D&D 4E New Year, New 4e

[C4]

With the New Year nearly upon us, I find myself looking into my future. And my crystal ball is showing me DMing 4e for a long time – it’s the kind of fantasy action-adventure game my group and I want to play, and I don’t see us jumping into another game anytime soon. But it does have flaws.

I’m starting to mull over a real 4.5e reboot – an ironing-out of core issues that have never been addressed, and a refinement of everything that makes 4e awesome. I already have a lengthening to-do list for this project, from ‘make the math simple and elegant’ to ‘reverse engineer PC power guidelines’ to ‘do something about Second Wind.’ But I also want to hear from other 4e fans.

What do you see as 4e’s core problems? What would you like to see changed?

 

[S'mon]

Fights take too long (so I halve monster hp), monsters have too many fiddly condition-imposing powers to track (so I edit their stat blocks - fewer conditions, more damage), and it's hard to explain to players using multi-target powers that they need to roll damage before attacks, whereas with the old Ref Save vs Fireball the system was elegant and intuitive. Not rolling damage vs minions is jarring and makes them feel unreal, so I give them a damage threshold.
Rolling tons of damage dice slows the game down to little benefit; I'm looking at using fixed damage for many monsters in future. The D&D minis game used fixed damage, and it runs a lot slicker.

 

[Scrivener of Doom]

I think S'mon has the right of it.

That said, I just stick to the Heroic Tier and avoid soldiers and it generally works well. I also give the PCs a higher point buy budget which makes them a little tougher and more flexible.

 

[Ajar]

Feat bloat is a significant problem, especially at higher tiers. There are way too many feats, and too many of them are fiddly situational minor bonuses.

 

[RangerWickett]

The character builder is untenable until Wizards excises 90% of the feats. Ditto items. Design should have been broader. Give feats less specific flavor and mechanics.

If you could just use Essentials, the game would work better. I don't know why there isn't a toggle for that in the CB.

Also, it'd be nice if you could get more of the 'bounded accuracy' that 5e is looking at. Then have less necessity for the party to keep leveling up gear.

Actually, the more I look at it, I don't think it's ideal to try to fix 4e; that implies keeping it compatible with most of the material produced for the game. I'd rather take the game design ideas that worked in late 4e and build a robust, compact system.

Heavy Duty Revision Ideas
Reduce the static level-based bonuses, so you get +0 to +5 instead of +0 to +15. HP and damage scaling works fine, I think.

Design 24 monster stat blocks - minion, standard, elite, and solo, at levels 1, 6, 11, 16, 21, and 26. Have simple templates for the different roles (artillery, +2 to hit with ranged, bonus damage; brute, +25% hp, bonus damage; soldier, +2 defenses; etc.).

Monster stats should be simple; the monster entries should focus on tactics, tricks, and novel actions. Liberally use 'page 42' to adjudicate these. A tiger has the same stats as an ogre (lvl 6 standard brute), but one pounces and rakes, while the other wallops people away or grabs them to use them as human shields or improvised weapons.

I guess keep the essential classes as is. I'd love to do rewrites, but they'll do for now. Don't allow non-essential powers, though.

Magic items no longer have levels. Enhancement bonuses only are +1. Never higher.

Like I said, though, it's a big overhaul.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

gonna repost my response from your thread at rpg.net, see if it gets different response here than there.

4e needs:

Most sources of static damage bonuses to not stack.

Inherent bonuses as part of the game's assumptions, or all half-level attack and damage bonuses removed, all +X from weapons removed and the math reworked from there.

All classes make basic attacks with their primary stat.

feat tax fixes worked into whatever they were made to fix. (Assassin and Warlock, I'm looking at you. The assassin works if you give it 3 or 4 "feat tax" feats for free, and upgrade the damage on powers a little, like the warlock got)

Get rid of all feats now made redundant or useless by basic math changes, and new damage stacking rules.

Further reduce the feats by killing the super boring/redundant crap. Should be fairly obvious. Make multi-classing give auto access to power swapping at no additional feat cost. You can just swap one power per slot from the class you're MC'd into.

Make the classes work with PHB style and essentials style options being more smoothly compatible. Example: Rangers should be able to more smoothly dial between the fully martial power based PHB thing and the more nature magic using basic attack based hunter/scout thing.

Assume themes from the beginning. Adjust any math that needs to be adjusted accordingly.

Reduce number of attack powers, increase number of utillity powers, expand page 42 to a chapter if needed, and put that info in the PHB. Front and center. Make it very, very clear that you can improvise, and how the mechanics of improvisation work.

