D&D General How would you redo 4e?

[gorice]

I have not, but I have other issues with this approach. Same goes for Level Up's dice. I don't personally think it's actually that good of design to encourage rolling and tabulating fistfuls of dice. That's a me thing though, so I don't make a big stink of it.

My personal preference would be to make a tiered system of benefits/detriments. Something like this (though it would, of course, need a ton of playtesting to make sure it works correctly):

For "basic" use, and as the thing to unlock something meant to be common but not guaranteed, effectively 4e's Combat Advantage: +2 to relevant rolls. Call it "Boosted."* It would also have an inverse -2 called "Busted,"* which could likewise act as something to unlock possible actions. Frex, the Bravura Warlord might have the ability to leverage an ally becoming Busted, or might have a core mechanic of enabling allies to acquire Boosted status in exchange for being inflicted with Busted. While it wouldn't stack, it would tally, so if you have three sources of Boost and two sources of Bust, you get +2; if the two cancel out exactly, you're neutral.

Then, for more advanced/important/dramatic buffs, you have 5e-style Advantage, which either you have or you don't. It doesn't tally, so if you have both Advantage and Disadvantage from any number of sources, you're normal. This would be used sparingly for stuff meant to be potent but not world-changing, that way it should generally matter a lot that a player can acquire it. It would also stack with Boost/Bust, allowing a spread of benefits: Boost alone pushes up the minimum but only gives a relatively small extra chance to succeed, Advantage alone gives a much higher chance of high rolls but can't push you past your limits, and Boost+Advantage gives you a really solid chance of success and potentially opens the door for higher success.

There would still be room for other modifiers, like granting +Cha mod to an ally's damage or whatever, but these would be used judiciously, only for things where it's really supposed to matter. (And it's not like 5e doesn't do stuff like that anyway.) Consumables might or might not be restricted to this system. I find that players usually need a lot of convincing to be willing to part with their consumables, so making them separate from the usual limits on bonuses is a way to use a carrot, rather than a stick, to encourage actually using the consumables you find.

*I'm not attached to these names. I just feel like they're quick, straightforward, and nicely assonant. "Boost and Bust" has echoes of "Boom and Bust," which doesn't really do much but is kind of fun.

That seems like a workable system. In defence of accuracy/difficulty, I find you're rarely rolling more than 1 die, so it's not really 'fistfuls of dice' -- search and handling is resolved extremely quickly. It also has the benefit/problem that additional dice give diminishing returns -- so the initial one is a +3.5, the next ~+1, and so on. Which may not be what you're after.

 

[Undrave]

Hmmm. Turning it over in my mind I think I'd shy away from encounter powers and go more for like the other three roles where their thing works continually in conjunction with their other powers/abilities. An encounter ability only might diminish the strong Controller feel we're trying to evoke, since it would be a buff to another power then fade/disappear. But a rider or ability every action would keep it front and centre and could give them more interesting choices.

Well, the Leaders have their 2x encounter heals so why not? I feel like an effect that applies every turn would need to be pretty to work with EVERY power. The idea of trigger on a save is that it only happens a few times per fight anyway, and that it would synergize with saves imposed by your allies, not just your own. It also keeps the focus on the powers themselves with the Controller mechanic being smaller in terms of impact.

There's also the matter of scale. There are circa 75-80 powers printed for each class in the PHB1 (not including powers printed for each class's paragon paths). If you commit just to redoing the PHB1 classes without some kind of consolidation effort, you're looking at 600-odd powers before even looking at paragon paths, much less other classes. That is a lot to design - and a lot of room for things to go wrong. (Whereas if you create one power that multiple classes refer to and get it wrong, you just have to fix that one power.)

Personally, I wouldn’t have any class power beyond level 11. You got your Paragon Path for that and Epic Destiny later. Anything lower would just have built-in improvements.

Maybe there wouldn't be harm in consolidating, but there would be a LOT of page flipping and I find that really annoying. I'd rather have similar powers just being named the same and repeated than to have to movie between sections and give up on unique powers.

