Discussion - LEW 4th Edition

Hello all,

I have just been reading through all the posts in this thread and seeing lots of interesting discussion about settings, pantheons, land mass and pdf's but what I am curious about is, exactly what are you trying to achieve with L4W?

LEW as it currently stands is essentially just a pool of consistent characters that go on adventures.

Are you basically looking to replicate that experience?

More or less, yeah. Nothing crazy regarding world generation... just a world that we can set consistent PbPs in.

I feel this thread should be resurrected now. Is there still interest?

I for one welcome our new 4th edition overlords.

OK, either everyone is finished with the discussion that has already transpired and doesn't feel the need to say something more or take the next step of polls and such, or there is officially not enough interest in a Living 4E game.

Knight Otu said:

OK, either everyone is finished with the discussion that has already transpired and doesn't feel the need to say something more or take the next step of polls and such, or there is officially not enough interest in a Living 4E game.

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I'm definately still interested in playing LEW in 4E. I admit that I dropped away from this thread when it jumped from the LEW sub-forum to the Talking the Talk sub-forum. If it was linked to the regular LEW main page, I'd probably be here more. As it is, I got pretty bored today and was listening to some of the 4E podcasts on the wizards site and got the wild idea to come find the LEW 4E discussion thread again since I hadn't been here in a while.

I haven't gone back and read the last several pages of this thread yet, so I don't know how far the discussion went into specifics yet for 4E LEW since I last read stuff here. But I will be catching up soon and will be interested to see where LEW goes in 4E. I'd love to see further discussion (unless the discussion is all done or something). I guess I'll find out what's been discussed first then come back and post again if needed.

The lack of visibility from the regular "Living Crowd" may be a contributing factor, but didn't seem to impede the original discussion on LEB and LS all that much. For the thread, the "Greek model" seemed to have some momentum, with most of the core races and some MM races being discussed in that context (not the dragonborn, which weren't known at that point, and not picked up later).

Yep, that's pretty much what I got out of rereading it myself, KO. "Greek model" of city states, some race/class discussion (minus dragonborn which hadn't been revealed yet), varying beliefs on the Pantheon and the "points of light", using (or not using) the starting town in the DMG, a transitive plane for the deep ocean which throws some fun mystery into sea travel, my own arena justice system, and many other larger and smaller details that could much better be discussed now that we've started getting more crunchy details of the rules.

So, does that mean it's about time to start throwing out some polls to have people vote on various aspects yet? Maybe a link from the General Discussion thread for more exposure so we can get this rolling again. As for myself, I'm gonna bookmark this thread this time so I don't have to hunt for it in the 'Talking the Talk' soup of threads. So I should be around more for the future discussion as well. Don't know how much of use I'll contribute, but I'll be here.

I'd still like to hit the ground running and do some ground work on the initial construction. My ideas, however, differ very much from at least the vocal majority within this thread. Especially given the direction that 4e is taking, I think that the game would be better served by some of the initial ideas I talked about. Things like using the core pantheon and default setting material. For the original LEW coming up with our own stuff made more sense. Here, where they are changing the very nature of the game to create a different feel, I think that we would be better served to keep things as simple and streamlined as possible.

Really, the way I would run it now, I would cut the rules and judging needed down substantially with a few major changes. For one, I would ideally like to cut judge responsibilities down to the judging of adventures and characters primarily. Then, in a sort of reverse of the current method, judges would be the ones to make proposals and the community would be the ones to vote on it. I think that this would help get proposals down to what's necessary or important to the game, and at the same time eliminate a lot of the "well if you make this change, and that change, and this change, then it's fine by me". Further, I'd like to implement mechanical reasons for the inclusion of character-born content. What I mean, is I'd like to implement a fairly basic, simple, and modular system where every time a character accomplishes some mechanical "point" they get to include a new power or ability into the setting. I'm referring to stuff like DiSenzio's technniques. I'd like to ideally make those something of an "I was there" token. You hit level 5? You get to add a technique (within certain guidelines) to the games library. You DM a couple games? You get to stamp down some permanent important features to the world related to your game. The rather iconic example would be "30th level? You get to add a deity based on your character."

It might be that more people will swing my way after seeing more and more info about 4e. I'm somewhat waiting to see what direction the majority seem to favor, so I'm mostly posting this in the hopes that maybe it will drum up some people that are in support of the methodology I'm considering.

Call me wishy washy or whatever, but I could go either way. I would be happy dealing with the default pantheon and starting city from the DMG, but I'd be fine doing something a bit more refined by the community as well. I just want to play, whatever the background is. I agree that using the default setting and city and pantheon would make it easier for new people to pick up and go with as well as less hassle for us to implement to begin actual play. But sometimes, the extra effort is worth it when making something your own. I like ideas on both sides, and look forward to seeing where it goes from here.