I've recently heard complaints on this site about an element in 4E, namely the inclusion of attack powers for player characters that deal damage within a certain area on the battlefield to inimical creatures only, not to allies - even if the area covers the allies as well.

The complaint that people have with this, if I recall, is that this sort of thing is hard to rationalize and bring across to the game at a level that makes sense in-game. Suppose the wizards casts a good old Ice Storm. It's hard to imagine why the orcs in front of him have their toes frozen off, while good old Mr Rogue and Mr Fighterman get swooped over by a cloud of snow unscathed.

I'm interested to hear more about this objection. I'd also like to start off by mounting a defense on behalf of 4E's design decision. It comes from an older post by Abyssal Maw.

Quote from: AMIn 3.5 players had a tendency to study the board to see where they should move- sometimes even consult with other players--"should I go here? or should I go here..or should I delay?"). Doing things the exact right tactical way was pretty rewarding- you needed to know about flanks and AoO's and all of that stuff. A wrong move or a single step out into the threat range of something dangerous could set you up really badly, and there were established methods for getting inside of reach. Characters with area attacks would often lay them down right alongside their fellow combatants because of the irregular shape of the blast templates. (I know it's probably pointless to point this out here, a board where 80% of the people never played D&D3 and 80% of the ones who did removed all of the tactical rules, but still).

In 4e someone who stands there to study the board is mostly wasting his time. The gameplay is meant to be fluid and it moves around a lot quicker. You can still get hosed for blundering too far ahead of the group or getting isolated, but in general 4e is far more forgiving of snap decisions. Reach is less dangerous, threat zones, blasts and bursts are more regular (they are regular squares rather than diamond or round, and in general they are much smaller) so there's less to think about that way. On the other hand, there's often a lot of "trick" zones and "gotcha" powers in the typical encounter in 4e- like there's a type of monster who you can attack, and he grabs a nearby minion and forces you to attack the minion instead.

I hope you can see the rationale for posting this here.

If an area damage power only targets your enemies, not your allies, you don't have to waste time putting a weirdly shaped outline of the spell area on the battle map, just to make sure your fire ball doesn't kill Mr Bard who's two squares behind a corner, when you only want to kill the orcs in front of you. If you never played 3.5, here's how that looks like:



Basically, that's a really clumsy element in gameplay, and good riddance say I.

What's more, to those who enjoy fiddling wish such things - at the level of detail they're actually designed for (as opposed to, say, just neatly houseruling it away and then come back claiming how "the 3.5 I played" never had that problem) - 4E has kept them in. It's now a choice of character class. You don't like to fiddle with spell areas when figuring who to hit and who to avoid? Here's your cleric. You do like to fiddle with these things? Pick a wizard.

Now, the main reason I'm posting this is the following.

There's a lot of criticism re:4E which I have a lot of sympathy for. Actually I've got lots of understanding for the line of criticism cited above, namely that area effects which conveniently target your enemies is a game element that kills suspension of disbelief.
Still, my sympathy ends at the moment when, to uphold the thing this criticism is in favour (namely, to revert to 3.5) ends up in a sort of gameplay that isn't worth the bother.
So, I guess what I'm saying is this. A lot of 4E detractors don't realize that the rationale for some elements in 4E design really do solve problems in game play. What a lot of 4E proponents don't seem to realize, on the other hand, is that a lot of 4E detractors never had these problems personally in the first place - either because they didn't play 3.5 as written, or because they never got that deep into 3.5 in the first place (or, because they ditched 3.5 in favour of a simpler game, Basic D&D or something else). Basically, there's a lot of people out there who are accustomed to games which never used defined spell shapes mandating the metal wire device depicted above. And for those people, looking at what 4E does just means solving a problem they never had.

And that seems to be the root problem of many pro/anti 4E discussions. 4E took many design decisions which are hard to find favour with until you actually pin point that area in play which previous editions - in particular, 3.5. - handled poorly. Hence, there seem to be three causes to disagreement (re: was design decision x really necessary?) at this point.

