Winds of Fate needs to be tested in a non-D&D system.

[Swordslinger]

As far as I can tell, the big disconnect between you and Frank/DS/Lago is that you assume that each round you can discard 2/3 of your powers without thinking about them much. Frank's goal is, explicitly, to get you not to do that, and to think about whether there's a way to make the single-target Flame Strike really useful against a mass of goblins. Because sometimes there is, and the game is more interesting if you do that sometimes than if you spend your mental energy thinking about whether to use Fireball or Lightning Bolt or Force Explosion.

I don't think that's a realistic design goal.

If the single target is competitive with AoE against masses of enemies then it will be a super spell against a lone monster. You can't set up a system where sometimes you'd use a single target against a mass of monsters and sometimes you'd use an AoE against a single monster, it's pretty much not going to happen.

[quanta]

I really don't think tightly defined power set ups are at all amenable to a situation where it's not obvious that a few distinct powers are optimal in a given situation.

Seriously, most of the options paralysis I've seen was when people only had 4-6 discrete choices. I think to some extent it must be admitted that options paralysis and tactical depth go hand-in-hand, especially when people don't have a strong familiarity with a system. Seriously, if something is tactically deep to some extent we mean the optimal mode of play is not obvious, and if the optimal mode of play is not obvious, it will take people longer to figure out what to do. I think most players who are familiar with a system like D&D 3e or 4e don't have much options paralysis anyways.

Basically, I don't think WoF solves any problem I've actually ever seen in regards to options paralysis.

That says nothing of course about 5 moves of doom or at-will spam. It obviously does solve those by just making them impossible. However, how badly you dislike those is a matter of taste. And may even vary from game to game.

edit:

If the single target is competitive with AoE against masses of enemies then it will be a super spell against a lone monster. You can't set up a system where sometimes you'd use a single target against a mass of monsters and sometimes you'd use an AoE against a single monster, it's pretty much not going to happen.

You could make every AoE also act as something else too. Like fireball also creates a temporary wall of fire, so against mooks it just wipes them out and against a single enemy it can damage and do control.

The single target case could be something like ghoul touch, where it's strong against one enemy and also debuffs nearby enemies slightly.

However, I think this is purely an issue of power design, and if I had a game where it was an interesting decision each round between just six at-will abilities, I wouldn't give a shit about WoF having six times as many situations that might occur due to a different six options each round.

I think WoF is better for making the narrative of combat more automatically varied. Whether or not it's tactically more interesting round by round is different.

[Draco_Argentum]

As far as I can tell, the big disconnect between you and Frank/DS/Lago is that you assume that each round you can discard 2/3 of your powers without thinking about them much. Frank's goal is, explicitly, to get you not to do that, and to think about whether there's a way to make the single-target Flame Strike really useful against a mass of goblins. Because sometimes there is, and the game is more interesting if you do that sometimes than if you spend your mental energy thinking about whether to use Fireball or Lightning Bolt or Force Explosion.

Its trivially obvious that the best possible matrix allows every row to cover every possible situation. Its also trivially obvious that this is best achieved by ensuring each row has powers that cover as diverse a set of situations as possible.

For a simple proof that Mean Liar is right assume that powers can either be aoe or single target. To satisfy optimal matrix design there is at least one aoe power in every row. Against a single enemy this power will be useless*, therefore I only have five options this round. More likely there are two aoes per row and you only have four options per round.


*Trivially obvious yet again, if it was good against a single target all of the similar single target abilities could be discarded as tactically limited.

[DSMatticus]

Okay, you're all having a discussion about tactical depth using a situation that has no tactical depth. If your DM says, "you see 10 goblins," everyone is going to look for their AoE's, whether they're using WoF, 3.5 Vancian, 4e's encounters/dailies, whatever.

If your situation is simple enough to have one obvious solution (an AoE), then it doesn't matter how many options you add, you're just adding clutter, not tactical depth. There is no disadvantage here for WoF compared, to say, Vancian: in both cases, characters are just automatically ignoring most of their abilities because there is a single solution and it is inherently obvious. Vancian doesn't do anything here WoF isn't doing.

