Immersiveness

So, I got an answer to my previous D&D post about broken mechanics... this one concedes that I have some points about the numbers actually working but says the real problem is that the rules, even if they work, "make no sense from an in-character perspective". I got linked to a couple of threads on a forum (the same one I got linked to before) that deal with 4E's lack of "immersiveness".

I find this ridiculous, because immersiveness is not a function of the system but of the DM and the players. That's why I love 4E and it's supposedly "Nothing But Combat" rules system. But the message and the forums contained several specific criticisms I'm going to take the time to address, since it's being claimed that they represent such shockingly ridiculous departures from reality that they make it impossible to forget you're playing a game.

( Cut for teal;megaloceros )

Man, why am I still reading this stuff? :P

Now I'm clicking around on links on the forum... they have multiple threads predicting the deathknell of 4E being various things, the latest being the "disastrous" hybrid class rules. They track whatever stats they can find, never realizing that roleplaying itself is a cyclical hobby that spends most of its time declining from a spike, but I think a lot of comes down to the kind of insularity that cliquish groups get. It's like in politics... no matter who's elected, there will be some people who go, "I can't see how that's possible. Nobody I know voted that way.", never minding the fact that they're only associating with people who share their opinions.

A direct quote:

They made a huge mistake when they made the Warden and the Invoker - they made classes that no one gives a fuck about. That's not somethng the game can well withstand when you still can't play a small spearman or a necromancer because the classes to do that shit haven't been written yet.

Do you hear that? No game product line can WITHSTAND coming out with classes that J. Random Internetguy, Esq. doesn't want to play before they bother to come out with classes he does want to play. Oh, wait. It's not about J. Random Internetguy. It's about what "everybody" wants to play, and "everybody" is interested in necromancers more than they're interested in wardens and invokers.

The same guy who supplied that quote (I'm not linking because I think I get enough grief from these quarters without sending any grief back) also opined that it would take him three weeks to hammer out classes for the Psionic and Shadow power sources and have freelancers fill in the blanks, but that it wouldn't be very interesting or playable because they'd be generic rehashes of existing classes.

I'm sure he's exactly right, but I'm not sure how this translates into a knock against 4E, since they're not doing that... their somewhat more reflective efforts result in classes like Warden, who plays way differently from a Fighter, and the Invoker, who plays differently from a Wizard.

And he also said: "I mean, am I the only one who remembers their discussion of how they chumped out on redesigning death and dying into something that wasn't shit?", and as evidence, he linked to this post from Andy Collins, the development and design manager... which does nothing of the sort. But he links to it and he quotes from it, as if

Eventually we got it through our heads that there wasn’t a radical new game mechanic just waiting to be discovered that would revolutionize the narrow window between life and death in D&D. What we really needed to do was just widen the window, reframe it, and maybe put in an extra pane for insulation. (OK, that analogy went off the tracks, but its heart was in the right place.)

were a confession of malfeasance, when it's nothing more than an admission that they spent a lot of time looking in the wrong direction before they got it right. You can agree or disagree that they did get it right, of course, but Mr. Collins is not saying he "chumped out". The solution fits the goals he outlined. The write-up there doesn't really follow up on the way that the new rules make capture a viable option for DMs, but the actual rules work just fine for that: all it takes to subdue someone is to say that you're subduing rather than killing them. No separate damage tracks for subdual and lethal damage.

If you want a battle's lose condition to trigger more story instead of everybody rolling new characters, that's all you have to do. Of course, any edition could have done that by DM fiat, but now it's canon.

It's simple, elegant, and playable. Is it "realistic"? Meh. See the big long rant below about immersion... no, the hobgoblins did not run all the PCs through with spears and then tie them up. The initial hits were wearing them down to the point where they could be defeated (again, "almost no HP" != "almost dead", it equals "almost to the point where you can't fight any more"), and then with the last blow they knocked them out. If that's not realistic, then any player who wants to roll percentile to see if the hobgoblin soldiers accidentally killed them while trying to capture them is welcome to set odds and roll against them. :)

This is getting less healthy than when I used to read Michelle Malkin's blog...

I keep finding people insisting that the demigod epic destiny's regeneration ability is too powerful and that the refusal of WotC to errata it is proof that they're arrogant and out of touch.

Okay, people... read that name: "demigod epic destiny". This is when your level 21 character (becomes/realizes they always were) a demigod. At level 26, they get a utility power that, once per day, gives them regeneration equal to their highest ability score for the remainder of the encounter. Not ability score modifier, but the raw ability score, which for an epic level character is going to easily be in the neighborhood of 26-30.

I can understand why they might look at that number and go "BUHWHU?" But there are epic level bosses that do 25 damage per round just for standing too close to them. I just flipped through the Monster Manual at random, stopping every time I found an epic monster, and none of them had damage low enough that they couldn't still present a credible threat. Even a level 22 thunderhawk thing can do 19 damage on an average at-will attack, +7 average damage if it's charging. 26 damage on a charge.

The regeneration would make it harder to kill a demigod... assuming that was the battle in which the demigod decided to pop this daily power... but it doesn't make it impossible.

Foes in the shallow end of the epic levels can easily inflict 20 points of damage on a hit. The 30th level character I have up in my character generator at the moment has 166 maximum HP and an Intelligence of 26... if she's bloodied, it'll take her four rounds to get back up to full, assuming she takes no more damage. This is overpowered? An ancient red dragon can make do 2d12+12 attacks against her every turn. One of those is likely to be enough to wipe out the regen. The other is gravy.