 

[Undrave]

One of the neat (to my mind) features of 4e is how class-specific powers can be tied back to class features;

I also really like that aspect. And I like when secondary attributes get brought up without the specific class feature. I really like the 4e System of "The class as 1 Primary and each 'subclass' has a favorite secondary" but that secondary isn't always necessary (depending on the class). In 4e you can totally have a STR/INT Fighter (especially with INT contributing to AC and REF) that can learn the Arcana Skill and Ritual Caster Feat without diminishing their efficiency as a Defender. Make it an Eladrin for even more synergy.

4e is a little 'Build your own MAD' (or I get TAD: Two Attribute Dependant) and I find it interesting.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

There is a major difference between cleaning up the crap powers (of which there are sadly a lot, one of the most valid criticisms of 4e which you will basically never hear) and smushing every power source's powers into a single common list. Likewise feats. By the end of 4e's run, there were a ton of pointless, dull, or just weak feats. That's not always the designers' fault, sometimes they implemented the same idea in more than one way and one of those ways was Just Better (e.g. the Essentials expertise feats are actually interesting and not just dull number goes up stuff.) But a lot of them just...they aren't designed as badly as 3.x feats were, but they aren't nearly as good as they should be.

The thing is, you basically can't avoid this "problem" of having lots of powers, because "power" is the word for "actions a character option can perform." Classes give them. Themes give them. PPs give them. EDs give them. Some feats give powers all on their own. For God's sake, items give powers! Add those up, and yes, you're going to get a large, large number of powers; it is unavoidable because of how utterly baseline the concept of "powers" is. To limit them too much would be equivalent to saying that you can only have a maximum of (frex) 100 class features to spread across all 13 of 5e's classes. That's only 7-8 class features per class, counting subclass features AND spells. It's just not feasible.

For 4e, we can get an idea of what a good "slimmed down" amount of powers should look like by setting some rules for reasonable limits. Class alone (excluding Essentials which did its own thing here) provides some kind of power 21 times (several of which are replacements of lower-level powers.) Of them, 2 are AW, 7 are E, 7 are D, and 5 are U. It is reasonable to say that, for each of these choices there should be at least one "generically good" option, and typically but not necessarily always one option for every "build" (baseline class feature choice) the class has. The number of builds varies between classes by quite a lot, but 2 is always the minimum and 3-4 is usually common once a class gets some support. So I think 4 is a reasonable limit here, and we'll say 75% of the time there's a build-specific power for any given choice, meaning there should be about 4 powers for every E/D choice and 5 powers for AW.

That gives 5+4×(7+7+5)=81 powers per class typically, though really the function is 1+X(1+7+7+5)=20X+1 where X is the number of builds for that class. If we keep at least 20 classes (granting that some, like Seeker and Runepriest, could be folded into existing classes as build variants), then we should expect about 20×80=1600 powers from baseline class growth. And this is with fairly conservative numbers, I hope you'll agree. If we want to preserve the fun synergy between class features and powers, we need to be open to what SOUNDS like a lot of powers, because powers do everything.*

But that 1600 doesn't include special features like Channel Divinity, Wizard Cantrips, baseline class features (Marks, Warlocks' Curse, Rangers' Hunter's Mark, Leader encounter heals, etc., etc.), PPs, EDs, items, or feats. PPs and EDs only provide a few powers each typically speaking, but there are hundreds of the former and dozens of the latter. There are likewise hundreds of items with item powers. Feats which directly provided powers are uncommon, but they do exist. Add all that up, and yeah, we probably should expect on the order of 3000-4000 powers in a solid, condensed rework of 4e that trims the fat while preserving the meat. For comparison, the actual number of powers in 4e across literally everything (as far as I can tell) was 9409. So aiming to cut out around half to two thirds of all powers is a relatively reasonable goal, at least by the numbers; we should expect if to be extremely hard to preserve the essence of 4e with something less than (say) 2500 powers, simply because of how much we'd want to keep.

*Even if we made it so only every other choice offered build-specific powers, the above equation would only change to 1+20(0.5X)=10X+1. Using the previous 20 classes with 4 average builds each, that adds up to 20(1+10×4)=20×41=820 class powers. Add any more class ideas, like how I wanted to expand Shadow into something of a "monsters" power source with a Werebeast defender, a Necromancer Leader, and some kind of psionic or charming Controller e.g. Demon or Devil or Mindflayer, and the whole thing grows along with it.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

If this is the case, then I have absolutely no idea whatsoever what you meant by the following text from your original proposal.

