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## 4e is out of ideas

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rasmuswagner
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Post by rasmuswagner » Wed Dec 07, 2011 7:15 am

> Swordslinger wrote: Not really. Charmed and dominated can just be status conditions and those spells give you that status condition. Figments can largely be defined by keyword and the actual spell text can just be "creates a single figment of large size with visual components only."

4E powers can be plugged into a computer game, no problem. Some rituals get a bit wonky, as do "Cantrip" and other flavor abilities. Just have them be auto-successes or ways to use weird skills in skill challenges.
Charm Person fails that test. Charmed is not Dominated.
Last edited by rasmuswagner on Wed Dec 07, 2011 7:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Vebyast
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Post by Vebyast » Wed Dec 07, 2011 8:03 am

On the difficulty of writing a 3.x game, I'm not just talking about spell effects, and I'm not talking about how hard it would be to create an AI to use those spell effects. I'm talking about how many programmer-hours you would expect to spend on adding a character feature to the game. That might be a new spell, it might be a new feat, or a new class feature.
4e character features are almost univerally numerical bonuses or new powers; those powers draw from a limited set of effects which are standardized and part of the core programming. Adding a new class to the game is very easy; once you've implemented the fighter and the wizard, implementing the rogue, the barbarian, or the bard is trivial because all of the code you need has already been written. Special mention does have to be made of a few of the flavor features, but those are few and far between and have direct equivalents in 3.x.
3e character features generally require nontrivial modifications to the algorithm that controls the evolution of the game's state. For example, Power Attack lets you trade a variable amount of one number for an equal amount of another. It is nearly the only feature in the game that does so. Adding power attack to a DND program requires writing actual executable code that links those two variables, imposes the constraint, and adds an option to the user interface to control that effect for every melee attack that character executes. And power attack is a simple example; most of 3.5's options are far, far more complex and unique, especially once you get into prestige classes.
Measured by required-programmer-hours, DND3.x is one of the most complex games devised by mankind, even before you get into effects that require magical tea party treatment (the block-of-gold bomb example). DND4e doesn't even compare.
Last edited by Vebyast on Wed Dec 07, 2011 8:16 am, edited 5 times in total.

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OgreBattle
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Post by OgreBattle » Thu Dec 08, 2011 3:06 am

> Measured by required-programmer-hours, DND3.x is one of the most complex games devised by mankind, even before you get into effects that require magical tea party treatment (the block-of-gold bomb example). DND4e doesn't even compare.

3.X:
4e:
I agree.
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Swordslinger
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Post by Swordslinger » Thu Dec 08, 2011 8:52 am

> rasmuswagner wrote: 4E powers can be plugged into a computer game, no problem. Some rituals get a bit wonky, as do "Cantrip" and other flavor abilities. Just have them be auto-successes or ways to use weird skills in skill challenges.
> Charm Person fails that test. Charmed is not Dominated.

Well the thing with charm is that you'd have to define "friendly" in terms of your computer game.
Gold box AD&D games just treated charm as being "Target NPC fights for you, but you can't actively control him."
It's possible to script that. Obviously you won't get all the non-combat uses, but if this is a computer game, so you're not going to get that kind of in-depth NPC interaction regardless of what system you use. You have to expect that some things are going to be lost in translation when you write a computer game, and complex NPC interaction is inevitably one of them.
I don't feel the combat mini-game loses all that much though. Most of the 3E effects are easy enough to program in.
You lose... figments and polymorph (you could still do this one the PHB2 way, just not the bullshit turn into anything way).
The rest is really not hard to translate.
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hogarth
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Post by hogarth » Thu Dec 08, 2011 2:22 pm

> Swordslinger wrote: You lose... figments and polymorph (you could still do this one the PHB2 way, just not the bullshit turn into anything way).
> The rest is really not hard to translate.

If you don't use spells in creative ways or outside of combat, that might be true. But there are also spells like Wall of Stone/Stone Shape/Move Earth/Fabricate (which you can use to make a variety of shapes) or Summon Monster/Planar Binding/Planar Ally (you can tell monsters to scout for you, or to use particular spell-like abilities, or to make skill checks on your behalf, etc.) or even Unseen Servant/Floating Disk.
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Maxus
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Post by Maxus » Thu Dec 08, 2011 5:21 pm

Reduce Person + Unseen Servant + Halfling or Gnome Wizard = Free 'flight'. Add some flour and you certainly have a good impression of a ghost.
He jumps like a damned dragoon, and charges into battle fighting rather insane monsters with little more than his bare hands and rather nasty spell effects conjured up solely through knowledge and the local plantlife. He unerringly knows where his goal lies, he breathes underwater and is untroubled by space travel, seems to have no limits to his actual endurance and favors killing his enemies by driving both boots square into their skull. His agility is unmatched, and his strength legendary, able to fling about a turtle shell big enough to contain a man with enough force to barrel down a near endless path of unfortunates.
--The horror of Mario
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virgil
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Post by virgil » Thu Dec 08, 2011 5:27 pm

> Maxus wrote:Reduce Person + Unseen Servant + Halfling or Gnome Wizard = Free 'flight'. Add some flour and you certainly have a good impression of a ghost.