Shallow combats + lots of options --/--> tactical depth.

And if you're point is that a Vancian caster might have more AoE's available to choose from, that's silly. He's probably going to have a handful prepared of each level, and he's just going to pick the one most likely to get the job done with the least expense to his charges. In an appropriately CR'd encounter, it will be his highest AoE. There was no tactical decision here, it's just a straight-forward calculation and estimation of odds with imperfect knowledge.

If you want to talk about which system has more tactical depth, we need to talk about combats which actually have more than one valid tactical solution, and then to see which system supports/fails to support more of those solutions.

[PhoneLobster]

Okay, you're all having a discussion about tactical depth using a situation that has no tactical depth.

What?

No really. You are just being stark raving NUTS at this point.

Your entire argument spurred from a basic misunderstanding of "a simple example to discus" proceeds from there to the heady heights of total irrelevancy as you fail to notice that at no point does "deepening" the complexity of the combat actually do anything of particular relevance to WoF.

And has already been ruled out as unacceptable by the Major WoF proponents and designers. Lago and Frank told us like 3 of Lago's WoF Spam threads ago that you can't and, according to them, SHOULDN'T use "tactical depth" to create variety in viable tactical choices.

The more tactical depth angle has been and gone. "10 goblins" or "1 big goblin" IS the level of tactical depth that WoF, apparently, intends to be working with. Furthermore it is ALSO officially "10 goblins" and "1 Big Goblin" over and over again in repeat encounters that is the official intended level of WoF tactical depth design.

[jadagul]

As far as I can tell, the big disconnect between you and Frank/DS/Lago is that you assume that each round you can discard 2/3 of your powers without thinking about them much. Frank's goal is, explicitly, to get you not to do that, and to think about whether there's a way to make the single-target Flame Strike really useful against a mass of goblins. Because sometimes there is, and the game is more interesting if you do that sometimes than if you spend your mental energy thinking about whether to use Fireball or Lightning Bolt or Force Explosion.

I don't think that's a realistic design goal.

If the single target is competitive with AoE against masses of enemies then it will be a super spell against a lone monster. You can't set up a system where sometimes you'd use a single target against a mass of monsters and sometimes you'd use an AoE against a single monster, it's pretty much not going to happen.

I mean, that's true most of the time. But maybe your single-target is "flame strike" and your AOE is "ice rain" and you're fighting a salamander. Or maybe your AOE nauseates enemies and your single-target doesn't have a rider attached, and maybe there's a blindness debuff on your list but your enemy fights by echolocation anyway. Or something. The point is that Frank wants to set up a situation where you actually can't just say, "oh, it's a big group, I use my AOE effect."

Quanta: the problem with saying "an interesting decision among six at-wills is enough" is that it's unlikely for much to change over the course of an eight-round combat. So on the first round you figure out which one of these is best. And then the second round you look at your list, and, surprise, the same one is best. WOF means you have to make that decision more than once per combat.

[PhoneLobster]

But maybe your single-target is "flame strike" and your AOE is "ice rain" and you're fighting a salamander.

Did my post right above your's not exist in your universe?

1) That kind of additional "tactical depth" or not is utterly independent of WoF.

2) When that kind of tactical depth was brought up in prior discussions as an alternative means of creating variety in combat Lago and Frank told us that it was a bad thing that it was too complex, didn't work and they were implementing WoF instead of doing that.

I think some WoF fans aren't paying enough attention to what the actual WoF designers are actually saying. They told us that tactical variety via Salamander was a bad thing and they would NOT be relying on it.

[Kaelik]

Point 1: DSM, stop whining about Vancian. No one is advocating that. Seriously, no one is advocating it, so the fact that it is also shit in some way that is either the same as WoF or not, is about as meaningful as when 4es point out that cyberpunk2K is shitty in the after sundown thread.

Now, if everything is at-will, your character can't have more than X powers total, by definition... In Winds of Fate you can have 6X options total, because not all of them are available in any one round.

