Tome Fighter and Foil Ability

[nockermensch]

Fuck this noise, Misty. If I have +30 Reflex, +50 AC and move 200', nobody bats an eye when Magic Missiles strikes me "unerringly". If a monster has Str 200, nobody finds strange when his chances to push and break a Wall of Force are exactly the same of a Str 2 character (it's zero). D&D is chock-full of Fuck You abilities that historically are all spells.

Oho, it's rare of you to display your butthurt so blatantly nocker. Everyone is fine with magic granting absolute effects because it's magic and I don't have to explain dick. Sadly noone is accepting of you getting to do things "cause I'm da pwotagonist" and rightly so. because like Foil action, it's stupid, DWI

The bolded terms exist mostly inside your head.

[nockermensch]

Also, try this for size:

Katanas are thrice as sharp as European swords and thrice as hard for that matter too. Ancient Red Dragons live for millenia, have Int 20+, and generally speaking even when they are Fire-Breathing they are thinking about like eighteen different things at one time. The idea that their breaths are negated by, get this, "evasion", is so fucking insulting that I would punch you in the face.

Ignoring for a while that two of the examples Avoracio provided were on the silly side, you already accept that special class training will grant supernatural but in the name abilities to some people. Quite obviously it's not "talking at them" that makes the mind-flayer miss its blast in the silly example. It's the special talent the Fighter 9 has to mess with people's actions, just what makes area attacks fail to damage people with evasion it's not "dodging really well" but the presence of the Evasion special ability.

[Kaelik]

Also, try this for size:

Katanas are thrice as sharp as European swords and thrice as hard for that matter too. Ancient Red Dragons live for millenia, have Int 20+, and generally speaking even when they are Fire-Breathing they are thinking about like eighteen different things at one time. The idea that their breaths are negated by, get this, "evasion", is so fucking insulting that I would punch you in the face.

Ignoring for a while that two of the examples Avoracio provided were on the silly side, you already accept that special class training will grant supernatural but in the name abilities to some people. Quite obviously it's not "talking at them" that makes the mind-flayer miss its blast in the silly example. It's the special talent the Fighter 9 has to mess with people's actions, just what makes area attacks fail to damage people with evasion it's not "dodging really well" but the presence of the Evasion special ability.

Are you seriously fucking misquoting me with katana bullshit to pretend that dodging a breath weapon is exactly the same as preventing a Dragon from using a breath weapon and that neither one shits all over Dragons and makes them less cool and they both just make you awesome?

Evasion makes you awesome, making dragons incapable of breathing fire by throwing a pebble makes them bitches. That is a huge fucking thematic difference that is literally the difference between killing them with eye lazors and killing them with a bent golf club.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Fuck this noise, Misty. If I have +30 Reflex, +50 AC and move 200', nobody bats an eye when Magic Missiles strikes me "unerringly". If a monster has Str 200, nobody finds strange when his chances to push and break a Wall of Force are exactly the same of a Str 2 character (it's zero). D&D is chock-full of Fuck You abilities that historically are all spells. If it rustles your jimmies that people introduce non-magical Fuck Yous to balance the game, you don't allow them in your games and be done with it.

Whether or not the game should have 'fuck you' abilities in it or not, surely you agree that there's a thematic and tone difference on the game between tanking, without a scratch, dragon's breath that is fluffed to evaporate tungsten with a blessing from the Spirit of Fire and with mundane armor made of cardboard, street signs, and football pads.

That kind of fluff dissonance is the biggest reason why 4E D&D high-level powers are so thoroughly and insultingly uncool. Even moreso than their cookie-cutter design, lack of numerical scaling, and video-game like segregation of combat and plot powers.

@Ice9 Thank you very much for articulating the Captain Hobo Problem. I've been trying to find a simple label to this phenomenon for literal years and you just fucking nailed it.

[nockermensch]

Are you seriously fucking misquoting me with katana bullshit to pretend that dodging a breath weapon is exactly the same as preventing a Dragon from using a breath weapon and that neither one shits all over Dragons and makes them less cool and they both just make you awesome?

