Recent content by willows

Stances are just the Essentials way of camouflaging At-wills. By allowing them to stack with At-Wills, you're basically doing the same thing as saying, "Sure rogues, you can use two At-Wills at once. Deft Strike+Positioning Strike FTW!"

Interesting point - I feel like the shift is still pretty intense given that it permits you to maneuver offensively out-of-turn, but I take your point. My suggestion about the surges was basically intended to provide variety rather than to power down an OP feature.

I didn't want to hijack the other wishlist thread, so here's my way of handling it in my current game - warstones, which work a little like Materia in FF. Magic Items & Character Builds tl;dr: You can socket a warstone into a piece of equipment to turn it into a piece of magical equipment...

Dude, I didn't get very far down your race list yet, but a free shift every time you suffer forced movement is staggeringly OP. Make that Gerudo ability an encounter power and it might be okay. Alternatively, maybe "If you are subject to forced movement during an enemy's turn, once on your next...

Stat up army units as biggish monsters. Dunno what size is most appealing to you. They all have an ability that triggers when bloodied: They go down to the next lower size category and replenish some HP. Their attacks recalculate based on the new size. They also get faster. Heroes can occupy...

Cool.

So, seeing as this has gone on two pages without a response, let's throw you a bone. You should really think about using a thesaurus or simply diversifying the radiant dude's powers, because more than half of them have "radiant" in them, and that's awfully confusing, as is using another class's...

What led you to that decision?

Why bother having ability scores at all? I don't think the game would suffer noticeably if you just dumped them and built level-based progressions where ability bonuses used to be.

Well, basically I think it's a bad idea, for all the reasons the guys above said, as well as this: Because of how much mitigation you can do in a turn, such powers would have to be very strong to be worth taking, and be very swingy in practice; either you get one to go off and you're...

I'm no rules guru, but that feature sounds good to me and similarly-powered to the feature you are replacing.

The error you're making here is assuming a middle class of artisans that stops at middle class. I think that in order to make the economy make sense, you need to posit that artisans are in fact the wealthiest class; bureaucrats and logistics people are the middle-class, followed by farmers &c...

The 5e system is a lot more fun! Energy nodes and fundamental force space allow magical characters to feel just as diverse as fighty guys, even though the dynamics of their powers are totally different. I find that empowerment is more satisfying than 4e-style item creation. That said, I...

Ten minutes isn't actually that long. That said, the reason it takes so long is so that Arcana doesn't become a jack-of-all-trades skill; if you can pick a lock just as easily and efficiently by whispering strange words at it as you can with actual lockpicks, there's no reason for the rogue to...

I was looking over Magic of Incarnum, which is full of bad game mechanics with a cool idea inside, and I was wondering how to handle it in 4e. This is the beginning of my efforts to do that. In this conversion, incarnum energy is depicted a little differently than the 3e version; incarnum...