Here's the thing though that's wrong. First of all, WoF deals with utility powers shittily, since you have to either create a completely different system for implementing them, or tell everyone to suck a cock (restrict access in an arbitrary stupid way, and also take up WoF cells). Secondly, at will can actually have 6 combat options, and an absurd number of utility powers.

So right out of the gate, if you aren't giving people at will as well as WoF, at will can actually have more powers than WoF.

Secondly, Even if you are limited to X combat powers with at will, and WoF has 6X (or 40X) combat powers, that's not actually a good thing at all. Having YX combat powers that could possibly come up at some point isn't really a meaningful metric of anything, because you still only really have X powers to make any given "tactically deep" decision from, and since we are talking about combat powers, having a choice between six combat power or a choice between six combat powers, followed by entirely different combat powers next round, but still six, is not in any way a good thing. Since combat powers only matter for killing shit, having infinity combat powers is not better than having one unless you can leverage that into a better combat result. Since WoF can't, it's not meaningful.

The "advantage" singular, to WoF is that it forces people to use different powers each round arbitrarily. But it does this at the cost of very very very increased likelihood of having actually shittier powers, and the absolute surety that you cannot plan in advance you actions ever.

So it drops a lot of the tactical minigame from it right off the bat, and when you are making YX powers instead of X powers, you are much more likely to end up with fireballs, flare darts, and other shitty powers that are obviously not useful ever, whereas with X powers you are more likely to end up with only X really good powers, like Create Ice, or Dust Storm or whatever. And yes, WoF can have at least X good powers, maybe more, but it's a lot harder to make YX extremely good powers than X, and when you devolve into adding fireballs and flare darts, your system becomes less tactically interesting on a round by round basis, because they 2X good powers are split up, and the you are making decisions between 2 really good powers, and a couple situational ones that might be useful, and ignoring the fireballs unless there are a bunch of mooks in a clump.

[hogarth]

everyone at the table knows that the best move is a ShitStab, then your game sucks.

Vancian magic does this - you have 2-3 max level charges at a time. The best moves are obvious, it just weights them by forcing you to consider cost.

So Winds of Fate is intended to fix "analysis paralysis"....which doesn't exist in D&D? And presumably exists even less in other games with fewer options?

[RobbyPants]

Here's the thing though that's wrong. First of all, WoF deals with utility powers shittily, since you have to either create a completely different system for implementing them, or tell everyone to suck a cock (restrict access in an arbitrary stupid way, and also take up WoF cells). Secondly, at will can actually have 6 combat options, and an absurd number of utility powers.

I've seen you mention a Take 6 or Take 2 mechanic before to at least make it less ridiculous. Could it work to allow a PC to freely choose any power so long as they aren't in "combat"? I'm not sure how you'd define this exactly, but it could be similar to 3E's "whenever you could take 10" type of rule.

So, the idea would be, during the ebb and flow of combat and yada yada, you have to roll for your powers. When you're standing in front of a locked door, you can totally just Acid Orb the shit out of it.

The "advantage" singular, to WoF is that it forces people to use different powers each round arbitrarily. But it does this at the cost of very very very increased likelihood of having actually shittier powers, and the absolute surety that you cannot plan in advance you actions ever.

Yeah. To me, the two biggest gains of the system are to:

1) Limit actual choices on a round.

2) Make combats seem more interesting.

#1 is probably a good thing because it probably speeds up game play. #2 seems kind of subjective to me. It seems if I could make a movie out of a combat, a WoF movie would be more interesting to watch than an At-Will movie, but I'm not really sure it'd be more interesting to play.

I guess it's hard for me to evaluate without seeing any fully fleshed out matrices and sample combats. So far, everything seems so vague and abstract that some people insist that there won't be best moves and others are worried that's exactly what will happen.

[Swordslinger]

I guess it's hard for me to evaluate without seeing any fully fleshed out matrices and sample combats. So far, everything seems so vague and abstract that some people insist that there won't be best moves and others are worried that's exactly what will happen.

Yeah pretty much.

Until somebody can at least write a single full line of a WoF matrix, it's hard to really make judgment calls.

