DSMatticus wrote:
That's not really true. There's no reason to assume that the 'resources' a person actually uses to perform their abilities are uniform and exchangeable. No matter how much I walk, my arms don't get sore. People in real life don't have a stamina bar that goes to every physical purpose, so this sort of per-ability cooldown abstraction is passingly consistent without adding any additional information to the game world. The characters can understand their ability-specific cooldowns without anybody calling bullshit (which is an issue of verisimilitude more than association, mind).
Generally for fatigue, people will question why each attack they have has a separate cooldown that doesn't affect each other.
It's one thing for a run power to have a separate cooldown from power strike, but why smashing blow and power strike have separate cool down timers is going to be a question for everyone. And even if you use Ki, you're still going to have those same issues.
I don't really want to have a discussion about which is better, but I would like to point out that a dissociated mechanic generates events about which you cannot actually tell a single story.
Well no. By nature of being dissociative, it never actually enters the story. The fact that you can only use covering strike once means that your character only uses it once. You never really even have to get into why you didn't do that, only that you didn't.
And that's to prevent spamming. If your ultimate attack was Exploding heart palm strike, you're going to keep using that until the game says you can't anymore. And that tells garbage stories where the guy just spams a one move strategy.
Ultimately we're not worried about how you get there, only what the end product looks like. Dissociative mechanics don't necessarily produce a bad end product, the only drawback is that it can bother players from a simulationist standpoint because the system feels too gamist.
I would find it genuinely bothersome how difficult it is to recap an 'awesome combat moment' is in 4e to a friend, because that thing you're describing that you did isn't actually what happened in the story.
I don't see where you're getting that from. Encounter/daily powers relate to what's happening in the story, they just leave the question of "why doesn't he always use that?"
But since you never actually try to use it a second time, as far as the story is concerned, the usage limits are not even considered in storytelling. Whether you believe it's because of fatigue, lack of openings or that the enemy had grown wise to the trick, it really doesn't matter. Because from the storytelling point, nobody really knows necessarily that that strike is the best for the job. That exists only in the gamist reality.
It's also interesting to note that modeling something cinematic doesn't always end up with something realistic. For instance to try to achieve cinematic quality fights where you have surprising comebacks, it actually means you benefit from having people fight as good or better than usual when they're hurt. Obviously from a reality standpoint this makes little sense, because getting hurt slows you down.
FrankTrollman wrote:
Which explains why you can't reuse those tricks when you're invisible or the enemy is helpless. Oh wait, it doesn't.
For helpless enemies go, I don't know why you'd really care, a CdG is a CdG and how you ended up finishing him off is just a matter of flavor anyway. For invisibility, it doesn't make sense, but really that's because invisibility in D&D isn't considered to be nearly as powerful as it should be. Being unseen in a real fight is a tremendous advantage, and it's just a game balance concern that it shouldn't be even more powerful than it already is.
But granted, it's not a great explanation, but like I said, who cares. Your goal is simply to find a simple system to stop people from spamming the same move. You're absolutely right that it doesn't hold up to nitpicking, but neither do hit point damage or the turn based combat, but we have those because it makes for a better game.
I could go on about how it's a big deal that you can end up moving an object very rapidly with a group of people in a line using the round structure. But it's really not. You just say, "Yeah that's kinda dumb" and move on.
Dissociative, yeah. But hardly a big deal.
There are ways to make "I saw an opening" work. Decks of cards or maneuver comparison charts or something. But charges are charges, and don't actually feel like you took an advantage of a transient opening.
That does work, the main problem is that you tend to make the game too complex with that. Game design is all about balance. My main complaint against deck systems and charts is that they get too complicated, especially for a DM who is trying to run multiple monsters. Each goblin can't have its own separate hand of cards.
