[Not 4e] What will we see from 5e?

[RandomCasualty2]

The aforementioned horse-archer party could, as one example, refuse or abandon any quest or mission that forces them into tight spaces.

Well sure, but generally denying a quest is just being a dick.

I mean you could say that you can be unbeatable in 3.5 by denying every quest that doesn't involve only CR 1 monsters.

I mean shit if you don't go into tight spaces in a game called Dungeons and Dragons... that's pretty bad.

[Just another user]

No, I said it's foolish and a sign of an inexperienced DM to use it in an obviously broken way

The problem is that the "obviusly broken way" is the way the game is written, and isn't 4e edition to be targeted expecially to new, i.e inexperienced", players/GMs.

[Roy]

The aforementioned horse-archer party could, as one example, refuse or abandon any quest or mission that forces them into tight spaces.

Well sure, but generally denying a quest is just being a dick.

I mean you could say that you can be unbeatable in 3.5 by denying every quest that doesn't involve only CR 1 monsters.

I mean shit if you don't go into tight spaces in a game called Dungeons and Dragons... that's pretty bad.

So not letting yourself be railroaded is being a dick? Because chances are, there's more than one thing going wrong at once, so you can just focus on the things that don't involve going inside. And the rest? Well someone else can deal with it. Or not. It's not as if anything bad will happen to the invincible sprites if you don't. Or the world will change. Whatever.

Because 4.Fail is D&D in name only, so an argument about the name is automatically invalid.

[Absentminded_Wizard]

So, am I missing something, or do HPJ's arguments consist almost entirely of 1) spamming the Oberoni fallacy, and 2) Calling 4e either a ROLEplaying game or a combat-centric game, depending on his immediate needs in the debate?

[Roy]

You're right about the spellcasters > all in 3e point. Anyway, the reason I asked whether or not we were assuming that every fight was an open field is that clearly, not every fight is going to be. You said the game breaks because of horse archers. You're basically throwing a bunch of hypothetical bullshit out here and assuming that there's a bad DM at the 4e table. A bad DM makes any game suck.

More handwaving bullshit. Are you now railroading the PCs into not always fighting in the open? Because if you are, it's still proving me right via Oberoni. And if you aren't, they just don't do that.

The fact that in 3.5 being a dumbfuck on a horse does not break the game or even make most people care, and in 4.Fail doing the same thing is practically an auto win button (and it is only 'practically' so because about 5% of the MOBs can actually shoot back). And the reason why that is so is because in 3.5 people have actual abilities and actual tactics, so they can counter dumbfuck on horse pretty easily. In 4.Fail they're stuck standing there asking themselves 'Hurk durk hurk?'

Kiting owns 4.Fail's face for exactly the same reasons it owns face in MMORPGs. Except that there you don't expect MOBs to have real abilities due to programming limitations - so going from 3.5 to 4.Fail is a great example of WotC insulting their player base.

Now, I and other intelligent people respond to this by telling WotC to fuck right off as well. You respond to it with something to the effect of 'Thank you sir, may I have another?'

...

A DM that repeatedly sets up fights where kiting enemies to death like in an MMO is a viable option is, again, a bad DM. This is a poor argument at best. You're essentially taking hypotheticals -- things that could be done on paper -- and using it to say that 4e sucks. That's weak. I could do the same thing with other systems that are generally regarded as playable.

He doesn't have a choice, other than 'don't play 4.Fail' which is perfectly valid. Otherwise already covered.

I'm going to ask you how much 4e you have played. It's a common trend for those who haven't (or have extremely limited experience) that rag on it tend to do so via improbable, hypothetical what-ifs like the horse archer PCs on an open field versus melee scenario, or by pointing out the lack of inconsequential minutia like how much damage a commoner should be able to do with a kitchen fork. Right now you're fitting that bill, just like PR.

Typical response from the 4.Fail fanatics - 'Have you played it?'

Skipping the obvious mind rotting jokes, skipping the obvious jokes about how you aren't actually playing it while you're defending it, and skipping the obvious jokes about how it's so bland and predictable you can set an excel script to play for you... What the fuck? How could you possibly deduce that any part of that is 'improbable'?