To me though, it seems as if the problem is unavoidable, because it'd be like say handing out all 4 4E at-will powers at once and expecting every round to have each be a possible choice.

It's just not going to happen.

You can hand out magic missile, ray of frost, thunderwave and scorching burst to someone and generally you'll be able to eliminate at least half of those options every round based on the number of enemies you have.

Now maybe somebody can write some expertly done powers that somehow manage to avert this by having a bunch of special conditions, but I am extremely skeptical.

[hogarth]

Yeah. To me, the two biggest gains of the system are to:

1) Limit actual choices on a round.

2) Make combats seem more interesting.

#1 is probably a good thing because it probably speeds up game play. #2 seems kind of subjective to me. It seems if I could make a movie out of a combat, a WoF movie would be more interesting to watch than an At-Will movie, but I'm not really sure it'd be more interesting to play.

1) It's trivial to limit your choices in an unintelligent way, like Winds of Fate does. E.g., "I'm fighting orcs, so I'll only use powers that start with the letter O!" There, I just created a new system (called "Bits of Alpha") that's just as good at limiting choices as Winds of Fate.

1a) I've actually found "analysis paralysis" to be a problem in games from time to time, so I do believe that it's worth looking into. However, usually it's from having one open-ended power, not a bunch of narrowly defined powers to select from. E.g., a player tries to figure out what illusion to make, or which creature to summon. Winds of Fate wouldn't have any effect on this kind of analysis paralysis, unless it goes the lame 4E route where there are no open-ended powers at all.

2) This is the one area where Winds of Fate might be an improvement. If I'm fighting the Silver Surfer (say), I want him to blast with energy in one panel, then punch in the next panel, then make a mini-tornado in the next panel, then turn the air into chlorine gas in the next panel, etc.; I don't want him blasting energy for five panels in a row. It's less clear that Winds of Fate would work well for adding variety to a character like Captain America where you would have to come up with a dozen variations on "hit with shield" and "hit without shield" in order to fill up a Winds of Fate matrix. One solution (and the one that Lago seems to favour) is to say that every character is required to be an "anypower" character with dozens of unique abilities, but I'm not convinced that that's an RPG genre that would be particularly popular.

[Kaelik]

I've seen you mention a Take 6 or Take 2 mechanic before to at least make it less ridiculous. Could it work to allow a PC to freely choose any power so long as they aren't in "combat"? I'm not sure how you'd define this exactly, but it could be similar to 3E's "whenever you could take 10" type of rule.

So, the idea would be, during the ebb and flow of combat and yada yada, you have to roll for your powers. When you're standing in front of a locked door, you can totally just Acid Orb the shit out of it.

The problem is that if you have something like True Seeing in your matrix, you will feel like shit every time you roll the number that goes with.

Seriously, imagine having True Seeing or Detect Thoughts in your WoF matrix. First off, every time you roll that result, you don't actually have 6 options that round, you have 5 options, so you are genuinely cutting down on combat actions just to include utility into the WoF. Secondly, you also have to make up the out of combat rule (or use the take 2, but you heard whiny bitch Lago complain about how if you do that people will actually just take 2 all the time, even in combat, those bastards. Which if they do, means WoF sucks ass). Thirdly, as discussed before, there are only so many ways to rationalize a WoF system for non martial characters who don't rely on openings, and most of them would create some cognitive dissonance when you can pull out whatever you want when not in combat, for a lot of characters.

1) Limit actual choices on a round.

2) Make combats seem more interesting.

#1 is probably a good thing because it probably speeds up game play. #2 seems kind of subjective to me. It seems if I could make a movie out of a combat, a WoF movie would be more interesting to watch than an At-Will movie, but I'm not really sure it'd be more interesting to play.

But honestly, it doesn't actually do 1 at all. I mean, it either means you have different abilities each round, or it limits choices, but compared to 6 at will, a 36 WoF doesn't actually give you more powers, it gives you 6 combat powers that change, but see the thing about earlier, having more combat powers only matters if one of them gives you a better result in combat.

