Search results

Currently, if you decide to play a race without an attribute bonus at your class's primary attribute, you're basically choosing to be inferior. There are a few exceptions where racial abilities compensate for the suboptimal choice, but something like a tiefling fighter is just asking to suck...

The way stun locking can completely shut down solos has been discussed ad nauseum, but the problem is really wider than stun locking; any debuff is worth more on an elite or a solo, because it's equivalent to hitting 2 or 5 standard monsters. This is also theoretically a problem if you're using...

At low levels, orb mastery is pretty underwhelming -- a 16 Wis is worth an average of 37% increased duration on a standard monster (1.82 rd to 2.50 rd), 30% on an elite, 23% on a solo. Given that Wand of Accuracy with a 16 Dex is about a 30% increase in hit chance and works with any power, not...

As was pointed out in Converting your Character, a samurai is rather close to a great weapon fighter. However, there are a few distinctive quirks, probably buildable as encounter powers, that are genre staples for the samurai. A big one here is the psychic duel -- rather than going after one...

Would the effects on PC power be too extreme if the bastard sword and rapier were eliminated from the game? Currently, they're so superior that they make any other weapon choice foolish, which is annoying; I'd rather not see players forced towards one path (yeah, it limits you to light/heavy...

The masterwork armor rules seem to have two purposes: 1) Cause PC AC to keep up with monster attacks, since there are rather few power bonuses to AC out there. 2) Cause heavy armor AC to keep up with light -- otherwise, the fact that light armor gets a stat boost means it will improve by up to...

One of the basic design objectives of the skill challenge system, as described in designers notes, is that everyone should be involved. This is manifestly not true in the current rules: having anyone but your best problem-solver involved in a challenge is actively harmful. In addition, skill...

This came up Keep on the Shadowfell (I may have made other errors, but it's irrelevant to the question at hand): I was playing the dragonborn paladin and hit the gnome sneak, who vanished. I then said I was going to use paladin's challenge to mark him, which got me a funny look from the DM, but...

Another thread gave me this idea, which I tried to polish for a bit before writing up. It has been mentioned that you can do D&D 4th edition without merchants; just use found items, residuum, and enchant item. This still, however, requires characters to get a fair amount of cash, and sometimes...

While there is a special move, crawl, for moving while prone, I can't find any evidence that you can't take a standard move or shift while prone. Am I missing something? One offhand thought is to add to the description of Prone: "+1 per square to movement costs while prone".

My experience with the sleep spell is that is it, outside of certain degenerate combos (e.g. the Orb combos which give a ridiculously difficult save), it's really not very good for a Daily, and it also doesn't work in the traditional role of "put the guards to sleep". So, I was pondering this...

There is a fantasy staple encounter which I call 'holding off the horde'. The basic idea is that you have a functionally unlimited supply of monsters which, however, only appear at a limited rate, and the job of the PCs is to prevent the monsters from breaking through for a relatively small...