I was unsure if your "mind flayers are totally sweet" tirade was as send up to "katanas are underpowered" or "shit was so cash" stylings, so I guessed one.

Evasion makes you awesome, making dragons incapable of breathing fire by throwing a pebble makes them bitches. That is a huge fucking thematic difference that is literally the difference between killing them with eye lazors and killing them with a bent golf club.

It's not "a pebble", it's "you, a Fighter 9, throwing a pebble". This is how you demonstrates badassness in some genres. Have the dragon breath through an avalanche of stones on one scene, and then have someone stop the dragon with a small thrown stone. You know pretty well that treating this as a "pebble > dragon" scenario is misdirection and I pulled the evasion example to show that.

The correct scenario is: "badass character ability" > dragon (sometimes).

EDIT: It just occurred to me that if you guys get queasy around Foil Action, the Tome Soldier must make you, like, SUPER-QUEASY.

[Lago PARANOIA]

It's not "a pebble", it's "you, a Fighter 9, throwing a pebble". This is how you demonstrates badassness in some genres.

No, fuck you, no story justifies badassedness through waving some unattached, context-free numbers around. Any author trying to justify badassery does it through description in the narrative. Sometimes the numbers reflect some kind of reality in the narrative (for example, you needing a minimum power level of 1000 before you can generate enough ki to start flying) but under no circumstances anyone but utmosts hacks will or even can simply claim someone is cool because their Melee rating is 12 or they're max level in Mage. No one thinks that Sephiroth is more badass than Lavos just because his hit points is dozens of times larger.

[nockermensch]

Whether or not the game should have 'fuck you' abilities in it or not, surely you agree that there's a thematic and tone difference on the game between tanking, without a scratch, dragon's breath that is fluffed to evaporate tungsten with a blessing from the Spirit of Fire and with mundane armor made of cardboard, street signs, and football pads.

That kind of fluff dissonance is the biggest reason why 4E D&D high-level powers are so thoroughly and insultingly uncool. Even moreso than their cookie-cutter design, lack of numerical scaling, and video-game like segregation of combat and plot powers.

@Ice9 Thank you very much for articulating the Captain Hobo Problem. I've been trying to find a simple label to this phenomenon for literal years and you just fucking nailed it.

See, in the breath soaking example you just provided, I'd immediately ignore the armor and conclude that the power to tank that damage was inside the guy all along. So you could also call this the Goku Problem, and it ends being a difference in perception: Some people like to see power as internal and inherent to the characters, and others see power on tools and special effects. Quite obviously every campaign should be on the same page regarding that, because it'll be super jarring and disenfranchising when someone who invested on cool toys and special effects figures it's on the same page as the guy with a baseball bat.

Some people want to deal 12d8 of damage because they're wielding a +5 Serrated Antimatter Claymore of Ultimate Death with a cherry on top, while other people want to do the same damage with a bamboo shinai because the character trained as a motherfucker for years.

Caveat: It's well possible that the original captain hobo didn't even care for inner badassery and was just trolling the group, and in this case fuck the guy.

[nockermensch]

It's not "a pebble", it's "you, a Fighter 9, throwing a pebble". This is how you demonstrates badassness in some genres.

No, fuck you, no story justifies badassedness through waving some unattached, context-free numbers around.

It's strange you say that, when the text just after what you quoted provide some narrative, exactly to put things in context. Avalanche happens, dragon breaths through it like a boss, so establishing that dragon > stones. After that you show somebody stopping a dragon in its tracks by throwing a small stone, and then the badassery is demonstrated.

[Lago PARANOIA]

See, in the breath soaking example you just provided, I'd immediately ignore the armor and conclude that the power to tank that damage was inside the guy all along.