More utility is awesome, but at will can support utility better than WoF, giving more total powers, and having a better system of interaction, so much so that any WoF system with a lot of non combat powers will probably have to just use at will for those, and keep them off the WoF, or write two versions of each power (IE Detect Thoughts is also Mind Crush).

But more combat powers doesn't actually mean anything except that no one can make predictions about their own or opponents actions. Which is not a price I'm willing to pay for "variety" which seems to offer nothing good at all.

2) This is the one area where Winds of Fate might be an improvement. If I'm fighting the Silver Surfer (say), I want him to blast with energy in one panel, then punch in the next panel, then make a mini-tornado in the next panel, then turn the air into chlorine gas in the next panel, etc.; I don't want him blasting energy for five panels in a row. It's less clear that Winds of Fate would work well for adding variety to a character like Captain America where you would have to come up with a dozen variations on "hit with shield" and "hit without shield" in order to fill up a Winds of Fate matrix. One solution (and the one that Lago seems to favour) is to say that every character is required to be an "anypower" character with dozens of unique abilities, but I'm not convinced that that's an RPG genre that would be particularly popular.

I would actually say instead, that you really want the Silver Surfer to do that, when you were fighting him, but that if you were playing the Silver Surfer, it would be shit. I think no one would actually find that terribly great.

And once again, I point to how you could actually just make it so that one of the PCs can totally just use their action to make it so that Silver Surfer can't Blast Energy as effectively, and he will choose to do something else.

[Username17]

Its trivially obvious that the best possible matrix allows every row to cover every possible situation. Its also trivially obvious that this is best achieved by ensuring each row has powers that cover as diverse a set of situations as possible.

For a simple proof that Mean Liar is right assume that powers can either be aoe or single target. To satisfy optimal matrix design there is at least one aoe power in every row. Against a single enemy this power will be useless*, therefore I only have five options this round. More likely there are two aoes per row and you only have four options per round.


*Trivially obvious yet again, if it was good against a single target all of the similar single target abilities could be discarded as tactically limited.

This isn't true at all. Or rather, it is true if and only if your only options are to do more damage to one target or less damage to a bunch of targets. If the abilities are more complex than that, indeed if they are interesting in any way that is not necessarily true.

So for example: if your AoE is Briar Web, and your single opponent is a melee beast that is going to take a long time to kill, that could really easily be the best possible option. Similarly, if your single target spell is Encase in Ice and the many enemies are coming through a limited number of doorways, that could again easily be the best option.

By using powers that have no depth in a hypothetical plane that has no depth, then yes, the question of which power to use is simply a math problem with an obvious answer. But that's a bullshit example, because no one is seriously suggesting that powers should be that boring or that combats should be that simple. So what you're really saying is that you intend to treat tactical situations as if they were much simpler than they really are and by extension to play the game rather poorly by ignoring many of your character's capabilities.

So Winds of Fate is intended to fix "analysis paralysis"....which doesn't exist in D&D?

This has been answered repeatedly. Option Paralysis exists severely in 4e D&D, and in many places in 3e D&D as well. Most notably for new players who have't figured out the heuristic of "only use the high level spells", but also for experienced players who are confronted with an easy encounter and are suddenly incentivized to go off script ad use a cheap, low level spell slot instead of blasting away with one of the top two spell levels.

WoF allows characters to have more total level appropriate abilities than 3e Wizards or even 4e Wizards do, while still having as little problem with round by round option paralysis as a 3e Wizard in a level appropriate encounter. That's all it does. That's the entire point.

-Username17

[hogarth]

So Winds of Fate is intended to fix "analysis paralysis"....which doesn't exist in D&D?

This has been answered repeatedly. Option Paralysis exists severely in 4e D&D, and in many places in 3e D&D as well.

I know your view; I just thought it was odd that DSMatticus seemed to be saying the opposite.

[DSMatticus]

Your entire argument spurred from a basic misunderstanding of "a simple example to discus" proceeds from there to the heady heights of total irrelevancy as you fail to notice that at no point does "deepening" the complexity of the combat actually do anything of particular relevance to WoF.

