D&D 4E What to do with 4th Edition

[Tallifer]

This is a long thread, so I have not read every post.

The Living Guild on roll20/discord faithfully recreates the 4E experience, and I had a good year adventuring with all those people. You need decent internet of course.

No need for a retroclone since these people (over a hundred players and several DMs) carry the torch.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

So the drive to make a retroclone is a bit less intense because if I want to run a 4e game not only do I have my books, any new players who don't own them could actually buy them (at least in PDF - it would be nice if they'd put 3e and 4e into POD like they have 1e and 2e).

for me I want ongoing support and update fixxing. I don't think they ever got the skill challenges right, and they also had some class emblances...

I had hoped 5e would be built on the 4e frames but better.

Even if it isn't making it better just NEW things would be good. Once you get the base book out and a fighter is a 4e fighter (even if you use slaywer as I would as a base) you could build ne powers and subclasses and feats.

 

[MoonSong]

The aim is 100% compatibility, within the constraints of using what has come before in Open Game Content.

The classes I've designed work differently to 4e classes (they can always use use primary and secondary abilities, so MAD is never a problem, and they get access to lists of powers instead of having class-based lists) but these are built into the classes, so a 4e class can be dropped in with no changes. Similarly there's some sample extended challenges that break the skill challenge format, but a 4e skill challenge would still fit.

But you're right that the actual game material from 4e - the fighter class, the come and get it power, the needle fang drake swarm, etc - isn't reproduced. I don't have any plans to do so, both because of the work involved and the copyright infringement risk.

But (1) that shouldn't affect most of the third party supplements that might use Orcus as a base and (2) I think this is less important for a d20 System game than an OSR one. An OSR game not having the fighter is, I think, closer to a 4e-inspired game missing a martial defender. After all, an Essentials only game would be missing "the fighter" too (though it would have two reimaginings of it).

That said, I'm certainly not opposed to someone else reproducing this stuff!

Thank you for your hard work. I'm thinking on contributing some stuff to it (something like... a "healer" that is in fact an striker -the unicorn companion does all the damage- ). However I'm thinking I'll stay the course on my own attempt to clone 4e using only the 5.1 and the 3.5 SRDs, plus the Archmage engine. I'm trying to get a game that gets the same math and the same combat loop and an approximation of all core classes. Whenever something is just too idiosyncratic, I look for an alternative way to get the same result, for example, to switch the calculation for hp and derivative values from a formula to a table with the values precalculated.

 

[Sanglorian]

Thank you for your hard work. I'm thinking on contributing some stuff to it (something like... a "healer" that is in fact an striker -the unicorn companion does all the damage- ). However I'm thinking I'll stay the course on my own attempt to clone 4e using only the 5.1 and the 3.5 SRDs, plus the Archmage engine. I'm trying to get a game that gets the same math and the same combat loop and an approximation of all core classes. Whenever something is just too idiosyncratic, I look for an alternative way to get the same result, for example, to switch the calculation for hp and derivative values from a formula to a table with the values precalculated.

Cool! The beauty of the Open Game License is all this content can be reused and adapted, even if it's ostensibly for a different clone.