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D&D 4E List of Potential New Martial Practices
- Thread starter Garthanos
- Start date
Garthanos
Arcadian Knight
Investigating Azagar's Book of Rituals probably the most valuable might be the ones that introduce mechanical distinctions. There is one which allows you to trade pittance cash and an encounter power (it is gone for the duration) for a days worth of magic item analogous bonus this is however a bland item bonuses and wasn't actually level appropriate but that is besides the point. The mechanic of disabling a power for a benefit makes me go hmmm.
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Garthanos
Arcadian Knight
Gilgamesh/Epic Flavored Thoughts
Challenging the elements might allow you to purify and improve harvests and broadly reduce bad weather and other things
Stoppering the Volcano makes the kingdoms effective land area and wealth increase. And may cause the lava beast to attack a neighboring country because you have intimidated it. (Marshal it alongside your forces in your next large scale battle)
Challenging the elements might allow you to purify and improve harvests and broadly reduce bad weather and other things
Stoppering the Volcano makes the kingdoms effective land area and wealth increase. And may cause the lava beast to attack a neighboring country because you have intimidated it. (Marshal it alongside your forces in your next large scale battle)
AbdulAlhazred
Legend
Definitely, 4e would do a 'birthright' type of game pretty well. Although, truthfully the combat system wouldn't be much help and so there's probably easier systems to run that in if it is the entire campaign. OTOH 4e is definitely the go-to if you need to start out as a level 1 piddle little local 'hero' and work your way up...
Marandahir
Crown-Forester (he/him)
I love these. Since I don't regularly play 4e these days, I may steal some of them for my 5e games. 
Garthanos
Arcadian Knight
5e rituals do not generally have costs so part of the paradigm is flumixed up to a degree I really do not have strong ideas on the translation yet. If one is ignoring that hd might actually be a better tool (since the number of them you have scales with level there is less need for a make a save to create an ascending cost for more difficult things.I love these. Since I don't regularly play 4e these days, I may steal some of them for my 5e games.
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Garthanos
Arcadian Knight
I always liked the paradigm of birthright but liked the relatively standard schtick of heroes adventurer with birthright part of the surrounding arena.
AbdulAlhazred
Legend
Well, 5e's ritual system just isn't much like 4e's at all. I mean, you CAN create 5e spells that effectively ARE rituals and can be cast as such, and simply have no real utility as memorized spells, in which case they are pretty similar to a 4e ritual, it just isn't the typical way things work.
And yes, 5e doesn't really have the sorts of 'hooks' that 4e has either in terms of structured use of keywords, specific resources, etc. Even the concept of 'treasure as a resource' is not REALLY that useful because in 5e terms there are no specific amounts of treasure a character would normally control as a resource, whereas in 4e residuum, ritual components, gold, etc. are all part of a single resource pool which has expected values at any given level.
5e does have 'hit dice', which can be used a lot like HS in 4e, so there is that, and advantage/disadvantage are possible costs/benefits in some situations. Then again, lack of a skill challenge system means there is no fixed value to 'get advantage on your next check in this challenge' or somesuch.
At least 5e does have a, fairly rudimentary, system in terms of Inspiration, that could be leveraged, but it really would benefit heavily from being restructured. I wrote an improved version for HoML and it can be pretty useful.
Garthanos
Arcadian Knight
Long Distance Runner
elaborated and why it needs to be more awesome. This is classic flavor evocative of Gilgamesh/Beowulf and the LOTR boys (so I want it to be of real value)
This level 6 martial practice allows one to potentially run for up to a full day (lots of skill required to get there). Now running? what does that mean? are they really talking about +2 squares? (running in really life is more than walking x 1.333 ) And what is the impact In terms of changes like overland movement speed? which is where you would really think the effect would be noted and valuable information but was not mentioned at all???
Well I will chock that up to Martial Practices being a bit under done/developed ... starting with combat movement seems a bad idea. So let's go with something irrelevant to fantasy... ie walking in real life is decent to say on the order of 2.5 to 3.5 miles per hour ie 30 miles in 10 hours I think going off of this and buffing by a real world definition of long distance running. Marathon speed is 5 to 6 miles per hour
Basically the above gives us running is a factor of 2x walking. In context and applied long distance this can allow a speed 5 character to match a horse (see Glimli). Or a human to exceed that. Now assuming one using the practice runs continuously when one reaches a full day of running that is more on the order of 2.5 times that but let's actually allow sleep an go with 4 times the normal travel distance in a day when the skill has scaled you to near peak performance.