What the fuck are you babbling about? That was my point. 'Deepening' complexity of combat is necessary for there to be any tactical depth at all. If you have a can opener, and you want to open a can, congratulations: you are in a situation with no tactical depth. It doesn't matter if I give you a 100 other things, because you have a can opener and you're going to use it.

Having more options CAN lead to more tactical complexity, but only if the situation supports some of those options as moves worth making. And that is irrelevant of WoF, Vancian, 4e, or anything else. That was my entire point. No system can add tactical depth to opening a can with a can opener. There's only one solution and it's fucking obvious.

And has already been ruled out as unacceptable by the Major WoF proponents and designers. Lago and Frank told us like 3 of Lago's WoF Spam threads ago that you can't and, according to them, SHOULDN'T use "tactical depth" to create variety in viable tactical choices.

Are you arguing with me, Lago, or Frank? Because if you're arguing with me, maybe you should respond to the things I've said. Not things Lago or Frank said somewhere in the past, and I suspect you are misinterpreting, but that's neither here nor now.

Point 1: DSM, stop whining about Vancian. No one is advocating that. Seriously, no one is advocating it, so the fact that it is also shit in some way that is either the same as WoF or not, is about as meaningful as when 4es point out that cyberpunk2K is shitty in the after sundown thread.

Pick an example you want me to rephrase, pick a resource management system you'd like me to use for comparison, and I will remake the entire example just for you.

So Winds of Fate is intended to fix "analysis paralysis"....which doesn't exist in D&D? And presumably exists even less in other games with fewer options?

Either you use the heuristic of "only use high-level charges, got it," and option paralysis goes away, or 3.5 does have option paralysis. Either way, whether or not 3.5 can avoid option paralysis by making lower level charges useless is irrelevant. The way Vancian magic avoids option paralysis restricts you to having only a handful of balanced, top-tier abilities per combat. WoF lets you have an arbitrarily huge number of balanced, top-tier abilities per combat.

Again, you're looking at WoF one-dimensionally. WoF does a few things, and analysis of any one individualy is an unfair analysis. WoF lets you have more top-tier abilities on your character sheet AND avoids option paralysis. Emphasis on the 'and.'

3.5E magic can boast being able to avoid option paralysis in many cases (ignore lower level abilities), but if it does that it can't boast having more top-tier abilities on your character sheet. Or you could make a Vancian magic where every option is equally powerful, and then give someone 50 charges, and they'd have more top-tier abilities on their character sheet than the typical WoF, but they would suffer option paralysis.

WoF combines the two at once, which is something Vancian, 'all at-will,' or 4e's dailies (which are pretty much a vancian system) cannot do. Finding something that does one of those things better isn't meaningful, because it probably can't do both of those things at once. And WoF can.

[MGuy]

Pick an example you want me to rephrase, pick a resource management system you'd like me to use for comparison, and I will remake the entire example just for you.

Charge System.

[DSMatticus]

Wait, what? Vancian is a charge system. I think I'm interpreting charge differently than you, so say a little bit more so I'm clear on what you mean.

[Draco_Argentum]

This isn't true at all. Or rather, it is true if and only if your only options are to do more damage to one target or less damage to a bunch of targets. If the abilities are more complex than that, indeed if they are interesting in any way that is not necessarily true.

So for example: if your AoE is Briar Web, and your single opponent is a melee beast that is going to take a long time to kill, that could really easily be the best possible option. Similarly, if your single target spell is Encase in Ice and the many enemies are coming through a limited number of doorways, that could again easily be the best option.

Well thats a question of whether Lago can write 60ish (I'm allowing for some power incest but still requiring enough for two people of the same class to look very different) abilities per class that fulfill that criteria. Thats a really tough ask, I doubt it can be done for non palette swap powers.

Hypothesis: All powers must have a debuff component or the fireball/firebolt criteria is immediately failed. Can someone disprove that?

[DSMatticus]

Well thats a question of whether Lago can write 60ish (I'm allowing for some power incest but still requiring enough for two people of the same class to look very different) abilities per class that fulfill that criteria.

