FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1083049006[/unixtime]]
How exactly is it a failure on your opponent's part to attempt to initiate a grapple against you?
If you intiate a grapple without improved grapple feat, then you've made a poor tactical choice. This in a manner of speaking, is a failure.
As for the rest of it - your argument that there is any problem with karmic strike makes less sense than an argument that Ash Rats and Fire Mephits shouldn't be healed when subject to fire. I mean, with Karmic Strike you still do damage to them at least.
Healing from fire is ok, because we expect enemies to have resistances and perhaps even feed on energy sources, and so there's no metagaming from that.
Our characters however do NOT expect someone to gain extra speed from being struck by your weapon and in so doing gain a free attack. It's totally counterintuitive and requires you metagame to fight such an ability. And anyone who doesn't metagame gets hosed.
Only if it's an ability that lots of people have - such as Uncanny Dodge. If it's an ability you have to voluntarily get, there's no problem. If one guy is the guy who wears a blindfold into battle because he fights better that way - that's cool. If everyone fights better with the blindfolds that's retarded. It's a fine line - not an absolute like you are painting it to be.
OK, there are certain disadvantages and bad things that can happen to you in combat, like getting flanked. The moment you make it so that being flanked is a good thing, then you force the opponents to metagame. Monsters now have to actively prevent themselves from flanking someone, and the target of the flank now actively seeks to be flanked. That's retarded.
Flanking should either be a bad condition or a neutral condition, it should never be a favorable one.
Or you could say that it's a completely valid cooperative
It's all presentation. The character isn't attempting to stab his friend in the face, he's cooperating with a very fast and mobile ally to get an advantage in combat - how that's represented in game mechanics doesn't make it stupid.
Sure it does. Why you suddenly gain reach and a free sneak attack when your friend happens to be standing there and you take a stab at him... that's very stupid. It's an attack you normally couldn't have ever made if you didn't take an attack on your friend. You couldn't even reach your target!
If that's your fighting style, what's wrong with that? There's room for a Willard-style character who has a lot of rats running around distracting foes. There's room for elaborate combination attacks set up with cues and specific positioning.
When you derive AoOs from killing your own rats, that's not willard-style, that's munchkin style. You're deriving combat bonuses from nothing more than metagaming. Killing your own allies should NEVER give you bonuses. If you want to have a bunch of rats using the "aid another" action, that's perfectly fine... but having them there so they can be cleave targets and allow you to cheese out some more attacks is totally dumb. It makes no sense in character, and it makes no sense from a game standpoint either.
Now the whole thing "Blindness supercedes flanking" was just retarded, but only because the penalties of blindness are easier to overcome than the penalties of flanking. If the rules were instead that overcoming one problem always necessarily overcame the other, there would be no problem with blindness superceding flanking and you could have a perfectly workable system with that in it.
Blindness and flanking is another basic example of these principles at work. Basically anything that causes you to do something stupid to try to gain a bonus is bad game design. Stupid stuff being, closing your eyes, attacking one of your allies and wanting to get hit in combat.
How is that a metagame or illogical tactic? If some guy is the guy who has a fighting style based on being able to fight forward and backwards simultaneously, why would it be at all weird to want to come at the guy from right angles?
Because flanking someone should be an advantage in all cases. Being surrounded is bad no matter who you are. It's basic military tactics to want to flank someone, and while it's ok to have someone whose good at beating flanks, having someone who thrives in flanks screws everything up, because now you have your opponents metagaming to beat the feat.
If people have specific fighting styles that make people want to fight them in specifically different ways, that's really fricking cool. It's not a problem.
If it turns a disadvantage into an advantage, then it's a problem, especially if it's something you expect your enemies to do, like flank you. When it's something you can trigger yourself, that's OK, when it needs an outside force to trigger, it must follow this rule or it forces metagaming and/or stupid tactics.
Feats shouldnt' be counterintuitive, and feats like elusive target are heavily counter intuitive. If you're flanked, one guy ALWAYS misses his first attack. Always. Doesn't matter if he's got true strike on, doesn't matter if he's a level 500 fighter and you've got 10 AC. He always misses it. So if you've got that feat you want to be flanked, you set yourself up to be flanked, and that forces enemies to metagame to beat you.
Same with cleaving off AoOs. You run a bunch of rats down a corridor, and you AoO them and then use those AoOs to take out a bigger foe. There's no real reason your character should be doing that, as dividing his attention between two combats is a bad thing and should not help him... but mechanically it's better for him to do so.
It only becomes a problem if one or more of these strange battle tactics becomes so widely used that these "different" fighting tactics become standard. If everyone is trying to get in at right angles to enemies instead of coming from two sides - that's weird and kind of dumb. But if it's the way you have to go about fighting Grand Master Shen, that's good for the game.
I disagree here. It's ok to say "tripping doesn't have any effect on this guy, he fights just as well on the ground." but to say that flanking actually becomes a bad thing. Nobody can know that unless they metagame like a whore and that's not good for the game.
There are basic military tactics that should pretty much always work.
- Outnumbering a defender should be advantageous to the attacker.
- Flanking should be the most advantageous position you can have in combat with regards to offensively attacking an opponent.
There are more but those are the primary ones I'm focusing on right now.
I can't put enough emphasis on that. Having the occassional character who actively seeks situations that other characters would go out and actively avoid is how character specialization in a cooperative storytelling game works. If you are the guy who flies and has a bow, being 100 feet in the air is pretty much your bag and you try to do it as often as possible. If you are anyone else, that's the place where you are about to pancake and it's a very bad thing for you. Similarly, if you bullrush the first guy off a cliff, that just means he's out of youtr melee range, while bullrushing a normal guy is a decent tactic.
Flying doesn't really turn a disadvantageous situation into an advantageous one, it just eliminates falling as a disadvantage and makes you more mobile. It doesn't really take metagame tactics to fight against a flying opponent, as it does someone with elusive target.
Also, remember that whenever you reward a character for a disadvantageous situation, you're actually rewarding him for being stupid. Someone with elusive target against gains bonuses for allowing the enemy to flank him. Someone with Karmic strike is rewarded for his abysmal AC. Cleaving off AoOs rewards you for killing your allies.
Now, perhaps you feel a bit different about it, but I don't think it's ever a good idea to reward stupidity. And these rules basically present good guidelines to creating feats that don't reward stupidity.