Dark Sun returns

[Username17]

Neither of those games is a role playing game. I have game mastered those games but it means something totally different.

Yes. That's exactly my point. The thing where my Mordheim character gets a bonus on tracking down rare items in the black market? That is literally more interesting than anything a 4th edition character brings to the table. It is seriously that bad.

4th edition is a tactical skirmish wargame. And you only move one uninteresting model around the table instead of 10. That makes it less interesting on the battlefield than Mordheim. The fact that it has less interesting non-combat abilities is just flies in your shit salad.

Is the game more fun to play than Warhammer Quest? Would you have a more enjoyable time playng Descent?

Oh absolutely. That's not even a fair comparison. Roleplaying/Board game hybrids like Descent and Runebound take a dump all over 4th edition D&D. It's not even close. Once you're talking about things that are even partially classified in the Roleplay genre, 4th edition D&D can't even get in the door to the room the competition is held in. 4th edition shouldn't be classified as an RPG, there's just no RP there.

4th edition D&D is only worth discussing in the realm of pure tactical skirmish wargames. And frankly it doesn't hold my interest the way Mordheim or Chronopia do.

-Username17

[Thymos]

There was a time when I strongly agreed. I had all the old 2nd edition books on rome and crusades. I had every book that had prices of everything. I wanted my players to come up with non magical solutions to things like sieges. Or to master the games economy. However, considering that those are situations which are once a game, and things like attack rolls against increasingly powerful monsters are made hundreds of times I eventaully decided that making things like combat really good resulted in more sessions that were more fun.

The issue is that the feel I get from 4e seems like it discourages anything unrelated to combat. This may be because their only big non-combat thing is skill challenges, and if I'm forced to go through those I feel like I'm being punished.

Should the game support players who want to play the hunt family and corner the world silver market? Possibly. However, if they can then use that to derive even a seemingly inconsequential numerical bonus to the quest to turn off oruces doomsday device then will. It ceases to become spectacular and becomes just the way the game is played.

I think it depends on the system. I would expect DnD to support them, and I don't mean provide a guideline on how to roll a d20 to fix the problem when I say support, I mean give guidelines for the DM on how the world economy works. Like how some RPGs give guidelines for how much to increase or decrease the price of items depending on supply.

This isn't about class balance. Its about the focus of the game. Is it worth narrowing the focus of the classes and trying to weed out classes that are really npc or roleplay only? Is the value of those classes as a selected option enough to justify printing them?

That non magic user thread isn't about in combat class balance. It's saying that wizards aren't playing the dungeon crawl game and that at high levels fighters shouldn't be playing that game either if we want to be honest about letting people "play" fighters. If you really look at it, most of the complaints are due to wizards having special effects that are cool and non damage related that fighters don't have.

For example wizards can cast invisibility and fly. Fighters can't; this is a problem. Wizards can teleport and scry; Fighters can't. It's more about how to give Fighters the ability to truly affect the world than about anything else.

That is true, you cannot make a 4th edition character that isn't good at some aspect of combat unless you pruposefully tank your primary stat. Although I don't understand why this is some badge of honor or something the game should shoot for. One thing that people complain about all the time in 3e is combat relevance. Its really easy to make a character whose supposed value is not combat related. However, why people who are planning on going and fighting dragons would associate with you is beyond me because they could probably get your skills AND a compotent sword wielder at the least. What did you do out of combat that was so amazing?

Teleport, Charm Person, Invisibility, Fly, Knock (which I hate as a spell actually, but the last 3 let the wizard supplant the rogues ability to steal things). I'm trying not to start typing out the high level stuff because 4e doesn't even try to do the high level. As pointed out in a previous post, you can flood cities or create the walls for a city.

Wizards secondary role is striker, his powers do more damage than the other controlers by alot. Invoker is probably the class you would like. All its powers are about moving and pushing people around the battlefield and obstacles. In addition in 4th edition you can deal non leath damage as a choice on any attack.

I don't want to deal damage that isn't lethal, I don't want to slide people or push them around. There's actual an article out there about playing the wizard as batman, which suggests taking evocation, the damage dealing spell school, as your restricted one. It suggests glitter dust for blind, fly to avoid enemies, invisibility or improved invisibility to help your rogue buddy, and simply goes through how non damage spells can aid your party and help you through challenges.