Somebody remind me the math on 4e, how many powers did they have per class? I know it's been ran before, but I'm too lazy to do it again. Hell, how many spells does a 3.5 wizard have? How many maneuvers does each school in Tome of Battle have?

[PhoneLobster]

Somebody remind me...

The issue isn't that you CAN'T write a ton of powers/rules.

The issue is that WoF multiplies the number of powers/rules you need to write. And does so for little observable benefit and at additional observable costs.

OK so you tell us it is possible to write a large amount of rules with power differentiation through salamander or effect riders and so forth. OK. But WoF requires you to do more of that than a non-WoF system.

Which is rather ridiculous because WoF proponents have time and again DENIED that you can actually write up multiple interesting and viable powers as part of their foundation for why WoF is suddenly desperately needed. And now WoF support has revolved back into saying hey actual the very premise of WoF is wrong because now we need to defy it in order to write an even larger variety of interesting viable powers for WoF...

But that sort of double think is pretty standard for WoF.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Here's the thing though that's wrong. First of all, WoF deals with utility powers shittily, since you have to either create a completely different system for implementing them, or tell everyone to suck a cock (restrict access in an arbitrary stupid way, and also take up WoF cells). Secondly, at will can actually have 6 combat options, and an absurd number of utility powers.

1) Mind telling me why it's so important for your full suite of utility powers to always be available whenever you want?

2) I gave a proposed method on how to combat this problem in one of my posts. Feel free to read it.

3) "At-Will can actually have 6 combat options, and an absurd number of utility powers", this is an absurd oversimplification. Let's go back to 4E for a moment. There are basically 3 kinds of utility powers in that game:

• Utility powers that supplement some kind of combat action. These do not create in-combat option paralysis because they don't displace any choices mostly because they operate at some kind of action advantage. Sword Burst vs. Lightning Lure requires some thought. SB/LL/Greenflame Blade even more. SB/LL/Greenflame Blade + a minor action utility power does not. You ignore it until you make your primary choice and then tack it on to the end.
• Utility powers that do not help out in combat. These do not create in-combat option paralysis because you can just totally ignore them when the combat music is playing.
• Utility powers that can potentially displace a combat action. Wall of Fog, Illusory Wall, Wall of Force, etc.. These operate at the same action cost as the nominal attack powers and if they're not full of ass (there are a lot of bupkiss standard action combat utility powers, but no one takes those) then you need to consider those in addition to said combat powers.

So no, it's not clear that a system can support At Wills + X number of utility powers. 4E Rangers are simple to run even after HotFL because their utility powers do not conflict with their general combat scheme. 4E Wizards are difficult to run because their utility powers can compete with their combat powers.

Now the 'obvious' solution to this would be to make utility powers operate like the 4E Ranger so people only have 6 At-Wills to really choose from and the utility power selection is actually really obvious. The problem with this is that you have to make utility powers really boring and lame. You can't have shit like Transmute Stone to Mud or Warp Wood because otherwise people are going to find ways to use it in combat--and of course the higher the level a utility power is the easier it is to find unintended combat uses for it. Now you might be saying 'don't these players deserve a little reward', but then you're right back to the option paralysis problem.

2) When that kind of tactical depth was brought up in prior discussions as an alternative means of creating variety in combat Lago and Frank told us that it was a bad thing that it was too complex, didn't work and they were implementing WoF instead of doing that.

You know, for someone who accuses people of not reading things...

I've quoted a block of text repeatedly on this thread and on the last thread about why you can't use just that method to shake people out of their comfort zone. I didn't say it was bad, just that it didn't go far enough because of various player-side problems and it's unreasonable to expect DMs to always have to go the extra mile to introduce tactical complexity. That big block of text pretty much stated why this is the case, but the takeaway is that you need another way to shake things up on top of that. This means that, no, I'm not advocating WoF as a way to replace other methods of depth, I'm advocating it to supplement what I see as an inadequate amount of depth.

Since combat powers only matter for killing shit, having infinity combat powers is not better than having one unless you can leverage that into a better combat result. Since WoF can't, it's not meaningful.

That would mean something if eliminating option paralysis was the only aim of WoF.