Let's see... getting a horse or similar mount = not hard at all.
Open field = also not hard, keeping in mind that trees of any number only provide normal cover and therefore even deep forest is an 'open field' for this purpose.
Melee enemies = given that 95% of them are limited to very short ranges, if not necessarily 'melee' and you aren't you still outrange and kite almost everything in the MM. And for the few MOBs that can actually shoot back, you'll need to go from 'dumbfuck with horse' to 'halfway competent horse archer'. But otherwise you just auto win because they do zero damage to you and you do an amount of damage greater than zero to them since they aren't immune to being shot with arrows. And nothing they do matters because while they might get a little resistance with say... cover all that means is more pointless rounds to be auto attack grinded through.

And that 'inconsequential minutia' is called 'making a believable world' which explains why you have such a hard on for signpost sprite NPCs.

This seems to be true. If you were a spellcaster or had access to UMD at least. While there are some very useful, low cost rituals/alchemy in 4e, they number less than their equivalents in 3e (I'm disappointed at the lack of cost-effective scrying).

A 3.5 Fighter with Knockback and Improved Trip has more options than any of the 4.Fail MOBs.

But in the end you're still there to fight monsters and gain experience, and gain gold, and gain better items so you can continue to do more of the same stuff. Which is what I was trying to point out. Saying it had "infinitely more" options is an exaggeration. D&D has always, at its core, been a combat-centric game.

And there's still more material being released for 4e.

Irrelevant Point is Irrelevant.

And given that their material could also be released via an excel spreadsheet since it's just picking two stats already used, writing random bullshit for the fluff text, then making it do either piddly shit damage or piddly shit damage + minor effect it really doesn't fucking matter how much more material they release, aside from perhaps this raising the entry cost to 4.Fail what with its 'everything is core' and all. But that isn't a point in your favor either.

If you're just going to keep chanting your mantra of "religious fanatic" every time you don't feel like refuting my points logically, then I'm going to ignore your posts. Full stop.

Says the guy who has yet to actually use logic and instead maintains his self delusions. The parallel is extremely apt. And just like the people who try to make some bizarre handwaving justification bullshit for how a supposedly good and loving deity can all for the annihilation of... pretty much everything and generally behave like a sociopathic stalker, you and the other 4.Fail fanatics are trying to make bizarre handwaving justifications for how that system is doing exactly the opposite of what it is supposed to do if it does anything at all.

Really, how else do you explain most of your posts making the exact opposite point you were allegedly aiming to make?

Edit:

So, am I missing something, or do HPJ's arguments consist almost entirely of 1) spamming the Oberoni fallacy, and 2) Calling 4e either a ROLEplaying game or a combat-centric game, depending on his immediate needs in the debate?

Nope, you got it in one. He's a basketweaver 1/self deluder 1/champion of FAIL 1.

[mean_liar]

It's bullshit to assume that because 4e doesn't do mounted combat well that the entire system is broken. It's especially bullshit to make the claim that if we can't all play horse archers every fucking time we play then this is shit.

There are plenty of complaints to be made, but to latch on to mounts being fucked and then saying that a GM that expects you to dismount sometime is a horrible person is just stupid.

[Roy]

It's bullshit to assume that because 4e doesn't do mounted combat well that the entire system is broken. It's especially bullshit to make the claim that if we can't all play horse archers every fucking time we play then this is shit.

There are plenty of complaints to be made, but to latch on to mounts being fucked and then saying that a GM that expects you to dismount sometime is a horrible person is just stupid.

Sirlin's Playing to Win. Since the 4.Fails have yet to manage to counter this simple move, I have no reason to move on to other techniques and reasons why 4.0 is made of Fail.

So no, it's not the only reason, it's just the most pressing because dude with horse shooting things in the face is not a very specific archetype at all. This sort of thing comes up all the time and by pure accident.

And the problem isn't that that specific case is a game breaker. It's the concept of incredibly basic and intuitive things you can stumble on entirely by accident just auto win. It would be like a FPS on the PS2 activating God Mode when you press X and O at the same time... and those are the shoot and jump buttons, that are also right next to each other.

If the 4.Fails could actually counter that, then we can move on to 'stunlocks lulz' and the massive grind fest and yogi hats and even the cheating being boring and your mom... Because it would honestly be easier to list the things that are not problems with 4.Fail.

In fact, here's a full list now.

But see, that's not how Sirlin works.

[violence in the media]

The aforementioned horse-archer party could, as one example, refuse or abandon any quest or mission that forces them into tight spaces.

Well sure, but generally denying a quest is just being a dick.