How does this not apply to 3e as well? The skill system is functionally Identical. With the right amount of time or money you can still pretty much magic your way around any skill check you want. The vast majority of 3rd edition powers were designed to be used in combat.

Actually what I hoped from 4e was to balance 3ed combat, smooth it out but keep it similar, and branch out into improving non combat related things. We got skill challenges instead and the removal of everything except skills that was unrelated to combat, which honestly feels like a slap in the face for people like me who ran 3ed without always throwing combat at the players all the time.

Yes, combat is the focus of a lot of rpgs. You can't honestly say though that Shadowrun is even remotely as focused on combat as 4e (or even 3.x). I actually feel like skill challenges are so bad they are a negative for roleplaying rules.

[souran]

Unstated Premise: 4e combat is better than 3e combat. Analysis: Wrong.

Actually, you need to read. i was talking about converting 2nd ed combat to 3rd edition combat. Although the final thought is one I passed on to all games. Exaclted 2nd edition is better than first because it works better. 4th edition is better than 3rd edition for no other reason than it scales better.

3rd Edition has lots of crappy rules that are ancestral hold overs from previous editions that should have been cleaned up when they swtiched to the d20 system from the myriad of broken systems that was 2nd ed dnd.

I'm pretty sure that Invoker would be equally as depressing as Wizard. See, "pushing people around" isn't exactly what I'd constitute as battlefield control. Oh sure, it's controlling one aspect of the battlefield on your turn, but a) It's a boring aspect, b) Your opponents just negate your work on their turn.

What constitutes battlefield control then? Actually restricting and punishing movement is an important part of many strategy games going back to things like backgammon. Also, by pushing enemies around you end up negating there turn. Basically you force an alternate choice action or yes they can move forward and you push them back before they attack.

All you have really said is that you think that the fundamental idea of a controller is boring. Thats fine, play something else.

Well, let's see. I have a True fiend who makes elaborate dungeons in his spare time,

Explain how this was either relvant to progressing the story. When did these dungeons come into play. What did your True fiend have to give up to get them? What did the other characters have that you did not because you were a true fiend with a dungeon?

Otherwise this is magical tea party crap that anybody could write on their character sheet. What was the POINT to being able to create that dungeon? Otherwise I would say research about a 15th level ritual and hand over the gold for it and you could do the same thing.

I have Wizards who use real divinations, I have Druids who flood coastal cities. Yeah, those things are out of combat things that are fun and interesting.

Again, flooding cities can be done by ritual. The fact that before you could do this at effectively no cost to yourself other than a nights rest and now it might actually result in having to make choices that matter is not a malfactor.

Doesn't seem to be all about Combat to me.

Actually you didn't list a single spell that was soley out of combat. Again while you could use those spells outside of combat what was your purpose in memorizing those?

The 3rd edition spell list is derived from the second edition spell list. 2nd Edition spells which came from 1st edition and by and large what Gygax and arnsen liked to do was develop combat spells.

Now the thing is a lot of people don't see the combat value of spells when they first pick up the book. However, once you have played with a remotely experieced player you see that even friggan knock was orginally designed to open doors in combat (basically faster than the rogue could do it).

"Roleplaying Rules" don't matter. Rules about things you can use to roleplay do. Or more specifically, the fact that 90% of 3e stuff can't be done in 4e.

This is a BS statement. It can't be done in the same way as before. It doesn't mean it cannot be done. The game is more similar than it is different.

[souran]

Honestly,

Every single complaint about 4e combat and being to combat oriented I heard when 3rd edition came out as well. Infact every complaint I have heard here I heard when 3rd edition came out.

It will probably be said by people when 5th edition comes out.

[Voss]

Honestly,

Every single complaint about 4e combat and being to combat oriented I heard when 3rd edition came out as well. Infact every complaint I have heard here I heard when 3rd edition came out.

It will probably be said by people when 5th edition comes out.

Really... I remember some combat focused complaints (especially on the more need for a battlemat style combat), but the sheer scale and volume of complaints were different. Most of the people I heard (and read about) were happy that 3rd was bringing things back (even monks and half orcs, as bad as those things turned out in the end) and expanding options and customization. 'No more cookie cutter fighters' was a big thing at the beginning of 3rd, as there was suddenly more to a fighter besides what weapon you specialized in.