1. People don't see the connection of a design decision with an actual problem in play.
2. People never experienced the alleged "problem in actual play".
3. People experienced the alleged problem, but found it unproblematic - for them the problem is really only allegedly one, not actually.

All this leads me back to the point I started out on. It seems to me that a lot of people seem positively unwilling to compromise (what they label) the "immersion" side to their games in favour of streamlining gameplay at all. People who like their D&D to be clunky and fiddly. (Jeff Rients wrote a nice blog entry on that, it's called "A tale of two 4Es.")

Enough from me. I'd like to hear your thoughts, in particular, on where you stand in this debate and why, and if you found any fault with my attempt to categorize the overall lines of debate. I'm grateful to stand corrected, as always.

First ed. was able to do comprehensive area effects without being particularly clunky. I mean--no one ever enjoyed the first time he threw a fireball at something close in a tight corridor, but he would feel next time that he had learned something about the physics of magic, and improved in his ability to negotiate the imaginary world. That learning to assess and live within the sometimes difficult parameters of an imaginary world is a huge part of what makes D&D appealing to some of the folks that play it. Removing that learning process removes a whole element of fun for some folks, without replacing it with a compensating element.

The only two editions of D&D that I have any interest in are 4e and 0e. I like the free form nature of 0e, and I like the more defined,  board game nature of 4e.  since I've come to 0e late, I'd have to say it solves more problems (that I had with 1e, mostly) for me than 4e. However, I don't like either game because it solves problems for me, I like them both because I think they're cool.

Quote from: Windjammer;332498I've recently heard complaints on this site about an element in 4E, namely the inclusion of attack powers for player characters that deal damage within a certain area on the battlefield to inimical creatures only, not to allies - even if the area covers the allies as well.

The complaint that people have with this, if I recall, is that this sort of thing is hard to rationalize and bring across to the game at a level that makes sense in-game. Suppose the wizards casts a good old Ice Storm. It's hard to imagine why the orcs in front of him have their toes frozen off, while good old Mr Rogue and Mr Fighterman get swooped over by a cloud of snow unscathed.

In direct response to this- it's magic, I have no more problem believing it could believe it could be selectively used in such a fashion than i do believing it could be used at all. Really, wtf? It's magic.

A fun story to tell, where the outnumbered and surrounded fighter calls in the wizard's air-strike on his own position, is lost. An archetypal moment. Exactly the sort of thing you want to fight to preserve.

I'm not keen on arguments from "realism" but I certainly would rate a game mechanism by whether or not it excludes stories I want to hear and tell. The "ice storm only affects bad guys" seems to exclude more than it creates in order to simplify game play. I would say if that's the sort of simplicity you're after then it's actually the rigid positioning you want to do away with, so the bard can use a power/spend a point/argue cogently that he was safely behind the pillar.

There have been a few casualties from 'friendly fire' in our Earthdawn games and that 'feels' right to us, and made for great stories. The mage had to learn what situations were good/bad for certain spells. It also led to us running for cover when he starts making certain motions in the air...
Having AOE miss the friendlies just feels lame to me... makes the magic a bit less scary... and reminds me of World of Warcraft.
I'd much rather think, 'that mage has a nuke in his pocket, I sure hope he knows how to use it.'

As for it being 'magic' so anything goes... I've always hated that argument. If I'm gonna have any kind of 'suspension of disbelief' in what's going on there has to be some kind of cohesive rationale... even for the imaginary crap.
It's like the old school zoo-dungeons... "what do all these monsters eat? How does the air circulate? Why is all this gold lying around?"... "Oh, who cares, it's MAGIC!!!"
That answer always sucked.

In the 4e example, where the cleric gets the ability to 'miss' at will with his AOE that could make sense since the power is supposedly coming from his god... and the god can micromanage where the damage falls. It's not a raw explosion of indiscriminate energy like the mage is using.
If you come up with anplausible in-game reason for the mage to selectively miss then that's fine... but it isn't how I'd want to play. I like magic to be kind of unpredictable and imprecise.

