D&D 4E's focus on defined game mechanics.
Aug. 7th, 2013 02:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerinI was flipping through the Adventurer's Vault 2 last night for random ideas/inspiration and I came across something that I think really sums up one of the big weaknesses in 4E's approach to codify as many things as possible in the same few simplistic game mechanical terms.
I never noticed this before because of a quirk of the book that a lot of the inset flavor text boxes and artwork is on a different page from the item it refers to. Not like on the facing page, but you see something and then turn the page and there's an inset reference to it, or vice versa. It's not a terrible flaw for a book to have, but it is something that should probably be avoided where possible.
Anyway, on one page, there's an illustration of someone in a jail cell using an item called "Gloves of Dimensional Grasp" to reach their hand through a tiny portal to grab the key ring hanging on a peg outside.
Pretty cool, right?
On the page before it, the description of the gloves. Their effects are defined as a static +4 bonus to Thievery (not too shabby) and a daily power, with the result of it being that the user can make a Thievery Check against a target in your line of sight 5 squares away.
Which, you know, sounds more like Gloves of Sublime Thievery than Gloves of "Dimensional Grasp". It makes you such a good thief, you can pick someone's pocket without ever seeming to go near them.
Which makes for a nifty magical item (though there is still an issue with the daily power that I'll get to in a minute", but it's not what the illustration on the next page implies.
The illustration makes it clear that "dimensional grasping" means reaching through a tiny portal, and clearly shows an action that is impossible under the rules as written. Picking up an object is not making a Thievery check against a target. It's allowable under the logic of "Well, if I could steal these keys off a guard's belt using this glove, it should be easy enough to steal it off a wall," and as a DM, I wouldn't think twice about someone using it to pick up unattended objects.
Actually, I just figured out how to make it work, rules as written. Define what you're doing as sleight-of-hand. You can't simply pick up an unattended object by reaching through the portal, but you can palm it.
And again, as DM, I wouldn't make somebody go through that kind of tortured logic to justify using this glove for its clearly intended use.
The reason things get written as this is one part for purpose of clarity ("open a portal through which you can reach one arm and manipulate objects, including making one Thievery check, or pick up an object and pull it back through" actually does leave open a lot of potential questions about its exact limits, whereas a Thievery check is a defined quantity) and one part for purpose of stopping munchkins (because there are people who can and will raise those potential questions
with an eye towards shaping the answers in such a way that an arm-sized portal becomes an unstoppable murder hole).
By thinking, "Okay, the main purpose of this item would be to take things people don't want you to have, from some distance away. What's that? It's a Thievery check. These gloves let you do Thievery checks at a distance," both those potential interrelated problems are nipped in the bud.
And it's not that this particular item would be puzzlingly vague or potentially unbalanced if its effects weren't tightly defined. This is just part of 4E's design philosophy, the way that 3E felt the need to define terms like "door" and "bridge" in the DMG (did you know that stone doors are similar to wooden doors, except they're made out of stone?).
But apart from weirdness and tortured logic created by the inherent limitations of a Thievery check, there's also weirdness created by the lack of such limitations. D&D 4E pared the skill list down to things that have potential direct adventuring applications, which leads to many of them being quite broad to begin with and some odd logic about what skills to apply when you need to bring in something that didn't make the list. Dungeoneering deals with both caves and artificial structures, so your party's underground ranger is both a geologist and an architect, and because Dungeoneering is the monster lore skill for the abberant creatures that come from another dimension beyond our reckoning, your geologist/architect is also a Lovecraftian scholar, with knowledge of the Far Realm and all the Things Mortals Were Not Meant To Know.
And Thievery? Thievery is the only skill that deals with mechanisms (traps and locks), so it's also used for anything dealing with mechanical matters, and because it's the de facto mechanical skill, it's the skill that adventures suggest be used whenever something other than a weapon or armor is in need of repair as a plot point. Do you know how to fix a broken axle on a caravan wagon? Slip on a "Glove of Dimensional Grasp", and you'll have a +4 bonus to do it from 25 feet away!