There's a level 24 rakshasa that can do three basic attacks a turn, and one of their attacks gets two attack rolls. And if they hit twice in one round the foe is dazed. I'd call that "overpowered", but it isn't... it's just about the right level of power for fighting a mid-epic level character, as the Demigod shows us.

Basically, by undoing one really good hit's worth of damage a turn, the regeneration works out to the equivalent of being hit slightly less often. It also gives the monsters an incentive to keep piling on attacks, unlike a power that just straight out boosts defenses... if you see that your attacks aren't effective any more you might back off, but if you see that the hero is healing damage almost as fast as one of your guys can dish it out, you pile on more guys.

I can understand why this power would seem unusually appealing to a person who plays the game in a very straightforward fashion, but it's far from out of balance with the other options available. In the same book (the core PHB), the Deadly Trickster has Epic Trick in the same slot. Each time you use it, you can pick one benefit: recover all HP and healing surges, or automatically save against all effects afflicting you, or recover all your encounter powers, or recover all daily powers except Epic Trick itself. That's huge. It could easily translate to more HP regained in a single encounter than the demigod's regen... it all depends on how long the battle lasts, from the time the power's invoked.

And compare it to the Archmage epic destiny's power, Shape Magic: regain one arcane power. One. It can be daily or it can be encounter. You recover one of them. It takes a standard action, whereas Epic Trick takes a minor action.

If we're assuming that each epic destiny's utility power is supposed to be balanced against the others' (and not looking at the classes as a whole... Archmages get extra use out of their daily powers to begin with via their features), it seems to me that Deadly Trickster's epic trick can trump both the Demigod's regen and the Archmage's shape magic. If the Demigod and the Deadly Trickster both trigger their epic utility powers to heal when they're almost dead, the Demigod is still almost dead but the Deadly Trickster is fresh. If the Archmage and the Deadly Trickster trigger their utility powers to regain powers when they're out, the Archmage gets one shot and the Deadly Trickster has several. And that's ignoring the versatility, the fact that the Deadly Trickster's power can be used for different things in different circumstances.

I keep saying that these 4E bashers are taking a very shallow approach to the material, and the more I look at it, the more I'm convinced it's true. I just read the Deadly Trickster's features so I could see if their other features suck, as that might explain why their awesome utility seems to be overlooked by the people who want Demigods nerfed.

At level 21, they get three d20 rerolls per day... usable on attack rolls, saving throws, ability checks, whatever. At level 24, they get to retain any encounter power or daily power and use it again if they roll an 18 or higher on the first attack roll with it. That's a flat 15% chance of reusing it. Even at 15%, that'll likely come into play at least once when they blow through their stack of powers... and it makes criticals something even more worth celebrating. At level 30, they can dictate that the DM rolls a 1, once per day.

I think I've found Pallas Snowblade's eventual epic destiny. Either that or Parable, which is essentially meta-awareness as an epic destiny.

What the Deadly Trickster is missing that many of the less mundane epic destinies... including Archmage and Demigod... have is an automatic once per day death cheat. Quite a few epic destinies, for their 24th level feature, have an ability that begins "once per day, when reduced to 0 HP" or "once per day, instead of dying"... the Archmage can separate spirit and body, one epic destiny has a self from another timeline come in and take up the fight, a Swordmage-only one has your spirit move into your sword and the sword fights on... if you win the fight, or don't lose so badly that sword and body are separated, the Swordmage can get back up.

The Demigod has the blandest version: Once per day, when you reach 0, your HPs reset back to your bloodied level (50%). What? You're a demigod. You don't have to pull off some amazing trick to cheat death. You just do it.

The Deadly Trickster is one of the epic destinies that doesn't have an automatic death-cheat, probably because the point of it is that you have all these nifty tools with which you can cheat death if you're clever in how you use them. But even without an automatic death cheat, it's hard to imagine anybody who's seriously looking at balance problems could look at the Demigod and Deadly Trickster side by side on the same page and go, "Well, the Demigod is clearly overpowered compared to this." The Demigod's advantages are straightforward, the Trickster's are a matter of giving you leverage.

And again I'll point out that when you reach level 30, the game is effectively over and you've won. All epic level characters are essentially gods by that point, and can only be really threatened by godlike forces. And yet I swear I've read three different versions of different people arguing that if an epic level demigod can only really be beaten by demon lords, ancient dragons, archdemons, and aspects of deities then it means something is wrong with the system.

Huzuwhu? Doesn't that sound like the way it should be?

Okay, that's enough forum-lurking and D&D crunching. I've got a lot of stuff to finish tonight. On to the writening.

I'm just going to flat out say this...

Anybody should feel free, when I'm blogging obsessively on a subject in the middle of the day and there are no stories out yet, to leave a comment saying words to the effects of, "Do you realize how much time you're spending on this?" or "Um, shouldn't you be writing?"

Because the answer may very well be no on the first and yes on the second. My reminders-to-self only work if I pay attention to them, and if I get really focused on something I may not notice them, or I may tell myself "I'll spend five more minutes on this", which might work if not for the fact that if I could tell when I'm spending "just five more minutes" I wouldn't need the reminder regimen.

There's no reason to be nasty about it, but you don't have to do a lot of bowing and scraping about it, which is probably going to come off with the opposite effect of what you intended. Just being upfront. I'm trying to be upfront about the issues I have. I won't snap and bite anybody's head off for noticing that I'm distracted and giving me a short and simple reminder.

I can't help it, I'm looking at it again.

( Cut for people who don't care. )