Because this, as you phrased it, explicitly means separating the parts ("split[ting] power source...from professions and roles and themes and archetypes.") As a player, you pick (perhaps in no particular order):

• Power source ("divine," "primal," "skirmishing," presumably others)
• Role ("archer," "spellcasting," "warrior," presumably others)
• Profession ("Ranger" being the common thread)

The way this was presented, these are totally separate things. You pick your Power Source, and it gives you some set of features which are common to all Primal characters. You pick your Role, and it gives you the set of mechanics to fulfill that role. These two things, as presented, are totally separate from one another; you could choose to be a "primal warrior" or a "divine warrior" or (presumably) an "arcane warrior," and you'd get exactly the same "warrior" component because that's the Role you've chosen.

So, if you did not mean to step away from classes, if you did not mean to have this viewed as "pick your Source from the Sources list, pick your Role from the Roles list, and pick your Profession from the Professions list," what on Earth DID you mean?

Because if "Paladin" is still an actually distinct thing, with actually distinct mechanics that cannot simply be boiled down to "well I have Channel Divinity, the common feature held by all characters using the Divine Power Source, and I have Defender's Mark, the common feature held by all characters of the Warrior Role," then I literally don't understand how anything whatsoever has changed about Sources or Roles. In which case...why specify those things first and foremost, turning their names into optional parentheticals, when it's still exactly what it was before? Why refer to it as "split[ting] power source...from...roles"?

Part of the reason I'm pushing back here is that what I'm responding to--whether or not it is your position--is something I actually do see a LOT from people wanting to "fix" 4e. They go for either pooling together all powers from a given Source or (even worse) pooling together all powers from all sources, and delete "class" entirely, replacing it with the choice of your power source and role. These are both really, really unwise design choices if your goal is to preserve the heart of the 4e experience, which most of these folks explicitly seem to want. The people saying this seem to have a good idea of what 4e is and how it works, and want to achieve something that respects that foundation while improving on it. But in doing what they propose to do, they rip out the part of 4e that holds the most mechanical interest--the intentional, focused design of each class to achieve a particular class fantasy and play-experience--and replace it with something intentionally generic and de-contextualized.

Yeah, the whole "matrix" approach simply doesn't work. I experimented with that when I first wrote HoML, and you simply CANNOT make anything close to 4e come out of that. I mean, Strike! has kind of done it, but what they did was HUGELY simplify everything in the game. It is kind of an interesting game, but the PCs feel very cookie cutter.

So, what I ended up doing was a bit more subtle. HoML Callings (classes) are pretty much like 4e classes but a bit lighter weight. So, there's a 'knight' class, for instance that deals with sword and board, and/or mounted combat options. Its a martial defender, so pretty much a 4e fighter. However, you don't really get a specific list of powers. Instead you get your class features, and martial power source attunement, and a medium large damage die, plus a thematic assortment of weapons and armor options.

Your knight calling's defender class features give you your nice sticky punishment dilemma stuff, but you will generally use whatever boons (and thus powers, which HoML calls feats) you feel like. Since you're martial attuned, those would be martial choices. Now, some powers tend more towards control, or damage output, or whatnot, but it turns out you generally end up with a pretty 4e-fighter-like build (you get 3 boons at level 1, so you generally have several powers). Your MBA/RBA are also going to get the benefit of class mechanics, plus you don't have a use rate for powers, its just that a basic 0 PP attack is pretty much like an at-will. PPs have a fair amount of use cases, so actually unleashing an 'enhanced' attack is not going to happen more than a couple times per combat, though some items can store PPs and whatnot, so it varies a bit and there are a lot of build options (testing all of the damned things is a real bear).

