No, 4e is designed to be roughly 95%+ combat, as evidenced by the fact that skill challenges are a shitty tack on system. Now maybe 3.5e is roughly 50%+ combat, but even then, the social skills need work.
So you're saying 3.x was supposed to be 99% combat? Seriously?
4th edition -actually has a non-combat resolution system which is designed to involve the whole party-. 3.x? Not so much.
Its not meant to be "95%" combat, and skill challenges are the least shitty tacked-on noncombat system D&D has ever had.
bluff...
"There is no file in here, no siree, no file"
Guards: "get the fuck back here, and put the damn cake down now."
It should actually, first, be dependent upon the guards' attitudes. If your friend is locked up by LGs, they'll be fine with the cake, if he's locked up by anyone evil, they'll likely take the cake for themselves, find the file, and lock you up. However, there is room for skills. How many groups are going to try the (incredibly stupid) "escape by cake file" tactic? very few. How many are going to try more aggressive jail breaks? Damn near most, if not damn near all.
Thing is, not really. LG guards aren't necessarily going to allow that sort of thing, nor will evil people necessarily prevent it. Remember, being evil doesn't make you a babyeater.
And if that conversation is the only thing you thought of, obviously the problem lies in your lack of imagination or creativity.
Some possibilities for a bluff check:
1) Distracting the guard with chatter so they forget to check the cake for files or similar.
2) Bluffing that their superior officer/politician/important merchant wanted this done/gave them permission.
3) Making the cake out of some disgusting material that the guards wouldn't eat, but convincing them that the friend would enjoy it (kills two birds with one stone)
4) Bring multiple food items and let the guards pick which ones they want (to both bribe them and also trick them into not checking them for files, as if they got their pick, obviously you aren't hiding food it it!) but via various psychological manipulations/sleight of hand not give them the one with the file in it.
Also, if you thought the guards would eat the cake rather than deliver it, maybe you'd put a knockout poison in it instead, and your bluff checks would basically be to manipulate the guards into eating the cake themselves while seeming like you wanted it delivered to your friend.
I'm just going to leave this here.
Are you seriously disagreeing with "not everything requires a die roll"?
If so, then you are wrong. See also: 2nd edition DMG, 3rd edition DMG, 3.5 edition DMG, 4th edition DMG...
First: That's not what he said. Second: Hasbro bought D&D and handed it to WotC, including the 3e project. WotC finished 3e, and sold it. Hasbro did market research, and found the biggest selling books were the Core books, and so, because they're a toy company more accustomed to the "minor project to sell shit loads of merch which can be replaced every so often" model than the "make one product, and support it as long as possible, making minor fixes as necessary" one. So 4e was made at Hasbro's behest, and now core books are coming out of Hasbro's ass.
WotC purchased TSR in 1997. Hasbro bought WotC in
1999. So, unless Hasbro also has a time machine stowed away somewhere, your entire conspiracy theory is shot to shit.
Seriously. We landed on the Moon, too, FYI.
And you know how they did that? Dragon Magazine. Gee, what was the first thing to go when 4e came along? Dragon and Dungeon Magazine. Yeah, that was smart... *headdesk*
No, actually, that's not how they did it, because they are not morons.
Turns out, people who subscribe to Dragon Magazine? NOT representative of their audience.
They sent out a survey to 65,000 people to sample the population. They then did a follow up survey with a thousand representative respondants from the initial survey.
I'd ask if you knew anything about market research, but it is pretty obvious you don't.
They have three years, and when 4e came out, it was pretty clear they'd been working on it concurrent with 3.5 for just about the entire time 3.5 had been out.
Half of it, actually.
Besides, if you're not willing to put time and effort into the game, maybe you should go play an MMO.
If you aren't willing to make an intelligent argument, maybe you should go play an MMO.
Ah yes, so much better than making the grapple rules easier to use and useful...
Yes, actually.
No, D&D is for everyone. An alot of them tend to want to do at least one of those things. So according to you, no one should play D&D, except you. Have fun.
Okay, you are wrong. D&D is not for everyone, including women who are pregnant or might become pregnant. Check with your doctor if you have liver problems before taking...
Oh, right. But seriously, it isn't for everyone. Its not supposed to be. If you think it is, then you are, simply put, wrong. This is true of pretty much every product; indeed, I can't think of any product whose target audience is "everyone". I mean, you'd LIKE for everyone to purchase your product, but in this world, that's not how things work. Different people have different wants and needs, and by satisfying some you are going to dissatisfy others. This is a fundamental part of marketing, something you obviously don't understand.