Wait, what? Are you saying that my Mongol can't refuse the widows and orphans that want me to go into the Caves of Terror to slay the evil wizard ( aquest that doesn't play to my strengths) because I'd rather be hunting the tribe of cyclops that are raiding the steppes (a quest that does)?

I mean you could say that you can be unbeatable in 3.5 by denying every quest that doesn't involve only CR 1 monsters.

You could, but there's actual disincentives for doing this. Eventually, you stop getting exp for these opponents. And the time between levels at 5+ may become interminably long for some players if measured in CR 1 kills.

I mean shit if you don't go into tight spaces in a game called Dungeons and Dragons... that's pretty bad.

Hey man, The sky is my ceiling, the earth is my bed, let never a structure close over my head.

[Fuchs]

It's not the question whether or not you go into Dungeons, it's whether you can leave the Dungeons without the game breaking down,

[Hotpants Joe]

So not letting yourself be railroaded is being a dick? Because chances are, there's more than one thing going wrong at once, so you can just focus on the things that don't involve going inside. And the rest? Well someone else can deal with it. Or not. It's not as if anything bad will happen to the invincible sprites if you don't. Or the world will change. Whatever.

Okay. You're either straight up trolling, or just horrible at RPGs. Some degree of railroading is necessary in a game with a DM. It doesn't have to be full-on. If the adventure involves going into a Keep to investigate, for example, you either go in and do what you need to, or you bail on the adventure. Refusing to do anything the DM throws at you unless it meets your list of specifications is being a shitty, uncooperative player.

If I tell my players to go north, they don't have to go exactly north. I can prepare for northeast, or northwest. I can probably even swing an east or a west if I really try. But if they want to go south? Fuck 'em.

[violence in the media]

Okay. You're either straight up trolling, or just horrible at RPGs. Some degree of railroading is necessary in a game with a DM. It doesn't have to be full-on. If the adventure involves going into a Keep to investigate, for example, you either go in and do what you need to, or you bail on the adventure. Refusing to do anything the DM throws at you unless it meets your list of specifications is being a shitty, uncooperative player.

If I tell my players to go north, they don't have to go exactly north. I can prepare for northeast, or northwest. I can probably even swing an east or a west if I really try. But if they want to go south? Fuck 'em.

How is neutering a closet troll being a shitty player? Especially if you're focued on being a ranged fighter? Are you just supposed to fight a monster on its terms because the DM says so? Are we not allowed to try and lure these creatures out of the keep so we can arrow-enema them in the courtyard? Also, in Oberoni land, is a railroad-y DM one of the good ones or bad ones?

Yeah, that's true, I probably shouldn't have implied that. If you want to play a party of ranged characters who focus solely on keeping enemies away from them then more power to you. If you're getting bored with combat because of this, then it's up to the DM to present challenging fights. It's up to the DM to provide a good game period, really.

Wait a minute, here you said it was ok for us to be ranged characters and that it was the DM's job to make challenging fights for us. Did you mean that the DM was supposed to make challenging fights for us by arbitrarily forcing us into melee, or that he was supposed to use ranged combatants so we could have shooty fights?

[Hotpants Joe]

More handwaving bullshit. Are you now railroading the PCs into not always fighting in the open? Because if you are, it's still proving me right via Oberoni. And if you aren't, they just don't do that.

Are you even aware of what handwaving means? I didn't handwave anything. You just like repeating inappropriate phrases without thinking. I straight up told you that you're taking a possible scenario in a 4e game where it breaks (an open field fight with short-ranged enemies vs horse archers) and saying that the whole 4e system fails because of it. That's bullshit.

The fact that in 3.5 being a dumbfuck on a horse does not break the game or even make most people care, and in 4.Fail doing the same thing is practically an auto win button (and it is only 'practically' so because about 5% of the MOBs can actually shoot back). And the reason why that is so is because in 3.5 people have actual abilities and actual tactics, so they can counter dumbfuck on horse pretty easily. In 4.Fail they're stuck standing there asking themselves 'Hurk durk hurk?'

/facepalm

It's not an auto-win button because unless you have a bad DM, not every damned fight is going to be open field + horse archers. Seriously. Tell me how "dumbfucks on horses" win every time when your party's goal is to oust a cult hiding underneath a city? Confined spaces. Please address this without throwing more of your "BUT THAT'S RAILROADING!!" bullshit.

Now, I and other intelligent people respond to this by telling WotC to fuck right off as well. You respond to it with something to the effect of 'Thank you sir, may I have another?'

