I started this new thread to aviod further derailing of an existing thread.
spasheridan wrote:
pinniped wrote:You can. You say to your DM, "I use my ray of frost to freeze this water", and he says, "Okay." If he says, "No, that's not written in the rulebook, and we must obey the rulebook literally", then you have a bad DM.
The rules for Ray of Frost state that it can only be fired if you aim it at a creature. If you aim it at anything else you cannot fire it. This is a core restriction to all powers - and an absurd one. But it is a fundamental aspect of how 4th ed operates,
Though it should have been done right the first time this was changed in errata.
Player's Handbook Update wrote:Target [Addition]
Player’s Handbook, page 57
Add the following sentences to the end of the first paragraph: “Some powers include objects as
targets. At the DM’s discretion, a power that targets a creature can also target an object, whether
or not the power lists an object as a potential target.”
PHB wrote:Melee Basic Attack Basic Attack
You resort to the simple attack you learned when you first picked
up a melee weapon.
At-Will Weapon
Standard Action Melee weapon Target: One creature
Attack: Strength vs. AC
......
So without "DM discretion", you cannot make even a basic attack against an object - which seems really odd, as DMG 65-66 has fairly explicit rules for damaging objects
"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."
Yes - this is a massive flaw in 4th ed. They ditched hardness. They ditched the 1/2 damage concept to objects. They made sunder impossible unless you have a class power called "break stuff".
Now - if your DM decides that some doors have HP then those doors can be attacked.
If your DM decides that the glass window doesn't have HP then it can't be attacked.
So - ray of frost doesn't product a ray of frost that shoots out of your fingertip - it produces a ray between you and a valid target, and if you miss it does nothing. Some kind of super target lock that only lets you shoot when you have it locked in.
Even weirder is the scorching burst. It creates a ball of flame that only damages creatures inside the burst. All that paper and kindling - ignored. Can't start a fire with it unless you can light a CREATURE on fire with it and then use that creature to light your fire.
OR - sometimes you can, if your DM is taking their meds.
This is totally a diablo clone - see, some things are barrells and you can walk up and wack em. They have HP.
Other things are like doors - no matter how many axe attacks you make, it's non-targetable so that door is IMMUNE!
So, by 4e RAW, you can break down a door but can't break a window? Is a glass house the best defense in 4e?
Doom314's satirical 4e power wrote:Complete AnnihilationWar-metawarrior 1
An awesome bolt of multicolored light fires from your eyes and strikes your foe, disintegrating him into a fine dust in a nonmagical way.
At-will: Martial, Weapon
Standard Action Melee Weapon ("sword", range 10/20)
Target: One Creature
Attack: Con vs AC
Hit: [W] + Con, and the target is slowed.
Absentminded_Wizard wrote:So, by 4e RAW, you can break down a door but can't break a window? Is a glass house the best defense in 4e?
Even better, you can break down a door with your bare hands. Without hardness even attacks that do a point of damage can -eventually- crash down any item.
Breaking down a wooden door with bare hands seems hardcore but not absurd to me.
But that Gargantuan Adamantine Statue at the top of the object scale has only 1000 HP an AC of 2 and a Fort of 20, Which means a baseline level 1 human who has a +0 unarmed attack dealing 1d4 damage can tear it apart in a little under 45 minutes.
Makes me wonder why it took those guys down the block weeks to demolish that house.
"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."
Just another user wrote:
Even better, you can break down a door with your bare hands. Without hardness even attacks that do a point of damage can -eventually- crash down any item.
Yeah, it's pretty much impossible to build prisons in 4E, given that regardless of your strength, you can basically break through bars, stone walls, whatever with your bare fists.
I mean it's basically like you're running a mental institution where every prisoner needs to be put on suicide watch. In 4E when the guy starts pounding his head against the wall, you're not worried about him hurting his head, you're worried about him destroying the wall.
A little kid throwing a temper tantrum can fucking break your house.
I mean the 3E object damage rules were stupid enough as it is, with adamantine weapon dungeon tunneling. 4E however took that stupid and brought it up a couple levels of magnitude.
Last edited by RandomCasualty2 on Tue Sep 08, 2009 8:47 pm, edited 1 time in total.
I'm surprised that people are surprised. I mean, 4e is a MMO simulator and we all know that in computer games you can't open a flimsy wooden door in a shack without the right Iron Key even if you are supposed to be a Master Thief with a Wand of Fireballs that can leave holes in the landscape.
I mean, every criticism of 4e falls back to this core premise.
