Things that are Easy to change vs. things that are Hard to change

[TerraDave]

There are certain things that are very easy for a DM to change, but very hard (or impossible) for a player to change. And vice versa, there are certain things that are very easy for a player to change, but very hard for a DM to change.

What is between the players ears (if anything) I think is the biggest problem.

This is why fluff stuff that may seem trivial may not be.

e.g. a simple bright line--no warlocks--may annoy some players, but will probably be remembered and easy to put in place. Something fiddly, e.g. armor as DR, may have all sorts of problems, but the DM will probably get stuck with most of them, and as it is his home brew he may be able to stay on top of them (though he may also find the trouble wasn't worth it).

But the sort of basic blanket statement: "since we are using campaing world X, all the names, gods, places, fluffy descriptiosn, and so forth you may see are not used, unless they are" can get a bit confusing, and annoying, if there are many such references, especially in the PHB. This is obviously not a new problem, but they seem to pushing this kind of stuff more then in past editions.

 

[Anthtriel]

Adding new races can be very difficult, depending on how material the average 4E race will have, and how material you have to base it on.

Making something like Warforged, who will apparently have some PC support built in, into a fully-functional race will probably be pretty easy, but making something up from scratch, especially if you have to come up with a couple of powers and feats, is rather difficult, if you want good results.

 

[Dragonblade]

How difficult can it be? You just don't Limit Break; let limit accrue indefinitely without penalty.

Except the Limit Break mechanic is one of the only ways in the game to refresh Willpower which is used to power many charms and some items. There is definitely a ripple effect to consider and I would have to come up with my own Willpower refresh mechanic.

 

[LostSoul]

economic system : if level and wealth are linked, if spells and magic item use money (material components), it's hard to rework the absurd prices table of the PHB.

I don't think so... I ran a campaign where I set 1sp = food for a family for two weeks. I pretty much eyeballed the cost of things based on that standard.

PCs couldn't buy items, so I made them available as loot. I realized that I wanted to keep the gp / level thing going, so I knew how much loot to give out. The players didn't have as much choice over magic items, but oh well.

 

[Belphanior]

Except the Limit Break mechanic is one of the only ways in the game to refresh Willpower which is used to power many charms and some items. There is definitely a ripple effect to consider and I would have to come up with my own Willpower refresh mechanic.

Other than stunting (which should happen pretty much all the time) and sleeping (which should happen about once per day). Limit Breaks aren't really all that great in this respect. A more subtle difficulty here is that virtue flaws and limit points are built in as some sort of balancing mechanic somethimes. See perfect defenses, social combat, and defying your own virtues.

But this is entirely OT.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I think the hardest thing to change, in practical terms, will actually be fluff-related. Rules-changes are rules-changes, and whilst some can cascade, they're usually straight-foward.

What is more of a pain, though, is changing fluff-stuff that's semi-built-in to the rules. I mean, if we have Golden Wyvern and Dragon's Tail Cut and a few dozen other highly dislikeable names scattered through the book, built into Powers, built in to Feats, maybe built into Spells (less likely to be annoying there, admittedly), and so on, and I want to change them, it's not going to hurt the mechanics at all, but it will hurt my brain.

I can't just go through the book and change the names, unless I want to ruin the thing with a ton of Tippex (do they still make that?). So I have to a create a list of all the names I've changed for my campaign, and put out that list to players (who may well have already memorized the PHB, knowing my players), and then I have to get them to use the "right" names and so on.

Impossible no? Hard? Probably not. Extremely annoying and likely to end up with people frequently using the "standard" term by accident? Yeah.

Of course, it remains to be seen how much would need to be changed. It might be almost nothing, in which case, yay.