Why did 4E D&D's classplosion fail?

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Orca
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Post by Orca »

One thing that people seem to like about PF2 is getting to use their movement without AoOs getting in the way often. Sticky zones of control seems to be the opposite of that; your idea might not be as popular in practice as you expect.
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

One thing that people seem to like about PF2 is getting to use their movement without AoOs getting in the way often.
Even if this anecdote wasn't a textbook case of selection bias, I think this is bullshit. People always ooo and aaa about 'action' scenes like Dragonball Z and Sword Art Online and Justice League Unlimited where the characters zip around the battlefield doing melee violence, but what they miss about those series is that the battlefields are BORING. It doesn't matter where they're fighting or where people start in relation to each other or how they're moved about, it's all the same. It's fucking 8-bit jRPG fights all the time where people just use superpowers at each other until one side wins.

If you want shit like positioning and terrain and melee interdiction to mean anything, you can't just let the characters move as freely as they want in a goat pasture as they could in a crowded bar with hostile patrons. People say they want their battlefields to be more cinematic and for positioning to matter, so people who say they don't like sticky zones of controls are fucking morons and you should just ignore them.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
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Post by jt »

I think having no AOOs by default, but having them as a common kind of bonus a class might grant or monster might have, could be a good compromise. Unexpected changes in control do slow the game down, and most AOOs aren't incredibly important. So if the wizard doesn't have any and the fighter does, you're limiting slowdown, keeping the most relevant AOOs, and improving class differentiation.

And that goes for monsters too. Sure you can run past that owlbear. Are you sure you want to run past that hydra?
WiserOdin032402 wrote:That sounds inherently fun and engaging, but would require a lot of legwork on the DMs part to set up interesting rooms to brawl in.
I made a game where a common thing players might have is a "tactical ability," which let them draw specific features on combat maps before combats started. Add a chokepoint for the defensive fighter, add something to swing from for the swashbuckler.

This solves that problem, but responses to the mechanic were extremely polarized. A handful of people loved it, but a probably larger number hated it. It makes tactical combat more fun and lets everyone contribute, but a lot of people aren't comfortable with the players getting narrative control in that moment.
Last edited by jt on Mon Aug 26, 2019 11:44 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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deaddmwalking
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Post by deaddmwalking »

In our heartbreaker, you can move within someone's threatened area (at half speed) without an AoO. You typically only get one for LEAVING. The major exception is if you're approaching someone (or something) with reach. If you don't have equal reach, you'll provoke for entering the threatened area

We don't have 5-foot steps, so you can't avoid an AoO for doing something that provokes by stepping away - leaving would provoke unless you withdraw. Usually a wizard's most powerful spells would provoke - we define it as anything that requires a full action.

Tactical positioning does matter a lot. People are 'sticky'. A successful AoO has a chance of ending a creature's movement so you can't just walk through someone's threatened area (though most people do have only a single AoO so it's possible to 'overwhlem' them by moving past as a group).
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

Having OAs be a thing that only certain monsters and classes have only screws over players and people who didn't read the monster manual. It doesn't even really speed play up, because if you didn't read the DM Notes, you may as well treat every monster as if they had OAs. Even if you 'know' that hobgoblin warmages don't have OAs, what if the DM gave them the Warcaster feat and they have a Shocking Grasp ready to shove up your ass? If you did read it, it just encourages metagaming on both the player and DM side.

Also, I couldn't help but notice your example of owlbears not having Opportunity Attacks. Here's a thought experiment for you: go through the Monster Manual and look at every monster of CR4 or higher, including the owlbear. Tell me how many of them and which kinds where it wouldn't make narrative sense for them to have some kind of melee interdiction. You pretty much have animals and monsters like Bheur Hags and Nymphs, so only about 10% of the manual.

Either everyone has access to OAs or no one does.
Last edited by Lago PARANOIA on Tue Aug 27, 2019 12:29 am, edited 1 time in total.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
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Post by MGuy »

Yea I don't really see the reason to not just have everything uniformly use the same AoO rules. Knowing that everything works like X save for special exceptions seems obviously like the easiest way to structure your rules. I don't see why trying to arbitrarily have whole swathes of your mm and classes just 'not' be able to do it is weird. I'd sooner like certain classes and monsters to get special rider effects for their AOOs to heavily discourage people and targets from breaking engagements and having special moves that teams can use to force movement to trigger these effects. Players like combos.
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Post by OgreBattle »

Goat pastures become interesting when you've got sticky mechanics, like in the NFL and Bloodbowl.