Do intelligent people also intentionally find ways to break the system with an unrealistic set of criteria? Hint: just because you can do something with a system doesn't mean you should and that doing so is a good representation of the game.

He doesn't have a choice, other than 'don't play 4.Fail' which is perfectly valid. Otherwise already covered.

No, this hasn't been covered by you. I explained pretty clearly how it's stupid to assume that players always have the kite MMO option you've displayed, and you're falling back on this binary concept of "either you play the game in its most broken manner possible, or you don't play it at all." If you can't see why this is a huge fallacy, then I'm done with you.

Typical response from the 4.Fail fanatics - 'Have you played it?'

So in other words, you haven't played it. Thought so.

Let's see... getting a horse or similar mount = not hard at all.
Open field = also not hard, keeping in mind that trees of any number only provide normal cover and therefore even deep forest is an 'open field' for this purpose.
Melee enemies = given that 95% of them are limited to very short ranges, if not necessarily 'melee' and you aren't you still outrange and kite almost everything in the MM. And for the few MOBs that can actually shoot back, you'll need to go from 'dumbfuck with horse' to 'halfway competent horse archer'. But otherwise you just auto win because they do zero damage to you and you do an amount of damage greater than zero to them since they aren't immune to being shot with arrows. And nothing they do matters because while they might get a little resistance with say... cover all that means is more pointless rounds to be auto attack grinded through.

Tell you what. You go ahead and sign up for a local 4e game and try to pull this off. Let me know how it goes.

And that 'inconsequential minutia' is called 'making a believable world' which explains why you have such a hard on for signpost sprite NPCs.

Yeah, you're right, it's important to calculate out the number of citizens in a town, the number of low-income households, the number of middle-class households, and to roll 1d4 children for each family. 1d6 for low-income. Oh, and you better stat all of them out, because you never know when a fight may erupt where they have to get involved! We must have more charts and tables to protect us from bad DMs who can't come up with this stuff easily on their own!

"signpost sprite NPCs"? Sounds like a possible strawman. You'll have to explain what you mean.

A 3.5 Fighter with Knockback and Improved Trip has more options than any of the 4.Fail MOBs.

Sure they do. If by 'fighter' you mean '2 levels of fighter and the other levels in a class that doesn't suck'.

Irrelevant Point is Irrelevant.

So because I've pointed out how 3e is about as much of a grind as you claim 4e to be, and you have nothing to come back with, it's irrelevant? You really enjoy throwing out inappropriate terms at your beck and whim. By the way, what you've done here is essentially handwaving. Maybe you'll use the term properly in the future?

Unless you actually address this, I'm assuming you've conceded here.

And given that their material could also be released via an excel spreadsheet since it's just picking two stats already used, writing random bullshit for the fluff text, then making it do either piddly shit damage or piddly shit damage + minor effect it really doesn't fucking matter how much more material they release, aside from perhaps this raising the entry cost to 4.Fail what with its 'everything is core' and all. But that isn't a point in your favor either.

A DDI subscription costs $50/year and lets you get all of the core updates in the character builder. It's a seriously good deal for a player. And that's ignoring book sharing.

Says the guy who has yet to actually use logic and instead maintains his self delusions. The parallel is extremely apt. And just like the people who try to make some bizarre handwaving justification bullshit for how a supposedly good and loving deity can all for the annihilation of... pretty much everything and generally behave like a sociopathic stalker, you and the other 4.Fail fanatics are trying to make bizarre handwaving justifications for how that system is doing exactly the opposite of what it is supposed to do if it does anything at all

The only thing I've handwaved is the subject of minutia in games. You and PR keep insisting that consulting charts and tables for every minor detail is incredibly important, while I'm saying it's not always. You haven't explained *why* it is necessary for an immersive setting.

So, am I missing something, or do HPJ's arguments consist almost entirely of 1) spamming the Oberoni fallacy, and 2) Calling 4e either a ROLEplaying game or a combat-centric game, depending on his immediate needs in the debate?

I wasn't aware that "roleplaying game" and "combat-centric game" were mutually exclusive terms. My bad. Also, thanks for not contributing to the discussion aside from ineffective criticism.

[Hotpants Joe]

How is neutering a closet troll being a shitty player? Especially if you're focued on being a ranged fighter? Are you just supposed to fight a monster on its terms because the DM says so? Are we not allowed to try and lure these creatures out of the keep so we can arrow-enema them in the courtyard? Also, in Oberoni land, is a railroad-y DM one of the good ones or bad ones?

I'm not saying you can't set up tactics that involve luring a group of enemies out into the open so you can exercise ranged supremacy. I'm just saying that it's unrealistic to expect it to work that way every time. If you get a group of monsters/enemies out into the open and begin sniping them from afar with your bows and arrows, they're probably going to retreat back into cover and force you to enter.

I don't know what/who Oberoni is.

Wait a minute, here you said it was ok for us to be ranged characters and that it was the DM's job to make challenging fights for us. Did you mean that the DM was supposed to make challenging fights for us by arbitrarily forcing us into melee, or that he was supposed to use ranged combatants so we could have shooty fights?

The former. A DM should allow you to have fights where your characters shine, but if it's a one-way battle each and every time it gets boring pretty quickly.

[virgil]

It's still a rather telling problem that the game breaks down utterly the moment you leave the closet.

[Username17]

I don't know what/who Oberoni is.

Obviously.

In this case, Oberoni is referring to the Oberoni Fallacy, which was originally coined on the WotC board by a brilliant, tiny, and angry man who posted under the name Oberoni. The short version is "If you say that the rules do not have problems because you can change the rules, then you are wrong." When you are confronted by someone making claim to a problem with the rules, you can engage with them in several ways:

• You can say that the problem claimed is not a problem because the actual rules when actually used as actually written are not problematic in that instance. You can even pull in other rules that the original claimant may have been unaware of that may limit the abuse of the system being discussed.
• You can say that the problem in question is relatively minor and/or unlikely to appear during play. A good example of this is all the ways 4e D&D breaks at 30th level: you can cogently argue that you never intend to play the game at 30th level and really no one else does either, so the game driving off a cliff and catching fire at this point makes no difference.
• You can say that a problem is real and that you have a fix for it that you use.

But you know what's not a possible or acceptable response?

"That rule is not problematic because the DM can change it."

That answer is bullshit. If the DM has to write a new rule, the old rule is problematic. Period. If you make that argument you are automatically wrong.

That's the Oberoni Fallacy. And frankly sir, you've been vomiting it up s hard that it's all over your shirt and keyboard. I am embarrassed for you, because your arguments are not only bad - they have actually been specifically and formally described as invalid. And people are laughing at you. With good cause.

-Username17

[violence in the media]

I'm not saying you can't set up tactics that involve luring a group of enemies out into the open so you can exercise ranged supremacy. I'm just saying that it's unrealistic to expect it to work that way every time. If you get a group of monsters/enemies out into the open and begin sniping them from afar with your bows and arrows, they're probably going to retreat back into cover and force you to enter.

Why are we forced to enter again? We're Mongols. That means we each have a horse, a bow, and a yurt. It also means that we're nomads and huge assholes--the quintessential murdering hobos. If they want to hide in their tower, we burn it down. We shoot anyone that comes out. If they cower in their cave, we seal them in. We wait, we hide, and we kill on our terms. If some hostages get killed in the process, so be it. If it gets to be too much trouble, we leave. When we acquire Gryphons we become sky-Mongols and even bigger bastards.

I don't know what/who Oberoni is.

Essentially, nothing is a problem because a good DM can solve all problems.

Wait a minute, here you said it was ok for us to be ranged characters and that it was the DM's job to make challenging fights for us. Did you mean that the DM was supposed to make challenging fights for us by arbitrarily forcing us into melee, or that he was supposed to use ranged combatants so we could have shooty fights?

The former. A DM should allow you to have fights where your characters shine, but if it's a one-way battle each and every time it gets boring pretty quickly.

Boring for you possibly. Maybe we enjoy the puzzle of how to stack things in such a way that the enemy has no choice but to cry and die.

[RandomCasualty2]

So not letting yourself be railroaded is being a dick?

When you're doing it solely because you are avoiding challenges. Then yes. It's one thing to not do a railroad plot because there's no RP reason your characters would do it. It's another thing just to say "I refuse to fight anything that isn't a dragon" or "I refuse to fight indoors."

I mean seriously, at that point wtf.

Of course, if PCs insist on this, there is an easy fix. Design some monsters specialized in open field combat. It's unsurprising most of the 4E MM isn't specialized for that, because It's a game about fighting indoors. Indoor monsters are designed to fight indoors. If people want to play an outdoor game, you can very well do that with 4E rules. But don't kid yourself into thinking all the monsters you fight are going to suck in open terrain. But you can make ranged attackers in 4E. It's not even that hard.

They're probably all going to be very fast fliers or have brutal ranged attacks. This translates to a bunch of long range artillery monsters.

Because by default in D&D you're going into the monster's home territory and fighting them there, so they're going to be specialized to fight in whatever territory that is.

Sure horse archers break the game if you're putting them against indoor monsters on an open plain. No shit, you're dealing with something specialized for one type of terrain and putting it against something not suited for that style of terrain.

Now if the PCs insist on these types of encounters being the only thing they fight, then they're being total dickheads who are afraid of difficulty. I'd advise they go play Doom 2 with godmode for a few hours and when they get bored with one sided battles, they can come play a real game.

It's seriously no different than a party of 9th level characters in 3.5 deciding they're going to do nothing but fight dire rats and kobolds. It's just a total dick move. And at that point, it's not about refusing to be railroaded, it's just about being a disruptive asshole. And that's precisely what you're doing if you're playing the "If the mission involves getting off our horses or encountering any meaningful resistance, we turn tail and flee and find an easier mission, cause we are a bunch of pussies" game.

[MartinHarper]

It's not an auto-win button because unless you have a bad DM, not every damned fight is going to be open field + horse archers.

It is a metaphorical button that automatically wins in some situations, but is useless in others. You don't even need to be a ranged character - you just need to buy a horse (75g) and a longbow (30g) and make basic attacks. You can call that "an auto-win button" or not, and I don't even care.

Having said that, 4e outdoor combat probably works fine for 99.9% of groups, because as soon as you have one player who gets within charge range because "I can do uber dps with Cloud of Daggers" then the monsters can start attacking.

[mean_liar]

There's a lot of creatures in the MM with Ranged 20 attacks. There's even about 15 with 15/30 or 20/40 ranged attacks.

I don't see how mounts are an ultimate weapon.

[hogarth]

There's a lot of creatures in the MM with Ranged 20 attacks. There's even about 15 with 15/30 or 20/40 ranged attacks.

I don't see how mounts are an ultimate weapon.

Because whenever you encounter one of those monsters, you wail "Railroad! Railroad!", jump on your horse and run away.

[Hotpants Joe]

That answer is bullshit. If the DM has to write a new rule, the old rule is problematic. Period. If you make that argument you are automatically wrong.

Complaints like "the game totally breaks at level 30" with proof is a legitimate gripe. If it's at the point where the DM has to bend over backwards just to make combat at that stage palatable, then that's definitely a case of problematic rules. But needing to fix the easy-factor of skill challenges by limiting aid other action is hardly indicative of a problematic rule. It's a stupidly easy fix that is arguably common sense. Please tell me you see the difference here.

Why are we forced to enter again? We're Mongols. That means we each have a horse, a bow, and a yurt. It also means that we're nomads and huge assholes--the quintessential murdering hobos. If they want to hide in their tower, we burn it down. We shoot anyone that comes out. If they cower in their cave, we seal them in. We wait, we hide, and we kill on our terms. If some hostages get killed in the process, so be it. If it gets to be too much trouble, we leave. When we acquire Gryphons we become sky-Mongols and even bigger bastards.

You're not forced to enter, but depending on the objective you could fail it by refusing to enter. Shoot flaming arrows into the crenelations if you want to, but your opponents could still adjust and hole up to prevent you from doing so. Maybe they have a network of tunnels to work with and and ambush you while you're sleeping. They could engage in a battle of attrition against you where they pop out and take pot-shots the same way you do as well -- once they know you're assaulting the base, they could gather up all of their ranged specialists and outgun you.

If you want to give up on that pursuit, you can move on to others and try the same thing, but unless the DM lets you get away with it constantly, you're going to come up against situations where that tactic simply doesn't work. Then what?

Boring for you possibly. Maybe we enjoy the puzzle of how to stack things in such a way that the enemy has no choice but to cry and die.

Of course. I was speaking in generalities because most gamers enjoy challenge and contention. If you really enjoy this playstyle and find a DM that is cool with it, then go right ahead.

[mean_liar]

"Truly, these are heroes for this new age."

[Roy]

So not letting yourself be railroaded is being a dick? Because chances are, there's more than one thing going wrong at once, so you can just focus on the things that don't involve going inside. And the rest? Well someone else can deal with it. Or not. It's not as if anything bad will happen to the invincible sprites if you don't. Or the world will change. Whatever.

