Pssthpok said:
Hi Pssthpok mate!
Yeah, I heard about 5E through the grapevine and dropped into the first thread I saw. If I had more time at the moment, I'd have gone into more detail. There's just so much rigidity and bloat in 4E that I hope goes away.
I think D&D definately needs a simplification to be more accessible. I think with 4E they got the monsters right, but the PC side of things needs to be simplified.
Instead of having a laundry list of powers (12 pages for the Fighter with 77 power choices not counting Paragon Paths even) they should have instead done something like the following:
At-Will powers:
Base Power: 1[W] at 1st, 2[W] at 21st,
Encounter Powers:
Base Power: 2[W] at 1st, 3[W] at 7th, 4[W] at 17th, 5[W] at 27th
Daily Powers:
Base Power: 3[W] at 1st, 4[W] at 5th, 5[W] at 9th, 6[W] at 15th, 7[W] at 19th, 8[W] 25th, 9[W] at 29th
So once you give people the basics you give a list of (for example) 20 effects that you can choose to add to powers. But each of these effects has a negative modifier to the damage dice. So 'off the top of my head' you'd have something like:
Power Modifiers
A. Glancing Blow (Miss = deals str bonus dmg) = -0 base [W]*
B. Precise Attack (+2 to hit) = -0 base [W]*
C. Push (1 square) = -0 base [W]*
D. Minor Shift (shift 1 square after attack) = -0 base [W]*
*Only add one to an attack
1. Two Attacks = 1/2 base [W] each
2. Knock Prone = -1 base [W]
3. Slowed (until end of your next turn) = -1 base [W]
4. Spend Healing Surge after attacking = -1 base [W]
5. Aggression (+2 to hit, +4 to damage) = -1 base [W]
6. Damage Bonus equal to ability mod = -1 base [W]
7. Immobilize (save ends) = -1 base [W]
8. Improved Glancing Blow (half damage on miss) = -1 base [W]
9. Daze (save ends) = -1 base [W]
10. Very Precise Attack (+4 to hit) = -1 base [W]
11. +2 to AC (until end of next turn) = -1 base [W]
12. Reliable = -1 base [W]
13. Major Shift (Shift # squares equal to Dex mod) = -1 base [W]
14. Superior Crit (Crit chance 1 better) = -1 base [W]
15. Slide Target (1 square) = -1 base [W]
16. Ongoing 5 damage = -2 base [W] (additional -2 base [W] for every +5 ongoing damage)
17. Three Attacks = 1/3 base [W] each
18. Close Burst 1 = 1/2 base [W] (Close burst 2 = 1/4[W])
19. Disarm = -2 base [W]
20. Stun (save ends) = -4 base [W]
e.g. Level 25 Daily = 8[W] flat damage
or you could change this to
2[W] Close Burst 1 and Daze (save ends)
So there is about 10 pages of text from the 4E Fighters section condensed down to about 1/2 a page.
For Wizards you could have a different set of modifiers affecting Range, Area size etc.
This way you don't need pages upon pages for each class. You just need a few lines of text.
All true and, while I certainly snark you a bit for all the time I've spent waiting for your official releases, I can't say any of that was your fault. It is, as you say, what it is. Life, as someone else said, is what happens when you're busy making other plans.
In fairness, it is my fault.
Agree on all points. For a class in 4E to be (and you may disagree with me here) as capable of appealing to as many players as their 3E counterparts, one required several volumes of Powers.
And then there's the issue of skill vs. luck, but that's another topic.
It would take a lot of work to get a sufficient number of Immortal Tier classes up and running. Even then, I can just imagine loads of people being disappointed if 'their' PC's class wasn't represented.
That would have been worth waiting for. 4E Epic was, for me, far less interesting since it had been folded into "regular" play. It didn't feel epic, it just felt like more of the same. A layer of Krust over those rules would have changed things a good deal, I imagine.
Even an updated version of the Epic Bestiary with maybe double the monsters would have been cool.
Yeah, exactly. That's one of the things I was wondering how you'd address. Each class has to have stacks of powers to choose from, and the demand for those powers never decreases over time. At least with your 3E rules, you could condense lesser feats into Divine/Cosmic or whatever abilities to take some of the bloat out.
From the feedback I got, all players wanted their class levels to continue in any Immortal Tier.
So I'd have had the Classes progress for 10 levels, plus the Portfolios would have been done as Portfolio Paths (replacing Paragon Paths).
I wouldn't even worry about something like that. Pathfinder, in my opinion, is a holdout's game. It was too like 3E to be a new game and didn't really do anything for me.
You're probably right, it did nothing to help 3E epic.
At any rate, I hope you can land a spot in the playtesting for 5E. At least get some of your non-edition-centric game ideas out there where they might be incorporated into the game.
Maybe who knows. If they just take the modular approach I suggested above then you could simplify ALL classes down to 1 page of text.