I don't get why you guys just don't hew as closely as possible to 4e to begin with, just to get it all in order and in place, and then fork from there to meet personal preferences.... I mean, it makes sense to have OSRic in place before you start working on Adventures Dark & Deep.
This makes a lot of sense. A document parsing each of the 4e PHB classes and races, and the general rules, plus enough monsters to run a quick level of a dungeon with a boss fight, using the 5e OGL, would be a basis from which every other 5.4e variant could diverge, while having some common ground for discussions. I do think even THAT conversion should tighten up the numbers treadmill dramatically, but I'd be willing to compromise on that.
Though that isnt where I am thinking about too much... i am concerned how much is +3 added to non-proficient activity Intimidate or Deception use for my Chosen one I have using in my example. I guess it does make her as able as someone with basic proficiency in say Heroic from the default rules. Which hmmmm .
Seems about right to me. If she has decent Cha (and any 4e retro-remix will have ASIs separate from Feats, I imagine), she should be pretty good at those skills. An epic Bard will have full training in every skill in the final tier of play, which feels right to me.
If you feel like a Chosen should have exceptional force of personality, that can be part of the Chosen Epic Destiny. Those will need a different name, obviously, but there's no reason that a 5e chassis can't handle having the Theme/Paragon Path/Epic Destiny layer added to it.
So in 4e we have an Inherent Bonuses rule 5e has since the beginning talked the talk of magic item bonuses being "not needed" is that actually true and How?
It's definitely true that you don't need magic item bonuses in 5e. I have one campaign where no +x items have ever shown up, and it runs just as well as the campaign that has several, and the campaign that has a few. How noticeable the difference is tends to be dependent on how finely tuned the optimization of the PC group is.
Now, for a 5.4e, I'd consider simply making the Tier Bonus not stack with +x magic items? So, you might get ahead of the curve, but there is no need really to have an item that is JUST +x. Instead, we can gather a wishlist of the more interesting magic items of 4e, pair it down to a list of about 100 items at most, and convert them without any +. We can work out a system for determining +/level once we have solid items that should scale well in a simple or at least rational manner.