Anyway, I was thinking that Heroic Origin, which can include some elements of 'background' and 'profession' should be an interesting final piece. I was using a somewhat clunkier background system, but it never felt right, so I think y'all have helped me figure out how to fix that. It could supply things like "you are really good at tracking" and such, although I think Rangers definitely have that too. Honestly, since it is quite feasible to build things like fighters that are pretty good with a bow, you don't need 'ranger as THE bow guy' quite so much anyway.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

You know, this bit about duplicate powers being bad always confused me. Some classes have overlap in roles, and sometimes you need a tool in your kit to perform a task. What is actually wrong with multiple classes needing the same tool anyways?

I mean, in other editions, we see this with spellcasters all the time where even magicians of completely different traditions can share spells! Oh no, my Light Cleric and the Wizard can cast fireball!

You see this sort of thing in other kinds of games. Some champions in League of Legends, I know (not playing myself but having friends that do) have abilities similar to other champions as part of their kit because they need a thing that does that.

Yes, but only in 4e is basically (sometimes EXACTLY) the same power recapitulated multiple times. Given that 4e has something like twelve THOUSAND powers, total, it kinda feels like it would be good to cut down that duplication! I can tell you this much, no game that isn't made by a HUGE team is going to have such large power suites.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Moreover, there is a reason for having Fighter Power A, Warlord Power 2, and Ranger Power III that all have very similar fundamental behavior.

Rider effects. Especially ones that are build-dependent.

Consolidating power lists down into source- or role-universal lists makes it incredibly unwieldy to have powers that get better with specific class features. You'd need to have a list half a dozen entries long in some cases, which is patently ridiculous, and loading up on fancy keywords is hardly better.

Honestly, I'm not so sure. I mean, HoML powers are non-class-specific, but do (sort of) require a given source. A fighter might use it, a rogue might use it, etc. Now, each of these has a pretty strong role feature that will get engaged on the majority of your attacks, so there's always something distinct going on. A given power might tend to do a bit more damage, or have a slightly control-favoring rider, etc. but that's fine. In 4e there are similar things, and the HoML character will be getting their class rider that implements their role, so it actually is distinct enough. Honestly, what you find is that TYPICALLY certain classes use certain powers, and there are a few that seem to work pretty well for 2 roles. Its not typical that everyone ends up doing the same thing anyway, but it still really cuts back a bunch on the size of the lists. I can do 25 classes with a total list of under 400 powers, which is more than TEN TIMES less than 4e needs.

 

[Undrave]

Yes, but only in 4e is basically (sometimes EXACTLY) the same power recapitulated multiple times. Given that 4e has something like twelve THOUSAND powers, total, it kinda feels like it would be good to cut down that duplication! I can tell you this much, no game that isn't made by a HUGE team is going to have such large power suites.

If two classes in the same power source require the same 'tool', then I would prefer they just copy and paste the same power on a different page than consolidate EVERYTHING by power source. It's not efficient use of book space but it's more efficient at the table.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Honestly, I'm not so sure. I mean, HoML powers are non-class-specific, but do (sort of) require a given source. A fighter might use it, a rogue might use it, etc. Now, each of these has a pretty strong role feature that will get engaged on the majority of your attacks, so there's always something distinct going on. A given power might tend to do a bit more damage, or have a slightly control-favoring rider, etc. but that's fine. In 4e there are similar things, and the HoML character will be getting their class rider that implements their role, so it actually is distinct enough. Honestly, what you find is that TYPICALLY certain classes use certain powers, and there are a few that seem to work pretty well for 2 roles. Its not typical that everyone ends up doing the same thing anyway, but it still really cuts back a bunch on the size of the lists. I can do 25 classes with a total list of under 400 powers, which is more than TEN TIMES less than 4e needs.

How do you handle the "build"/"subclass" hooks, then? Because I consider those relatively important to the spirit of 4e--that your build choices shape later choices, without determining later choices.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

There is a major difference between cleaning up the crap powers (of which there are sadly a lot, one of the most valid criticisms of 4e which you will basically never hear) and smushing every power source's powers into a single common list. Likewise feats. By the end of 4e's run, there were a ton of pointless, dull, or just weak feats. That's not always the designers' fault, sometimes they implemented the same idea in more than one way and one of those ways was Just Better (e.g. the Essentials expertise feats are actually interesting and not just dull number goes up stuff.) But a lot of them just...they aren't designed as badly as 3.x feats were, but they aren't nearly as good as they should be.