Okay. You're either straight up trolling, or just horrible at RPGs. Some degree of railroading is necessary in a game with a DM. It doesn't have to be full-on. If the adventure involves going into a Keep to investigate, for example, you either go in and do what you need to, or you bail on the adventure. Refusing to do anything the DM throws at you unless it meets your list of specifications is being a shitty, uncooperative player.

If I tell my players to go north, they don't have to go exactly north. I can prepare for northeast, or northwest. I can probably even swing an east or a west if I really try. But if they want to go south? Fuck 'em.

*takes mirror, points it at Joe* Fail.

This is why you suck. Full stop.

Are you even aware of what handwaving means? I didn't handwave anything. You just like repeating inappropriate phrases without thinking. I straight up told you that you're taking a possible scenario in a 4e game where it breaks (an open field fight with short-ranged enemies vs horse archers) and saying that the whole 4e system fails because of it. That's bullshit.

One of many very basic things the system you keep fellating cannot support and shatters into over 9,000 pieces just by considering it. Again, Sirlin.

/facepalm

It's not an auto-win button because unless you have a bad DM, not every damned fight is going to be open field + horse archers. Seriously. Tell me how "dumbfucks on horses" win every time when your party's goal is to oust a cult hiding underneath a city? Confined spaces. Please address this without throwing more of your "BUT THAT'S RAILROADING!!" bullshit.

Sirlin again. Also, full stop at the first sentence. Auto fail. Try again.

Do intelligent people also intentionally find ways to break the system with an unrealistic set of criteria? Hint: just because you can do something with a system doesn't mean you should and that doing so is a good representation of the game.

"Ok, so we're these dudes with horses. And we can totally fucking own shit as long as we're outside, even if its a forest or something. Not so much inside. So we'll just chill out here and take care of outdoor problems."

Once again, Sirlin. If dumbfuck on horse is 'unrealistic' that is further proof Fail System is Fail.

No, this hasn't been covered by you. I explained pretty clearly how it's stupid to assume that players always have the kite MMO option you've displayed, and you're falling back on this binary concept of "either you play the game in its most broken manner possible, or you don't play it at all." If you can't see why this is a huge fallacy, then I'm done with you.

You sure do love using push/pull bullshit on the goalposts. No wonder you wank to 4.Fail so much. But seriously. You have no room to talk about fallacies, given that you can't fucking breathe while screaming Oberoni, and further they actually can do that. And the fact you are now calling it 'the most broken manner possible' to be dumbfucks with bows again screams volumes about the extreme fragility of 4.Fail.

So in other words, you haven't played it. Thought so.

And now you've just devolved to hurk durk spam.

Tell you what. You go ahead and sign up for a local 4e game and try to pull this off. Let me know how it goes.

I am right, and I know I am right. All that not working would prove is some DM is a douchebag whiny power tripper. Which is completely irrelevant. So why would I waste my time proving what is already blatantly fucking obvious? Next you'll try to claim getting shot doesn't hurt.

Yeah, you're right, it's important to calculate out the number of citizens in a town, the number of low-income households, the number of middle-class households, and to roll 1d4 children for each family. 1d6 for low-income. Oh, and you better stat all of them out, because you never know when a fight may erupt where they have to get involved! We must have more charts and tables to protect us from bad DMs who can't come up with this stuff easily on their own!

Your snark aside, that probably would protect us from bad DMs. For example, it seems to be scaring you away. Which means it's high time to break out the dice Denners! We got a village to generate!

"signpost sprite NPCs"? Sounds like a possible strawman. You'll have to explain what you mean.

NPCs that exist for no purpose except to say the same one or two lines. Which explains why you like the way 4.Fail handled that.

Sure they do. If by 'fighter' you mean '2 levels of fighter and the other levels in a class that doesn't suck'.

Nope, even a straight classed Fighter with those two feats has more options. Now, such a character is still made of Fail in 3.5, but if you ported it to 4.Fail it would slaughter the MOBs for Great Justice because even basic shit like that can't be countered by the gimps.

So because I've pointed out how 3e is about as much of a grind as you claim 4e to be, and you have nothing to come back with, it's irrelevant? You really enjoy throwing out inappropriate terms at your beck and whim. By the way, what you've done here is essentially handwaving. Maybe you'll use the term properly in the future?

Unless you actually address this, I'm assuming you've conceded here.

You're fucking delusional. Seek professional help. Dead serious. This has gone beyond some dumbfuck spamming lies on the internet.