My old DM hated that trick.
My personal favorite was using dancing lights for making monsters think a will-o-wisp was around (terrifying monsters), or even using the spell for long range communication like you would semaphore. I've used silent image for the same trick for longer range messages (ball of light for the full volume at max distance can be seen some distance).
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Maxus
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Post by Maxus » Thu Dec 08, 2011 5:41 pm

It just occurred to me that a level 1-3 wizard with some illusion, transmutation, and Unseen Servant and all makes for a good Scooby-Doo villain...
Last edited by Maxus on Thu Dec 08, 2011 5:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.
He jumps like a damned dragoon, and charges into battle fighting rather insane monsters with little more than his bare hands and rather nasty spell effects conjured up solely through knowledge and the local plantlife. He unerringly knows where his goal lies, he breathes underwater and is untroubled by space travel, seems to have no limits to his actual endurance and favors killing his enemies by driving both boots square into their skull. His agility is unmatched, and his strength legendary, able to fling about a turtle shell big enough to contain a man with enough force to barrel down a near endless path of unfortunates.
--The horror of Mario
Zak S, Zak Smith, Dndwithpornstars, Zak Sabbath. He is a terrible person and a hack at writing and art. His cultural contributions are less than Justin Bieber's, and he's a shitmuffin. Go go gadget Googlebomb!
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ModelCitizen
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Post by ModelCitizen » Thu Dec 08, 2011 9:48 pm

> Swordslinger wrote: I don't feel the combat mini-game loses all that much though. Most of the 3E effects are easy enough to program in.
> You lose... figments and polymorph (you could still do this one the PHB2 way, just not the bullshit turn into anything way).
> The rest is really not hard to translate.

Some things from Neverwinter Nights:
-Bursts are weird in real time because of the time delay between casting and the effect going off. Either enemies move out of the area, or friendlies move into them, or if the effect is centered on a creature it moves up to you.
-Summon Monster doesn't work in real time either. The player loses 1-2 "rounds" selecting the creature and moving it to the target. (NWN solved this by making summons into effectively permanent party members. There were a couple modder attempts to make Summon Monster work like in tabletop and at level 1-2 the summons would despawn as fast as they faded in.)
-Power Attack would work fine mechanically but it's too hard to reflect in the UI. At level 20 you'd need 20 different buttons. Really any power with more than 4-5 subchoices requires too many buttons to be worth it.
-Dimension Door could work but it puts a lot of burden on the level designers, who would have to account for players teleporting past script triggers on the floor.
-Flanking is too fiddly for a real-time game. Players can't control their position well enough to set it up. (NWN just dropped it and let rogues sneak attack anything that was targeting another creature.)
-Flat-footed and surprise rounds don't work, because they don't work in tabletop either and a computer can't handwave. You could make them work with a Final Fantasy battle screen though.
-E: Probably the biggest difference - A fight that would take two hours in tabletop is over in a couple minutes, which means players need to fight a lot more things per adventure. That breaks XP and daily spell slots. (NWN set XP gain to about 10% of 3.0 and made it really easy to rest in dungeons. The latter wasn't particularly elegant and fanboys cried about it.)
-More encounters per time also means low-probability instant death is a much bigger deal. In tabletop, if you make your save vs basilisks on a 2, you probably won't sweat going on an adventure to kill a basilisk. In a videogame it's a cave with like 15 basilisks and you're going to fail that save eventually. (I had to turn off monster crits in NWN because some asshole decided orcs look cool with scythes.)
Last edited by ModelCitizen on Thu Dec 08, 2011 10:04 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Avoraciopoctules
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Post by Avoraciopoctules » Thu Dec 08, 2011 10:48 pm

NWN spoiled a lot of tabletop 3.x combats for me. After playing through a bunch of modules with reasonably complex, fast-paced encounters, the scenarios a lot of MCs threw at me felt painfully slow. My main method for getting around that when I MCed generally involved sliding most of the mechanics into Magical Teaparty and putting the PCs in charge of a larger warband.
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souran
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Post by souran » Fri Dec 09, 2011 5:48 am

