A 4E Retro Clone

Let's pretend it's 5-10 years down the road and WotC is ready to retire the 4E game and move on. Yet, for whatever reason, you and your group aren't ready to go. Instead, you decide to build a 4E retro clone based on the best elements of 4E (and a few improvements here and there)

Based on what's out for 4E from 2008 to now, what elements would you draw from? What portions would you avoid? What tweaks (but NOT overhauls) would you make? What would you not want to see changed?

In short, what do think has been the best (and worst) of 4E so far?

I suspect a 4e retro-clone may prove to be rather difficult. Although the engine at the heart of 4e is fairly tight and compact, it relies on a huge range of powers/magic items/other "bits" to make for a satisfying gaming experience. And while one almost certainly could clone all those "bits", it would be an awful lot of work.

It's perhaps also worth noting that there may not be a place for a 4e retro-clone in the first place - existing groups have (and will continue to have) access to the original books, which will almost certainly remain easily available on eBay and the like. It's really not the same situation as with the older editions, which were long out of print before the first retro-clones appeared.

But, to properly answer your question: if I were to build such a retro-clone, I would probably pull in only a subset of the races and classes, and a subset of the powers for each (more than just the PHB, but way less than the full array now available), leave the 'engine' mostly intact, but try to take some steps to reduce the micro-management of short-term effects/conditions/etc.

The other question is legality.

Because of the OGL, there's a lot of people who have become, for lack of a better term, "ballsier" in creating retro-clones. While the OGL offers some protection for the D&D ruleset (at least the one based on 3rd Edition), I've seen people think they can retro-clone anything they like, probably based on the "you can't copyright game rules" idea. Just because it's out of print or it changes does not mean there are legitimate copyright and other IP concerns.

Simply put, at some point I do think there will be a legal challenge to this. Somebody's going to retro-clone a game without permission from the original developer and get sued. And I think what happens with that eventual lawsuit will be a test case for this. (It's one thing to create a module that's compatible with a rule-set, it's another thing to clone an entire series of rules).

If you were going to retro-clone D&D 4e, you'd definately have to at least wait until it was replaced with something else. I think attempting to retro-clone their active ruleset would be asking for trouble.

You can use the OGL for 4E. Or not even worry about it (see all the stuff being done by Morrus).

The powers are some work, but so are spells in the other clones.

The books have high errata dependence and there a strong feeling that there are a lot of subpar options. Both of those open the door to cloning.

There would be splits over how faithfull to be (do you try to speed up combat in the core, do you fix rituals, skill challenges), and compatability of stuff made when. But, in my own opinion the best would be an errated version of "core" 4E: classes that follow the standard (in 08) power structure, many powers with clear analogies in older edition spells, classic monsters. So basically you are keeping pretty much all the core options, but using 4E history as a play test to fix issues in the details, and trying to keep the junk out.

And new adventures. Losts of scope for that.

JohnRTroy said:

Simply put, at some point I do think there will be a legal challenge to this. Somebody's going to retro-clone a game without permission from the original developer and get sued. And I think what happens with that eventual lawsuit will be a test case for this. (It's one thing to create a module that's compatible with a rule-set, it's another thing to clone an entire series of rules).

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There's a massive risk to WotC (or whoever) if such a case were to conclude - if they were to lose, it would open the door to many more clones of active games.

So, I would imagine their first strategy would be to use the lawyers to try to scare off the cloner. If that fails, their next gambit would be the try to force a settlement (or buy out). I would imagine they would try really, really hard to avoid setting that precedent, even if they were fairly sure they would win.

If you were going to retro-clone D&D 4e, you'd definately have to at least wait until it was replaced with something else.

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Agreed. WotC probably don't care if someone clones any rules prior to 3e, and they basically can't do much of anything about 3e (Pathfinder).

But the same is not true of 4e. While it remains active, they will of course care. Even when they move on to 5e, they'll probably still care - 4e is likely to be one of the biggest competitors to any eventual 5e.

Oh, and just in case: I am not a lawyer.

If we make two assumptions, namely:

1. A retro-clone of 4e could be legally made without losing much of the system in the process.
2. This retro-clone was meant to be a single, unified ruleset

Here's what my retro-clone of 4e would look like.

For classes, I think I would present a blend of the AEDU and Essentials design philosophy. Namely, martial classes get stances in place of at-wills, and only the "spellcaster" classes get to pick multiple different encounters (others just get several uses of one). I'd include a feat to allow people playing the non-"spellcaster" classes to swap one use of their baked-in encounter power for some other power. I'm inclined to give dailies back to the martial classes... not sure what would need rejiggering to account for that.

