Roy wrote:Hardly limited to 4.0. It's true in any and every system where damage does nothing until it KOs or kills. Damage is worthless, unless it bypasses that Critical Existence Failure threshhold.
The truth of this statement cannot be understated.
Right now, D&D (all editions, not just 4th) are set up so that monsters suiciding themselves to take out one member of the 6-person opposing team is better than leaving all PCs at 10% health. That's fucking fucked up and leads to gangbang situations.
In Shadowrun, enemies don't have as much of an incentive to focus fire on someone as they do in any edition of D&D. If you've got someone taking heavy wound penalties it's better to start taking out other PCs. Wasting time taking someone from -6 to KO when you still have fully healthy opponents on the same side is
a bad idea in that game. At least when the dice pools are small, I'm not sure what happens when the pools reach 20+.
The net result of course is that even if you go down, you can still participate in the fight in minimal ways and you won't die unless everyone else does. And since in almost every game death is a pain in the ass to reverse it's more fair and makes people feel less like they're being picked on.
In some ways, 4E tries to address this with the defender role but any headway made by this is completely wrecked by the fact that some monsters gain additional effects when they're bloodied or when they have someone bloodied. Unless you have an area stunlock it's better to focus fire on one opponent.
... unfortunately, every edition of D&D has been like that.
At least in late game when it becomes nearly impossible to gangbang someone in two to three rounds monsters generally try to spread out their stunlocks. That's more fair.