4e took a hell of a lot options away. Some are slowly trickling back, but only a few, one $40 book at a time.

[RandomCasualty2]

Okay first, a lack of noncombat rules doesn't mean less roleplaying. It changes the role that you're playing. Instead of being a wizard capable of flooding cities, you're playing a wizard who isn't capable of flooding cities. There's nothing saying that it's not an RPG if you aren't playing a godly powerful character. It just means that the game toned the power level down. Bunnies and Burrows is still an RPG, even though you're just a rabbit and never get to take over the world.

In general RP is one of those things you don't necessarily even have to touch. People can generally RP on their own without any systems. Do you need a system to have an IC conversation with an NPC or another PC? I don't think you do. In fact, such a system can detract from RP a lot of the time, because you care less about what you say when the result of what happens is based entirely on your die roll. In fact, everyone at the table feels like you're just wasting their time, because it really doesn't matter what you say.

Things that actually reduce RP:

• Inability to handle specific character concepts that should be genre appropriate. (unarmed warrior, nonmagical warrior, swashbuckler, etc.)
• Rewarding concepts that don't fit with the genre or are just ridiculous (octopus druids with blade boots for example).
• Any rule that discourages you from talking in character.
• Rules that mechanically reward you for doing things against your character concept or against the genre.
• Playing characters that are too alien to adequately RP effectively, because nobody actually understands the character.
• Rules that produce results that you cannot translate into a logical story (4E unconscious from sword to full hp after short rest and no magic).

[FatR]

Honestly,

Every single complaint about 4e combat and being to combat oriented I heard when 3rd edition came out as well. Infact every complaint I have heard here I heard when 3rd edition came out.

Well, shit, I somehow doubt that people have complained about removal of options in early 3E days. They surely didn't on my favorite forum of the time. The fact that certain complaints about 3E and 4E are similar is entirely explained by the fact that 4E took certain design decisions of 3E (easy resurrection + lessening the effects and permanency of potential debiliating conditions, crunch bloat at the expense of fluff + splatbook glut, numbers bloat, sacrificing elements of realism on the altar of whatever authors think is coolness, attempts to impose balance, just to name a few), and friggin turned them to eleven.

[Username17]

Okay first, a lack of noncombat rules doesn't mean less roleplaying. It changes the role that you're playing.

That's not exactly true.

It reduces roleplaying to Cops And Robbers. That's a fun game, but it plays like it was written by five year olds and it's totally free.

-Username17

[mean_liar]

You're exploiting his misstatement.

He said, "lack of noncombat rules" but if you read the rest of the paragraph he obviously meant "lack of ability to blast apart a mountain".

His bullets are the meat and worth discussing, and they're universally good.

[RandomCasualty2]

You're exploiting his misstatement.

He said, "lack of noncombat rules" but if you read the rest of the paragraph he obviously meant "lack of ability to blast apart a mountain".

Yeah, that's more what I meant.

A lot of people make a big deal about 4E because it nerfs scrying down or prevents people from breaking the economy or summon undead hordes. But being able to cast charm person, teleport or tunnel through stone walls with your sword isn't a roleplaying ability. It's a strategic ability. While it's true that 4E focuses entirely on tactical and tends to remove overall strategic powers, this really has little to do with roleplaying, but more with defining the general power level of the characters.

While people may miss this stuff for its strategic value, not having it present doesn't interfere with anyone's ability to roleplay their character. It just means that they're playing a hulking barbarian who can't hack through adamantine instead of playing one who can. And honestly, personality wise I can't see that making a heck of a difference from an RP standpoint. It just means they're lacking an extra tool in your toolkit to strategically solve an adventure.

[Kaelik]

Except you know, it invalidates roleplaying any character worth roleplaying.

Seriously, "You play someone incapable of influencing anything beyond the next five minutes" is a huge rp barrier that kills pretty much every character I've ever wanted to play.

[RandomCasualty2]

Except you know, it invalidates roleplaying any character worth roleplaying.

Well this is different than actually preventing roleplay, it's more that you dislike the theme of the game. Some people just don't find the idea of playing low power characters to be interesting. But that's really not the rules fault discouraging roleplay. That's more just that it's not the type of game you want and thus you aren't interested in any of the archetypes that the game is themed around.