I mentioned above that there's a problem in defining its remote thieving power as a daily power. In previous editions of D&D, magic items were one thing that made play balance... swingy, because there wasn't a fixed progression or a hard limit on their accumulation. D&D 4E was structured with the expectation that magic items would mostly a follow a progression that was part of the normal character growth in power/experience (which is something that a lot of people objected to, me not among them because if magic items are important and powerful they should be seen as another aspect of the character itself), and part of that is that when a magic item has a power that can be used once per day, that doesn't just mean it can be used once and then it's done until it recharges.
There's also a limit on a given character's ability to use such magic items in total. Like, it takes something out of you to activate a magic item and you can't do it too much before you're done. Which isn't a terrible idea in and of itself. It's not how things worked in earlier editions, but it follows the same kind of logic of magic in general for D&D.
Again, this is a balance/munchkin aversion thing. By the time you get to higher levels, you could afford to make/buy lower level magic items over and over again. So you could end up with ten copies of a power that's supposed to be once per day. It'll be weaker than other powers you have available to you... but you can do it over and over again.
I think the limit is one per ten-level tier. I could be remembering that wrong, but assuming I'm not, this means that a character who uses these gloves has basically just given up the ability to use a daily attack or healing power from another item. This is a mid-second-tier item, so if you have the Gloves of Stealing And Wagon-Fixing From 25 Feet Away, a Ring of Hey I Almost Died But Then I Didn't. and a Sword of We Kill The Boss Before The Boss Kills Us, how often are you going to use the gloves? The way a typical D&D 4E adventure is structured around the use of daily powers and "going nova", you'd pretty much have to be backed into a corner to use the gloves' daily power, and instead of thinking, "Man, I used these gloves to do some impossible thievery and it was awesome!", it would be, "Man, I got cheated out of being able to use a daily attack power."
So if the rules as written are followed, what should be an interesting magic item with all sorts of inventive uses basically just becomes gloves of +4 thievery.
As a side note along the same lines, the same page with the picture of the gloves has an inset fluff box for an item called Illusionists' Gloves, that tells a story of how a master illusionist once killed a traveling street conjurer who was using them for entertainment in order to become a master burglar.
What do the illusionists' gloves do? Like the Gloves of Stealing And Wagon-Fixing From 25 Feet Away, they have both a static property and a daily power. Sidenote: I think the combination of fixed benefit and invoked limited use power is a good idea in general. The property here is that any time you hit someone with an illusion attack, the victim gets a -2 penalty to their attempts to fight off an ongoing effect. The daily power is something you can trigger when you miss with an illusion attack power, allowing you to re-roll the attack and you the second one.
THIS is a daily power that will get used. Why? Because an illusionist character is going to have illusion-based daily attack powers. And missing with a daily power sucks, because again, adventures the game is structured around them as a finite and definite resource.
So my point here isn't that this is a terribly designed item. It's... this is a combat item. The one line description in the info box says that it allows you to alter an illusion on the fly to make it more effective. And okay, a penalty to throw off the effects of an illusionary attack and the ability to re-roll an attack that misses are a good way to convey that, but this only affects attacks. There's no utility effects. If the original owner in the example story was using them at children's birthday parties, that's... that's pretty bad. And the second guy? The illusionist thief? The stolen gloves are explained as something he uses to cover his escape. It doesn't sound like he's using illusions to murder the minds of guards and witnesses, which is all these gloves are actually good for, in game terms.
How hard would it be for them to have a property that raises the DC of and/or gives a penalty to Perception Checks to see through illusions the wearer creates? Answer: not hard. Easy. It would be the direct equivalent of the property that applies to attack powers, and it would make the item actually fit with the story.
I really don't resent the general nerfing of magic items in D&D 4E. I understand the reasons behind them and in some cases the more limited items are more interesting. And they're less likely to overshadow the character's own abilities. But so many items, as part of the nerfing/clarification process, had their effects so exactly defined that they no longer do the things they're depicted as doing on the same page (or near the same page) as the rules defining them.
