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[DnD 4E Discussion] Psion is out and it is awesome, and I normally hate psionics.
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I agreed the unarmed punch was bag of rats, but I might let the fighter gain THP from a full-on magical blast from the wizard, since that's a comparable situation to an actual battle. It wouldn't be reduced by War Wizardry, though.
The situation I'm talking about was Unstoppable arrows, the "enemies in burst" attack. Under your system, my ranger with this attack is physically unable to shoot his friends with it. This makes no sense to me.
I don't dispute that there are situations you shouldn't be able to benefit from attacking your allies. (Pretty much any time an old-style BRV fighter is involved, for one.) But going from that to "you can never, ever consider an ally an enemy (except for domination and the like)" makes the system too goofy for me to accept.
"So, Holmes, what did Lord Winterbottom die from?"
"Deadly impact to the back of the head, my dear Watson. Most likely with a bag of rats."
I honestly don't see a reason why you would want to do that in the first place. The whole point is you don't have to really worry about hitting your buddies with the attack.
This is what you get for playing console FPSes.
I've never heard anyone argue about whether or not you can capture your own units in chess because such a thing might "make sense" in a feudal government.
Why is this sort of thing harder for people to accept in D&D?
There is no role play in chess. There is a story to D&D, and i like for things to make sense in the story.
Some people have difficulty with the mix of the abstract and the specific.
No offense, but I kind of gave up on realism around the time we made the great leap from having four different definitions of forget in game to only three. woo, heady there.
I haven't been able to see the update yet. The BRV seemed to be something that you could handle really easily: "sorry, your character doesn't actually find this invigorating and doesn't get pumped." This is much harder to explain away, and seems like much stronger argument for your interpretation of the targeting rules. It's also the first example I've seen of the use of the 'enemies' keyword that was not 'all enemies in blast/burst.'
@Arivia: I don't know about that one. I skipped 3.x entirely, and enjoy 4E much more than I ever enjoyed any of the 2E stuff because I find it much less jarring.
edit: yeah the more I think about it that power completely invalidates the entire way I was thinking about ally/enemy stuff, and also makes no freaking sense. Why would you ever use target a monster with it, and why wouldn't you be able to target an ally with it?
Repeating it doesn't make you less wrong. Remember when you asked when this had been debunked and then I quoted the post and you didn't respond? It's easy to come up with a coherent system that allows you to declare allies as enemies and then shoot them with enemy powers, and if you don't get THP or other boosts from cheesy abuses of it, or even from any uses of it, it makes much more narrative sense than Bob's magic ally-shield that prevents Joe from hitting him with an enemy power.
The Psion power just seems weird to me. How can you fit that into a story? "Phoenix, being a level 30 Psion, could move combatants around the battlefield at will while attacking simultaneously. Unless they were on her side. A wizard did it."
Your jedi mind tricks will not work on me.
Not really. But I think one of the things that I like about 4e is that it's willing to make changes and state things for the game as game's sake first and let people worry about how historically/fantastically accurate it is second. It's not jarring because I see it as something to grow out of, not something that needs to be accounted for at the base level then developed.
Btw, my new 3.5 character is totally a sadomasochist. Great job there, Monte Cook!
Huh. What do you mean by grow out of?
I want that ability, but I also don't think hard-and-fast switches like that are a good model of team allegiances. For example, if I shot my buddy and we fought for a round, but then Orcus popped up out of nowhere, I'd like to be able to set the fight aside for the moment and be a team again against the new threat.
People and situations are complicated, and having enemy and ally be irrevocable divisions makes the game dumber to me.
That said, declaring an ally an enemy for the specific purpose of shooting them as part of a area power strikes me as one of those things that make you "That guy"
My train of thought on it is this (as an example): the psion I'm running as an NPC has an ability that moves one foe and lets her deal damage to another.
What I need to do to include that, then, is simply figure out how to represent it in the narrative. "Pheonix focuses on the invisible strings of the mind, pulling on Telthram to throw him across the room and against the wall. While the knight is preoccupied, she makes an attack against the defenseless Aerae."
Unless there's a specific problem with a rule, I'll take it at face value for consistency and reliability's sake. Then I'll take whatever's applicable and craft a workable narrative out of that, instead of worrying about tweaking things just so for realism/systems of imaginary magic. I mean, a system that relies heavily on moving someone exactly 10 feet that way has only so many similes it can make that don't involve chess.
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Yeah, the easiest way to work with 4E's rules is to use it as written and then tack on the fluff after the fact. Sure, they could have explained WHY each ability works that way, but then we'd have a lot of wasted space for something that many people will ignore or refluff on their own anyways.
Okay, but I misled you wrt to the power. The choice is, I think, between moving Telthram across the room and having him unwillingly strike Aerae, or moving Wolverine across the room and having him unwillingly strike Aerae. One is considerably more sensible, and incidentally gamebreaking. How do I incorporate that into the narrative, other than just doing the less sensible thing and pretending that it never occurs to Phoenix or Wolverine that maybe his claws would do way more damage than Telthram's mace?
CB updates seem to be working again.
Did you forget about the psion power that sparked the discussion? DELIBERATELY moving your striker ally across the battlefield and forcing him to shoot the slimy monster makes him decide that killing you is a pretty good idea?
I like the idea of it just being rude to control someone like that. So maybe you could do it if there was serious danger of a TPK but short of that it would just be too awkward.
That's what I'm trying to say - I really, genuinely, don't care about that at all. There's a degree of separation between realism and the game there, and I'm fine with that. I don't want to go internally tweaking the game when it works fine as is; I'll work with what it gives me and go from there, as opposed to trying to fix a problem it might create in the first place.
If I was DMing and you were to ask me about using an ally for all that in any way shape or form, I'd point out it was an enemy only and make that a quick table ruling. After the session, if you wanted to go over it in more detail, I'd point out that it was an offensive action only as written and that altering that would make it a significantly different power. Similarly, I'd take a strict view on trying to mess around with the fine line of the ally/enemy distinction.
It works as is, and there's little reason to change that for a simulationist perspective in an over-the-top narrative game.
Huh. Well if I'm just weird, I can live with that.