The good thing and strangely realistic is boiled you get athletic humans rather realistically able to match a horse for long distance travel and actually exceed and run it down ( if you had rules for it or a DM that made killing one's mounts a potential repercussion of pushing them for longer than and a way of paying for successes in a Skill Challenge.)
Speaking of Skill Challenges this is the arena that Practices and Rituals both need considered in terms of ie not just in terms of raw effects.
In game terms as an ability like all trances (which I am going to make this one of) it only affects you so you pretty much need some clever use running ahead in a long term skill challenge to aid the purpose and you need to lack a mount... so its pretty situational in the first place. If you can work your allies into the mind set/trance state like a Warlord using a wolf pack mentality practice of some sort (hypnosis granting this practice)
Basically At level 6 you are in mid heroic tier and having the ability be still fairly real world isnt too bad but what about paragon and epic.
In terms of mythical one would expect at epic this is significantly worse than the archetypal a Gilgamesh whos ascribed long distance movement speed I calculated once amounted to full clip world class sprinting for multiple days but this is our starting point). We DO want to go beyond that because this is fantasy and gilgamesh went days at a pace that would be sprinting and maybe at the Usain class.
elaborated and why it needs to be more awesome. This is classic flavor evocative of Gilgamesh/Beowulf and the LOTR boys (so I want it to be of real value)
This level 6 martial practice allows one to potentially run for up to a full day (lots of skill required to get there). Now running? what does that mean? are they really talking about +2 squares? (running in really life is more than walking x 1.333 ) And what is the impact In terms of changes like overland movement speed? which is where you would really think the effect would be noted and valuable information but was not mentioned at all???
Well I will chock that up to Martial Practices being a bit under done/developed ... starting with combat movement seems a bad idea. So let's go with something irrelevant to fantasy... ie walking in real life is decent to say on the order of 2.5 to 3.5 miles per hour ie 30 miles in 10 hours I think going off of this and buffing by a real world definition of long distance running. Marathon speed is 5 to 6 miles per hour
Basically the above gives us running is a factor of 2x walking. In context and applied long distance this can allow a speed 5 character to match a horse (see Glimli). Or a human to exceed that. Now assuming one using the practice runs continuously when one reaches a full day of running that is more on the order of 2.5 times that but let's actually allow sleep an go with 4 times the normal travel distance in a day when the skill has scaled you to near peak performance.
The good thing and strangely realistic is boiled you get athletic humans rather realistically able to match a horse for long distance travel and actually exceed and run it down ( if you had rules for it or a DM that made killing one's mounts a potential repercussion of pushing them for longer than and a way of paying for successes in a Skill Challenge.)
Speaking of Skill Challenges this is the arena that Practices and Rituals both need considered in terms of ie not just in terms of raw effects.
In game terms as an ability like all trances (which I am going to make this one of) it only affects you so you pretty much need some clever use running ahead in a long term skill challenge to aid the purpose and you need to lack a mount... so its pretty situational in the first place. If you can work your allies into the mind set/trance state like a Warlord using a wolf pack mentality practice of some sort (hypnosis granting this practice)
Basically At level 6 you are in mid heroic tier and having the ability be still fairly real world isnt too bad but what about paragon and epic.
In terms of mythical one would expect at epic this is significantly worse than the archetypal a Gilgamesh whos ascribed long distance movement speed I calculated once amounted to full clip world class sprinting for multiple days but this is our starting point). We DO want to go beyond that because this is fantasy and gilgamesh went days at a pace that would be sprinting and maybe at the Usain class.
Garthanos
Arcadian Knight
And a partial solution may not really much of a change. Note if good skill rolls occur and allow easier repeat use then the doing it for many days factor is already covered (or even just multi use and accepting the hs cost in the original form) So the factor I think to top it off wrt being legendary or mythic is actually adjusting the assumed pace of running speed. Heroic tier assume 2x normal pace for marathon running anyway. high heroic 3x and for paragon 4x, high paragon 5x, low epic 6x and high epic 7x (high end sprinting alah Usian Bolt). These are just assumptions about how fast it means by to run after all so arguably it isnt even a house ruling to use more awesome amounts as you scale the tiers?
This solves the "is not legendary or epic" completely enough but does not really solve the useability factor nor the endemic issues of magic can do anything. Yes you can chase down the dragon on foot you are that badass like Will Smith in MiB but cannot reach the sky castle he flew up to.
This solves the "is not legendary or epic" completely enough but does not really solve the useability factor nor the endemic issues of magic can do anything. Yes you can chase down the dragon on foot you are that badass like Will Smith in MiB but cannot reach the sky castle he flew up to.
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