'scuse me while I go cast speak with dead so you can tell Mr.s Gygax and Arneson that they weren't supposed to have characters leading armies...
Actually, that's the underlying basis of Dungeons & Dragons - a wargame where you control only a single character.
I thought this was well understood as the inpsiration for the game in the first place.
Which is why every class needs some way of putting together an army, and a mass combat engine needs to be worked up. People are going to want to lead armies. Now, sure, the LotR game probably has great mass combat rules, but it probably doesn't have much in the way of necromancy rules, it's not appropriate to the setting. Armies are, however, appropriate to D&D's setting, as are ravening hordes of undead. Not only does D&D need mass combat rules, but it needs mass combat rules that can handle single people taking on armies. It's probably better (and easier) to add mass combat rules to D&D than necromancy rules to LotR.
No. Its why no class needs some way of putting together an army. This is Dungeons & Dragons, not Chainmail.
I'm not sure whether to laugh my ass off or cry because you seem to actually believe this...
Given other people agree with me, and you seem to think Hasbro are a bunch of time-travelling capitalist genies, I'm going to go with the people who agree that this is the case.
and yet you seem to think skill checks are actually useful... Either you're a pathological liar, or seriously disturbed...
They are useful for some things. They are far from optimal as they can break in half if someone bothers.
um... no.... controlling trade in the region is not handwavium, it is "DM, hook me up with a beat adventure a bunch of people to push around and maybe kill a few of so the king has to actually send a level appropriate encounter to stop us!"
... which is exactly the same in both editions, and is, in fact, handwavium? There's no mechanic for how you control trade or what exactly that means.
lets see... Wizards and sorcerers get extra actions with haste, and time stop, and familiars... Rangers and druids get extra actions through companions... clerics get extra actions through undead... Paladins get extra actions through mounts...
that's just over half the classes that are getting extra actions and rounds through class features. I think it's okay to let the rest train creatures... especially since it makes sense for a good number of them (barbarian, fighter and rogue)
Which still doesn't solve the other problem - that of turns taking forever.
no, it's not a reasonable way of doing it, you might as well give rangers polymorph.
There is a class which has the ability to shapechange, though you can't really do anything useful with it without expending powers.
Having two bodies around is different from having one changing body.
Actually, combat's getting better in computer games, look at Kingdom Hearts 2 and the God of War series.
You can make interesting monsters, but I would not really cite those games for it. Devil May Cry was far better (if harder). Of course, I actually like a challenge in my games, rather than "I'll play this on the highest difficulty to start out with and it is still easy".
Not that I expect people to actually cater THAT much to me, as I'm far better than the average gamer (in terms of pick-up talent), which means that I'm beyond their target. But when games include multiple difficulty levels and the highest is still too easy, I wonder what the point is - isn't the idea so that people like me can still play their game and enjoy it, as well as adding replay value as the weaker player gets better at it?
If you need someone to pick locks and the rogue is nowhere to be found, drop some gold in a street thug's hands, they'll give it a shot. If you need someone to listen around the castle, talk to the servants, spread a little gold around, you'll get everything that's happened in the castle, ever.
Sure. Or you could use a ritual. And hiring thugs isn't always a possibility when you're in a dungeon/ruins/wherever you've managed to put yourself.
You can't tell me that I'm supposed to be serious about a game edition that actually plans to write and release the "Player's Handbook IV" and the "Game Runner's Guide V"
That's a self-parody right there. It's a shining example of thoughtless marketing. If you put that in some kind of media, people would seriously recognize it as a cheap dig at companies, by exaggerating the common perception. It's like that line in one of the Harry Potter books, where the name of a video game is "Mega Mutilation 3".
And yet, it's actually true.
3e at least tried to fill all the niches well enough you wouldn't need to write another book about it, were it done right. And, hell, it was a big deal with 3.5 PHB2 was released. I was surprised to hear they were going to do it again.
But now, there's already a PHB2 and 4e's been out for more than a year.
I'm sorry... you obviously missed the part where 3.x did the exact same thing, but shittier.
You notice how Complete Warrior, Complete Arcane, Complete Divine, ect. all had classes in their front, new feats in them, new spells, ect? So... what's the difference between putting the new classes in a new PHB, and putting new options for the classes which previously existed (as well as a few new ones) in a X Power book?
