As an
avid board gamer and a well-known strategy fan, there's a siren's call that emanates from what little I know about D&D4e. I've never been a RPer, but I've always been quietly and mildly envious of those with friends geeky and dedicated enough to pull off campaigns. 4e takes it to a level with more personal appeal: I hear stories of game
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We've played FFT, and one of the things you can't really do in the game is have one person be a tank. To protect your mages you either need a wall of people around them or use the terrain to restrict access. 3rd's designers realized that it was pretty dumb to let someone just run by the front line fighters without the fighters having a say in it. Hence, they introduced the concept of characters being able to "threaten" an area. A character equipped with a weapon 'threatened' a 3x3 area around them (essentially 5' all around them). Anyone who began or continued a move action in that area would be considered relatively open for attack (as they're more focused on moving then addressing the problem of their armed adversary), and the threatening character would be able to get a free attack against the moving target. This way, it makes opponents think twice about disengaging from melee combat. In 4e, you can disengage safely by taking a move action to "shift," meaning to move only one square, but doing so does not provoke an opportunity attack (they changed the name from Attack of Opportunity to Opportunity Attack from 3rd to 4e but the idea is the same).
Of course, there are various things you can do to change the properties of opportunity attacks. Fighters get a mark akin to the Paladin (Combat Challenge) that has the same -2 to attack rolls against people who aren't the Fighter, but its additional property is that any time the marked target makes an attack that doesn't include the Fighter or shifts while adjacent to the fighter, the Fighter gets an immediate opportunity attack against the target. So shifting away from a Fighter in 4e isn't always a safe bet!
The PSX game Vanguard Bandits had something like this, where certain characters would have spaces around them that the enemies could stop on and move off of, but not move straight through.
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Also as a sidenote: while 4e's combat takes place on a square-based grid (ala FFT), diagonals don't count as two squares of movement, they count as one, so the range of movement is more like a square than a diamond.
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Gameplay sidenote: kobolds are infuriating because a lot of them have an ability that, when an adjacent enemy shifts, the kobold can shift with them without having to spend any actions.
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The new system sounds like an improvement.
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