There are plenty of people who would enjoy playing Aragorn or Conan even though they can't take on armies of orcs singlehandedly.

[Aharon]

Actually, you can influence the world (by rituals).
Fool's Gold is one example (though stupid and probably not allowed by most GMs).
Another, higher level one would be Control Weather. In a two mile radius, you can make the weather go havoc (or stay normal, if you pity the commoners). That's definitely influencing the world. Do it in the summer, and you doom them to hunger because the harvest is destroyed. If it's really important to you, you could, at 26th level disenchant the 30th level item you got and have enough residuum to do that on 446 consecutive days.

Or take the 30th level ritual Raise land (PGtF). Your castle is now on a floating 10-mile radius rock.
Then you use Conceal Object (10th level, Dragon 366), so that nobody who hasn't an absurdly high perception ever sees your floating rock.

Does it cost a lot of money? Yes.
Is the ratio of world-influencing rituals/non world-influencing rituals very low? Also yes.

But they do exist, and you could use them, if you're willing to sacrifice power (cash).

It's far more limited than 3rd edition in that respect, but if the players really want it, it can be done.

[TOZ]

Damn, I need to make something up for that in 3.5, so I can have the motherfucking Floating Continent in my game too.

[Starmaker]

Cloud castles shouldn't cost money. Like, at all.

[repost]
When talking about resources, treasure, vanity stuff and the like, it's important to keep in mind the resource management scheme the game uses for that particular resource. These are:

# Title
Description
Good: How it's supposed to be used.
Bad: What should be avoided.
Ugly: How it's been incorporated in a game system in a deliberately retarded way.

1. Accounting.
Your character's resource (e.g. wealth) is always monitored and compared to other players' or to a certain predetermined amount (such as WBL guidelines). If you're lacking, the DM gives you more, if you're rich, the DM gives others more and/or waits when you run out of yours.
Good: It helps keep characters balanced.
Bad: Prices are not always accurate and amortization can hit you hard when non-liquid stuff (e.g. point-buy abilities) is concerned. Also, recycling unwanted loot.
Ugly: When you refuse to accept the title of emperor because it would cost character points you'd sooner spend on raising your Stabbing skill from 3 to 4.

2. Finders keepers.
Your character gets to keep certain resources he earned through "roleplaying", no accounting or property tax.
Good: Marrying the hobgoblin princess doesn't reduce the amount of plusses on your lucerne hammer.
Bad: The girl your DM wants to fuck has an entourage of CL+6 utterly loyal cohorts trailing behind her character's ass, obviously because she's a fantastic roleplayer and really invested in the plot.
Ugly: You're starting out as a naked hobo because having a house and pants at character creation costs character points, while obtaining them in-game costs nothing.

3. Milk in your tea?
You have whatever you want (out of a certain category).
Good: Generates well-rounded characters, reduces bookkeeping, can be used in creative ways.
Bad: Some DMs won't let you use your freebie skills to any effect, and some players will insist on a retarded use of their 117 ranks in Knowledge (length of longcat) to win the day, all the time.
Ugly: Cannot think of an instance.

3e setting-affecting stuff is free as per Accounting-Good and Finders Keepers-Good: you empty some spell slots or spend money to get a new castle, then your spell slots refresh or you find a pile of money sitting in the middle of the road. If your DM is retarded he can subtract the cost of your newly-wished-for cloud castle from your WBL (Accounting-Ugly).

4e economy (and the ritual system in particular) is the opposite of Finders Keepers (Finders Weepers?) At least in Accounting-Ugly you can shatter your green porcelain palace and immediately spot a holy avenger in a dung pile. In 4e, you get screwed the moment you try to interact with the economy: there's a predefined grand total of all your income from 1 to 30, and everything you do subtracts from it, UNLESS you do something game-breaking, perhaps in a gentleman's way ("I only rust milk to survive").

TL;DR GURPS is bad, 4e is shit.

[MGuy]

After reading I am having trouble figuring out your point that makes 4e rituals so shitty. I actually think the rituals are a good idea yet from what you posted here it is shit because if you accidentally find the floating castle it fucks up your wealth? That seems more like a complaint about how the wealth system works in 4e than the rituals.

[RandomCasualty2]

After reading I am having trouble figuring out your point that makes 4e rituals so shitty. I actually think the rituals are a good idea yet from what you posted here it is shit because if you accidentally find the floating castle it fucks up your wealth? That seems more like a complaint about how the wealth system works in 4e than the rituals.

