when fighting, you rely on an ever-increasing repertoire of spectacular martial maneuvers. Depending on which disciplnes vou choose to study, you might be a mongoose-swift skirrmsher who uses speed as your sword and shield, a fierce master of blades, or a bold commander who leads your allies into battle. Your maneuvers are the signature moves that
serve to define your character

Yep, that all sounds totally mystical and completely incompatible with any other way of fluffing it. It's utterly impossible that the book was written with anything else in mind.

>>51933259

Fucking paste errors. I had to tidy enough OCR errors as it was. I really need to find a better PDF version of the ToB.

>>51933259
>Yep, that all sounds totally mystical and completely incompatible with any other way of fluffing it. It's utterly impossible that the book was written with anything else in mind.
yeah pretty much

>>51933538

I... Are you really that stupid?

Like, Crusader and Swordsage, sure. They're both designed to be pseudomagical, which is why they get access to the explicitly supernatural martial disciplines. Warblades... Don't. Everything they do can is entirely mundane, both mechanically and fluff wise. They're just people who are really good at fighting.

>>51933663
>They're just people who are really good at fighting.
Who can recover their super moves after taking a break of about 3 seconds, not 1/day, and the entire fucking chapter with the disciplines is literally called blade MAGIC, but you're just a shitposting 4rry, so you'll reply with a meme or not at all.

>>51933806

Except the disciplines they have access to... Aren't magical.

Diamond Mind is clarity and focus. Iron Heart and Stone Dragon are being tough and hitting hard, Tiger Claw is speed and aggression and White Raven is teamwork.

By the very standards the book applies, none of these are supernatural..

Of course, given that you have no ability to understand or accept reasonable abstraction, of course you can't wrap your head idea around it existing without some form of supernatural component. It's kinda sad, really.

>>51899977
Dubs and trips of truth. RC is the best version of D&D.

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>>51933880

>>51934090

Oh no, a chapter title. That... Isn't an argument.

Especially since the cap you took actually includes the exact phrase 'Many of the maneuvers of the various martial disciplines aren't magical at all'. As well as calling them mundane a couple of sentences later.

>>51934090
>first paragraph
>Many of the maneuvers of the various martial disciplines aren't magic at all
Are you illiterate or just a baiting retard?

>>51934155
>>51934224
Continue reading
>near super-human skill
>can only be used once per day
doesn't make sense

>>51934277

Why not?

>>51934277
If you're an autistic fucker who can't understand abstraction, maybe.

>>51934277
>>51934329
ToB maneuvers aren't even 1/day
Which is why I sorta prefer the system to 4e

>>51934329

Man, autism doesn't even explain it dude. I'm an aspie and I get this shit just fine. You have to be pretty far along the spectrum to find it hard to handle.

>>51934329
>abstraction
crutch of a broken system
HP are an "abstraction" and are widely recognized as one of the weakest parts off DnD

>>51934305
That's not how skill works.

>>51934355
>ToB maneuvers aren't even 1/day
That's the fucking point.
It's why ToB works on a conceptual level and 4E martials don't. It's understandable that you can't pull your supermove every six seconds, you need to bring yourself into position, but 1/day just makes no sense for martial stuff.

>>51934386

>HP are an "abstraction" and are widely recognized as one of the weakest parts off DnD

The fuck? Just another wild, baseless assertion?

>That's not how skill works.

Why not?

>>51934383
Yeah, this is some next level shit right here.

>>51934416
>Why not?
Because PCs aren't fat NEETS like you who can only physically exert themselves once per day.

>>51934386
>crutch of a broken system
Only if, again, you're a severely autistic moron who cannot grasp that not being 1:1 simulationist is not the same thing as being bad. Go play Phoenix Command and leave us the fuck alone with your dumb shit.

>>51934386

>abstraction
>crutch of a broken system

So I guess you don't use initiative order then? Since that's entirely an abstraction which makes no real, practical sense whatsoever and has very little direct correlation to in universe factors.

Or grid combat as a whole, but that was brought up earlier and dismissed out of hand without actually engaging with it.

>>51934558
>initiative and grid
While not 100% aligning with reality, they still generally follow common sense.

>daily powers
see
>>51934467
makes no sense

>>51934531
>buttmad 4rry shitposting
this is why people preferred a game by fucking paizo of all companies to 4E

>>51934638

>they still generally follow common sense.

You've never been in a melee, have you?

I mean, it's only reenactments and mock battles, but from what I've experienced D&D grid combat does not follow 'common sense' at all.

When lines break down and you're swept up in a melee it's a dangerous, chaotic mess. You're lucky if you can pay attention to everything in front of you or in your peripheral vision. Stuff behind you, ten or fifteen feet away? You wouldn't have a fucking clue.

And yet D&D grid combat ensures that you always have that utterly unrealistic degree of situational awareness. It's part of what makes the tactical combat fun and, y'know, actually possible since occluding the amount of information necessary to make it 'make sense' would make it virtually unplayable.

I guess that might be why I'm much more accepting of things that don't 'make sense' though. Having actually experienced the closest thing to the reality of it, I realise just how abstracted the entire thing is, right down to core principles.

Bump for 4e on /tg/

>>51932033
>Except it has been repeatedly explained to you why this kind of abstraction is completely dissociated from what the character knows.
Bullshit. That's only remotely true for a select number of casters, and isn't true for casters like Bards, Sorcerers and Psionicists that don't have to select specific spells for their slots. In those cases, there's an arbitrary abstraction separate from the knowledge of the character (PP, spell slots, whatever). You can just as easily argue the same for martial characters.

