D&D 4E List of Potential New Martial Practices

[NotAYakk]

Consider stealing martial practices from the 5e "skill feats" article recently.

If I wanted to invest in reworking Martial Practices, I'd rebuild them.

Martial Practices:
Some martial practices can be Prepared. Preparing a martial practice requires a long rest. You can have 1 martial practice prepared per tier for free; every additional martial practice prepared requires you to invest a healing surge which you cannot regain while you keep it prepared.

Lock Savant: Thievery. By spending a minor action examining a locked device, you can roll 1d20. You can use the result of this roll when unlocking the locks on the lock or checking for traps on the device. You can only do this to a locked device once for each long rest. Prepared: You can unlock all locks (magic or not) on a device as a standard action. As a minor action, you can use a single skill check to attempt to unlock all locks on a device.

Grasshopper: Athletics. Your jump distance is doubled. Prepared: You can long jump up to 8 squares + athletics bonus/2 + level squares as a standard action. You can high jump up to 10' + athletics bonus/2 + level feet as a standard action.

Spider: Athletics. You climb using your full speed. Prepared: Your speed is now a climb speed.

Shark: Athletics. Your swim at your full speed. Prepared: Your speed is now a swim speed.

Coyote: Bluff. Feint and Distract are minor actions. Prepared: The first time per day an intelligent being notices you fail a check or task, they are convinced you failed on purpose for an innocuous reason (humour, being helpful, etc).

Fox: Diplomacy. Once per day you can reroll a failed diplomacy check. Prepared: If you spend a minute talking to a creature who understands your language, you can make an Diplomacy vs their passive Insight check. If you or your allies are fighting the creature this check automatically fails. If you succeed, the creature becomes unable to attack you and you get to roll twice on all social skill checks made against them as the target until they are more than 60' away from you and for 1 minute thereafter. They also view you as friendly, will give your motivations the benefit of the doubt.

Bear: Intimidate. Your Intimidate skill gains a power bonus equal to your Strength when you have a weapon visible you are proficient in. Prepared: As a Standard Action you can attempt to Demoralize a target. Make an intimidate check opposed by the target's insight check. If you succeed the creature is unable to attack you and you get to roll twice on all social skill checks against the target. Whenever the creature takes damage or takes a long rest they may make a saving throw against this effect. They also view you as dangerous, and will be cautious when acting against you.

Rat: Streetwise. Secret information no longer recieves an increased DC. Prepared: When in an urban area, once per day you can spend an hour scrounging for slipshod equipment. This equipment becomes useless after a week. This equipment otherwise duplicates the effects of an item worth your level or lower. As a focus, you require gold or other valuable items worth 1/10th the price of the item in question; in the hour you barter your way up to the item and manage to break even.

But maybe this isn't what you are interested in.

 

[Garthanos]

Consider stealing martial practices from the 5e "skill feats" article recently.

If I wanted to invest in reworking Martial Practices, I'd rebuild them.

Martial Practices:
Some martial practices can be Prepared. Preparing a martial practice requires a long rest. You can have 1 martial practice prepared per tier for free; every additional martial practice prepared requires you to invest a healing surge which you cannot regain while you keep it prepared.

Lock Savant: Thievery. By spending a minor action examining a locked device, you can roll 1d20. You can use the result of this roll when unlocking the locks on the lock or checking for traps on the device. You can only do this to a locked device once for each long rest. Prepared: You can unlock all locks (magic or not) on a device as a standard action. As a minor action, you can use a single skill check to attempt to unlock all locks on a device.

Grasshopper: Athletics. Your jump distance is doubled. Prepared: You can long jump up to 8 squares + athletics bonus/2 + level squares as a standard action. You can high jump up to 10' + athletics bonus/2 + level feet as a standard action.

Spider: Athletics. You climb using your full speed. Prepared: Your speed is now a climb speed.

Shark: Athletics. Your swim at your full speed. Prepared: Your speed is now a swim speed.

Coyote: Bluff. Feint and Distract are minor actions. Prepared: The first time per day an intelligent being notices you fail a check or task, they are convinced you failed on purpose for an innocuous reason (humour, being helpful, etc).

Fox: Diplomacy. Once per day you can reroll a failed diplomacy check. Prepared: If you spend a minute talking to a creature who understands your language, you can make an Diplomacy vs their passive Insight check. If you or your allies are fighting the creature this check automatically fails. If you succeed, the creature becomes unable to attack you and you get to roll twice on all social skill checks made against them as the target until they are more than 60' away from you and for 1 minute thereafter. They also view you as friendly, will give your motivations the benefit of the doubt.