Mainly it's because giving up some of your wealth to make floating castles is a total fuck over because you're not gaining any power and you're giving up real power in the form of magic items.

Ritually pretty much give you a way to flush money down the toilet that you'll never see again. And that's bad, because it means that your character is permanently gimped the more rituals you cast.

[FatR]

After reading I am having trouble figuring out your point that makes 4e rituals so shitty. I actually think the rituals are a good idea yet from what you posted here it is shit because if you accidentally find the floating castle it fucks up your wealth? That seems more like a complaint about how the wealth system works in 4e than the rituals.

Rituals eat your money permanently and, with 2-3 exceptions, don't even do anything remotely useful. Maybe you don't care about the effect at all, maybe the mundane ways of solving the same problem are strictly better. Even if a ritual actually does something useful (which, except again, 2-3 of them, it doesn't, unless GM very deliberately engineers a situation where a certain ritual is useful, although even this is possible only for a small percentage of them), it still eats your money permanently. In the system where the sum total of wealth you can acquire during your adventuring career is fixed.

[FatR]

It's far more limited than 3rd edition in that respect, but if the players really want it, it can be done.

First, I really don't care about dumpster diving through the entirety of 4E to find a dozen or so rituals that actually do something cool. Second, they still permanently subtract money from your Winning the Game fund. It is not that rituals must necessarily suck or are inherently bad idea, it is that 90+% of rituals from actual books suck.

[MGuy]

Again that sounds more like an argument against the wealth system more than the rituals. If you could replace that money or actually making a floating castle generated more wealth for you then there would be no problem but still both of your statements seem to be saying, "its a waste because I can't get my money back after doing it" more than "rituals are bad and they should feel bad for existing".

-edit for double post: I will agree with you there I have not felt the desire to take up ritual casting because most of what you can do with it doesn't appeal to me.

[Username17]

Again that sounds more like an argument against the wealth system more than the rituals.

The two are inseparable.The 4e design criteria that gave birth to rituals was:

"Things that have an effect lasting longer than a combat should have a permanent cost."

-Username17

[Kaelik]

Pretty much.

If you just said "All rituals, as they are currently, cost exactly zero cash of any kind and take one standard action to perform."

You would have a mediocre out of combat ruleset that at least had some pretty cool effects, even if they were only situational.

What you'd also have is a game that explicitly violates 4e's design.

Just like if you said "Everyone knows every encounter power, and encounter powers can all be used at will." You might be able to create a more tactical combat system (after removing some of the better encounter powers that completely invalidate all the others) that doesn't suck as much.

It was also cause the actual game designers a stroke because it starts by trashing half their ideas about the ritual/combat system.

[Lago PARANOIA]

There are plenty of people who would enjoy playing Aragorn or Conan even though they can't take on armies of orcs singlehandedly.

4E isn't advertised as that kind of game, though.

Here's what the game actually says in the PHB, page 7.

A Fantastic World
The world of the DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS game is a place of magic and monsters, of brave warriors and spectacular adventures. It begins with a basis of medieval fantasy and then adds the creatures, places, and powers that make the D&D world unique.

Or how about on pages 28 and 29?

In the paragon tier, your character is a shining example of heroism, set well apart from the masses. Your class still largely determines your capabilities. In addition, you gain extra abilities in your speciality: your paragon path.
...
You are able to travel more quickly from place to place, perhaps on a hippogriff mount or using a spell to grant your party flight. In combat, you might fly or even teleport short distances. Death becomes a a surmountable obstacle and the fate of a nation or even the world might hang in the balance as you undertake momentous quests. You navigate uncharted regions and explore long-forgotten dungeons, where you can expect to fight sneaky drow, savage giants, ferocious hydras, fearless golems, rampaging barbarian hordes, bloodthirsty vampires, and crafty mind flayers.

In the epic tier, your character's capabilities are truly superheroic. Your class still determines most of your abilities, but your most dramatic powers come from your choice of epic destiny (THIS IS A DAMNABLE LIE), which you select at 21st level. You travel across nations in the blink of an eye and your whole party might take to the air in combat. The success or failure of your adventures has far-reaching consequences, possibly determining the fate of millions in this world and even planes beyond. You navigate otherworldly realms and explore never-before-seen caverns of wonder, where you can expect to battle savage pit fiends, the ferocious tarrasque, sinister sorrowsworn deathlords, bloodthirsty lich archmages, and even demon princes.