I never noticed this before because of a quirk of the book that a lot of the inset flavor text boxes and artwork is on a different page from the item it refers to. Not like on the facing page, but you see something and then turn the page and there's an inset reference to it, or vice versa. It's not a terrible flaw for a book to have, but it is something that should probably be avoided where possible.
Anyway, on one page, there's an illustration of someone in a jail cell using an item called "Gloves of Dimensional Grasp" to reach their hand through a tiny portal to grab the key ring hanging on a peg outside.
Pretty cool, right?
On the page before it, the description of the gloves. Their effects are defined as a static +4 bonus to Thievery (not too shabby) and a daily power, with the result of it being that the user can make a Thievery Check against a target in your line of sight 5 squares away.
Which, you know, sounds more like Gloves of Sublime Thievery than Gloves of "Dimensional Grasp". It makes you such a good thief, you can pick someone's pocket without ever seeming to go near them.
Which makes for a nifty magical item (though there is still an issue with the daily power that I'll get to in a minute", but it's not what the illustration on the next page implies.
The illustration makes it clear that "dimensional grasping" means reaching through a tiny portal, and clearly shows an action that is impossible under the rules as written. Picking up an object is not making a Thievery check against a target. It's allowable under the logic of "Well, if I could steal these keys off a guard's belt using this glove, it should be easy enough to steal it off a wall," and as a DM, I wouldn't think twice about someone using it to pick up unattended objects.
Actually, I just figured out how to make it work, rules as written. Define what you're doing as sleight-of-hand. You can't simply pick up an unattended object by reaching through the portal, but you can palm it.
And again, as DM, I wouldn't make somebody go through that kind of tortured logic to justify using this glove for its clearly intended use.
The reason things get written as this is one part for purpose of clarity ("open a portal through which you can reach one arm and manipulate objects, including making one Thievery check, or pick up an object and pull it back through" actually does leave open a lot of potential questions about its exact limits, whereas a Thievery check is a defined quantity) and one part for purpose of stopping munchkins (because there are people who can and will raise those potential questions
with an eye towards shaping the answers in such a way that an arm-sized portal becomes an unstoppable murder hole).
By thinking, "Okay, the main purpose of this item would be to take things people don't want you to have, from some distance away. What's that? It's a Thievery check. These gloves let you do Thievery checks at a distance," both those potential interrelated problems are nipped in the bud.
And it's not that this particular item would be puzzlingly vague or potentially unbalanced if its effects weren't tightly defined. This is just part of 4E's design philosophy, the way that 3E felt the need to define terms like "door" and "bridge" in the DMG (did you know that stone doors are similar to wooden doors, except they're made out of stone?).
But apart from weirdness and tortured logic created by the inherent limitations of a Thievery check, there's also weirdness created by the lack of such limitations. D&D 4E pared the skill list down to things that have potential direct adventuring applications, which leads to many of them being quite broad to begin with and some odd logic about what skills to apply when you need to bring in something that didn't make the list. Dungeoneering deals with both caves and artificial structures, so your party's underground ranger is both a geologist and an architect, and because Dungeoneering is the monster lore skill for the abberant creatures that come from another dimension beyond our reckoning, your geologist/architect is also a Lovecraftian scholar, with knowledge of the Far Realm and all the Things Mortals Were Not Meant To Know.
And Thievery? Thievery is the only skill that deals with mechanisms (traps and locks), so it's also used for anything dealing with mechanical matters, and because it's the de facto mechanical skill, it's the skill that adventures suggest be used whenever something other than a weapon or armor is in need of repair as a plot point. Do you know how to fix a broken axle on a caravan wagon? Slip on a "Glove of Dimensional Grasp", and you'll have a +4 bonus to do it from 25 feet away!