Again, go fuck yourself with this power-tripping bullshit. If I'm playing a character who was using an allowed in-game mechanical and fluff-justification to explain my actions I want to use those explanations. I would be deeply offended if my DM retconned the reality of psionic powers to actually the result of unseen pacts with demons or that my agent's super-dodging skills was the result of hitherto unrealized exposure to radiation that awakened my latent luck-warping mutant gene.

If you don't like Space Rangers using laser guns and jetpacks from alien invetors to wreck the theme of your game, don't put laser guns and jetpacks in the game. Don't do this passive-aggressive, dishonest retcon shit.

[Lago PARANOIA]

After that you show somebody stopping a dragon in its tracks by throwing a small stone, and then the badassery is demonstrated.

If you don't have a justification behind it, even a bullshit one like 'while superficially resembling their mundane counterparts, human beings are much more powerful and crazier in this world' (like what One Piece uses), then you don't have badassery. What you have is Willing Suspension of Disbelief-breaking dissonant fluff.

If Luke survives and wins a firefight despite getting a vibroblade through the heart, we can accept it with a 'blah blah blah, Jedi force power, blah' explanation. Hell, if Chewbacca does something like that, all we need is a 'Wookies are really fucking tough' explanation. But if Han Solo does it, it completely wrecks the narrative unless we get a damn good explanation.

[nockermensch]

See, in the breath soaking example you just provided, I'd immediately ignore the armor and conclude that the power to tank that damage was inside the guy all along.

Again, go fuck yourself with this power-tripping bullshit. If I'm playing a character who was using an allowed in-game mechanical and fluff-justification to explain my actions I want to use those explanations. I would be deeply offended if my DM retconned the reality of psionic powers to actually the result of unseen pacts with demons or that my agent's super-dodging skills was the result of hitherto unrealized exposure to radiation that awakened my latent luck-warping mutant gene.

If you don't like Space Rangers using laser guns and jetpacks from alien invetors to wreck the theme of your game, don't put laser guns and jetpacks in the game. Don't do this passive-aggressive, dishonest retcon shit.

Quite obviously every campaign should be on the same page regarding that, because it'll be super jarring and disenfranchising when someone who invested on cool toys and special effects figures it's on the same page as the guy with a baseball bat.

Are you suffering from selective-reading disease, Lago?

[Lago PARANOIA]

But you still typed that phrase. You can whinge all you want about 'this wouldn't be necessary if people talked about it before the game started', but when the chips were down you supported a solution that involved smearing your DM penis all over another person's character.

[codeGlaze]

It's not "a pebble", it's "you, a Fighter 9, throwing a pebble". This is how you demonstrates badassness in some genres.

No, fuck you, no story justifies badassedness through waving some unattached, context-free numbers around.

It's strange you say that, when the text just after what you quoted provide some narrative, exactly to put things in context. Avalanche happens, dragon breaths through it like a boss, so establishing that dragon > stones. After that you show somebody stopping a dragon in its tracks by throwing a small stone, and then the badassery is demonstrated.

There's a CGI movie on netflix where a big quiet guy saves the world with sewing needles.

[nockermensch]

No, fuck you, no story justifies badassedness through waving some unattached, context-free numbers around.

It's strange you say that, when the text just after what you quoted provide some narrative, exactly to put things in context. Avalanche happens, dragon breaths through it like a boss, so establishing that dragon > stones. After that you show somebody stopping a dragon in its tracks by throwing a small stone, and then the badassery is demonstrated.

There's a CGI movie on netflix where a big quiet guy saves the world with sewing needles.

The Thief and the Cobbler?

[codeGlaze]

There's a CGI movie on netflix where a big quiet guy saves the world with sewing needles.

The Thief and the Cobbler?

CGI, not classic animation

It was Dragon Hunters.
Cute movie.

[fectin]

Disruption at a distance:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vt7MGgxbhho

(Of course its silly and unrealistic. So are psions and fireballs.)

[Cheiromancer]

So what I'm hearing is that we need fluff for Foil Ability that doesn't turn the fighter into Captain Hobo.