I know people around here don't like to hear it but the real advantage 4E has in combat is that the "padded sumo" model is much better for tabletop than rocket launcher assuming you want a "tactical" rpg.
people on this board hate the numerous powers with push/pull/slide 1-2 squares.
They also act like sleep doublecast is as powerful in 4E as it is/would be in 3E.
The simple fact of the matter is that its not even close to the same.
The 4E powers when used in play are a lot more like magic cards than 3E powers.
A 1 square push pull or slide can effectively end a monsters turn, set up another players ability to do signifcantly more damage with one of their powers or corral monsters into aoe effects.
These things are just not really as possible in 3E D&D, there is not as much reason to constantly take 5 foot steps unless your a caster.
4E at my table (and at every table I have ever seen) plays more like fire emblem or shinning force during combat.
3E plays like final fantasy. You really don't need the gameboard, positioning is just not as important. Its more important than 2E but still way less than 4E.
Could you script shinning force? Yes you could, heck thats how the bad guys fight. But that doesn't mean that its not challenging or interesting.
Some people really don't like their rpgs to spend that much time on the minutia of combat. Seriously every comment i have ever seen frank make about 4E seems to come from a perspective that he doesn't want to as much time on combat as 4E wants to because it doesn't hold his attention.
If 4E combats were always against a single monster then sure you could script 4E characters to fight them. However, becasue shit moves around, because there are actually conditions that change the order of use of abilities, and the utility abilties in general defy the supposed "scripting" of 4E characters just has the flexibile nature of 3E spells makes them difficult.
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Vebyast
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Post by Vebyast » Fri Dec 09, 2011 6:53 am

> souran wrote:However, becasue shit moves around, because there are actually conditions that change the order of use of abilities, and the utility abilties in general defy the supposed "scripting" of 4E characters just has the flexibile nature of 3E spells makes them difficult.

False. 4e is, at its heart, a simple probabilistic adversarial game. The game's branching factor is big, but still comparable to that of Chess, even when you include things like sliding. Remember, "slide 1" is just a king move. Even better, the game provides some very effective heuristics for action selection (for example, use high-level powers first). Turn reordering doesn't cost anything, because it's just a different branch in the game tree.
In other words, once you have a basic 4e game engine, tacking on an effective AI is straightforward. Getting a working system would take about as many programmer-hours as implementing a really big 3.5e prestige class.
I'm not going to dispute padded sumo vs. rocket launcher tag. All I'm going to say is that 4e is much, much more uniform than 3.5 and that its game tree is orders of magnitude smaller. On top of the entire engine being easier to implement.

> souran wrote:Could you script shinning force? Yes you could, heck thats how the bad guys fight. But that doesn't mean that its not challenging or interesting.

That's true. However, games like FE and FFTA have an inherent advantage in being computerized: the ratio of interesting stuff to bookkeeping is much, much higher. If you ran them by hand, they'd be unplayable. 4e was designed for the tabletop, so it's still playable, but it's not great. 3.5e wins by having huge interestingness with only a moderate amount of bookkeeping.
Of course, this ties back into one of the original complaints about 4e: it plays like a video game because it is a video game. If they'd made a solid 4e engine with a good UI and hooked it up to something like Google Hangouts, they'd have made a killing. But they didn't, and without that it sucks, as would any video game run by hand.
Last edited by Vebyast on Fri Dec 09, 2011 9:46 am, edited 6 times in total.

> DSMatticus wrote:There are two things you can learn from the Gaming Den:
> 1) Good design practices.
> 2) How to be a zookeeper for hyper-intelligent shit-flinging apes.

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hogarth
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Post by hogarth » Fri Dec 09, 2011 12:38 pm

> souran wrote:A 1 square push pull or slide can effectively end a monsters turn, set up another players ability to do signifcantly more damage with one of their powers or corral monsters into aoe effects.

That's generally the idea, but (a) I've had shifting/sliding/pulling/pushing make a difference maybe 1% of the time (maybe because my DM is stingy with unusual terrain features) and (b) even if shifting/sliding/pulling/pushing is interesting, it's much less interesting if you repeat minor variations of the same power a hundred times on a dozen different power lists.
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Josh_Kablack
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Post by Josh_Kablack » Sat Dec 10, 2011 10:50 pm

