Majoru Oakheart, I am going to agree with you. And disagree as well. From my DMing experience I have modify things when I thought they were dumb and convoluted. I have also ran straight through modules verbatim before too. I always try to add in different elements to spice them up. Lets face it running through an endless string rooms with combat encounters is not that interesting.
We have fun with dungeon crawls now and then. I modify things when I think they are dumb. I just have a high tolerance. I almost never think something is dumb. New elements are always fun. I'm certainly not knocking people who modify their adventures. If you have the time, go ahead. But, the way you were making it sound was that a game system doesn't have to work, because you'd modify your game around any problems. I think a game system should just work without modification.
I understand that you can guess and get it "mostly" right. But I'd prefer not to guess at all.
The living stuff should be played by the rules in the book because there are too many house rules out their and if one DM is doing it one way, then you can pretty much count on every DM doing it a different way and consistency is important for the players. Most D&Ders do not play "living" stuff so are more free to house rule things and mod encounters and stuff.
I have the freedom to change things in my home game. I don't, because I like consistency as well. And Living Forgotten Realms encourages people to modify the encounters if they think it'll be more fun. We just don't allow changing of the rules. I prefer to be able to move from game to game without learning new rules all the time. I prefer to know my powers will work the same way each time I use them, even if I switch DMs.
I work my home games the same way. The rules are never changed, but the encounters are where I get to make things up and make things interesting.
I am hearing you say that 4e is not a robust system that it cannot handle any change to its intricately fragile system and a single up tick or down tick will collapse the game.
This is correct. More than any previous edition, 4e has had a LOT of math and probability theory put into it. I'm not on the design team. I'm just pretty good at math. But there was no math behind 3e(or at least, not much). It was pretty much completely random. Changes one way or another didn't affect things much because there was no way to really see what effect the change had.
The math behind 4e reduces the factors involved to a couple of easily predictable numbers. Since they are so predictable, other portions of the game can depend on them.
As a rough example. In 3e, a PC could be doing 1 damage a round or 100. No real way to tell. They might have decided to play a halfling with 6 Strength who attacks with a dagger for 1-2 damage per round. They might have decided to play a half-orc barbarian with Power Attack who has a +1 weapon at first level who does 46 damage on a crit. How long does a creature with 18 hitpoints and an AC of 16 last for? No way to tell. Might as well just make up numbers that looks sort of correct and see what happens.
In 4e, the average plus to hit is +6 at 1st level. The average enemy has a 15 AC. The average damage is 8 damage per hit. With a 60% chance to hit that means each character does 5 damage per round. We assume 5 characters. So, 25 damage total per round. If there are 5 enemies, each has 30 hitpoints, then the combat should last 6 rounds. We want the PCs to win an average fight with no one dying. A character has and average of 25 hitpoints on average. We want the total damage of the enemies to be around 62(hitpoints of 2 characters plus 2 healing surges). The average AC of a PC at first level is 16. If we give the enemy +5 to hit, they'll hit 50% of the time. Assuming we that one enemy dies in every round after the first, that means they get 20 attacks total. That means each enemy should do an average of 12 damage on an attack when it hits.
And there you have the main formula for the math in 4e. Due to the randomness of die rolls, character choices, monster choices and types, the rest works itself out. The individual numbers don't matter since we can accurately predict the average. However(and this is key), the only way the math continues to work is if we don't let people get too far away from the average. 4e lets people get between +4 and +8 to hit at first level(without going to extremes). If there are people with +0 to hit in the same group as people with +10 to hit, the difference is too great to determine the average accurately. Since you can't do that, you can't determine what the AC of the enemies should be, which means you can't determine their hitpoints nor their attack bonus nor their damage.
The whole house of cards falls apart.
This is what happens when you force someone to make melee attacks with their 10 strength with a +2 prof bonus quarterstaff in an average round instead of their 20 int vs Ref Magic Missile(average 1.8 damage per round vs 6.5). This is basically 5 damage less a round. Assuming the same 30 hitpoint creatures, it means an extra round of combat. If you have 2 casters in your group, it means 2 extra rounds of combat. Now, remember how we balanced the damage the enemy did so it wouldn't kill anyone in 6 rounds of combat. Well, now there's 8 rounds of combat. The enemy does 12 more damage(on average) during those 2 rounds. Which is just enough to be the difference between someone living and dying.
Really small differences create large problems in 4e.
) or wield a sword the player would create their character with a mid ranged DEX or STR or both. That character concept is so completely sub-par in the current rules. It is almost pointless to even consider one because your at-wills are easily superior and work off your single uni-bloated stat. This is what this whole thread is about.
