Alex,
ColCol,
Excidium and
Esquilax:
When you control a chess-team, you control 8 pawns beyond all the other shit. When you P&P a fighter, you control that guy. All you will ever do is perfom the functions of a pawn.
I have seen AD&D fighters use all kinds of maneuvers. Here is some stuff I have either seen or heard about:
- Standing under a wooden drawbridge with a few holes, so he could attack the soft underbelly of a giant lizard.
- In a similar vein, getting swallowed whole by a giant goad so he could attack it from inside (a risky one, to be sure, but turned out to be very effective).
- Using the backwards spike of a polearm (I forgot the name) to draw in a lizard man that was pelting the party with slingshots.
- Falling down on an enemy with a polearm and using the weapon to propel himself forward, avoiding damage and causing his falling damage on his enemy (the player had played way too much Final Fantasy Tactics. This didn't work anywhere nearly so well the second time around, though).
- Using a few magic spears that could go through the ground effortlessly to hit the limbs of a hydra, pinning it into place.
- Coating their weapons with different sorts of poison, making it have all kinds of different effects.
- Swinging from a chandelier onto the back of ajuggernaut, where it couldn't reach him (he eventually got thrown out, but managed to do a lot of damage).
- Stabbing a beholder on its main eye, finally dealing with its anti-magic power.
- Distracting an opponent with false strikes, lowering his AC for the other PCs to attack him.
- Using all sorts of dirty tricks, like throwing sand on their eyes, sweeping kicking them so they fall on their butts, using an illusion to conceal their true fighting moves (this one needed an MU, but the warrior was the one dealing the damage), throwing oil on their feet so they slipusing a hidden dagger to cut them during their parry, etc.
- Throwing a bomb into the dragon's gullet just as it is about to flame breath, causing the creature's neck to explode and its head to fall several feet away.
- Inventing a fighting style that looks like a dance, and thus being able to keep fighting against some kind of annoying fey (I forgot which, brownies maybe) and tarantella who would make the character dance unable to help himself otherwise.
- All kinds of troop dealing stuff once they get to 11th level and get a keep. Training the soldiers, coming upt with ploys and leading the armies.
I see you (deliberately?) missed the rest of the discussion. This is ALL stuff that deeper, tactical classes could do as well. Most of what you describe is PRECISELY what I took into account by writing this:
You will almost never have tactical depth, unless you don't play by the rules of course and makes shit up as you go (which many P&P tables do, which is cool)
For example, throwing a bomb into the dragon's gullet. You could have been playing any class ever - it says nothing about the design of the class. I realize you like AD&D Alex, and you're welcome to it, but that list is pretty much walking dead into my argument.
Well, but that is the whole point of playing earlier editions. To make shit up. On the fly. To come up with cool ideas and then testing them against the situation at hand. Of course, if you play P&P D&D character like you played a fighter in a gold box game, it isn't going to be much fun, as all your tactics is in placement, and the game doesn't have rules that are very fair in that regard.But there are lots of interesting things you can make with older editions fighters. Some of these at least could be transferred to CRPGs as puzzles and elements in combats you can try to use in your favor.
Bullshit, Alex. You are the one who for some reason made up a world where the absence of rules (or indeed, the absence of rules other than AD and fucking D) is needed for this kind of stuff. I have told you many times before how many campaigns I play in and DM that utilize these exact mechanics. That does not excuse the fighter in AD&D.
"Oh, but Grunker" you argue, "I like minimal rules when making shit up on the fly!"
Oh shit... wait... you actually have a point... but... Then why the
FUCK are you playing AD&D? One of the absolute best examples of how shitty that system is the level of complexity you need to understand and the number of completely different and arbitrary table-based systems you need to know at least superficially to
play a guy who, by RAW, is not allowed to do much more than swing sharp objects at things. That, is hilarious. AD&D is not a simple system, yet it has classes that are shallow. There are much better simplistic systems out there.
"Oh, but Grunker" you contrinue, "maybe some players like complexity and some like simplicity!" OK. Fair enough. How lucky that Pathfinder's fighter can be played fucking blind-folded too, huh? There's also many other fantasy systems that provide this much, much better than AD&D which require the poor simplicity-liking player to understand the arbitrary piece of fuck that is AD&D. You're not saying "to make shit up, we need minimal mechanics," you're literally saying "too make shit up I need this set of
bad mechanics!"
You could still do these things in a more restricted game like D&D 4e, but I can't see that really working without shooting balance to hell.
Funny, you using 4E as an example, seeing as I've stated in multiple threads, multiple times how I dislike that system, particularly because it goes out of its way to block shit like this. I do, however, like 3.5 and Pathfinder, systems where stuff like what you mention is
more than possible.
Summa summarum: You like AD&D, and I really have no problems with that, but your arguments of placing it descriptively above 3.5 et al are arbitrary and irrational. I've told you these things before, and I'm fairly surprised I have to listen to the same arguments again. AD&D is arbitrary, it's a mess, and it was designed without an overarching goal. It isn't even a system in a sense that a system is a coherent set of rules that are all tied to the same core. I love it to death anyway and often play it, since it is the system I played the most as a kid without a doubt, but when taking time to consider what makes a good system and what we should strive for in the future, AD&D is the very anti-thesis to that.
Let's end it on a consolidary note, since the two of us so often have this debate: I hope, and I believe there is a slight chance from what we've seen so far, that Next can unite us all
. I sincerely hope a generally clever and smart guy like yourself, you irrational like of AD&D not withstanding, is giving them feedback during the BETA.
I suggest you crosspost it somewhere on the Codex.
of RPGs by making them easier/less challenging. Reading my posts, sometimes I'm afraid that I sound that way. I want this stuff to be tactically challenging and a head-scratcher. It's just that initial learning curve can be steep for a lot of people and leads to degenerate playing. My biggest fear is, in fact, that because other gamers do not RTFM or wish to jump in and fight the learning curve, that developers will conceed. They will see that people aren't paying attention and that they, the developers, are doing something wrong. This is how Josh felt after the tester couldn't see to buff. When it came to hiding dialogue options because they wouldn't contain [tags] like [Speech] he said this:
