But, seriously, man. Does 4e have any sort of rule of what happens when you shove someone back into a wall or a statue or over a bench?
Explicitly, no, too many ways too push a guy. But it has rules for knocking a wall, statue or bench into a guy.
Any sort of foundational upon which some rules could be based?
Yes, P.42 DMG. The golden rules for anything in which the rules for would require too much complexity.
If it can't even let me use my environment to my advantage (and if I'm in an occupied dungeon, there'd better be more than 10x10 tunnels and empty rooms with monsters in it.
there is fantastic terrain and terrain powers.
Even caves would have uneven floors and stalagmites and the like) to come up with something A) Awesome B) Unexpected C) Productive, it fails as a tactical game.
Although 4e does do that, I was speaking about when placed in a vacuum anyway. But addressing this point, 4e has rules guiding and promoting improvisation, that actually can be used with anything. 3.5 doesn't. Which in that alone makes 4e's environmental tactics better.
Anyway, my point was that tactics means options. To me, each power and option your character has is like a chess piece. With 4e, if placed into an empty room, I have far more options then in 3.5, whose options are generally limited to just ones basic attack and 1-2 class features. +All those things that cause you to take an AoO, which if you do the math, are rarely the better option.
If placed into a room full of stuff, I still have all those options and whatever stuff I can do with the stuff.
+Maneuvering is more important in 4e.
I have a lot more options in 4e and options=tactics.
-Cinematic combat? What a fucking weasel criteria.
Cinematic feel mainly comes from people actually putting some effort into describing their actions. System support comes in the ways of, oh, having rules for how much effort it takes to break a door, or collapse a column to drop a balcony, or how much a table weighs when you think picking it up and throwing it would make a difference. As with tactical combat, as soon as you can come up with a definition of cinematic that can reasonably exclude 3.x, be sure to let us know
Cinematic combat has three criteria.
1. Use of the Pendelum of Power.
2. Abstract actions.
3. A level of dynamism.
The pendelum of power means there should be a shift in combat, the enemies should usually start out strong, hitting hard, throwing the party for a loop, then the party should come back hitting hard themselves, then there should repeat in an ever decreasingly extreme fashion, until the party wins.
This is a basic technique employed everywhere from Professional Wrestling, to Action Movies, to Lord of the rings, to suspense, to everything. It is considered to be an essential component to any cinematic scene.
4E has the pendelum built into the mechanics, with the second wind and enemy encounter and recharge powers.
As for effective use of the abstract, a hit shouldn't be just a hit, a swing of the sword. Its an attack and anybody who knows anything about combat knows you can't just hit, you must riposte. You got to move, parry, set up your opponent for the strike. You can't just hit. And the attack should encompass this.
Here are two examples of combat, one from a 3.5 game I was in, one from a 4e game.
3.5. Here I made a basic attack against a ghoul with my female Barbarian.
"Sillia brought her axe up uppercutting the ghoul with the flat of the blade, as it stumbled backwards from the blow, she grabbed its throat with her left hand, yanking it back towards her, as it returned it hissed and started clawing her arm, raking sparks on the metal. Then with a flash Sillia grabbed her axe right beneath the head with her left hand, allowing for a quack slash across the ghoul's face."
I had wrote this up while waiting for my turn to come up. ((I save all of the game texts.)) And I got a shit storm of flak for godmoding. Not just one DM either, I've had three different 3.5 DMs and these posts always get flak for godmoding.
Apparently the reason is because once you get higher level you start getting 2 and more hits per turn. And it is apparently a general consensus that RP should directly reflect mechanics.
Maybe I just happened to get 3 DMs and entire groups in a row that sucked. But the odds don't favor it.
Here is a different post from 4e, a giant bird had just snatched away the halfling. My Fighter used Serpant's coil, forceful drag, drop flail, draw greataxe action point then Reaping Strike
"Geheim reflexively swung his flail upwards at the foul fowl! Wrapping the chain around its leg, the fowl screeched as its flight was ceased, Geheim felt himself leave the ground for a moment before his weight proved too much and he landed back on the ground. Wasting no time he pulled hard with all of his might, swinging down he smashed the bird into the ground. Drawing his great axe he hurled himself into the bird rapidly cutting and chopping and and hewing into the bird, strike after strike!"
In this case every stated action here is defended either directly by mechanics or I think it was P.22 DMG2, that sidebar giving direct permission to players to alter the flavor of their posts however they want as long as they don't change the effect.
Ergo, abstract actions.
As for the last Criteria. Both 3.5 and 4e have Dynamism. 4e has the movement aspect of dynamism stronger then 3.5, and 3.5 has everything else, far, far, far higher then 4e in dynamism.
If 4e had at least tried for something more than "This turn I use Sword-Twirling Strike, which dizzies the foe because of the sword's spin" and "I, uh, well, shit. I shoot a magic missile at him this round, too",
I consider any wizard who chooses magic missile to be a total idiot in 4e.
There is no reason to choose such a boring attack even if it hits 100% of the time. An Regardless this is still a total strawman.
I'd also be more charitable if it admitted combat plays out much the same with the same half-a-dozen power effects showing up all the time and just tried to find ways to let players use those effects. Such things as "Okay, the wizard hit him with a bright flash that blinded him? Then I'm going to shove that statue over onto him while he's confused and can't see it coming."
Another strawman since you can do that, explicitly as of DMG2.
I don't see how you can compare 4E with any other TTRPG period. It's changed so wildly, so vastly, and so quickly over the life of it's "edition", that entire builds have sprung up, thrived, and been literally killed off and made invalid simply through the errata issued. And I'm not talking builds which use strange interpretations of errata. I'm talking about fundamental system changes that introduced new systems and then eliminated them entirely. Which means that any discussion of 4E vs whatever has to be insanely selective about where in time you're culling 4E from, what's been errata'd and what hasn't.
Thats a slight exaggeration. Most of he errata is just grammar fixes and clarifications, some more are balance fixes usually to specific powers and items.
The biggest change done was to wizards and magic missile.
Considering that points 1, 3, and 4 are all title neutral and dependent on enthusiastic players/GMs, you're left with stating that 4E provides more tactically relevant options than 3E, or even other RPGs in general.
3 and 4 are. 1 is at least partially mechanics dependent.
4E has some interesting ideas (e.g. suggesting that there should be more interacting with the environment in combat, giving every class a variety of powers to choose from), but overall I found the execution to be pretty boring (e.g. dozens of different powers along the lines of "XdY damage and shift/slide target a few squares, combats end up with two sides spamming at-wil powers at each other until one falls down).
I would call this a strawman. Which is to say, I find this over simplified.To be honest, if you find yourself spamming at-wills, you suck at tactics, as does the DM. When I DM 4e, I end up killing my players if they revert to static at-will spams. Cause my monsters won't be.