Hmmm. With all due credit to Simon Green's Nightside (and Jessica Sorrow in particular) how about we say that it is the Fighter's power of disbelief that negates actions? The (ranged) touch attack required by the ability is like how an illusion has to be interacted with to be disbelieved.

Jessica Sorrow, the Unbeliever... She gave up her humanity to become what she is. Now she doesn't believe in anything. And because she doesn't believe with such utter certainty, all the world and everything in it are nothing to her. None of it can affect her in the least. She can go anywhere, and do anything, and she does. She can do terrible, distressing thing, and she does, and nothing touches her. She has no conscience and no morality, no pity and no restraint. The material world is like paper to her, and she rips it apart as she walks through it.- Agents of Light and Darkness, p. 4

Jessica Sorrow is not Captain Hobo. Comparing what she does to what a fighter does with Foil Action is rather like comparing a forest fire to a camp-fire. But I think you could make the case that it is the same sort of thing: an all-inclusive negation of what is actually out there.

And to back up this fluff with a little bit of mechanics, maybe say that anything that can be done without magic by a humanoid of 5th level or less, or anything by a real-world animal, cannot be foiled. By accepting a D&D universe we are suspending our disbelief; the fighter just unsuspends it for a particular action.

[vagrant]

All I'm reading is a shit-ton of butthurt that a mundane character could possibly have the fucking balls to do something a spell can't do.

Fuck you. D&D doesn't fucking work by our physics or our definition of 'mundaneness.' D&D rouges straight up somehow dodge dragonfire strafing without batting an eye - fuck you if you think 'D&D fighters, the stupid fucks out there on the front lines with shit-tonnes of experience and knowledge' can't tell when the perfect moment comes to fuck up someone's action.

They're fucking fighters. They don't need 'magic' (bullshit, because by reality definitions, damn near everything a D&D character does past level fucking two is magic), they got grit, balls, and a plot-explicit ability to fuck up someone's day. It doesn't use the fluff explanations of magic - who the fuck cares? For D&D, that shit seriously is mundane (but magic in our reality) and it works. If it breaks your suspension of disbelief that a trained fucking adventurer with a near-encyclopaedic knowledge of the Monster Manual can't predict the precise and exact moment an illithid will mind-blast, then go suck a barrel of dicks, because you obviously are incapable of playing a fantasy game.

[fectin]

The strain on disbelief is that there is already a system in place to recognize an Illithid using a mind blast, and the fighter isn't using it. Nor does he otherwise bypass that system; he's recognizing one illithid getting ready to blast, but can't recognize the same thing when the next illithid over does it at the same time.

No matter how passionately you curse that strawman, the problem is still internal consistency, not realism.

[Lago PARANOIA]

So what I'm hearing is that we need fluff for Foil Ability that doesn't turn the fighter into Captain Hobo.

The Captain Hobo problem isn't just one of fluff dissonance or genre inappropriateness, it's a problem with the confines of the archetype. That explanation you gave? The one where you said: "The material world is like paper to her, and she rips it apart as she walks through it." This explicitly breaks the fluff of actual VAHs people want to play, like Conan, Batman, and Madmartigan. If you're trying to appease Batman's player in a high-powered superhero game by saying 'Batman has a secret superpower of being able to deconstruct and alter reality as long as he does in a handwavy 'realistic' way, with fate pating the hole', you've already failed because that is not what people who want to play high-level Batman want to play. I mean, just look at vagrant's little nugget of bullshit right here:

All I'm reading is a shit-ton of butthurt that a mundane character could possibly have the fucking balls to do something a spell can't do.

I mean, really now. Do you really think that he and nockermensch and others like him are really not going to notice you stealth-magicking up that worthless goatfelcher fighter? You can act like it's not a spell, but it's a fucking spell.

Anyway.

Fuck you. D&D doesn't fucking work by our physics or our definition of 'mundaneness.'

This is an equivocation. When people say 'mundane' in reference to phlebtonium'd or not characters, what they really mean is 'non-supernatural'. Because when using our reality as a reference, those are damn near synonymous.