Last edited by K on Tue Sep 08, 2009 8:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.
The problems you are talking about here have existed in all versions of D&D.
The real issue is that D&D going all the way back to chainmail + houserules the game is a COMBAT simulator. Its abstractions are based around a combat centric view.
You are now looking at what in reality are variations on physics problems and saying "gee my combat simulator sure is stupid."
I work in the engineering field. If you want to dimantle or demolish something there are simulators you can use. They make use of physics principles. Force, material strengths, pressure etc.
If you use this model you can get a pretty realistic analog of what is going to happen when you knock down a support beam. You could also take meaurements and get a good idea of what is going to happen if bobby hits a wall made of stone with a slegehammer. Heck, in some ways you can even use physics and science as a combat simulator and determine what the likely effect of bobby hitting billy with that same slegehammer is.
Strangley, hit points never factors into physics....
If you describe every object in the universe in such a way that it can be destroyed by other things in your combat simulator you are obviously going to get stupid results. Your combat simulator is RIGHT to assume that hands and feet can cause bodily harm to another person.
However, as pointed out you feed this capability into your combat simulator and all of a sudden bobby can wreck marble with his bare hands because it has hit points. Even if we add other onerous mechanical requirements as long as we leave a non zero chance for a character to cause damage to a thing unarmed the game will allow said character to physically reduce that thing to rubble given infinite time. Whats more because we are allowing retests on 6 second intervals we are likely to see these effects in minutes rather than hours or days or years.
The only other option is to have some things that are beyond a characters abiity to destroy. This can be done mechanically, by reducing his chance to zreo or by simply mandating that it cannot be done. While the first solution seems better, it fundamentally means that while billy might be unable to every destroy a chair, another character who mechanically has a non zero chance to destroy chairs lives in a world where all wooden objects are balsa wood and kindling. The other issue is that only mechanics stand in the way of billy being able to eat his way out of prison somebody will write feats/power/class/spell that could give him the ability to do so. Some of these methods might be fine. Others just undo the system that you worked to make more realistic.
This has nothing to do with 4th ed in particular. This has to do with the type of game D&D is in the first place. Remember the old addage "if you are a hammer all problems look like nails?"
Last edited by souran on Tue Sep 08, 2009 9:39 pm, edited 3 times in total.
I think it's rather scary that someone who works in an engineering field can be innumerate, but I guess it happens.
Back to the point, certainly, you can get some theoretically stupid results on some arbitrarily slapped together simulator...but if you work on a simulator for 30 years, it usually doesn't have hole after hole after hole after hole in the simulation.
Consider what Chess programs are like now, as opposed to 30 years ago, by comparison. Those early programs were quite capable of stupidity in odd scenarios, but now? Not so much, no.
Similarly, for a 30 year old game to have such issues is strange, to some folk, is all.
Last edited by Doom on Tue Sep 08, 2009 10:04 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Doom314 wrote:Consider what Chess programs are like now, as opposed to 30 years ago, by comparison. Those early programs were quite capable of stupidity in odd scenarios, but now? Not so much, no.
That's mostly because chess programs today are vastly more complicated, and running on vastly superior hardware. If you try and run a modern chess program on a computer from the 1970s, it won't even start, because it uses too much memory and too much disk space.
RandomCasualty2 wrote:Especially when the game simulation actually got worse from the prior edition for no apparent reason.
I'm not convinced that DM discretion is actually a worse simulation than 3e object damage rules. I guess it depends on the DM. The apparent reason is simplicity. 4e means no more arguments about whether acid bypasses hardness.
Pinniped wrote:It's logical (as logical as any of this can be) for a divine power to only function when doing the work of the divine. Slaughtering goblins who can't even begin to fight back isn't a particularly holy task.
Cleric "fluff" such as it is in 4e is that cleric powers are already invested in them and are "blind" to what the cleric is using them for... that is, they can go rogue, because the ordination they have received is permanent.
I would be more likely to give ground to an argument that they could not gain levels/increase their powers, but they sure can use them regardless of what the gods think. They just usually don't, since, y'know, they usually made an agreement, and know they'll be hunted down otherwise.
Ack, yeah, that's a good point. In that case, you have to assume the power naturally comes with limitations, along the lines of, "Whenever you are in danger, my disciple, this will strengthen you." Perhaps the power draws from the spirit of what it is harming, or perhaps it draws from the user's conviction to preservation, which is hard to muster when smacking a chair/bag of rats/helpless goblin.
