The thing that makes 4e D&D one of the most easily customizable D&D versions ever hinges on four little rules that make up the core of the system. Understand these, and you can twist the engine to your own ends beautifully. What are these four fundamental elements? How might you use these rules to enhance your own games? Come get your weekly dose of RPG potassium, lads & lasses.
Ah, the "wonders" of dice math. Throughout the history of the D&D game, we’ve seen a lot of variation in the odds of your character actually accomplishing the thing they try, and significant variation in how long it takes them to accomplish it. Your 1st level thief might hide in shadows 10% of the time – only one in every ten times! And your 1st level magic-user might cast Sleep and wipe out an entire room full of goblins….and if that room full of goblins is the elite guard for the MacGuffin, you just Won D&D.
Those kinds of odds are bound to make someone a little disgruntled.
One of 4e D&D’s most significant accomplishments is in developing and applying a consistent standard across every level and in every encounter and with every turn for how a player character should perform in combat. This consistency ultimately involves tracking a lot of disparate game elements, but it comes down to four principles that 4e D&D adheres to quite strongly: the four elements at the core of 4e D&D.
Tea with Aristotle?
Earth: Thou Shalt Succeed On A 9
Mr. David Flor breaks down the details here.
The short version is this: the math shakes out so that characters hit on an 8+ at early levels, and by late levels, this turns into a 12+. On average, if you roll a 9, you’re hitting. The variation likely accounts for the various bonuses and penalties that become more common as you gain higher levels.
So, if the rule is: “Roll a 9 and hit,” you can adopt that regardless of your game. All the bonuses, all the Expertise feats, all the buffs and debuffs, all fold into this one simple rule. The rule is psychologically pretty robust: you succeed slightly more often than you fail, so you are encouraged to try, but the difference is not so great as to give you an auto-success: you still have a significant chance of failure. Regardless of your game, if you adopt this rule you can pretty much eradicate fiddly math bits, and just look at the number you rolled on your d20: if it’s 9 or above, you hit.
In exchange for fiddly +1’s and -2’s you can adopt other mechanics to represent situational bonuses to attack and defense. Something like 5e’s Advantage/Disadvantage mechanic helps fill that role, but you might also consider non-stacking bonuses: a character that is “accurate” might get a constant +2 or +4, a creature with high defenses (either via evasion or via thick armor) might apply a constant -2 or -4. Essentially, this could be just your ability score modifier (a la 3e and 4e), and nothing else. One modifier to keep track of, one penalty or bonus to apply, instead of a cascading wash of dozens, makes the whole thing a lot more about what modifiers you WANT to include, rather than about trying to add up all the ones the game WANTS you to include.
You can also adopt this outside of attacks. Skill DC’s and ability checks and pre 4e saving throws and proficiency checks might be rolled into this as well: roll 9 and you succeed in your check. You could add some gradations, but it would essentially be something you could control for your own games. Want a character good at Activity X (whatever Activity X might be)? Give them a +4 bonus, or Advantage on the roll. Any roll involving a d20 could work with this.
Air: Thou Shalt Win After 6 Hits
The lovely and talented “Haze” sets this one up.
The abstract here is this: strikers kill a typical monster in 4 hits. Everyone else kills a typical monster in 8 hits. On average, your party is killing monsters at the rate of 6 hits per monster, per character. This assumes you’re dealing at least your level +3 damage with each hit (easier with bigger dice).
This combines with the rule above to make any combat with any creature at any level something you can run without a reference to the precise stats or CON modifiers or whatever. If you’ve got a 5-person party, you’re going to need a total of 30 d20 rolls that are 9+ to win the combat. Period. Meaning, about 43 die rolls. This might be 30 minions, this might be 5 “normal” monsters, this might be one “solo” monster, but it’s 6 hits, and then you win.
You can also eliminate much of 4e’s infamous drag by changing the assumptions. Make everyone a striker, and now the typical monster goes down in 4 hits. Make strikers do DOUBLE THAT, if you’d like, and you got a monster that goes down in an average of 3 hits (2 for strikers, 4 for everyone else). Suddenly that 43-roll combat is more like a 22-roll combat, cutting the time it eats up significantly. You could even eliminate the need for strikers entirely in this way: just make EVERYONE a striker. Suddenly, there’s not just one character that does the damage: everyone does.
Believe it or not, this works outside the context of combat, too. Because we’ve removed damage dice from the equation entirely, we’re really just tracking “successes,” skill-challenge style. A chase scene or an epic overland journey or a staring contest with a beholder…and it can be as long as a typical 4e combat, or longer, or shorter, or anywhere in between simply by adjusting the number of assumed “successes.” This could even let you play with ideas like gaining “victory points” toward your goal by making the equivalent of damage rolls. Though this might draw the parallels to combat a bit too closely for some, its ability to be included as an option is clear.
