True in theory, but not in practice.
I'm certainly not going to start disputing your experience, but I found this to be quite true in practice!
There will always be players who get more of a kick out of exploiting the rules to gain an advantage. The trick is not having loopholes whereby those players always dominate the play.
My point is that extensive experience tells that the ONLY way to do that is to make the set of combinations and their effects very limited in significance and to keep tactical considerations fairly secondary, such that there's not much of an advantage to being clever. You cannot 'not have loopholes', not unless your system is exceedingly simplistic, and even yours isn't THAT simple. [MENTION=12749]MwaO[/MENTION] has already pretty much broken it once. You can fix each thing he finds, but I guarantee you that by the time you fix all of them, you won't have any more options, maybe less, than an Essentials Slayer.
Then it would do in 2 pages everything the core rules currently does in 100+ pages.
No, that's my point, it won't even be CLOSE to as much stuff. 4e powers can do a vast, and in fact pretty much open-ended list of possible things. Your system (and I'd look at Slayer as being an example of the same thing, Knight also) doesn't allow for anything like CaGI, or RoS, or RoB, not even to start on the paragon and epic level fighter powers. This is the example which is BEST in your favor, fighter. Every other class is hurting much more. You can't even come close to the flexibility of a 4e Wizard or Cleric. Not even Essentials' designers cracked THAT nut, though I think they may have considered it and tried!
I don't see it being as black and white as you suggest, more likely that players could gain a +/-25% swing depending on their element set-up. But its not going to be an advantage/disadvantage in every situation.
Fair enough, that's probably not untrue. Still, some characters are going to be pushed into a secondary place in a range of encounters, and others will become primary. Now, this CAN happen in 4e already to some extent (clerics and undead clearly) but there are always options for other classes, because there is a wide range of items, powers, and feats to produce solutions with. The issue being, if you allow all that in your game, you're right back to square one!
I'd have specified Arcane Magic cannot be made 'safe' for allies.
OK, I'm just going by what WAS there and what I know is possible in 4e from feats, etc. I think if we fed your 2 page wizard solution to charops they'd pretty much produce a specific optimum build in a week or two.
Most are just the same half dozen powers repeated - not worthy of dozens of pages within multiple books.
I disagree. No doubt there ARE some powers like this, and the redundancy tended to grow somewhat with time as more powers were added, but there's a LOT of variety in there as well! I could start running through lists and show you how much your implementations are losing out on, but do I need to do that? I'm sure you know 4e pretty well, you can do it. I think you know what I mean.
You could but that would still be 15-20 pages per class.
So what? 15-20 pages of good stuff is fine with me!
Sounds cool - albeit restrictive. My approach was to expand options and create freeform combat.
I'm not sure I follow you... What is 'restrictive' about what I've done? Everything which exists in 4e in terms of being able to choose from a wide range of powers and the structure which leads to doing a wide variety of things each encounter is fully intact in HoML! I find it quite puzzling that you could call MY implementation 'restrictive', when your own removes all but a small fixed list of options from the game!
I stand by my Revised (two) classes. However players would need a few sessions to get used to the freeform nature so I agree it won't initially feel like the same game.
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I don't think it has to do with a number of sessions to get used to something. The degree of flexibility is just not there! You cannot create a wizard anything close to an actual 4e wizard by your 2 page system. Every spell you have is just some sort of fairly simple blast. I mean, you can't get the effects of even some at wills, let alone the large array of things that encounter/daily powers can do.
I understand and sympathize with what you want to do, and I think that in a game which has different objects than 4e this is a workable system. Its just that powers do a HUGE amount in 4e. They are the beating heart of the system, and FOR ME it wouldn't be 4e with just a small set of stock effects. In terms of exploring what makes 4e tick, and in presenting a different mix of game elements, I'm glad you've done this work. I know I sound critical, but I certainly don't want to sound like I'm putting it down. I just think that other aspects of the game have to be created or built up or redesigned to move the focus to something else, so that powers aren't doing so much work. Then this may be a more palatable option.
Finally, I think that one way it might work best is in a game which is not really all that tactical. One where combat is more about the effects of your choices and less about how you implement your tactics. In other words something like a non-tactical Story Now kind of a game would probably be fine with simplified powers. Wizard would probably get their awesome magical effects in somewhere outside of combat, and fighters would probably merge with warlords or something and become all about being leaders, etc. It would, in short, be a different sort of game entirely!