A DDI subscription costs $50/year and lets you get all of the core updates in the character builder. It's a seriously good deal for a player. And that's ignoring book sharing.

Way to ignore most of the point, and prove the rest right. NEXT!

Anyways, Frank, VitM, and others are smiting the dumbfuck nicely.

Why are we forced to enter again? We're Mongols. That means we each have a horse, a bow, and a yurt. It also means that we're nomads and huge assholes--the quintessential murdering hobos. If they want to hide in their tower, we burn it down. We shoot anyone that comes out. If they cower in their cave, we seal them in. We wait, we hide, and we kill on our terms. If some hostages get killed in the process, so be it. If it gets to be too much trouble, we leave. When we acquire Gryphons we become sky-Mongols and even bigger bastards.

Like this. Since Murdering Hobo = adventurer and Mongols are the quintessential Murdering Hobos, that makes Mongols the best adventurers. QED. By the way, what's a yurt?

And I still want to know how the MOBs are getting in melee range.

When you're doing it solely because you are avoiding challenges. Then yes. It's one thing to not do a railroad plot because there's no RP reason your characters would do it. It's another thing just to say "I refuse to fight anything that isn't a dragon" or "I refuse to fight indoors."

Oberoni. This time not from Joe Fail.

Also, why is it acceptable for the MOBs to stay in their spawn areas to play to their strengths, but it's not ok for the PCs to play to their strengths?

Let me guess - you're one of those types that thinks you should have to go into the water to stab the shark MOB so it can bite you when you could stand on shore and poke it with a spear instead? Fuck you, and fuck your dumbfuck games. Fuckity fuck fuck.

There's a lot of creatures in the MM with Ranged 20 attacks. There's even about 15 with 15/30 or 20/40 ranged attacks.

I don't see how mounts are an ultimate weapon.

Your range is 40, at least. So those at most 15 creatures out of... how many are the only ones that can touch you. And it's probably less than that since by your own admission some have less than 40.

Which means there's even fewer MOBs that can fight back than I thought.

And then you consider that all that means is you need to go from dumbfuck with bow to half decent horse archer to handle those oddball MOBs and there you go.

[RandomCasualty2]

Oberoni. This time not from Joe Fail.

Also, why is it acceptable for the MOBs to stay in their spawn areas to play to their strengths, but it's not ok for the PCs to play to their strengths?

Actually it's not Oberoni, the 4E DMG specifically states that monsters should fight in terrain optimized for them and goes into detail about what terrains work well for different monster types. If you are fighting everything on an open plain, that's actually reverse Oberoni. You're causing a problem by not following the guidelines.

As far as from a logical points, the PCs have some objective that requires them to go into the monsters territory. Sure, they could stay on the plains, but that's not going to achieve a heck of a lot, because all they can really do is defend a single town. So if they want to play Plains Patrol, it's going to be a pretty boring ass game and they can't rescue the princess, they can't get the dragon's treasure, they can't even go into the bugbear cave. They pretty much can't do anything other than attack cities.

Of course, cities are going to have archers and all that anyway, since they're based on using city walls, cover and arrow slits to take down enemies. So the horse archers dance around at the edge of the walls while the town rallies all their archers and fires a deadly volley of focus fire.

Seriously, you're talking about horse archers who can't enter castles, inns, or pretty mcuh any structure. So any enemy can beat them by just going indoors and then the horse archers will basically just leave since they refuse to pursue. What kind of effective adventuring team is that exactly?

"So how'd that turn out with you trying to rescue the princess?"
"Well the bugbears ran into a cave... so we had to back off."
"Ok... well then we sent you against that corrupt lord. You had to have killed him."
"Dude... no, he had a keep."
"The magic sword we hired you to find?"
"Yeah that turned out to be in an indoor ruin... again we were forced to turn back."
"So what can you do?"
" Um... we can guard merchant caravans."
"Damn... do you guys know any real heroes?"

I mean sure, you can play the sailor who absolutely refuses to leave his ship, but that really limits what adventures you can even do. I mean the horse archers couldn't even complete official modules. And if heroes that constantly retreat from danger is your ideal character, then you should just play an agoraphobic character who never leaves his inn room. Imagine how many potential quests you could reject then.

[Roy]

You are invoking Oberoni by making a bunch of new ranged MOBs to handle the massive lack of them by default.

Also, VitM has already covered that nicely.