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A lot of warlock powers get a boost from Int, so having a decent Int is a good idea. That opens up the wizard at-wills. If your Int is 14 or 16, it will only be a point or two behind your main attack. Our group's warlock picked Thunderwave, because he used Str as his dump stat and has no decent...

That sounds ... pretty awful, actually. Your problems are not unique. I've seen several groups that are new to the game get obsessed with treasure (though I admit, its been a very long time since I've personally witnessed those kinds of issues). The way I address these kinds of issue is that I...

This might be kind of a radical suggestion but ... you could just have fewer fights. The combats in my game run about an hour or so, and that works fine for us. I generally have 3 fights total in a single adventure, and have about a 50/50 ratio in combat vs. non-combat time. I haven't used the...

You are including bonuses for attacks and defenses, but not bonuses for damage. By 30th level, I imagine the +6 damage bonus (and +6d6 for crits) becomes pretty important. At the highest levels, in your low-magic system, PCs will have half that (low and mid-level PCs are only 1 point behind, not...

All that goes to show is that excessive feat prerequisites are not limited to the spell caster classes. What fighter in his right mind would take a Wisdom of 15 just to get the Distracting Shield feat? Polearm gamble *might* be worth it, but other than that, the Wisdom bonus is only helping your...

I have players make active Perception checks against their enemy's passive Stealth rating to avoid ambushes. It doesn't reveal too much, since they are going to be in combat shortly. Those who fail are surprised. Your uber-Perception guy will mostly be fine, but will still be surprised...

The rust monster could weaken gear (giving it penalties) by making attacks against Reflex. After the fight, the PCs could use the Make Whole ritual on their gear to restore it to normal. If you allow the rust monster to effect magic items, I would make the casting cost of Make Whole based on...

JH, maybe your expectations are off. I find that 4E combats take 6-7 rounds, as opposed to 4-5 rounds for 3E combats. I find that standard 4E combats take about 45 minute of play, though, less than my 3E combats. Boss-fights take a bit more than an hour generally. Maybe you are making your...

The bullet, open and closed circles are just regular characters. So, I just cut and paste. If you want to get technical, it appears that the forum software on Enworld supports the full UTF-8 character set (which is just about everything, including international characters). For fun, here is...

Hmm. That's a hard question. Your system feels to me to be roughly equal to a single Complexity 1 challenge in the old system. That is, it is about one equal-level monster worth of XP. It's not just a question of difficulty; it's a question of game-time used. I doubt your challenge would take...

That seems clear to me: curse damage on at most one target, once per round. It says "a cursed enemy", meaning the bonus applies to that enemy, not the attack. I admit it is vague enough you could argue the other way, but compared to Hunter's Quarry and Sneak Attack, that is likely the intended...

It's been suggested before, but I find that a printed summary sheet of each PCs power list with all the attack and damage bonus pre-calculated helps a lot. I find this a lot more useful than power cards, myself. You should be able to fit it all onto one page. On my sheets, I put a bullet (●)...

I agree that the spell damage feats are generally not worth getting. Astral Fire is might be worth it for a cleric, and Dark Fury might be worth it for a warlock, but none are worth the trouble for a wizard. I think the "right" way to fix the problem, though, is to remove the spell damage feat...

The math isn't hard to reproduce. If you total the gp value of the treasure parcels on DMG 126+ and divide by the expected party size (5), it works out to the equivalent of a Level + 2 magic item. So, as you advance from Levels 1 to 2, you will earn the cash-value of a Level 3 item. Similarly...

I don't know if this is what you are referring to, but here are my house rules on gold-less 4E. It includes rules for "free" rituals. I've refined them a bit from the original post. Equipment and Magic Items Tracking money and treasure is a bookkeeping pain and detracts from the heroic...

I think it is difficult if not impossible to have a character creation system that is both balanced and flexible. There are plenty of systems out there that let you build exactly the character that you want. GURPS, the Hero system and M&M come to mind. Those systems require player cooperation...

If you look at the DMG errata for generic skill difficulties, WotC has upped the progression to about +2 DC per 3 levels rather than +1 DC per 2 levels. http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/updates Based on my number crunching, that's a better fit to the actual progression, once you figure...

I'd base ambushing on the Surprise rules on PH 267 rather than the Stealth skill block. Here is how I do things: 1) The ambushers just needs cover to set up an ambush. No checks are necessary. Combat begins with a Surprise round. 2) The ambushed group individually makes active Perception...

A simple rule would be to make the training in the Ritual's key skill required for learning the ritual. That will probably give you the "division of labor" you want without a major rewrite.

My opinion: 1) Using Stealth to get Combat Advantage should be easy, at least for character's training in Stealth. You need this for the rogue to work as a balanced character. 2) Using Stealth to get Invisibility should be hard, because Invisibility is a huge advantage, defensively. If...