There are those players who will have issues with game systems of the kind you talk about here, and those who won't. I prefer to play with the latter (I have nothing against the tactical game play of 3.5, and as a matter of fact, love it, but it serves a purpose at the game table as an abstraction of what's going on in the game world. It can be enjoyed as a part of the game, but it shouldn't become all that the game's worth, to me. A lot of the "problems" and "broken-ness" people talk about aren't actually "problematic" nor "broken" when you realize the game's about people around a table, and not the rules they use).

That about sums it up, to me. That said, I'm glad 4e exists for people interested in that sort of mechanical hair-splitting. They now have a game system to play with, while I stick to the game systems I do like.

While 4e does have effects like this, it also has ones that affect everyone in the area. This past Thursday we had two separate instances of the latter.

Seanchai

Quote from: Windjammer;332498If an area damage power only targets your enemies, not your allies, you don't have to waste time putting a weirdly shaped outline of the spell area on the battle map, just to make sure your fire ball doesn't kill Mr Bard who's two squares behind a corner, when you only want to kill the orcs in front of you. If you never played 3.5, here's how that looks like:

What the hell just draw a bloody circle and eyeball it or you can use these exciting devices they have these days called "computers"

Sarcasm aside – and I really do think, if you felt compelled to do that every single time somebody casted a fireball, you'd run to a simpler system within days – I don't really have a problem with area spells that distinguish friend from foe, especially if they're of divine provenance, so I wouldn't necessarily have complained about this to begin with. Though if area spells that didn't hurt your friends was the standard, it would begin to seem cheap.

Most area effects in 4e affect both enemies and allies evenly - especially Wizards' spells.

The ones that don't are actually fairly rare...  I mean, a fighter attacking everyone around him can exclude allies for (what I think are) obvious reasons.  But a fireball or an ice storm hurts everyone.

There are some exceptions, naturally.  Invokers (for non-4e folks, think a Wrath of God-style Old Testament prophet) have some divine prayers which hurt enemies and help allies in the same burst.  But not all of them, and the ones which work that way usually have a pretty decent reason to do so.

Man, I almost forgot about the crazy cone templates, though.  I know it's unrealistic, but I've grown to appreciate wacky 4e square areas for simplicity's sake.

-O

It depends on the effect. Generally cleric effects effect enemies only, wizards spells damage enemies and allies alike.


A 3.5 spell to look at for comparison is ....well, now it's slipped my mind. It isn't cure light wounds, mass. There's one that does an interesting thing against undead that damages all undead and simultaneously heals all friendlies in 3.5 and I can't remember which one it is.

Quote from: Abyssal Maw;332619A 3.5 spell to look at for comparison is ....well, now it's slipped my mind. It isn't cure light wounds, mass. There's one that does an interesting thing against undead that damages all undead and simultaneously heals all friendlies in 3.5 and I can't remember which one it is.

Well, here's something from the Pathfinder RPG which matches that description.

QuoteChannel Positive Energy

When you channel positive energy, you unleash a wave of positive energy in a 30-foot burst. All undead in this radius take 1d6 points of positive energy damage plus 1d6 points of positive energy damage for every two cleric levels you have attained beyond 1st (1d6 at 1st level, 2d6 at 3rd, 3d6 at 5th, and so on) and must flee from you (as if frightened) for 1d4 rounds + your Charisma modifier. Undead in this radius are allowed a Will save that negates the frightened condition and results in half damage. The DC of this save is equal to 10 + 1/2 your cleric level + your Charisma modifier. Undead who take damage greater than their hit points crumble to dust and are destroyed by the power of your deity. If a fleeing undead is subject to channeled negative energy, it is not controlled, but does receive a new saving throw to dispel the flee effect.

Living creatures within the area are healed a like amount by this wave of positive energy. You can choose whether or not to include yourselfin this effect. Hit points gained above a living creature's total are lost.

The rationale for the same magical power having distinct effects on foes and allies seems to do with them reacting differently to the same input (living creatures regain energy whereas undead loose it when exposed to positive energy). Could you transport this sort of reasoning to the 4E cases?

An enemy is simply a creature of your choice, and an ally is a willing creature of your choice.