I guess this is just the interaction of several rules, each of which I am fine with: that there are at-will powers, that powers can have non-temporary effects, and that the rules can distinguish between threats and non-threats. If you don't like the threat/non-threat distinction, then at-wills can't heal. That's a fine solution as well.
MartinHarper wrote:
I'm not convinced that DM discretion is actually a worse simulation than 3e object damage rules. I guess it depends on the DM. The apparent reason is simplicity. 4e means no more arguments about whether acid bypasses hardness.
Yeah it really is. The main problem is that there's no happy medium at all between walls crumbling to dust with a few swings and walls being totally resistant to your attacks. Nor are there even any guidelines as to what objects should be attackable and what shouldn't be. At what level can characters chop through walls or doors? Obviously they're meant to be attacked since they are given stats in the DMG. But what can damage them?
It'd be okay to just say "you can't damage them", but leaving it vague like 4E does is a bad system, since you don't even really know your own character's capabilities.
Doom314 wrote:Back to the point, certainly, you can get some theoretically stupid results on some arbitrarily slapped together simulator...but if you work on a simulator for 30 years, it usually doesn't have hole after hole after hole after hole in the simulation.
Except the goal of D&D is not to be a simulation, but a game. Sometimes, the simulation has to take a backseat to things like ease of play and balance.
The D&D I played growing up was 2e, which has a lot of cool ideas, but was always a nightmare to actually run. 2e had so many fiddly little rules that looked good on paper, but just slowed the game down in practice while someone hunted through the DMG to look up the relevant table. If you can't write a good object-damage simulation by hand (and it must be tricky, if people are STILL arguing about 3.5's rules for it), then just throw it out and let the DM tell you whether you blew open the door or merely singed it.
Pinniped wrote:If you can't write a good object-damage simulation by hand (and it must be tricky, if people are STILL arguing about 3.5's rules for it), then just throw it out and let the DM tell you whether you blew open the door or merely singed it.
I'd be okay with the game just providing guidelines like saying "A paragon character should be able to bash down wooden doors, and walls, but not iron ones."
Or some kind of benchmark like that. But 4E doens't give you even that.
And the problem is that honestly due to how 4E does its powers and HP, we have no real benchmarks for how powerful a given strike is. A cyclops can seriously die to one hit if it's a minion, or it can take a shitload of hits. Therefore when someone tosses out a 30 damage attack, we don't really know how powerful that really is.
Given that trying to cut down doors and other obstacles is likely to be something PCs can try, a few guidelines at least would be nice.
Pinniped wrote:
Except the goal of D&D is not to be a simulation, but a game. Sometimes, the simulation has to take a backseat to things like ease of play and balance.
The D&D I played growing up was 2e, which has a lot of cool ideas, but was always a nightmare to actually run. 2e had so many fiddly little rules that looked good on paper, but just slowed the game down in practice while someone hunted through the DMG to look up the relevant table. If you can't write a good object-damage simulation by hand (and it must be tricky, if people are STILL arguing about 3.5's rules for it), then just throw it out and let the DM tell you whether you blew open the door or merely singed it.
Fine, hole after hole after hole in the game...the balance of DnD4.0 is pretty much gone now, and 'ease of play' vanishes after a few levels, anyway.
I grew up on AD&D, and it, too, had fiddly little rules, but it didn't take half a dozen people paying absolute attention in order not to miss the latest '-1 to hit until next turn' effect amongst all the other effects.
It's just disappointing to toss everything but the name, but have the same problems.
What's the problem with people digging tunnels with an adamantine dagger?
You presumably don't have problems with people digging holes with magical spades, so what's the problem with a dagger?
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
Yeah it really is. The main problem is that there's no happy medium at all between walls crumbling to dust with a few swings and walls being totally resistant to your attacks. Nor are there even any guidelines as to what objects should be attackable and what shouldn't be. At what level can characters chop through walls or doors? Obviously they're meant to be attacked since they are given stats in the DMG. But what can damage them?
It'd be okay to just say "you can't damage them", but leaving it vague like 4E does is a bad system, since you don't even really know your own character's capabilities.
Actually break DCs for common items are found on page 262 of the phb, in the exploration section of the phb. These break rules are remarkably like the ones in 3e....
Lago PARANOIA wrote:What's the problem with people digging tunnels with an adamantine dagger?
It's not so much that they can do it with the dagger, but just that they can do it so quickly. I mean excavating walls takes a long time. You need people to remove the rubble and clear that away, even if your mining equipment is good.
There was also the general crap where you were better off mining with greatswords than with picks.