Push/Pull/Slide 1 is usually so minor as to be nearly meaningless when a character can use 1/3 of their action to "shift 1" and undo it. Note that I said "nearly meaningless", there are situations where difficult terrain or hazardous features on the map or even just-right initiative ordering will make it matter - but those situations are few and very far between. A push/pull/slide of greater than target's reach at least means that a character might risk an OA regaining their prior position. But to really matter, forced movement needs to exceed a combatant's speed - if you push/pull/slide an enemy at least Move+1 squares, then their counterattack is limited to ranged attacks or charging - which is a meaningful enough restriction that it matters often. Likewise, combining any Push/Pull/Slide effect with Dazed or Prone conditions can frequently restrict the victims' counterattack options meaningfully.
The problem with 4e is that there are like a bajillion powers where is seems that side order of push/pull/slide 1 is not handed out as the rarely-useful freebie it should be, but is instead somehow supposed to be enough compensate for doing a [w] less or something meaningful. Then 4e has only a handful of powers where the forced movement is either enough to be commonly useful and/or combined with a status that makes small amounts of forced movement useful.
See also: Marked status not-quite being enough to care about since defenses between targets within charge range usually vary by more than 2.
Last edited by Josh_Kablack on Sat Dec 10, 2011 10:55 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Avoraciopoctules
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Post by Avoraciopoctules » Sun Dec 11, 2011 1:16 am

Sliding someone a single square may be more valuable if someone else creates squares of damaging terrain with their powers. I don't play 4e, but I hear Murder Pinball is a very effective tactic.
Last edited by Avoraciopoctules on Sun Dec 11, 2011 1:20 am, edited 1 time in total.
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ishy
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Post by ishy » Sun Dec 11, 2011 1:32 am

If you pick up a feat or something to make it a slide 2 you can at least also slide them up so they take falling dmg and fall prone.
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Koumei
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Post by Koumei » Sun Dec 11, 2011 3:21 am

Does 4E distinguish between the Forced Movement of mesmerism drawing someone towards you and the Forced Movement of a TK shove? I mean, one of them should have limitations (you can make someone want to walk 10' in the air as much as you damn well like, it isn't happening though) and the other... should just flat-out move them.
Or is it still just one category, and thus subject to the MC going "Nah, I don't think you can make them move there"?

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Josh_Kablack
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Post by Josh_Kablack » Sun Dec 11, 2011 3:37 am

> Koumei wrote:Does 4E distinguish between the Forced Movement of mesmerism drawing someone towards you and the Forced Movement of a TK shove?

No.
Forced movement is forced movement - see 4e PHB 285-286. Whether it is a push, a pull or a slide it does not provoke, and it cannot be used to move targets into squares they couldn't enter by walking. {insert smartass quip about 4e not acknowledging this newfangled third dimension and Edwin Abbot reference here } It's applied universally, and the gain in simplicity is worth the loss of distinctions in cases like your example.
I would happily trade any melee attack with an added effect of push 1 or push 2 for the exact same power with the added affect of "you may use this power in place of a basic melee attack" substituted. Likewise, playing any 4e class save for Fighter, I'd make a similar trade to sell off "and the target is marked". Because in my opinion, being able to use a power on a charge or as an OA or due to your warlord buddy's inspiration is a bigger deal than those effects are.
Furthermore, I really wish that 4e had taken the idea behind the Domain feats in Divine Power further and actually had a few in-game mechanisms to allow players to occasionally make choices to trade off things like that when they used the at-wills their characters are going to be spamming a lot.
"But transportation issues are social-justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and badly serve low-income neighborhoods, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by black and brown communities."
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Swordslinger
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Post by Swordslinger » Sun Dec 11, 2011 12:12 pm

> Avoraciopoctules wrote:Sliding someone a single square may be more valuable if someone else creates squares of damaging terrain with their powers. I don't play 4e, but I hear Murder Pinball is a very effective tactic.

Murder Pinball is pretty effective, but not super effective, mainly because creatures get a save when being forced into damaging terrain (like a pit or wall of fire). If they make the save, they don't move into the terrain, but instead fall prone.
So half the time any attempt to slide someone into a dangerous spot just doesn't work at all.
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Post by Winnah » Sun Dec 11, 2011 12:50 pm

Murder Pinball was a convoluted 'exploit' that was nerfed out of existence when Complete Arcana was errated.
It involved a level 13 wizard power that summoned an earth elemental. An enemy that began it's turn adjacent to the elemental, took damage and was pushed or slid before it took any actions.
Combine with an action point and a method of regaining encounter powers, then place the elementals on either side of the creatures you wished to kill. The enemy is shunted into a space adjacent to the second elemental and as it is still the start of the round, the second elemental shunts the enemy back next to the first elemental. Hilarity ensues.
Not quite the same as pushing into hazardous terrain, as the creature summoned was the hazard. Otherwise, pushing someone into a Fighters stance would entitle the target to a save.
I have not checked the WotC forums lately, so I am unaware of what passes for Murder Pinball these days. By the sound of it, it is not as amusing.
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Koumei
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Post by Koumei » Sun Dec 11, 2011 1:41 pm

> Josh_Kablack wrote:and the gain in simplicity is worth the loss of distinctions in cases like your example.