Some simple rules for playing gridless. Mostly, forced movement could be pushback, or call out a few examples of short range moving you could do, like pushing someone into being flanked, or pushing someone far enough away that they have to move in order to get to you again/you can move away without shifting, stuff like that.


a DnD 4e Basic edition that can be mixed with the core game without any conversion needed.

also, fewer items that are more broadly usable, rules for designing your own items, more weapon and armor properties, ways to make simple weapons as good as superior weapons, even if it involves feats like the spiked chain thing. Weapon "multi-class" feats shouldn't count as multi class feats.

obviously, print the skill challenges using the most current updated rules, but also include good guidelines for mixing skill challenges with combat, making multi scene skill challenges, etc.

Allow players to make money from making things. I know haggling works, but if magic items don't have stat bonuses, it's less of a big deal if players have a lot of money, and they can spend it one fun things like creating merchant businesses, buying an inn, building a castle, etc.

Don't "balance" rituals via cost.

 

[Randomthoughts]

What do you see as 4e’s core problems? What would you like to see changed?

4e's current combat system is perfect IMHO for set piece battles...and that's how I mainly use it. But it does need a way to speed up combat, a middle ground. There are many threads by GMs running gridless combat, so it can be done, but it would be great to consolidate and refine it into a cohesive whole.

Rituals need a second look. I'm looking at 5e for ideas right now. Cleaning up the feat list, as Ajar suggested, (especially the obsolete ones) is also needed.

The OP mentioned cleaning up the math. What exactly is the problem there? If it's referring to feat taxes or how the math bakes in magical items, I thought inherent bonuses addressed that.

That being said, I didn't particularly care for how magic items were handled - a certain sense of wonder was lost - but I don't consider it a core problem.

 

[Sunseeker]

It's been mentioned, but I shall reiterate.

Feat Bloat. The Essentials "Heroes..." line introduced some feats that are simply superior to earlier ones, and there are a lot of near-redundancies(ie: feats that do similar things in similar, but different ways).
Monster HP: Too freaking high, comparativly, monster damage is often too low. The MM3 and later monster design did a great deal of good in fixing this, but it isn't perfect. 9/10 of my fights include 1 or 2 actual monsters and then a half-dozen plus "super-minions"(monsters with 1 HP but otherwise normal attacks).
Effects: There's so many of them and some of them are silly complicated to resolve, not to mention there are buckets of effects that last many turns, both from players and monsters. When I custom-build monsters, unless I want some very specific effect, every effect happens on a successful attack, and any that last are kept very simple. "You are weakened." "-2 penalty to attacks." "you are polymorphed into a chicken, will save ends!" More complex effects are limited in use. "You take a -2 penalty to will saves, and each failed save increases this penalty by -2. If the penalty equals or exceeds your will score, you become Dominated by the BBEG."


Personally, the REAL issue with long-combat is just getting people to know what they want to do before they do it. To this end: I turned the AEDU system into a quasi-vancian system, wherein a player had X encounter and Y daily slots, and could use the same encounter or daily X or Y times respectivly. People who enjoyed specific powers always ended up knowing what they would do, no thought to "other" powers, hell they didn't even have to choose other powers if they didn't want. And people who enjoyed the diversity the system enforces normally got along just fine.

The simple creativity of the Slayer should be retroactively applied to the vast majority of 4e. The Slayer never lacked ways to slay even if they lacked a laundry-list of AEDU powers.

 

[Remathilis]

I'm probably not your intended audience (IE I'm not a 4e player) but I'll give you some of my ideas...

The biggest thing I'd do is start with Essentials as the baseline. I'd mostly use those books to begin with, along with the Planar Hero books to fill in the gaps. THEN, I'd start seeing which classes haven't made the cut and work on Essentialized versions of them. Then, I'd use Mordenkainen's book as a guide to converting whatever magic items need converting. I'd use MM3 and the Monster Vaults as the baseline for monsters.

Really, too much of the early Core book 1 era stuff is beyond fixable at this point, and only smatterings of the Core book era 2 stuff is good. Using Essentials would be a great "jump on point" as it fixes a lot of problems with the classes, races, and monsters. I'd just hunt down all the Essential compatible stuff there is and then start using it as a template for the new stuff.

 

[Storminator]

That being said, I didn't particularly care for how magic items were handled - a certain sense of wonder was lost - but I don't consider it a core problem.

I do. Treasure is pretty boring now. This game used to be about killing things and taking their stuff - heck, it used to be about taking their stuff and you only killed them if you couldn't get it any other way!

I'd love to see magic items become interesting again.

PS