We had a chance to do some actual RPing in the town of Winterhaven. I started up a riddling contest the local inn that escalated nicely. Of course, this being 4e, everything was resolved with dice rolls, but the dice were on my side--the rolls went against me at first, thus bringing in more rubes, then I started rolling hot and raking in the cash, finally defeating the lord of the town and earning his goodwill, which in turn led to a contract to go root out some pesky kobolds.
During the subsequent encounter with a group of kobold bandits, I was standing by, ready with a couple hundred "yo mamma" insults culled from the Internet, the better to zazz up my Vicious Mockery. Alas, I only got the chance to get off one zinger ("Yo mama so fat, when she tried to join an eating contest they said, 'Sorry, no professionals.'") before we started getting our asses handed to us.
Things turned around when the party mage cast Sleep and took out most of the kobolds. And here's where things turned south for me again. I was in a position to start finishing off the slumbering kobolds while the rest of the party took care of the remainder, so I looked up the Coup-de-Grace rules.
"OK, I get to use any attack power. If I roll a successful hit, it's automatically a critical. If I do damage equal to the creature's Bloodied score, the creature is killed outright."
(First, what happened to auto-killing a Sleeping monster? That's a staple of low-level D&D tactics! This would be a prime example of what people mean when they say, "Tis a fine game, but sure tis no D&D, English.")
Looking at my available attack powers (including my scimitar, which I have yet to actually use in combat), I see that Misdirected Mark gives me the best damage total potential. But...how the hell, exactly, am I using this power to kill sleeping kobolds? The "fluff" part of the power description says I use my "arcane powers" to fool my enemy into thinking that an attack was coming from somewhere else. (How does that even do damage in the first place? The abstracted nature of 4e's damage system makes earlier editions look like simulationist exercises worthy of Phoenix Command.)
We decided (with much chuckling and laughter) that I was whispering in the kobold's ears, turning their dreams into terrifying nightmares, Freddie Krueger-style. A fine solution, I suppose, but one that, again, left me with a weird taste in my mouth. I wasn't the only one: Alex, the DM, even said at one point, "Fourth edition is turning my D&D worldview upside-down!"
In the end, we all agreed that, whatever the weirdnesses, 4e seems to guarantee epic and exciting combats, and you really can't fault that it does what it set out to do, and it does it well.
I think the coup rule is there to give PCs and monsters a chance while being incapacitated in combat. If you want to auto-kill sleepers go ahead, just don't complain when it happens to your character :)
ReplyDeleteHalf the fun of 4e is coming up with applications and flavor for the powers as you're using them. I like the idea that you Kreuger'd the kobolds to death. I barely read the flavor text of powers – I roleplay more based on the situation and the effect in question, and it's always more fun that way.
ReplyDeleteTom: Yeah, I definitely hear you on that. Although I have to say that I think it's kind of a bum trip if one has a DM who goes around killing off characters just because they get knocked out! ;)
ReplyDeleteWyatt: I'm starting to cotton on to that approach. I think what's tripping me up is in fact the flavor text of the powers. I think the rules would've been better served by just having mechanical descriptions and an explicit proviso that it's up to the players to explain how things happen. That's definitely how I'll approach things from now on.
To be honest, I have no idea why that approach wasn't taken, because it's seriously what I always feel, from reading the rules themselves, and from reading some of the dev blogs and such. When I read a 4e power I think "this power could be me pretty much doing anything that can warrant this effect."
ReplyDeleteThe flavor text is pretty useless most of the time. When I write my own powers, I tend not to think about it too much, because it's a) a pain to write when you, personally, don't care about the flavor text of YOUR OWN POWER and know people will do whatever they feel like; and b) because deep down, you WANT to encourage people to do whatever they feel like.
My theory is that it's there because some people would whine and moan if there was no flavor text whatsoever. But I think the effect of the power coupled with your own imagination is the best flavor text there is...nothing wootsie could write can beat that.
While I agree that the "disconnected mechanics" arguement can be true for 4e I'm always a bit baffled by how far people need to take it to prove it's "not DnD" (which is meaning less to me but apparently is supposed to be some sort of powerful rebuttal of the value of the system).
ReplyDeleteMisdirected Mark -> you hurt somebody with your magic, but the effect is such that it seems that the attack came from one of your companions...
The power makes such obvious sense that I'm not sure what the problem is...
Is it that you want the flavor text to spell out exactly how the power works, in precise detail?
(the blog is generally very good and well thought out, btw, so the fixation on minor details as "proving it's not DnD" confuses me.
I can't speak for other people, who might very well be using it as an attack, but when I say that 4e "doesn't feel like D&D" it's in comparison to how previous edition shifts "felt". When third edition came out, for example, it was a fairly radical shift in terms of mechanics, but it still managed to retain the core D&D experience. As I think I've mentioned, I think 4e is a fine system, but it seems to just...lack something of that core. Not sure how best to articulate it. At any rate, I'm not really trying prove anything; I'm not interested in edition wars. These are just my impressions having finally played the new edition.
ReplyDelete"Is it that you want the flavor text to spell out exactly how the power works, in precise detail?"
Well, yeah, frankly. Either that or ditch flavor text entirely. I guess this gets back again to earlier editions. In earlier iterations of D&D, things were fairly narrowly defined: you cast a fireball by pointing your finger and causing a stream of flame to jet out and detonate at a certain point.
With 4e, the flavor text is much more vague. And, as in this case, there's no explicit explanation of how the damage is caused. You say that the power represents me hurting someone with my magic, but then I say, "What magic?" Is it a spell or...what? I guess I'm just in a mindset of older editions, where cause X always has effect Y, and cause X is explicitly spelled out.
If flavor text had been absent from the power descriptions, I probably would have shifted gears more easily, but the presence of flavor text kind of muddled things for me. At this point, I've come around to accepting that powers are there to define on an ad-hoc, as-needed basis and that's fine by me.