I'm sorry, but the idea that this is some sort of terribly novel thing is simply wrong. WotC has been doing this shit for years, and TSR did the same thing. They simply rearranged how they were doing it. Now the PHBs have clases in them, and the class splatbooks are actually -class splatbooks- (well, more multiple class splatbooks, but that has always been the case).
You didn't ever realize they were doing it before because you weren't paying attention, and now that you can actually understand what's going on you think it is some sort of fundamental change.
Here's a link to an article which summarizes that "market research" that was done a decade ago by WotC, which the previous poster was probably thinking of.
http://www.theescapist.com/WotCsummary1.htm
The problem with the article is that it is missing a lot of details, which makes it difficult to verify whether the study was done properly or not. There's also no easy way to authenticate many of the numbers presented.
They've done at least one more such survey since then, but the results are not public knowledge.
And as for it being missing a lot of details, its missing them because WotC paid to get that information. The way to verify the numers would obviously be to do the market research, which is, you know, the entire POINT of doing market research.
Yeah, but the previews show that Bruce Cordell managed to whine until he could make a set of classes that are only partially compatible with the rest of the system.
It's not psionics unless it's unmanageable and confusing.
Its funny because it is true.
Name 4e's non-combat abilities then. Anime and The Hobbit have non-combat stuff in them. The Hobbit is mostly non-combat. So lets hear it, what part of 4e covers any part of The Hobbit outside of a fight? You've already admitted the skills are worthless, theres not much left.
Skills, rituals, some powers have non-combat applications.
"But I thought you said that skills are worthless! Ha! You're a hypocrite!"
I thought I also said 3.x sucked. So you're saying that's true as well?
It is true. The skills are irreparably broken. They are less broken than 3.x's, however.
Frank and the rest want the players to be able to really deconstruct the gameworld. Read his stuff on the wish based economy its still around on the board. Its a very entertaining read. It also a style of play that only a tiny fraction of the gaming populous would even understand much less actually be able to play. Its all pretty hard core.
And this is
perfectly fine. But D&D was never really meant to cater to him in the first place.
Its not that I don't understand why he's upset; he's upset because he feels that he has been excluded from the audience of the game. The trouble is that he was never meant to be a part of that audience in the first place, and that his desire for the game is at odds with those of other people. As those other people are more numerous, its very likely he will not be catered to by a product aimed at them because he isn't important enough as a demographic.
I understand this pain. I'm a guy who plays video games, and I sometimes feel the same way because I am very good at video games, and most video games are designed so that their target audience can beat them. Sadly, this makes a lot of games hopelessly easy for me, even on "hard" mode, such as the aforementioned Kingdom Hearts games. And games which aren't hopelessly easy for me, such as Devil May Cry, get complained about for being too difficult. I beat Cerebus in DMC 3. A lot of people couldn't because they simply were not good enough at the game.
Now, this isn't to say that these companies are necessarily wise for neglecting me; in some cases (such as the original Devil May Cry) they can make differences in difficulty which allow both the unskilled player and myself to be satisfied. If they screw up, as in DMC 3, I'm happy but the average player gets controller-snappingly frustrated. So its more important for them to get the normal difficulty right.
And that's just DIFFICULTY. What he wants is an entirely different gameplay experience, like turning DMC into a FPS or a JRPG. There's nothing wrong with an FPS, but that doesn't mean that every game will be one, because there are other audiences. Perhaps a more appropriate example would be an Adventure game, which is a far more niche genre than an action game like Devil May Cry - if a company wants to sell a million units, they're probably going to make an action game, not an adventure game. It sucks, too.
I agree that the hatred of 4e on this board is a bit rabid, but 3ed really did try to simulate the world even if it failed. In 3ed I could make a wizard who didn't even do damage and was a positive contribution to the party. I could make characters whose schticks were something unrelated to combat.
You can make a wizard who does little damage in 4th edition, and who primarily focuses on being a controller, and be very useful to the party. Indeed, that's more or less what wizards are supposed to be.
But as for "a character whose schtick is something unrelated to combat" - that's bad design in a system so intent on combat (which 3.x was, no less than 4th edition). Being able to sacrifice combat effectiveness for noncombat effectiveness, and vice-versa, is not a good thing if it can be done to a significant degree, because it leads to the "sitting out" problem.