I mentioned above that there's a problem in defining its remote thieving power as a daily power. In previous editions of D&D, magic items were one thing that made play balance... swingy, because there wasn't a fixed progression or a hard limit on their accumulation. D&D 4E was structured with the expectation that magic items would mostly a follow a progression that was part of the normal character growth in power/experience (which is something that a lot of people objected to, me not among them because if magic items are important and powerful they should be seen as another aspect of the character itself), and part of that is that when a magic item has a power that can be used once per day, that doesn't just mean it can be used once and then it's done until it recharges.
There's also a limit on a given character's ability to use such magic items in total. Like, it takes something out of you to activate a magic item and you can't do it too much before you're done. Which isn't a terrible idea in and of itself. It's not how things worked in earlier editions, but it follows the same kind of logic of magic in general for D&D.
Again, this is a balance/munchkin aversion thing. By the time you get to higher levels, you could afford to make/buy lower level magic items over and over again. So you could end up with ten copies of a power that's supposed to be once per day. It'll be weaker than other powers you have available to you... but you can do it over and over again.
I think the limit is one per ten-level tier. I could be remembering that wrong, but assuming I'm not, this means that a character who uses these gloves has basically just given up the ability to use a daily attack or healing power from another item. This is a mid-second-tier item, so if you have the Gloves of Stealing And Wagon-Fixing From 25 Feet Away, a Ring of Hey I Almost Died But Then I Didn't. and a Sword of We Kill The Boss Before The Boss Kills Us, how often are you going to use the gloves? The way a typical D&D 4E adventure is structured around the use of daily powers and "going nova", you'd pretty much have to be backed into a corner to use the gloves' daily power, and instead of thinking, "Man, I used these gloves to do some impossible thievery and it was awesome!", it would be, "Man, I got cheated out of being able to use a daily attack power."
So if the rules as written are followed, what should be an interesting magic item with all sorts of inventive uses basically just becomes gloves of +4 thievery.
As a side note along the same lines, the same page with the picture of the gloves has an inset fluff box for an item called Illusionists' Gloves, that tells a story of how a master illusionist once killed a traveling street conjurer who was using them for entertainment in order to become a master burglar.
What do the illusionists' gloves do? Like the Gloves of Stealing And Wagon-Fixing From 25 Feet Away, they have both a static property and a daily power. Sidenote: I think the combination of fixed benefit and invoked limited use power is a good idea in general. The property here is that any time you hit someone with an illusion attack, the victim gets a -2 penalty to their attempts to fight off an ongoing effect. The daily power is something you can trigger when you miss with an illusion attack power, allowing you to re-roll the attack and you the second one.
THIS is a daily power that will get used. Why? Because an illusionist character is going to have illusion-based daily attack powers. And missing with a daily power sucks, because again, adventures the game is structured around them as a finite and definite resource.
So my point here isn't that this is a terribly designed item. It's... this is a combat item. The one line description in the info box says that it allows you to alter an illusion on the fly to make it more effective. And okay, a penalty to throw off the effects of an illusionary attack and the ability to re-roll an attack that misses are a good way to convey that, but this only affects attacks. There's no utility effects. If the original owner in the example story was using them at children's birthday parties, that's... that's pretty bad. And the second guy? The illusionist thief? The stolen gloves are explained as something he uses to cover his escape. It doesn't sound like he's using illusions to murder the minds of guards and witnesses, which is all these gloves are actually good for, in game terms.
How hard would it be for them to have a property that raises the DC of and/or gives a penalty to Perception Checks to see through illusions the wearer creates? Answer: not hard. Easy. It would be the direct equivalent of the property that applies to attack powers, and it would make the item actually fit with the story.
I really don't resent the general nerfing of magic items in D&D 4E. I understand the reasons behind them and in some cases the more limited items are more interesting. And they're less likely to overshadow the character's own abilities. But so many items, as part of the nerfing/clarification process, had their effects so exactly defined that they no longer do the things they're depicted as doing on the same page (or near the same page) as the rules defining them.