Walls should also interact with positional mechanics like...

At the 6:14 mark you see a fighter put his back against the wall to make himself harder to take down:
https://youtu.be/q4xzs2besWk?t=303
That happens a lot in cage fighting too, so wrestlers want to get their opponent's away from the wall.

In an outnumbered situation... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUIoMreBQa0

There's 'soft forced movement' in that the 1 is always moving to avoid being flanked by the 2, with back close to the wall being a solid move.

While we're at it... having a longer reach greatsword or flail vs shorter rapiers, you can spin around to hold off multiple opponents:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxHaNRO705k&t=66s
Such a montante maneuver could be...
"Spin, attack everyone around you [negative modifier to hit, or lighter damage since it's a big spin instead of strong strike on one],
you enter the Spinny Stance,
as long as you are in the spinny stance any enemy that ends movement in your reach (so they can leave, this is a maneuver meant for pushing enemies away) you make a free OA at [penalty because it's a passive spin rather than aimed] to hit"
Last edited by OgreBattle on Tue Aug 27, 2019 2:27 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by JigokuBosatsu »

OgreBattle wrote:4e was intended to be paired with a virtual tabletop that got cancelled because the project lead or programmer or so murdered somebody and killed himself yeah?
what the fuck
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Post by Whatever »

JigokuBosatsu wrote:
OgreBattle wrote:4e was intended to be paired with a virtual tabletop that got cancelled because the project lead or programmer or so murdered somebody and killed himself yeah?
what the fuck
https://modenook.com/the-murdersuicide- ... ns-online/
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Post by Username17 »

Lago PARANOIA wrote:
One thing that people seem to like about PF2 is getting to use their movement without AoOs getting in the way often.
Even if this anecdote wasn't a textbook case of selection bias, I think this is bullshit. People always ooo and aaa about 'action' scenes like Dragonball Z and Sword Art Online and Justice League Unlimited where the characters zip around the battlefield doing melee violence, but what they miss about those series is that the battlefields are BORING. It doesn't matter where they're fighting or where people start in relation to each other or how they're moved about, it's all the same. It's fucking 8-bit jRPG fights all the time where people just use superpowers at each other until one side wins.

If you want shit like positioning and terrain and melee interdiction to mean anything, you can't just let the characters move as freely as they want in a goat pasture as they could in a crowded bar with hostile patrons. People say they want their battlefields to be more cinematic and for positioning to matter, so people who say they don't like sticky zones of controls are fucking morons and you should just ignore them.
This is importantly true. People want to move around a lot, but "movement" only matters if locations are different. The movement paradigm in Mutants and Masterminds isn't freedom, it's stupid. Characters go wherever they want and attack every turn and the battle grid does not matter at all. If you can freely move twelve spaces and attack then there's simply no difference between any two points that are 5 squares or 11 squares away. And that means that you have less meaningful options for movement and placement.

The paradigm of course is Rubix cubes of different numbers of faces per side. Apparently a 6x6 or 8x8 Rubix Cube isn't appreciably more difficult to solve than a 5x5 one. Because from the standpoint of the math, it only matters whether a square is located on a corner, edge, or middle of a face. You can add as many squares as you want that and if they aren't topologically different, they don't make the problem any harder.

Adding more squares you can move to at the cost of reducing the number of squares you can move to that are tactically different is unambiguously a step in the wrong direction. It's not an arguable point, it is mathematically provedly a bad idea.

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Re: Why did 4E D&D's classplosion fail?

Post by hogarth »

Lago PARANOIA wrote: A close second with how the classplosion failed is because 4E D&D characters are BORING. The powers are small-scale '[3W] + a slide 1' shit, classes get their powers and big upgrades at the same schedule, soforth.
My main complaint was that playing my character was boring. At first I thought it was because combat was so repetitive: shoot at the bad guys with your at-will power, or one of a very small selection of powers that are just barely superior to your at-will power. But when I thought about it, most 3E fights didn't have much more variation in terms of actions (e.g. an archer is going to spend most of her actions firing her bow) and yet 4E felt much more dull than 3E to me.

Upon reflection, I came to the conclusion that I liked having a wider variety of tactics (like grappling or drinking a potion or activating a magic item, etc.) to potentially choose from, even if I mostly stuck to the same-old same-old. Then I can at least pretend I'm thinking tactically rather than just holding down the fire button (so to speak).
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