Hell, if it'll curb your autism, let's give it a magic name! Mana, nah let's change it. Mina... maybe with another syllable.

How about Sta... mina? Stamina? Is that a thing?

>Hey look, a 4E thread.
>Maybe it'll be cool.
>HURR FIGHTERS HAVING DAILY ATTACKS RUINS IMAGINATION
>I APPARENTLY WILL NEVER BRING UP THE DAILY LIMITS OF BARBARIAN RAGE FROM EARLIER EDITIONS BECAUSE I'M A DELUSIONAL HYPOCRITE
This is the America Donald Trump has given us.

>>51940057
To be fair, autism and/or brain damage have been a thing long before trump.

>>51920216
>10-foot cliff
That's two squares they don't even take fall damage.

>>51939933
That's not true, you can only spend a spell slot to cast a spell of equal level. The only true caster class that can split higher level spell slots to make more lower level slots, or combine lower level slots to make higher level slots is 5e sorcerers using their sorcerer points as a go-between

>>51941092
>That's not true, you can only spend a spell slot to cast a spell of equal level.
Incorrect, as you can cast any spell of lower level with a higher DC as well. Or utilize metamagics. There are plenty of options.

>>51940107

I dunno. I saw the time Donald Trump had a special needs guys shaved on national television for his amusement while the special needs guy cried.

Man, all the stuff Trump did with professional wresting got a lot funnier now that you can go 'Right, that guy is president'.

>>51941391
Yes, you can cast a lower level spell using a higher level slot

But you can't, for example, cast two level 3 spells using one level 6 slot, or use two level 3 slots to cast one level 6 spell. Unless you're transferring level 3 slots into level 6 slots or vice versa using sorcerer points on a 5e sorcerer

>>51941531
>But you can't, for example, cast two level 3 spells using one level 6 slot, or use two level 3 slots to cast one level 6 spell.
No shit. What is the point of this digression? The rules for spell slots were arbitrarily designed. The rules for martials are arbitrarily designed. They both exist in an arbitrary fantasy world.

>>51941633
Exactly my point

Spell slots are an arbitration, they don't work anything like "stamina". They're inflexible and mostly nonsensical, but they work from a mechanical standpoint

>>51896910
>objectively best edition

Objectively speaking, from a purely practical perspective, 5E is the "best" edition so far.

>>51941668
>They're inflexible and mostly nonsensical, but they work from a mechanical standpoint
Just like Martial exploits.

Maybe you finally get it.

>>51942074
What the fuck are you on about?

Do you think I'm the idiot who was complaining about 4e martial powers not making sense or something?

>>51900368
>mother may I

It's called rolling, you little shit. The fact you're complaining about having to see if you succeed at an action rather than just activating some simple, derivative ability thrown into your class already speaks volumes about why you like 4E, and it's because you like the feeling of having "options", even though you had just as many, if not thrice as much options in 3.5, it's just that they weren't all organized and arbitrarily told you. But when push comes to shove in 4E anyway, none of those "powers" (or """""""""options"""""""") really add up to much because they're all generic bonuses and penalties, rarely any of which actually do anything unique unless you're playing a spellcaster, and even then they're exactly the same as other abilities just given a fancy little title to make them seem different. Hell, even the FEATS in 4E are a fucking joke, and hardly different from the powers.

The only reason people like 4E is because it gave every class special "powers". Powers which gave you the illusion of doing something when you were really just adding pluses and minuses, and maybe doing something that you could've done in 3.5 anyway, you just had to actually think of doing it (like knocking someone fucking prone, are you kidding me?)

>>51900612
>M-M-M-MUH POLYMORPH

So fucking glad that spell got fixed in 3.5 from 3.0

>>51912085
Haha yea, bullshit.

Every single person who's played before 3rd called it a fucking miniature game.

>>51896910
I will not lie.

I kind of want to play some 4E.

>>51942624
Do you have brain damage, or do you just really like Half-Dragons? They're in 3.5 too ya know.

>>51942624
It's not for everyone, but it is definitely worth a shot for everyone.

I for one find it a bit heartbreaking, there's several classes I just can't play in D&D outside of 4e because they're so disappointing compared to their 4e counterparts. Like rogues, or fighters, or sorcerers, or warlocks. And some classes in 4e that I know are good and well-designed, but clash with what I expect of the class so much that I can't enjoy it, like monks and rangers

>>51943121
What did you expect from Monks and Rangers?

Monks seem to be well loved, since they just took Jackie Chan and went crazy with it.

Rangers are top tier Operators, doing crazy amounts of damage.

>>51930550
Only 30 pushups?

>100 pushups, 100 squats
Get on my level, peasant.

>>51943290
Basically, what I expected from monks I got in rangers, an unending flurry of strikes that can burst down a single target super fast. Alternatively, something closer to a Street Fighter character. And for Rangers, I expected a degree of primal power, like the Seeker except less terrible

>>51943357
>Alternatively, something closer to a Street Fighter character.

That'd be extremely hard to do in a single class, considering the width of concepts "street fighter character" covers. The only common ground is that they are (mostly) unarmed.

>>51942577
Only namefags deal in absolutes.

>>51942527
It doesn't matter whether you think of doing something or not when one game has workable mechanics for doing something and the other doesn't. 3E's combat maneuver rules are utter shit and are built to punish anyone who uses them without devoting tons of feats towards them, then the entire rest of the game is built to punish you for doing just that by making sure that most enemies have size bonuses over you and commonplace immunities both soft and hard. Fuck that, and fuck you for pretending that they're even remotely equivalent.