You’d be surprised. There’s more than one way to pull off a maneuver. Since disarming is the example of the moment, consider this:
One of the styles I’ve studied is a stick-fighting style that heavily emphasizes weapon stripping techniques. Part of each test was demonstrating X number of different techniques for disarming/weapon stripping an opponent using each of six “basic” attacks. When I was in practice, I could demonstrate several dozen ways to disarm someone, depending on what kind of weapon they had and what they were doing with it.
One of our drills was a man-in-the-middle exercise; one unarmed student took a position in the center of the boxing ring, with four (or more) armed attackers positioned around the edge. The unarmed student’s task was to defend themselves against the others. The approved way of doing this, which allowed you to end the exercise early, was to disarm all of your opponents in such a way that the only weapons left in the ring were the ones you kept for yourself. It happened more often than you’d think–I even pulled it off myself, a couple of times. That’s a minimum of 16 disarms in a single fight, lasting less than 3 minutes, against opponents who know your style and are expecting disarm techniques.
3.5/Pathfinder will let you try that, especially if you build for it by taking feats like Improved Disarm and Spring Attack, pumping up skills like tumbling/acrobatics, and choosing weapons that are suited to the style. It’s not optimal, but you can build a character who specializes in bouncing around the combat, disarming people. The mechanics for it are there. 4E–at least as far as I know–can’t accommodate that kind of playstyle.
Similar to Balance’s story, in one game, my high level monk was mistaken for a murderer, and attacked by several (low level) guards. My character was Lawful Good, and didn’t want to hurt them, so he just started doing Sunder attacks against their swords with his bare hands. I described him wading into the mass of guards, delivering short, sharp taps to their weapons with his extended index and middle finger, and the swords exploding into shards. In two rounds, he had completely disarmed them, and sent them running, without dealing a single hp in damage.
It was an awesome scene, and impossible to do in 4th edition.
It’s the whole simulationist/narrativist thing. D&D, I think, tries to have narrativist mechanics in many ways–when its players want a simulation instead.
Personally, I want a game that lets me tell a good story through simulation, in which my character is awesome. (Thereby hitting all three–simulation, narration, gamism.) Tall order, though.
By “impossible” do you mean there’s no power like this, or do you mean that it’d be impossible to even design such a power within the 4e framework?
The former may or may not be true, but doesn’t seem like a very serious criticism. The latter would be a more serious criticism–but doesn’t seem true. What prevents such a power from existing? (BTW how do you make a sword explode without dealing damage to its wielder and those around him?)
This is not true at all. It’s “We’re working on a fantasy plot. Good fantasy plots have certain constraints. Now tell the story!”
I don’t understand the complaints about doing the same thing over and over again. In 4e combat, you must think tactically, planning ahead, getting a good position, timing the use of your powers, etc. If you’re playing in games where you don’t have to do that, you’re playing poorly designed encounters. That’s the fault of the designer of the encounter, not the designer of the game.
Heh, wouldn’t you know, that’s exactly the kind of scene I had in my mind when trying to conjure up a situation where chain-disarm would not only be mechanically possible, but story-driven. That one opening scene in every chambarra movie ever - the wizened old master hobbling along the road with his cane, beard down to here ; the huge group of brigands springing him as he’s crossing a scenic bridge:
Heh heh heh. It’s not your lucky day, old man. Your money or your life !
Begone. I don’t want to hurt you.
HA ! Can you believe this guy ? He don’t want to hurt us ! Joey, can you believe this guy or what ? Anyway. Boys ! Get him ! PAFCRASHSLAMCRUNCHTWAINAINAING
Going all the way back to Chainmail, D&D has historically been a simulationist system with just enough slop to squeeze in a bit of narrative. The result was a complex (and sometimes contradictory) set of rules that was vulnerable to a wide variety of gamist exploits. Of course, exploiting exploits doesn’t particularly interest narrativists and simulationists since they tend to reject abashed lines of play as unrealistic or dramatically unsatisfying. The fact that a rule set may *allow *game-breaking moves is immaterial if a player never makes them.
4th Edition was an attempt to “fix” D&D from a gamist perspective by tightening and balancing it. But reality is inherently unbalanced and narrative is inherently chaotic, so the net result of the 4th Edition “fix” was a system that not longer did a good job of supporting non-gamist agendas.
I doubt that 5th Edition will correct this problem. The fact that they’ve essentially thrown their hands up in the air and cried “Please, just tell us what you want!” is not a good sign. It suggests that they’ve worked themselves into a design box that they can’t see a way out of.
I have a hard time viewing any edition of D&D as being particularly narrativist, and 4th edition seems to be moving even further away from that. I mean, not being able to make a disarm attack every round is neither simulationist (there’s no real-world reason why a fighter couldn’t try a disarm every round) nor narrativist (in that it removes the ability for a player to tell a story in his own way, by hedging him in with artificial limitations). I think CandidGamera hit the nail on the head when he described it as “gamist.”
