D&D 4E List of Potential New Martial Practices

[Garthanos]

The Rangers Arts

1. Animal Tongues
2. Beast Bond
3. Bringing in the Herd: Mounts
4. Bringing in the Herd: Swarm
5. Double Back
6. Hunters Mind
7. Long Distance Runner
8. Messenger Birds
9. Obscure Trail
10. Peerless Tracker
11. Trackers Eye

Monks Way

1. Acupressure
2. Acupuncture
3. Animal Tongue
4. Aura Manipulation
5. Aura Reading
6. Long Distance Runner
7. Martial Techniques
8. Feign Death
9. Oath of Independence
10. Sensei
11. Transcendental Meditation

 

[Garthanos]

Hurl into Space

Trying to think of epic feel practices inspired by mythic and legendaries

Hurl into Space.

After working your self up to an extreme exertion and burst of strength you throw an object very very hard very very high it eventually returns to you but it is effective perfectly hidden for a duration defined by an athletics check. (in effect you choose the duration and your mental calculations and foresight allow it to return wherever you are at the end of the duration.) Skill check might also determine how far you can move and still recieve the item when it returns. This may involve bouncing the object off of surfaces to create an indirect path which is hard to disrupt.

May require a heritage bound object.

 

[Garthanos]

I also think epic needs much higher attack ranges areas ... I think currently it doesn't match legend or myth, I know this is probably a case of game board practicality.

 

[Garthanos]

Bringing in the Herd might have 3 effects

*Bringing In The Herd:Mounts --Nature → Phantom Steed
Bringing In The Herd:Swarm --Nature → (Obscuring Swarm)
Bringing In The Herd:Stampede --Nature → (Creates Dangerous Terrain)

 

[Garthanos]

Deep Sea Swimmer

Inspired by Beowulf

Deep Sea Swimmer
this is the through water travel variety akin to Long Distance Runner also one is effectively moving in a trance state and functioning much more anaerobically this reduces air and breathing needs even though fully active.

Preparation involves hyperventilation.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I also think epic needs much higher attack ranges areas ... I think currently it doesn't match legend or myth, I know this is probably a case of game board practicality.

True. Its HARD to make really 'epic' type effects that fit on a battlefield when the scale is 1" = 5'

 

[Garthanos]

duplicate

 

[Garthanos]

True. Its HARD to make really 'epic' type effects that fit on a battlefield when the scale is 1" = 5'

Perhaps epic could be handled better with more theatre of the mind style mechanics...

This is less a limit for practices and rituals.
With practices I can make a ground breaker practice that will drain a lake or divert a river (inspired by Herakles) entirely within scope and I can make a ritual to part a sea.

I just find both the range and area of effect of epic combat attacks a bit embarrassingly mundane... My thinking of ways to make martial controllers could make melee combatants have a broader area of effect, then I kind started thinking that even if they remained defenders in epic they would need more sense of scale.

A character in an anime I seen recently hurl a spear with miles of range and another sense it incoming enough to deal with it and that made me think D&D fails at epic.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Perhaps epic could be handled better with more theatre of the mind style mechanics...

This is less a limit for practices and rituals.
With practices I can make a ground breaker practice that will drain a lake or divert a river (inspired by Herakles) entirely within scope and I can make a ritual to part a sea.

I just find both the range and area of effect of epic combat attacks a bit embarrassingly mundane... My thinking of ways to make martial controllers could make melee combatants have a broader area of effect, then I kind started thinking that even if they remained defenders in epic they would need more sense of scale.

A character in an anime I seen recently hurl a spear with miles of range and another sense it incoming enough to deal with it and that made me think D&D fails at epic.

Well...

If you look into this what you find is that early on the PHB1 provided for some really HUGE AoEs at epic, but later books toned that down drastically and many of the early ones were errata targets. The most significant being epic Turn Undead, which got a HUGE nerf. The general thinking on this is that WotC saw how people were actually playing epic and concluded that giant battle grids just don't exist! It is simply so inconvenient and downright impractical to do that the game can't feasibly accommodate it.

I mean, consider, to make a 200'x200' square area requires a map 40'x40'. NOBODY makes a battlemat that size and even if you could get one very few tables are more than 32" wide (36 at most). Even a 4'x8' sheet of plywood (the size of the tables at our gaming club back in the 70's) barely allows enough room for it with 6" on each side retained for all the rest of the contents of the table! Anything beyond 200x200 is simply never going to happen. 200' is well within the effective range of mundane archery, let alone really impressive epic magic.

It would be possible, IF you had a system where scale could be changed, but of course 4e is so sensitive to exact positioning to the square that this is a hard thing to do (I guess you could play at 1" = 10' as long as the battle was fairly widely spread out). Classic D&D of course used 1" = 30' outdoors, which at least gets you into a scale range where archers have to move before they can engage.

Personally I think most action in Epic should be SCs. Here you're unconstrained and if the SCs are grand in scale then rituals and other less constrained magic becomes pretty key. You can always drop down to 'tactical' level for mixing it up, and at that point I don't feel too bad about the limited AoEs. Its not really like you'd expect characters to unleash world-shaking magic at the drop of a hat in a sword fight. If a capstone encounter includes pulling off something that affects the entire board, so be it.

 

[Garthanos]

It would be possible, IF you had a system where scale could be changed, but of course 4e is so sensitive to exact positioning to the square that this is a hard thing to do (I guess you could play at 1" = 10' as long as the battle was fairly widely spread out). Classic D&D of course used 1" = 30' outdoors, which at least gets you into a scale range where archers have to move before they can engage.

This lacking of sense of epic scale by the way is not just for ranged combatants ...

An epic melee combatant feels epic when he strikes the enemy soldiers and a hand full of them fly back an unreasonable distance like 30 feet or even 60 not when they stagger back 5 feet ... images of Sauron sweeping men in a certain movie and you might argue that is reflecting improved potence against lower level minions but I think this is true even against other epic combatants knock back is on the list of visuals its that kind of thing which feels epic... however that 30 feet against another epic combatant may not mean any more than the 5 feet at heroic scale and 60 no more than 2.

Epic I think ends up flavor wise having more potential collateral damage going on its not just that the arenas that can contain their battle are larger they break their battle fields... (its why we put them pillars to crash the ceiling down on the dragon and similar into our fights)

ie with big things happening in battle it's then not surprising when a hero can focus for a minute leap into the air smash into a lake and split a hole in its bottom that makes it drain out an a few minutes.