What do we learn from this mission statement? A few things.

1) You are expected to be defined by the class you took at level 1 as you are late in life; not as much in the epic tier as you were in the heroic tier, but the fact that epic-level heroes started off as a 'fighter' or 'cleric' is still supposed to mean something.

2) The game has an enormous hard-on for flight for some reason, whining and wheedling so much about how epic-level heroes 'might fly for the duration of combat!'

3) The game has no clue what it's doing for scope of stakes. How is 'determining the fate of millions in the world' more epic than 'saving an entire nation or even the world'?

4) The game has no clue what it's doing for the scope of challenges. Why is a tarrasque more deadly than a mind-flayer? Why do I care so much about what lich archmages are doing? I know the real reason to that answer (they're stronger and take more power to defeat), but what does that mean to someone outside the Dungeons and Dragons bubble?

5) Most importantly, even though 4E Dungeons and Dragons doesn't have any clue what it's supposed to be doing, you can infer that the adventures of Conan and Aragorn are only supposed to be good for heroic tier.


This is a straight-up deceit. Or incompetence of the highest caliber. Whatever. I'm not saying that a game with a limited scope has to be bad. Shadowrun has a very limited scope and it's a good game. I am saying that the game that Dungeons and Dragons is and the game that it wants to be are two different beasts.

Saying that the Aragorn effect is intentional is just a weak-ass apology.

[RandomCasualty2]

This is a straight-up deceit. Or incompetence of the highest caliber. Whatever. I'm not saying that a game with a limited scope has to be bad. Shadowrun has a very limited scope and it's a good game. I am saying that the game that Dungeons and Dragons is and the game that it wants to be are two different beasts.

Saying that the Aragorn effect is intentional is just a weak-ass apology.

Not really no.

Most of epic and paragon in the mission statement is defined by the foes you face. Unfortunately, their difficulty is arbitrary. Remember that Conan takes on a god in Conan the destroyer and wins. That's determining the fate of millions and the world. The destruction of the one ring is also a similarly world spanning feat. About all that seems to be missing is the lack of teleportation.

I mean, at most 4E just seems to adopt the Final fantasy style. You can do all these awesome battle cinematics in combat, but they can't really do anything like that while out of combat.

I think it's safe to say that part of the idea of 4E was to tone things down. The removal of pretty much all the global changing spells shows that. They were most certainly trying to make a simpler version of the game that got back to the basic dungeon crawling paradigm. And that style supports Aragorn and Conan just fine.

[Voss]

This is a straight-up deceit. Or incompetence of the highest caliber. Whatever. I'm not saying that a game with a limited scope has to be bad. Shadowrun has a very limited scope and it's a good game. I am saying that the game that Dungeons and Dragons is and the game that it wants to be are two different beasts.

Saying that the Aragorn effect is intentional is just a weak-ass apology.

Not really no.

Most of epic and paragon in the mission statement is defined by the foes you face. Unfortunately, their difficulty is arbitrary. Remember that Conan takes on a god in Conan the destroyer and wins.
That's determining the fate of millions and the world.

Well, no. Gods in Conan's world get a bit mysterious. There are gods like Mitra that are pretty much non-present real-world-style gods (unapproachable, unknowable and noninteractive), then there are the other gods, which are largely daemonic or otherworldly entities that have worshippers or else they eat people. But its really, really rare that they threaten more than anyone in the general vicinity and very rarely, a city. And the source material makes it pretty clear that if more people were awesome barbarians (like conan) instead of weak, decadent city people (or black) they could kill these sort of demon gods as well. But they aren't really world spanning threats.

The destruction of the one ring is also a similarly world spanning feat.

And aside from taking Frodo for a walk, Aragon wasn't involved in it. For the brief period he was involved in the main quest, Aragon drove off wraiths with fire, ran from wraiths, made a heal check, fought some orcs, ran from a balrog, ran from more orcs, and then fought some more orcs while losing the object of the quest and getting stuck on the sideboard. Thats seriously the sum total of his participation in the world spanning feat that was 'walking into Mordor and dropping the ring in some fire.'