I mean that, in the standard rule set, there’s no provision for doing something like that. You could come up with a hack of some sort, but you’d need a sympathetic and at least moderately talented GM to apply it on the fly. In 3.5, I was able to do that using class features and feats taken directly out of the PHB.
I was using the basic Sunder maneuver, which doesn’t deal damage to the weapon’s wielder. The idea of shattering their weapons using just my first two fingers was color I came up with on the spot to make the scene cooler.
I’m not really seeing the difference between what I said and what you said. If you prefer your formulation, I’m fine with that, but it doesn’t resolve the essential flaw in the approach.
Yeah, I know. I’ve been doing that for over ten years in 3.x. I’m not complaining about the maneuvering system, which is largely unchanged. I’m talking about the attack mechanics. When I swing a sword in 3.5, the very genericness of the attack stat allows me more freedom for imagination. When I swing a sword in 4th ed, I feel constrained by the fluff associated with the power. It gives the feeling of a more limited game, even if, on paper, you technically have more options.
Kobal2: “Rule Number One” was that monk’s defining character concept.
I read the transcript of the live chat with Monte Cook and Mike Mearls. I didn’t see anything that I thought was terribly interesting – just a lot of “you’ll be able to do anything in the next version of D&D!”
It’s easy to do in 4th, for what it’s worth. A mob of guards would probably be statted as minions (or a swarm, maybe). The monk would would bop around with his high mobility attacks, dropping a couple guards a round while they’re powerless to stop his progress. Since in 4th you’re explicitly allowed to make nonlethal attacks without taking any sort of penalty, you just describe all of the hits as smashing weapons, twisting arms, shoving helmets over eyes, and any other non-lethal subdual methods you feel like doing. In other words, you get to roleplay the results as whatever you want without the rules telling you that you’re wrong.
This is true, but not relevant. Miller’s complaint was that he kept doing the same two things. I’m listing off the options; even if one of them is strictly inferior to the others, there are still four options in every round, a fifth available once in each combat, and a sixth available once per “day”. The point is that there are more than two choices; I know that you know this.
That’s what I get for replying before getting to the end of the thread…
Again, I’m surprised that you had this kind of experience. My own experience was that having two at-will attacks plus an encounter plus a daily was a fairly large menu of options, particularly in comparison with first-level fighters in previous editions, where my options were:
Attack with longsword
Clearly, 4E was not something you enjoyed, for reasons you’ve stated. I have found it to work well for me and my players - we’ve sustained a 4E campaign for longer than any previous game.
With 4E’s emphasis on optimization, I honestly can’t call those at-will powers meaningful options in that system. “Let’s see.. I can do more damage.. or I can do less damage. Let me think about it..”
And if we want to catalog options in that manner, 3E’s got Sunder, Disarm, and Trip for all characters, technically. They’re just not useful for most folks without the feats to make them better.
Attack with longsword. Attack with longsword and dagger. Attack with bow. Throw dagger. Throw flask with oil. Throw flask with acid. Attack with dog. Thrust torch. Bull Rush. Charge. Grapple. Run away. Taunt and hold action. Hold action with dagger, preparatory to the old Manual Counterspell.
(Thank god Pathfinder fixed Grapple.)
That’s without any using terrain, all reasonable actions at first level. I dunno what game you’re playing, but you could stand to have a lot more fun doing it. Get dangerous!
I think you’re really getting hung up on cataloging the number of combat options available, when that’s really not my point at all. When I first brought the subject up, I specifically said that 4th edition gives you more options. My problem was that it doesn’t feel like more options. It feels repetitive, even though mechanically, it is less repetitive. Which is a counter-intuitive reaction, and my original post here was an attempt to explore that reaction and figure out why I felt that, when it doesn’t seem to match up to what’s happening on paper. Telling me (again) what’s happening on paper doesn’t change that, because it’s not new information. The apparent superiority in combat options in 4th edition is baked into my reaction to the system. It’s the launching point for everything I’m saying here.
Again, I never said I didn’t like 4th edition. As I said in my first post on the subject:
So, I haven’t actually given any reasons for disliking the game, because I like it fine. It doesn’t really scratch my D&D itch, but I play a lot of games that aren’t D&D. I’d be more than happy to play more 4th edition. It’s a good game.
Some interesting news on races and classes: Apparently, both will give stat bonuses, making the Orc Bard a less-suboptimal choice, for example.
On classes and themes: the current intent seems to be to use themes to specialize classes, rather than the kind of class proliferation we saw in 4E. This seems to me to hint at a move away from at-will/encounter/daily powers, unless they’re going to extend modularity inside those (e.g., swapping out the power source).
And on skills: the current plan seems to be to make them stat-based, with the skill being a plus on top of the stat value. It’s not clear if the intent is to use the full value of the stat or the “+1 per 2 points over 10” approach.
And there’s a nice idea of moving towards eliminating rolls for simple stuff - you have STR 17, you bash down the door, no need to roll. I may adopt that for my current game - give a stat or skill value that gives automatic success.