The thing is, you basically can't avoid this "problem" of having lots of powers, because "power" is the word for "actions a character option can perform." Classes give them. Themes give them. PPs give them. EDs give them. Some feats give powers all on their own. For God's sake, items give powers! Add those up, and yes, you're going to get a large, large number of powers; it is unavoidable because of how utterly baseline the concept of "powers" is. To limit them too much would be equivalent to saying that you can only have a maximum of (frex) 100 class features to spread across all 13 of 5e's classes. That's only 7-8 class features per class, counting subclass features AND spells. It's just not feasible.

For 4e, we can get an idea of what a good "slimmed down" amount of powers should look like by setting some rules for reasonable limits. Class alone (excluding Essentials which did its own thing here) provides some kind of power 21 times (several of which are replacements of lower-level powers.) Of them, 2 are AW, 7 are E, 7 are D, and 5 are U. It is reasonable to say that, for each of these choices there should be at least one "generically good" option, and typically but not necessarily always one option for every "build" (baseline class feature choice) the class has. The number of builds varies between classes by quite a lot, but 2 is always the minimum and 3-4 is usually common once a class gets some support. So I think 4 is a reasonable limit here, and we'll say 75% of the time there's a build-specific power for any given choice, meaning there should be about 4 powers for every E/D choice and 5 powers for AW.

That gives 5+4×(7+7+5)=81 powers per class typically, though really the function is 1+X(1+7+7+5)=20X+1 where X is the number of builds for that class. If we keep at least 20 classes (granting that some, like Seeker and Runepriest, could be folded into existing classes as build variants), then we should expect about 20×80=1600 powers from baseline class growth. And this is with fairly conservative numbers, I hope you'll agree. If we want to preserve the fun synergy between class features and powers, we need to be open to what SOUNDS like a lot of powers, because powers do everything.*

But that 1600 doesn't include special features like Channel Divinity, Wizard Cantrips, baseline class features (Marks, Warlocks' Curse, Rangers' Hunter's Mark, Leader encounter heals, etc., etc.), PPs, EDs, items, or feats. PPs and EDs only provide a few powers each typically speaking, but there are hundreds of the former and dozens of the latter. There are likewise hundreds of items with item powers. Feats which directly provided powers are uncommon, but they do exist. Add all that up, and yeah, we probably should expect on the order of 3000-4000 powers in a solid, condensed rework of 4e that trims the fat while preserving the meat. For comparison, the actual number of powers in 4e across literally everything (as far as I can tell) was 9409. So aiming to cut out around half to two thirds of all powers is a relatively reasonable goal, at least by the numbers; we should expect if to be extremely hard to preserve the essence of 4e with something less than (say) 2500 powers, simply because of how much we'd want to keep.

*Even if we made it so only every other choice offered build-specific powers, the above equation would only change to 1+20(0.5X)=10X+1. Using the previous 20 classes with 4 average builds each, that adds up to 20(1+10×4)=20×41=820 class powers. Add any more class ideas, like how I wanted to expand Shadow into something of a "monsters" power source with a Werebeast defender, a Necromancer Leader, and some kind of psionic or charming Controller e.g. Demon or Devil or Mindflayer, and the whole thing grows along with it.

HoML is a bit more aggressive. By reducing levels to 20 in 3 tiers you get rid of 1/3 of the need for powers right off. Instead of a wide range of possible sources of powers, there is only one, boons (and class features you start with, which is a minor contribution). Each character gets 20 boons in 20 levels, and its easily possible to get half your boons from items, or other 'non-class' sources. So right there that core 1600 number became something more like 300, and that includes items and all of that stuff. Given that you DO want half your powers to be unique and thematic, then you need maybe 200 for a decent list of 20 classes. I mean, maybe you WILL have 600 powers, total, but that's 600, not 2500, making the reduction closer to a factor of 5 to 8.

Now, I also allow different classes to access the same powers, though you still need some that are pretty thematic for a given class, so it may be possible to cut down even some more, though I honestly haven't come close to designing THAT many HoML powers, so I'm not sure! lol.