Fire: Thou Shalt Die After 5 Hits
This one involved a little bit more independent research, but take your favorite character generator, whip up a Fighter of a given level, and compare that to the damage done by a monster of the same level. A quick division will find out how many hits that Fighter can take. Now take a Wizard and do the same. You’re likely going to hit a number somewhere between 3 and 6. On average, we’ll say 5.
So now not only do you have a measure of how long and how many hits it’ll take for you to win, but you also have a measure of how long your character can survive against the assault. You don’t have to worry about tracking individual monster damage totals or adding five different attributes in. In fact, you don’t even have to worry about PC HP: “tough” characters can take 6 hits, “weak” characters can take 4, “average” characters can take 5. This can also be altered to make a fight more tense or death more likely: reduce this number by 1 or 2 or 3 and you suddenly have a game where monsters are real and present dangers.
Ah, but not just monsters. Like everything else, this can be applied to other challenges, as well. While you wander over the desert, the desert makes “attacks” against your character’s defenses (9+ hits!), and if it does, your character takes a “hit.” Maybe in your bid to take the throne from the corrupt noble, he makes “attacks” against your characters in a propaganda campaign – if he “hits” the public often enough, your characters will lose. In this case, maybe it means being run out of town by an angry populace! This even improves on the Skill Challenge base by having an active opposition, who can win even if you don’t fail.
Healing in this system effectively works like giving your party an extra hit: it removes one hit. You can also treat dodging and negation as basically equivalent to healing, mechanically. If you can “deflect” one attack in each encounter, negating its damage entirely, it works like one extra use of your Leader’s healing ability. It’s actually possible to get away with removing healers entirely with this perspective: if you just give out two extra “hits” per encounter, you’ve duplicated what 4e’s Leader features do.
Water: Thou Shalt Have 5 Encounters Per Day
Another one that involved a little bit of research, we can see that 4e is built assuming that the characters will get in roughly 5-6 encounters between each full recharge. This can be found by digging into the healing surges available to a character: before taking modifiers into account, the system grants between 6 and 9 surges per character (on average, 8). The party in general can spend usually one healing surge each, plus two more (for the Leader), meaning a party of 5 loses, on average, 7 surges per encounter. That same party of 5 has 40 hp. A simple division comes up with slightly less than 6 encounters in which the party can spend all of their surges. Because surges rarely undo a hit in a 1-to-1 relationship, and because the level difference comes into play, this number can have quite a bit of variance, but it generally pings between 3-6, depending on how careful the party is and how stringent you are with allowing them to rest. This also lines up with the number of encounters required to gain a level: if you fight for 2 days straight, you should gain a level.
Once you have this metric, you can start messing with the flow of time and pacing of your games. If a party of 5 can endure 5 “encounters” between a recharge, you pace a story so that it naturally flows through these encounters, or set up a dungeon that consists of 5 encounters’ worth of enemies (for a party of 5, that’s 25 standard monsters, each standard monster consisting of 6 hits).
As with the other systems, you can remove this from the context of combat and place it in front of any challenge. To journey to the nearest city may require a wilderness trek that may suck up 5 encounters’ worth of healing surges from the party, or a party involved in a game of courtly intrigue may spend healing surges to prevent vicious rumors from spreading. It might get a little abstract and meta-game in some of these instances, but it’s just a few levels removed from the already-abstract healing surge itself.
In fact, though, with this metric you can also jettison healing surges entirely. If a character can have 5 encounters per day, and can take 5 hits per encounter, you can just take the base HP (for instance, 4), multiply it by the hits (5), and then multiply that by the number of encounters (5) to get the total number of HP necessary for the whole day. If you combine this with rules for adjusting the rate of healing (for instance, making short rests overnight and extended rests a weekly experience), you can weave rests into the over-arcing narrative as well!
How Would You Use “4elemental”?
So, this series of four little rules gives us a way to look at 4e as a simple game of “get 9 or better 6 times before your enemies do it 5 times for each of you.” It’s the same essential math, just stripped of fiddly bits, math, and D&D-ish trappings (like hit points). It’s the “chassis” of fourth edition, a lite version, the basic die rolls that the game runs on. It doesn’t include the powers that perhaps eat up the most wordcount in published 4e material…but then, the powers are just variation on this basic math chassis, bigger spike effects that represent or negate more hits.