Mundane may mean something different depending on what reality people are talking about. But make no mistake, when we talk about the 'martial' power source we mean non-supernatural.

They're fucking fighters. They don't need 'magic' (bullshit, because by reality definitions, damn near everything a D&D character does past level fucking two is magic), they got grit, balls, and a plot-explicit ability to fuck up someone's day.

Man, there's so much bullshit in there.

[*] Magic is another weasel word. When people say magic, they could refer to 'supernatural' or 'the themes and tropes of spellcasters'. If you mean the latter, no, they don't. I can think of a lot of supernatural archetypes that don't conform to that definition. But in reference to the first definition, yes, anyone playing past a certain level does need some kind of supernatural jazz.
[*] What counts as supernatural in one setting may not count as supernatural in another setting. However, D&D (at least the non-shitty versions) obviously, if not explicitly. strives to create some 'non-supernatural' baseline. They fall down on the job sometimes, of course, but by and large there is supposed to be a demarcation between 'non-supernatural' and 'supernatural'. And D&D's non-supernatural things that don't exist in our reality (orcs, goblins, dire badgers, soforth) looks pretty damn close to a plausible simulation of our world. There are some mathematical quirks like housecats fucking up human beings, but by and large peasants really are supposed to get their ass handed to them by a tiger -- which in turn can be taken on by a phalanx of lightly-armored warriors armed with javelins. Stuff like that.
[*] A plot-explicit ability to fuck up someone's day? Heh, don't confuse necessary mechanics with bad or handwaved fluff with the author's providence. Sometimes people put in mechanical shit that they don't agree with fluffwise -- or vice versa -- in order to grease the wheels of the game better and hope the net effect is positive. Frank has said several times to the contrary and I'm pretty sure K did, too. Heck, even in the description of Foil Action itself you're supposed to justify the actions in-game.

[Avoraciopoctules]

@Cheiromancer

I read a story once where the main character started wondering why every complicated device and towering boss monster he had to deal with had a glowing weak point. Later on it turned out that his training had awakened a passive mystical ability that let him perceive and attack a weak point for anything magically powerful, even if the target didn't have something like that normally. The physics of the power got kind of weird when he tried to advise people he was working with.

If you want a special-effects budget for foil action, you could do worse.

[icyshadowlord]

To be honest, having the DM call bullshit when I use Foil Action would be a legitimate concern.

So long as I'm DM, I wouldn't usually have any problems with a Tome Fighter using Foil Action.

[Kaelik]

To be honest, having the DM call bullshit when I use Foil Action would be a legitimate concern.

So long as I'm DM, I wouldn't usually have any problems with a Tome Fighter using Foil Action.

I'm not going to call bullshit, but I think that more often than not, my players and I agree to just completely ignore how the fighter foiled, because there is no non insulting non Captain Hobo way of foiling a great many actions. We usually just say "Aftersundown Sand Throw" and move on now days, because that way we can all agree what actually happened, and it requires a ranged touch attack, but we all agree that there is no good reason for the Fighter throwing sand to have crazy fucked up effects like preventing dragons' breath, or stopping a Druid from Wildshaping.

[AndreiChekov]

There's a CGI movie on netflix where a big quiet guy saves the world with sewing needles.

The Thief and the Cobbler?

CGI, not classic animation

It was Dragon Hunters.
Cute movie.

those were knitting needles.

[OgreBattle]

D&D4e Rangers have 'Disruptive Strike', which is an interrupt encounter power that has you apply a large penalty to the opponent's attack.
You make a weapon attack vs the target's AC for it to succeed. It's one of the more iconic 4e powers, and a favorite of mine as it feels flavorful and has a strong in-game effect. Well, at least to me.


Why not just say foil action has to hit the target's AC to disrupt them? Then you have fighters launching an arrow into a dragon's neck right when he's inhaling, and Conan throwing his sword at evil wizards waving their arms.