Quote from: B.T.;546958A 19-year-old girl.

He can, it's just costs him a 4 million dollar diamond when he does.

Quote from: CRKrueger;546968He can, it's just costs him a 4 million dollar diamond when he does.

Plus whatever he paid her to drop the charges.

Quote from: One Horse Town;546961Being English, not dunking biscuits in your tea is a crime.

Gah! How common!

Quote from: One Horse Town;546961Being English, not dunking biscuits in your tea is a crime.

Being American and from the South, tea that isn't sweet and ice cold ain't real tea.

Being French, not discarding that tea crap for wine is tantamount to treason.

Beer!

Quote from: Settembrini;547054Beer!

That too. In Northern France at least.

Quote from: jadrax;547040Gah! How common!

I'm a gangsta, innit?

I know the thread has moved on to tea and basketball and shit, but skimming the thread there were one or two bits I felt like commenting on.

Quote from: John Morrow;545946And I also agree that once something like throwing sand in the eyes is given a positive modifier, there is little reason not to use such tactics every time the character is in combat.

It really depends on whether you handle sand the way Gleichman describes (allowing the sand and the attack as part of the same action, and appending a bonus). Most of the time freeform combat maneuvering spends a main action or equivalent, allows a save or equivalent, and accomplishes a single specific effect. As a player of 3x I also see a lot of allowing an AoO, or a choice between an AoO or a check to avoid.

Anecdotal and specific to games I play and all that, but given all of the above sand in the eyes isn't better than a basic attack because it doesn't directly get a guy closer to dead, because it might fail entirely, and because it costs an action the same as an attack.

He's spot on about the weirdness of maneuvers in a system without wounds, though.

Quote from: gleichman;546013Second
This answer fails to take into account the impact of teamwork. While one character has given up the option to do damage, others on this team now have a significantly increased chance to do more damage.

In games where target focus is advantageous or are focused on tactical maneuver (i.e. position and movement like Age of Heroes) the result can be immediate and overwhelming.

RPG are all about teamwork, and I find that GMs and even designers forget about that fact all too often.


Third
Perhaps the worse result from your PoV (not mine) is that if you for some mystical reason are able to balance it nearly 100% of the time. For in that case there is no reason at all to do your special out of the box action as it has provided no benefit. The exact opposite of your stated claim upfront that you were rewarding your players for these actions.

I know you can't hear me, but the answer to the third problem is the second problem. If maneuvers are circumstantially useful in defined ways (for instance, if throwing sand in the eyes is more useful the more allies can make follow-up attacks) then they will be used in the circumstances that make them useful and not in the circumstances that make them useless. Then there's planning to make them useful and so on.

Freeform judgement calls won't end up working that way for other reasons, but if people know roughly what conditions they can inflict and roughly what the costs and odds are, and only have to find a way to make it happen (in other words there's a rough framework in place), that tends to work out well.

I feel there's an unwritten and common framework here that usually involves opposed checks, ditched damage, and a spent action. I think in a lot of instances what gets described as freeform uses an unwritten framework, or one based of specific instances (so people extrapolate how most maneuvers work based on how specific maneuvers are written).

Quote from: Justin Alexander;546230The problem is not that fighters get special abilities. It's that 4E-style fighter abilities tend to:

(a) Be dissociated mechanics
(b) Require characters to have a special ability in order to attempt an action that any character should be able to attempt

The wizard's traditional spells, on the other hand, generally DON'T fall into those traps.

There are several ways that you could design fighter abilities that wouldn't fall into those traps. And I'd enthusiastically support it.

I tend to agree with you, but I've seen what B.T. was talking about. I'd really like to see a better fighter, with cool abilities that weren't dealbreakers.

I wonder if 5e will fail to serve this middle ground, with feats and maneuvers aimed squarely at folks not worried about a or b, though. Their healing rules were dissociated, but I would have loved a shorter-term hp management system that wasn't.

Quote from: jeff37923;547042Being American and from the South, tea that isn't sweet and ice cold ain't real tea.

Being from the Pacific Northwest it's coffee not tea, preferably a double shot, short cinnamon latte. From Piccalo's using Seattle's Best not Starbucks.

Quote from: Marleycat;547117Being from the Pacific Northwest it's coffee not tea, preferably a double shot short cinnamon latte.

I lived in Seattle for awhile too and I raise you a venti white chocolate mocha with a double shot of godiva chocolate liquor.

Being from Califa, it's coffee with tequila, que no?

Well I was thinking it was for workplace pickmeup but Jeff's idea sounds delicious.

Quote from: Marleycat;547117Being from the Pacific Northwest it's coffee not tea, preferably a double shot, short cinnamon latte. From Piccalo's using Seattle's Best not Starbucks.

A fellow PNWer huh?  I knew there was a reason why I liked you

Although I actually prefer hot chocolate to coffee.

Espresso or tea, because health doesn't permit alcohol.

I miss wine.  And good German brews.  And SoCo.