How would you use this information? Does the simplicity appeal to you or turn you off? Is the adaptability a gain, or something pointless? Let me know down in the comments!
Ah, the "wonders" of dice math. Throughout the history of the D&D game, we’ve seen a lot of variation in the odds of your character actually accomplishing the thing they try, and significant variation in how long it takes them to accomplish it. Your 1st level thief might hide in shadows 10% of the time – only one in every ten times! And your 1st level magic-user might cast Sleep and wipe out an entire room full of goblins….and if that room full of goblins is the elite guard for the MacGuffin, you just Won D&D.
Those kinds of odds are bound to make someone a little disgruntled.
One of 4e D&D’s most significant accomplishments is in developing and applying a consistent standard across every level and in every encounter and with every turn for how a player character should perform in combat. This consistency ultimately involves tracking a lot of disparate game elements, but it comes down to four principles that 4e D&D adheres to quite strongly: the four elements at the core of 4e D&D.
Tea with Aristotle?
Earth: Thou Shalt Succeed On A 9
Mr. David Flor breaks down the details here.
The short version is this: the math shakes out so that characters hit on an 8+ at early levels, and by late levels, this turns into a 12+. On average, if you roll a 9, you’re hitting. The variation likely accounts for the various bonuses and penalties that become more common as you gain higher levels.
So, if the rule is: “Roll a 9 and hit,” you can adopt that regardless of your game. All the bonuses, all the Expertise feats, all the buffs and debuffs, all fold into this one simple rule. The rule is psychologically pretty robust: you succeed slightly more often than you fail, so you are encouraged to try, but the difference is not so great as to give you an auto-success: you still have a significant chance of failure. Regardless of your game, if you adopt this rule you can pretty much eradicate fiddly math bits, and just look at the number you rolled on your d20: if it’s 9 or above, you hit.
In exchange for fiddly +1’s and -2’s you can adopt other mechanics to represent situational bonuses to attack and defense. Something like 5e’s Advantage/Disadvantage mechanic helps fill that role, but you might also consider non-stacking bonuses: a character that is “accurate” might get a constant +2 or +4, a creature with high defenses (either via evasion or via thick armor) might apply a constant -2 or -4. Essentially, this could be just your ability score modifier (a la 3e and 4e), and nothing else. One modifier to keep track of, one penalty or bonus to apply, instead of a cascading wash of dozens, makes the whole thing a lot more about what modifiers you WANT to include, rather than about trying to add up all the ones the game WANTS you to include.
You can also adopt this outside of attacks. Skill DC’s and ability checks and pre 4e saving throws and proficiency checks might be rolled into this as well: roll 9 and you succeed in your check. You could add some gradations, but it would essentially be something you could control for your own games. Want a character good at Activity X (whatever Activity X might be)? Give them a +4 bonus, or Advantage on the roll. Any roll involving a d20 could work with this.
Air: Thou Shalt Win After 6 Hits
The lovely and talented “Haze” sets this one up.
The abstract here is this: strikers kill a typical monster in 4 hits. Everyone else kills a typical monster in 8 hits. On average, your party is killing monsters at the rate of 6 hits per monster, per character. This assumes you’re dealing at least your level +3 damage with each hit (easier with bigger dice).
This combines with the rule above to make any combat with any creature at any level something you can run without a reference to the precise stats or CON modifiers or whatever. If you’ve got a 5-person party, you’re going to need a total of 30 d20 rolls that are 9+ to win the combat. Period. Meaning, about 43 die rolls. This might be 30 minions, this might be 5 “normal” monsters, this might be one “solo” monster, but it’s 6 hits, and then you win.
You can also eliminate much of 4e’s infamous drag by changing the assumptions. Make everyone a striker, and now the typical monster goes down in 4 hits. Make strikers do DOUBLE THAT, if you’d like, and you got a monster that goes down in an average of 3 hits (2 for strikers, 4 for everyone else). Suddenly that 43-roll combat is more like a 22-roll combat, cutting the time it eats up significantly. You could even eliminate the need for strikers entirely in this way: just make EVERYONE a striker. Suddenly, there’s not just one character that does the damage: everyone does.
Believe it or not, this works outside the context of combat, too. Because we’ve removed damage dice from the equation entirely, we’re really just tracking “successes,” skill-challenge style. A chase scene or an epic overland journey or a staring contest with a beholder…and it can be as long as a typical 4e combat, or longer, or shorter, or anywhere in between simply by adjusting the number of assumed “successes.” This could even let you play with ideas like gaining “victory points” toward your goal by making the equivalent of damage rolls. Though this might draw the parallels to combat a bit too closely for some, its ability to be included as an option is clear.