I was just now making a 4e character. I wanted to make the batman wizard who just supported the party and didn't do damage. I look at the supposedly controller wizard and quickly came to the conclusion that the controller class is a joke as far as being a support class. It's all about damage and that's it. 90% of his powers deal with taking out enemies by disabling them or dealing damage.
Well, there are a lot of very bad wizard powers. The class is fine in terms of power level, but there are some powers (like Fireball) which are utter garbage because the class is meant to be a controller (they have a striker secondary, incidentally, which is probably why they have them... but they are mostly pretty awful and not worth taking). They deal damage and disable them with powers. That's what controllers do. They don't deal as much as other classes, which isn't necessarily very noticable in a vacuum. But when you are actually playing, and you deal 30 damage and the ranger deals 70, its very noticable.
Why would I play 4e D&D over Mordheim or Necromunda?
The combat systems in those games are better and more interesting. The characters have deeper and more interesting "world" powers. I'm dead serious. Mordheim is a tactical miniatures game, and it is more of an RPG than 4e D&D.
Mordheim and Necromunda are both enjoyable, but they aren't the same thing as an RPG, and claiming it is more of an RPG than 4e is wrong. There isn't really any roleplaying involved in it. You don't play your zombies like morons, or your wizard as a coward.
All you need to make a shitty 4e character is to draw their powers randomly (or worse, ignorantly).
Depends on the class. Unless you screw up your stats, its actually very difficult to make an actively bad fighter. On the other hand, if you try to play a striker wizard, your character is probably going to be crap.
Thing is, however, you can retrain all your powers, and people often do so. The wizard in my current campaign figured out at level 9 how controllers actually worked, and suddenly changed his character around considerably. Now his character is much more useful and synergistic with the rest of the party. He has retrained an at-will power, a first level encounter power, a third level encounter power, a fifth level daily power, and he has changed his seventh level encounter power TWICE over the course of his career. So even if you do make bad choices, you can change them. Except for stats which aren't retrainable (it is true that retraining your stats could allow you to do some sort of stupid things, but I'm not sure its worth screwing people).
And it is really hard to not break the fourth wall when you want to use you magical might to do some story effects and you are reminded that all your good shit is combat only. Furthermore your combat schticks are clearly intended to be used in small boxes. Pigeon holes are where essentially all 4e characters make their home.
Not really. The wizard in my current campaign is a sailor. He sometimes uses thunderwave to push his ship a little, he has used Blur to easedrop, and the whole party has used their skills out of combat (as well as done various other things).
Unstated Premise: 4e combat is better than 3e combat. Analysis: Wrong.
Its actually true.
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.
You don't just push people around. There's a wide variety of debuffs.
Plus, pushing people around matters a lot more if you fight in interesting environments.
Well, let's see. I have a True fiend who makes elaborate dungeons in his spare time, 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.
Okay, I see the problem.
This is all stuff that, frankly, isn't stuff that the game is meant for,
and never was. And also is a bit compensatory.
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.
Thing is... let's consider 3.x. It lacks even skill challenges.
So, by your very own reasoning, there is no non-combat thing at all in the game, so you should like it
even less.
Clearly, you do not. So it isn't the real issue. This is a "fake issue", something people throw up to avoid what their issue REALLY is (often because they don't know what it is which leaves them dissatisfied).
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.
Thing is, adventurers are assumed to be rare. Why is this? To make them more special. Thus, there isn't really an economy for them to interact with, because what they're doing is beyond the mortal ken, and there really isn't an economy as far as magic items go, because there are so few consumers. Heros don't consume 10,000 horseshoes.
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.
And I think here's the important thing to consider: What IS the game trying to accomplish?
3.x, to some degree, didn't make that decision. 4th edition decided that the game is about adventuring, and focused on that. People who were trying to make 3.x work for something it wasn't designed for are frustrated because they got rid of what was, from the perspective of their goal, bad.
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.
Teleport is a ritual, Invisibility still exists (and honestly, it isn't actually very different from 3.x's invisibility, its just that you can only use it 1x/day), Fly still exists (and the main difference is you're flying for only one combat in 4e, or 5 minutes, whereas in 3.x you were flying for a few), Knock (which is worse than just picking the lock, if you have someone who CAN)...
If you're going to list things which are missing, you should find things which are actually gone. Yes, the ability to flood cities and create walls for cities are gone because the first is really more villainous and the second is pretty much outside the scope of the game. (You can still create temporary walls, incidentally)
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.