I'd agree if it was "Forced movement is forced movement: it moves them, by force. Choose where they go. I don't care if it's in the air, in a zig-zag through a fire wall, or off a cliff."
As it is, there's a gain in simplicity and "Dragon-kick their ass into the milky way" can't hurl them in the air. So more simplicity, less function/usefulness of the power, and more "Can you believe this shit?"
I would literally prefer every single "Forced movement" power define its own forced movement and how it works.

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Post by Swordslinger » Sun Dec 11, 2011 3:49 pm

> ModelCitizen wrote: -E: Probably the biggest difference - A fight that would take two hours in tabletop is over in a couple minutes, which means players need to fight a lot more things per adventure. That breaks XP and daily spell slots. (NWN set XP gain to about 10% of 3.0 and made it really easy to rest in dungeons. The latter wasn't particularly elegant and fanboys cried about it.)

Yeah admittedly, anytime you do a port of a turn based game to a real-time game, you will have some issues. That has less to do with the rules set itself and more to do with designing things for real-time gaming. Everything real time gaming needs to be quick. If a command can't be issue with a a couple keystrokes + a mouse click, it's probably too complicated.
I don't really see why you couldn't do a turn based 3E game though.
Last edited by Swordslinger on Sun Dec 11, 2011 3:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Blicero » Sun Dec 11, 2011 6:30 pm

> Swordslinger wrote: I don't really see why you couldn't do a turn based 3E game though.

They did, and it was called Temple of Elemental Evil. It's really one of the few dndbased crpgs that actually maintained 3.5's class balance dynamic, but it was also a total buggy mess. Now it's been fanpatched into playability, but it still suffers from being a fairly tedious dungeoncrawl with little to recommend it beyond facestabbing.
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Josh_Kablack
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Post by Josh_Kablack » Sun Dec 11, 2011 7:11 pm

> Koumei wrote:I would literally prefer every single "Forced movement" power define its own forced movement and how it works.

Well that becomes a mess of confusing and contradictory rules the instant you let someone like Mearls or Baker write more than one singular forced movement power.
What you probably want is something more like the Champions knockback mechanic - there is a global rule ( BODY - 2d6 ) but then a bunch of standardized exceptions to account for variations (if target has ___ then ___; if attack is ___ then ____ ) and if none of the standard exceptions are capable of modeling the effect you want there are a couple unusual ways to account for moving an enemy -- instead of knockback, you can build a telekinetic grab and throw, or use Mind Control to make an enemy use their own movement or try Flight: usable as an attack or something.
But in the context of 4e "Dragon Kick their ass into the milky way" is totally off the menu and the closest you get is like "Dragon Kick them almost half as far as a mediocre rugby punt - and be happy your game isn't using the errata which nerfed it to 2 squares" And in that case, the silliness involving the third dimension really isn't that big a deal in actual play. 4e is a beer and pretzels and stabbing your thumbs with the pins the status markers go on dungeoncrawl game.
Last edited by Josh_Kablack on Sun Dec 11, 2011 7:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.
"But transportation issues are social-justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and badly serve low-income neighborhoods, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by black and brown communities."
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Post by Krakatoa » Mon Dec 12, 2011 4:00 am

> Push/Pull/Slide 1 is usually so minor as to be nearly meaningless when a character can use 1/3 of their action to "shift 1" and undo it. Note that I said "nearly meaningless", there are situations where difficult terrain or hazardous features on the map or even just-right initiative ordering will make it matter - but those situations are few and very far between. A push/pull/slide of greater than target's reach at least means that a character might risk an OA regaining their prior position. But to really matter, forced movement needs to exceed a combatant's speed

Except none of that is actually true. I mean, call it boring if you wish, but in 4E that sort of thing does have an effect on the combat. You can Push 1 someone off an edge into an abyss or slide someone into a square that gives another team member flanking, which gives characters combat advantage. And certain class features like the Rogue's sneak attack require combat advantage.
Really, no table top game can be directly converted to a video game without directly replicating the turn-based structure. That was tried in TOEE and D&D:Tactics but they weren't particularly fun or successful.
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- ↳ In My Humble Opinion...
- ↳ I Gave the Mouse a Cookie...
- ↳ In The Trenches
- ↳ It's My Own Invention...
- ↳ MPSIMS