My cleric would look different. Since the warlord ate the, "armored melee healer" role and the invoker ate the, "divine will of the gods" role, I think I'd end up merging the current cleric and runepriest and tie the cleric a lot more to the domains for the gods so they could manifest a domain aspect and alter their powers a little like the runepriest and its rune states.

Feats would be downplayed a smidge. There wouldn't be any generic attack/damage bonus feats. Feats would still alter combat abilities, but more along the lines of, "You can shift instead of making an opportunity attack," than, "+1 damage with acid and fire powers."

Inherent bonuses would be standard to get the game off of the weapon/armor/neck slot treadmill. Most of the magic items a PC finds would be consumables, wondrous items, and the other "slot" items, though magic swords and armor would still exist (they'd just provide the property/power, not the enhancement bonus).

Obviously the more oddball, D&D-specific races wouldn't be reproduced, but I could see the racial array looking something like human, half-elf, elf, eladrin, dwarf, gnome, halfling, goliath, dragonborn, goblin, hobgoblin, half-orc, and kobold. I'd like to work up racial utilities for all the races, similar to whay the vryloka and shade have access to in HoS, and offer them as options for people who want to make their PC a little "more elven" than the baseline rules. I can envision a couple of heritage feats for half-elves, one that lets them use their normal racial or elven accuracy once per encounter, the other that lets them use their normal racial or fey step once per encounter and they qualify as an eladrin for feats instead of a half-elf. (That tackles both the, "What if my half-elf is really half-eladrin?" and the, "Most of the feats I qualify for need elven accuracy" issues.)

JohnRTroy said:

Simply put, at some point I do think there will be a legal challenge to this. Somebody's going to retro-clone a game without permission from the original developer and get sued. And I think what happens with that eventual lawsuit will be a test case for this. (It's one thing to create a module that's compatible with a rule-set, it's another thing to clone an entire series of rules).

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Take a look at Palladium Fantasy and Rolemaster. Identify elements that appear in 4e that do not already appear in one of those two games. You tell me how much "original art" is left to make a case out of.

Stormonu said:

Based on what's out for 4E from 2008 to now, what elements would you draw from? What portions would you avoid? What tweaks (but NOT overhauls) would you make? What would you not want to see changed?

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I'd keep the basic framework, but enhance skills a bit. Then I'd diminish powers some, in favor of rituals--and probably expand the flavor space of rituals to cover more than "magic rituals" conceptually. Feats would get a pruning ...

And then, who am I kidding? No matter how much I tried to work under those restrictions, I just couldn't. I'd be using the core ideas, but making major overhauls left and right on the details. The only thing I can say for sure is that the whole thing would be a lot shorter when I got done with it.

It is hard to see the dynamic that would give rise to a 4e clone and I would say if one were to occur it would be more likely to be 20 years time rather than 10.

The Old School Clones are in that timeframe and clones of a simpler game because as far as I know they clone the core books not optional rule books, kits and the like.

Pathfinder is a separate category as Paizo found itself in a situtation where they had an extablished market in adventure paths with a steady subscription sales model that depended on 3.5 for sales and that owing to licencing considerations they felt was not transferable to 4e. So there was a very strong incentive for them to exploit theOGL licence to allow then to continue to attract new players and subscribers to their products.

4e requires an awfull lot of text (in the form of powers)to suppot each class.
In 20 years time we could very well be playing 5e using natural user interfaces (like Kinect) in front of 3d diplays with very accurate voice recognition and good quality voice chat.

Estlor said:

Obviously the more oddball, D&D-specific races wouldn't be reproduced, but I could see the racial array looking something like human, half-elf, elf, eladrin, dwarf, gnome, halfling, goliath, dragonborn, goblin, hobgoblin, half-orc, and kobold. I'd like to work up racial utilities for all the races, similar to whay the vryloka and shade have access to in HoS, and offer them as options for people who want to make their PC a little "more elven" than the baseline rules. I can envision a couple of heritage feats for half-elves, one that lets them use their normal racial or elven accuracy once per encounter, the other that lets them use their normal racial or fey step once per encounter and they qualify as an eladrin for feats instead of a half-elf. (That tackles both the, "What if my half-elf is really half-eladrin?" and the, "Most of the feats I qualify for need elven accuracy" issues.)

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[emphasis added by me]

So, what, exactly would constitute "the more oddball" races for you...if this is what you are including as a set of "core" races...seems at least a half-dozen too many to me.

Just as a pointer, from one DM to another, a sure fire way to eliminate the "What if my half-elf is really half-eladrin?" argument...THERE ARE NO ELADRIN!

"Elfier elves" are one of the dumbest things ever to come into the D&D universe...among other things, but they're neither here nor there.

IMHO.
--SD