3rd edition combat was utter crap and I'm glad it was destroyed. Save or dies and save or sucks are terribly unfun, and combat was absurdly swingy. Monsters also didn't last long enough to be meaningful or feel threatening, and the number of monsters you fought was off. It also had the whole "number of actions" issue, as well as a high degree of repititiousness. And healing was horribly designed. Combat in 3.x was actually my least favorite part of the game, which, when I came to realize it, made me quit playing. I kept running my 3.x campaign out, which hurt sometimes, but I had a great group of players and I ran a lot of non-combat stuff.
4th edition combat is actually mostly quite enjoyable. It is much closer to correct.
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.
Thing is, though, those strategic powers completely annihilated tactics. You could just scry and die, or walk through the dungeon's walls without thinking about it. I think it was much less fun because the strategies were simple and obvious.
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").
This is actually entirely wrong.
The reason is actually simple. Firstly, most of your wealth isn't in the form of liquid wealth, but rather in the form of items you can use (and are not meant to sell). If you sell them, you're being stupid, and if you play stupidly, you can make yourself unhappy in any game.
So only about a fifth of your wealth lies in coins, jewelry, ect. And, really, you don't need to keep track of mundane expenses, because the amount of money you have is vast in comparison to the amount of money a barrel of pickeled herring costs. Unless it is a big purchase (a ship), it really doesn't matter.
The only thing you can really burn money on is rituals and magic items, and you're mostly supposed to spend it on the latter. The former, due to their narrowness, are intended to be last resorts or conveniences, not requirements, and if you are using a ritual as part of an adventure, and the DM intended for you to do so, then the DM is being an ass if they aren't providing you with compensation for it (and indeed, the rules actually encourage you to drop some ritual reagents for the characters to use occaisionally).
So really, this is unfounded.
The money you get in 4th edition is designed with the idea that you're actually spending it rationally in mind.
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."
Which is perfectly reasonable. Yes, rituals are not hugely useful. This is entirely intentional because, guess what, if you could use them for free all the time you would. And this is bad. Why is this bad?
Because it means you cannot make rituals which are actually useful, because then they'll be used all the time and make that character overpowered because they now have a huge number of out of combat abilities in addition to their incombat abilities. There isn't really any compensation here for anyone else.
Rituals have a few purposes.
1) Convenience. The teleportation rituals and tenser's floating disc are good examples of this.
2) Gap fillers. If you don't have someone with trained Theivery, you can have knock and open locks. It sucks, but you can do it.
3) "We're stuck, help!" Divinations, mostly. Arguably gap fillers and this are the same thing.
4) Story effects. Stuff like scrying, water breathing, sending, ect.
Thing is, these are all useful to have around in the game; however, these effects have some power behind them, and as such a simple feat or class feature is insufficient payment. So they have a gp cost to prevent them from being spammed. Divinations in particular should have a monetary cost, because it makes people think before they use them - more or less, if you can solve it without spending money on a ritual, you'll want to do so, so they're "get a hint" lines. Gap fillers could be eliminated entirely, but I think they prefer for people not to have issues if they put a locked door in a dungeon (though, frankly, there are other solutions).
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.
Which is a good thing in a party-based game.
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!'
That's because flight is ridiculously powerful and problematic. Many people don't really understand flight's impact on the game.
If you can always fly, nonflying monsters shouldn't exist. But people like fighting monsters which don't fly.
Flight also screws characters who take up space on the battlefield - namely, melee combatants, because they take up less space.
Flight makes the game less tactical, because terrain is less of a concern (and when it does matter, it often feels contrived).
And flight is more difficult to represent on a battlemat, as it requires a third dimension.
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'?
Because in a game where you save the world in paragon tier, you are saving the universe in epic.
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?
Because they're bloodthirsty, clearly!
And I think the monster names are not meant to be understood outside the D&D bubble, to be honest.
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.
It knows what it is doing. But you don't want it to.
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 don't think this is entirely fair. You just can't do certain absurdly broken things out of combat anymore. For example, charming someone or dominating them is no longer possible for long periods of time - you can dominate them for a round, or possibly a few if you're high enough level. Which is entirely reasonable. After all, its far stronger to actually GAIN CONTROL of your enemy than it is to kill them.
Well, you could always reflavor your diplomacy check as charming them into seeing you in a more favorable light, but a lot of people argue that isn't really the same thing.