Fire: Thou Shalt Die After 5 Hits
This one involved a little bit more independent research, but take your favorite character generator, whip up a Fighter of a given level, and compare that to the damage done by a monster of the same level. A quick division will find out how many hits that Fighter can take. Now take a Wizard and do the same. You’re likely going to hit a number somewhere between 3 and 6. On average, we’ll say 5.
So now not only do you have a measure of how long and how many hits it’ll take for you to win, but you also have a measure of how long your character can survive against the assault. You don’t have to worry about tracking individual monster damage totals or adding five different attributes in. In fact, you don’t even have to worry about PC HP: “tough” characters can take 6 hits, “weak” characters can take 4, “average” characters can take 5. This can also be altered to make a fight more tense or death more likely: reduce this number by 1 or 2 or 3 and you suddenly have a game where monsters are real and present dangers.
Ah, but not just monsters. Like everything else, this can be applied to other challenges, as well. While you wander over the desert, the desert makes “attacks” against your character’s defenses (9+ hits!), and if it does, your character takes a “hit.” Maybe in your bid to take the throne from the corrupt noble, he makes “attacks” against your characters in a propaganda campaign – if he “hits” the public often enough, your characters will lose. In this case, maybe it means being run out of town by an angry populace! This even improves on the Skill Challenge base by having an active opposition, who can win even if you don’t fail.
Healing in this system effectively works like giving your party an extra hit: it removes one hit. You can also treat dodging and negation as basically equivalent to healing, mechanically. If you can “deflect” one attack in each encounter, negating its damage entirely, it works like one extra use of your Leader’s healing ability. It’s actually possible to get away with removing healers entirely with this perspective: if you just give out two extra “hits” per encounter, you’ve duplicated what 4e’s Leader features do.
Water: Thou Shalt Have 5 Encounters Per Day
Another one that involved a little bit of research, we can see that 4e is built assuming that the characters will get in roughly 5-6 encounters between each full recharge. This can be found by digging into the healing surges available to a character: before taking modifiers into account, the system grants between 6 and 9 surges per character (on average, 8). The party in general can spend usually one healing surge each, plus two more (for the Leader), meaning a party of 5 loses, on average, 7 surges per encounter. That same party of 5 has 40 hp. A simple division comes up with slightly less than 6 encounters in which the party can spend all of their surges. Because surges rarely undo a hit in a 1-to-1 relationship, and because the level difference comes into play, this number can have quite a bit of variance, but it generally pings between 3-6, depending on how careful the party is and how stringent you are with allowing them to rest. This also lines up with the number of encounters required to gain a level: if you fight for 2 days straight, you should gain a level.
Once you have this metric, you can start messing with the flow of time and pacing of your games. If a party of 5 can endure 5 “encounters” between a recharge, you pace a story so that it naturally flows through these encounters, or set up a dungeon that consists of 5 encounters’ worth of enemies (for a party of 5, that’s 25 standard monsters, each standard monster consisting of 6 hits).
As with the other systems, you can remove this from the context of combat and place it in front of any challenge. To journey to the nearest city may require a wilderness trek that may suck up 5 encounters’ worth of healing surges from the party, or a party involved in a game of courtly intrigue may spend healing surges to prevent vicious rumors from spreading. It might get a little abstract and meta-game in some of these instances, but it’s just a few levels removed from the already-abstract healing surge itself.
In fact, though, with this metric you can also jettison healing surges entirely. If a character can have 5 encounters per day, and can take 5 hits per encounter, you can just take the base HP (for instance, 4), multiply it by the hits (5), and then multiply that by the number of encounters (5) to get the total number of HP necessary for the whole day. If you combine this with rules for adjusting the rate of healing (for instance, making short rests overnight and extended rests a weekly experience), you can weave rests into the over-arcing narrative as well!
How Would You Use “4elemental”?
So, this series of four little rules gives us a way to look at 4e as a simple game of “get 9 or better 6 times before your enemies do it 5 times for each of you.” It’s the same essential math, just stripped of fiddly bits, math, and D&D-ish trappings (like hit points). It’s the “chassis” of fourth edition, a lite version, the basic die rolls that the game runs on. It doesn’t include the powers that perhaps eat up the most wordcount in published 4e material…but then, the powers are just variation on this basic math chassis, bigger spike effects that represent or negate more hits.
How would you use this information? Does the simplicity appeal to you or turn you off? Is the adaptability a gain, or something pointless? Let me know down in the comments!