But it does this at the cost of very very very increased likelihood of having actually shittier powers, and the absolute surety that you cannot plan in advance you actions ever.

it gives you 6 combat powers that change, but see the thing about earlier, having more combat powers only matters if one of them gives you a better result in combat.

1) If you're doing an At-Will only system and you go into combat with a shittier set you're stuck with a shitty set for the rest of combat. At least in WoF you have a chance of rolling a good set. I feel this is an advantage, because people are more peeved about bad luck then they're encouraged by good luck and also because it's easier to placate people if you say that their luck could turn around in 1 rounds instead of 5.

2) I'm actually not a fan of people planning their actions in advance more than one round. The first is because this leads to scripting--coming up with a brand-new script every combat is actually kind of interesting and clever, but if you have the same set of powers then it leads to similar or identical scripts which gets old fast. The second is because it encourages people to overlook or ignore the tactical situation because a lot of human beings have trouble abandoning bad or suboptimal plans once they invested enough effort into them.

3) Who cares if your powers you have available are shittier than a supposed optimal power? I don't really give a shit if you're fighting Frost Giants and a fire-themed power never came up. It's not like you didn't get to make choices among your other powers. If you don't get Fireball when fighting a Treant, tough cookiepuss. Figure out which out of X number of spells is the best. Stop throwing a hissy fit because your plans got a slight derail.

[DSMatticus]

The issue is that WoF multiplies the number of powers/rules you need to write.

4e cleric, ignoring utility powers, has 60 powers written for the class.

A WoF matrix is probably going to cap out at 36. If you wrote 60 powers for the class, that means there would still be 24 the player would never see or use. And that's plenty.

Alleviating the pain, powers don't have to be designed such that they level. Hell, 4e powers don't 'level' except the numbers get bigger. 4e should have just let powers scale and focused on diversity, but they were lazy assholes who thought they could get away with writing the same power five times for five different levels with bigger numbers. There's no need to imitate that mistake.

You can make a credible WoF system with no more powers than 4e has, so you can take that completely inaccurate complaint and shove it.

[Lago PARANOIA]

The issue is that WoF multiplies the number of powers/rules you need to write. And does so for little observable benefit and at additional observable costs.

Uh. You would have to do that for ANY system where you wanted a large number of abilities. The vast majority of games would be unplayable if players had access to 25 generically equal powers, let alone 36. Hell, I'll even go as far as to say that this aspect of At-Wills are superior for systems that:

• Has combat go by really quickly or where combat is uncommon, so people don't get bored spamming the same set of moves.
• People don't change their powers all that much, either through advancement or something wonky like having to cycle through five different heroes per player over the course of the campaign.
• Has a limited range of character archetypes.
• Has combat about equal in utility towards advancing the plot to subsystems that have easier minigames. Skill checks or magic tea party.

This list totally covers like 75% of all TTRPGs ever made and if we're going to include board games that can go up to like 95%. HOWEVER there are games that don't meet these criteria and a version of D&D that people demand (have a large range of powers AND combat lasts for 4-5 rounds) is unfortunately one of those.

[quanta]

Quanta: the problem with saying "an interesting decision among six at-wills is enough" is that it's unlikely for much to change over the course of an eight-round combat. So on the first round you figure out which one of these is best. And then the second round you look at your list, and, surprise, the same one is best. WOF means you have to make that decision more than once per combat.

There is something wrong and boring about a combat system where the situation doesn't change between turns 1 and 6. If that's solved by making me re-choose from a different list each round, that would just piss me off. Because I'd be incentivized to make rows as similar as possible anyways to avoid being fucked by the dice in any given situation, so it either barely changes how long it takes me to decide each round, or alternatively how successful I am in a combat has become very random. Possibly as bad as "I need to roll a 6 ASAP". That would be retarded. It'd be like all attacks having a less than 25% chance of hitting.

No, the combat had better vary from round to round even if I roll 6 twice in a row.

That's why I had my examples, Frank had a briar web example of an AoE, etc. Unless those powers' effects lasted one round, things would stay interesting because the battle situation would vary along with WoF rolls.