Could also be applied vs Fortitude.

My monster’s ability was a little stronger in the sense that it had reach 3, knocked prone then pulled you next to him so his minions could cut you to pieces.

One example that jumps into my head at the moment is Maid Marion throwing candle wax on the sheriff during the climactic battle in “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves”.

In a 4E game, I would probably just adjudicate these as an improvised attack (p. 42 of the DMG) which either adds a circumstance modifier to the next attack or causes the opponent to grant combat advantage until the characters next turn.

An example “Maid Marion candle wax attack” might be:

Make Dex vs Fort melee attack while wielding the candle. Hit: Opponent takes 1d6+3 damage from the wax. All attackers gain a +2 circumstance bonus to their attacks against the target until the end of your next turn.

Also, since she is an NPC, I might just build in an encounter power that does something similar when I am designing the encounter. Something like this:

Distracting Presence -(Standard; Encounter; Melee) +7 vs Will. Marion can do something distracting (throw something, attempt to trip the opponent, etc) that will cause the target to grant combat advantage against one opponent of Marion’s choice until the end of her next turn.

Despite all of that, I am not opposed to tripping rules being added back into 4E. Now that the prone condition is not as detrimental as it was in 3E, it seems much less likely to unbalance the game.

Seems pretty clear to me.

Now you just need to decide how you think it ought to work and implement it.

Personally, and off the top of my head, I’d probably have it work with mechanics similar to Bull Rush (Strength vs. Fortitude) – although perhaps I might go with an approach analgous to 3.x in which case it would be Strength versus the opponents choice of Fortitude or Reflex.

Off hand, it doesn’t seem too imbalancing since the character is choosing to take this action rather than an action that would more directly harm the opponent. You are trading your own damage for the ability of others to do more damage.

And the benefits of that “extra damage” are offset by the fact that – if there are multiple players attacking the creature -they most likely already had combat advantage due to flanking.

And it is not as powerful as it was in 3.x because it you no longer draw OAs when you stand up. So its other major effect is hampered movement – and it is not significantly more useful in that regard than bull rush or grab.

Carl

It’s not “tripping at will,” but “attempting to trip at will.” You get to decide what the attempt involves.

For instance, you could rule that a Str-based trip attempt must follow a successful grab — you need to get a good grip on your target before you can throw him to the ground through brute force. That means you’ve now spent two standard actions to achieve that prone condition, and you haven’t caused much (or any) damage. Fair trade.

Meanwhile, a Dex-based trip could take only one action, but prompt opportunity attacks from the target or from any adjacent enemy — that maneuvering to get the right position and leverage to sweep the enemy’s legs out from under him is basically just like movement, and you’re paying attention to your target’s stance and balance instead of keeping an eye on all the surrounding threats. You could even rule that a successful hit on those OAs ruins the attempt.

It’s just a matter of what you decide the character has to give up in exchange for making the attempt.

@Trask Yeah… that makes little sense. But why do we need to have every physical action possibly undertaken in combat to be reflected in some kind of power or feat or mechanical system? The GM coming up with a way to handle it is part of being a good GM. Having to rely on some explicitly printed feat or maneuver or some such for every significant combat action is the mark of someone who can’t think on the fly.

Tripping isn’t that hard to improvise. I’m a little puzzled about it getting left out myself, but there are a couple ways of doing it, so maybe they wanted to keep the designated maneuvers straightforward, and handle the “you can do it this way or that way or the other way” stuff through page 42.

The main methods I can see are Dex vs. Reflex or Str vs. Fort.

@Precocious–I am just annoyed that so many powers knock you prone, but PCs cannot do it at all. Of course a DM could errata on the fly and kludge something together, but it just strikes me odd that trip was overlooked in favor of (relatively) exotic maneuvers like bull rush.