Bear: Intimidate. Your Intimidate skill gains a power bonus equal to your Strength when you have a weapon visible you are proficient in. Prepared: As a Standard Action you can attempt to Demoralize a target. Make an intimidate check opposed by the target's insight check. If you succeed the creature is unable to attack you and you get to roll twice on all social skill checks against the target. Whenever the creature takes damage or takes a long rest they may make a saving throw against this effect. They also view you as dangerous, and will be cautious when acting against you.

Rat: Streetwise. Secret information no longer recieves an increased DC. Prepared: When in an urban area, once per day you can spend an hour scrounging for slipshod equipment. This equipment becomes useless after a week. This equipment otherwise duplicates the effects of an item worth your level or lower. As a focus, you require gold or other valuable items worth 1/10th the price of the item in question; in the hour you barter your way up to the item and manage to break even.

But maybe this isn't what you are interested in.

These seem rather like skill powers ... with a based line form and a souped form.

I have been considering an idea where a skill power was associated with each martial practice and we have been discussing the possibility of allowing a form of preparing to swap out a skill power perhaps like the umm "martial versatility feats".

Boosting skill powers by way of healing surge expenditure seems definitely a potential option.

The idea is already becoming "cheaper" costing practices only have healing surges optionally or when applied in a rush situation (like in a skill challenge or combat scene) and similar things.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

One direction I thought to go with this is to enumerate rituals which we think CANNOT be converted directly into martial practices.

Then figure out indirect methods of approaching it.

For instance Teleport

Teleport is of course also exceptional transportation. There are potentially any number of such that could be represented as 'practices'. They wouldn't exactly replicate teleportation, but they could be better in some respects (IE not requiring the creation of an entire teleportation circle for instance, or more flexible in target location, etc).

 

[Garthanos]

Teleport is of course also exceptional transportation. There are potentially any number of such that could be represented as 'practices'. They wouldn't exactly replicate teleportation, but they could be better in some respects (IE not requiring the creation of an entire teleportation circle for instance, or more flexible in target location, etc).

Arguably it might be that the most significant element of long distance teleportation is being able to get to a destination without disruption of the journey

which is one of the effects in peerless exploration

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Arguably it might be that the most significant element of long distance teleportation is being able to get to a destination without disruption of the journey

which is one of the effects in peerless exploration

Right, you could also have stuff like 'Peerless Tracker' that lets you unerringly go to where someone is, even if they're 1000's of miles away, on another plane, etc. (possibly scaling there).

 

[Garthanos]

Right, you could also have stuff like 'Peerless Tracker' that lets you unerringly go to where someone is, even if they're 1000's of miles away, on another plane, etc. (possibly scaling there).

Definitely that seems like a worthwhile possibility it doesn't have get to my destination speed but it has get to one I do not know very well safely.

In general we need to look at implications of the rituals out there and play off of those, instead of duplicating the direct effect.

 

[Garthanos]

Spider: Athletics. You climb using your full speed. Prepared: Your speed is now a climb speed.

That might be an appropriate component of Parkour...

 

[NotAYakk]

The thing that makes rituals "work" is that they are ways to veto base game assumptions, and they do so with mechanics. While my stuff is somewhat utility power like, the idea is that they mostly are useful out of combat. A standard action to move extra far (jump) is rarely worthwhile inside combat (except for fleeing!), but outside combat being able to jump a few 100' as an action is going to change how you interact with the world. Now, having a climb speed is arguably mainly useful in combat; so maybe it is a bad choice.

 

[Garthanos]

The thing that makes rituals "work" is that they are ways to veto base game assumptions, and they do so with mechanics. While my stuff is somewhat utility power like, the idea is that they mostly are useful out of combat. A standard action to move extra far (jump) is rarely worthwhile inside combat (except for fleeing!), but outside combat being able to jump a few 100' as an action is going to change how you interact with the world. Now, having a climb speed is arguably mainly useful in combat; so maybe it is a bad choice.

Mighty leap is a skill power which is quite usable in combat but admittedly it doesn't double a running jump distance (it does allow one to jump from standing as though running which doubles that) and adds 5 on top of that to your skill roll which also affects your distance.

The core of parkour lol is you have to be able to analyse the scene ahead of using it, ie spend 10 minutes or the like on analyzing the obstacle course and then you have rather unobstructed mobility within the area. It indeed sometimes might be valuable in combat if you have fair control of when and where the encounter occurs, like if you are setting a trap....

 

[Garthanos]

I have added some thoughts on usage and design guildelines to the op