D&D 4E 4E Retroclone

[overgeeked]

Since this popped up in another, completely unrelated thread, I thought I'd split this off.

Here's my post on it.

There's a lot I really like about 4E so I think about this regularly. If I were to design a retroclone, I'd do it as minimalistically as possible. Create it as a framework that could rebuild 4E rather than outright rebuilding 4E. Instead of trying to recreate the 9,409 powers and somehow avoid the associated legal landmines, I'd create a framework where the players and DM can make their own powers. Break them into role categories (melee dps, ranged dps, tank, healer, AoE) and have rider lists players can pick from. Most at-will powers were some version of [1]W + role appropriate rider anyway. Higher levels simply gave you more damage and access to better and more riders. Same with encounter and daily powers. There's solid math behind it all. Really solid math. All you'd have to do is ignore the specific instances of it and look at the underlying math, then present a framework that uses that math. Look at the forest and not the trees, as it were.

Feats would be easy to do in a similar fashion. Think stunts from Fate. "Because I [describe some way that you are exceptional, have a cool bit of gear, or are otherwise awesome], I get +2 when I use [pick one stat] to [pick one action] when [describe a limiting circumstance]."

 

[overgeeked]

Thinking about it a little more and looking through some old notes, it would be almost trivial to recreate the AEDU system under the OGL. With short rests and long rests a standard 5E mechanic, simply have always available abilities (cantrips/at-wills), short rest abilities (encounter), and long rest abilities (dailies). 5E already works that way. It's just "hidden".

Looking at the PHB1 and the fighter, there are four at-wills. They're all [1]W + rider. The riders are: STR mod damage to second, adjacent target; damage on a miss; +2 to-hit; push the target 5ft.

Just rename those stunts (or something) and have them all always available when the fighter attacks. Maybe add in one or two other simple riders. +2 damage. Pull the target. Shift the target. These could literally be a list for the fighter to pick from with every attack. It solves the problem of the players who want simpler characters ("I just want to swing my sword") and the problem with players getting bored with their locked-in power selection.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

My first thought about 4Ed as a system after I had played with it a bit was that it would have made a GREAT classless (or nearly classless), toolkit-style system. I maintain that to this day,

Class-specific abilities like Shadow Walk, Marking, and the like would need to be evaluated for utility & overall power and broken up into menus and ranked into tiers. During ChaGen and advancement, players would choose abilities from the appropriate tier list.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

Since this popped up in another, completely unrelated thread, I thought I'd split this off.

Here's my post on it.

There's a lot I really like about 4E so I think about this regularly. If I were to design a retroclone, I'd do it as minimalistically as possible. Create it as a framework that could rebuild 4E rather than outright rebuilding 4E. Instead of trying to recreate the 9,409 powers and somehow avoid the associated legal landmines, I'd create a framework where the players and DM can make their own powers. Break them into role categories (melee dps, ranged dps, tank, healer, AoE) and have rider lists players can pick from. Most at-will powers were some version of [1]W + role appropriate rider anyway. Higher levels simply gave you more damage and access to better and more riders. Same with encounter and daily powers. There's solid math behind it all. Really solid math. All you'd have to do is ignore the specific instances of it and look at the underlying math, then present a framework that uses that math. Look at the forest and not the trees, as it were.

Feats would be easy to do in a similar fashion. Think stunts from Fate. "Because I [describe some way that you are exceptional, have a cool bit of gear, or are otherwise awesome], I get +2 when I use [pick one stat] to [pick one action] when [describe a limiting circumstance]."

Write this up! I like it and would love to see it.

 

[James Gasik]

Having been a huge fan of 4e, I will mention what I found to be it's limitations.

-Decision paralysis. There was a lot of options by the end at each level, and finding the good ones from a sea of mediocre choices took a great deal of time. The loss of the character builder and online options beyond the books that helped fix weaker classes killed the game rather definitively.

-Related to the last bullet, some options were just bad for no reason. This could extend to entire classes. Where older classes (especially Wizards) kept getting great support, you couldn't say the same for Wardens, Seekers, Assassins, Sorcerers, Swordmages, etc..

-Equally related is how wildly unbalanced Feats were against one another.

-Forcing you to decide between utility and non-combat choices and combat benefits. Many really cool Feats and Utility Powers were ignored because they didn't help characters survive combat, which the bulk of the game revolved around.

-Related to the last point, rules for exploration and social interaction were woefully underdeveloped. This has always been a problem with D&D, but it really seemed to stand out in this edition.

-Complicated Stealth rules, and a sea of terribly worded Immediate Reaction abilities that lead to all manner of arguments. Despite having Immediate Interrupt as an action type, many designers got cute and made powers that reacted to triggers that could invalidate actions (one that we had many arguments about was a Feat that allowed a Drow to use Darkness as a Reaction to being targeted, then another Feat that stapled a Reaction to move to using Darkness. In theory this could invalidate an attack, but you can guess how many DM's felt about that!)

-Epic Tier play was not well thought out or playtested, and it caused my Scales of War game to fall apart. When we first hit Epic, we were getting mangled on a regular basis. 2 levels later, and we had a session where we were down two players and were having difficulty fighting a "puzzle boss".

So instead we hunkered down and just bludgeoned it to death, despite not being able to weaken it's special attacks and defenses. The DM even later admitted he'd tweaked the monster to make it stronger. Didn't matter. In the previous session, my Ranger won initiative against a powerful Solo, and after his attack routine was done, she was left prone, slowed, dazed (save ends), stunned (save ends), and had her incorporeal status removed (save ends) thanks to my Ghost-Grinding Powder. I didn't get a second turn.

But that's all you would really need to focus on. The math needs a little tweaking, but increasing attacks and defenses by 1 per tier should be sufficient.

 

[cavetroll]

I would be interested in you thoughts and examples

Looking at the PHB1 and the fighter, there are four at-wills. They're all [1]W + rider. The riders are: STR mod damage to second, adjacent target; damage on a miss; +2 to-hit; push the target 5ft.

idk what riders are though, apart from people who sit on steeds I'll have to read some basics on 4e.

 

[James Gasik]

Riders are shorthand for additional effects caused by an attack. They come in two varieties; innate, as in, everyone who uses the power gets to do something like impose combat disadvantage (+2 to hit) or cause an enemy to be slowed until the end of their next turn.

The second category are subclass-specific, so a power might say "Cosmic Sorcerer: add your Strength bonus to the damage of this power".

 

[Jacob Lewis]

There are many hurdles getting in the way of projects like this. One of the most common is the compulsion to retain a high level of backwards compatibility in order to keep previous materials relevant and useful. I get that it's easier to reuse existing content so you're not having to redesign a ton of material that already exists. But it also limits the need for new innovation and mechanics which could actually make the system work better.

For example, healing surges could be more useful as a player resource if it did more than just recharge hit points. As written, players only needed to decide how many to burn before the next rest based on their character's health (i.e. remaining hit points). In my experience, it was rare for any of my players to actually run out of healing surges before their next long rest. They would typically often run out of daily powers first, which forced them to look for that long rest opportunity instead, and consequently recharge their surges in the process.

Now imagine if they had the option to spend some of those surges to recharge one of their powers. Or if surges were required to use your strongest abilities. Players will need to make more tactical decisions regarding how they manage their resource as a group. Do they save their last surges to stay in the fight? Or expend them on a powerful attack which could be the difference between victory and defeat?

This, in my mind, accomplishes several things but it also requires more work. "Daily" powers would no longer require an artificial timer that doesn't always make any sense. It gives characters better agency to make decisions based on both strategies and narrative. And it just makes the game more efficient.

Of course, this is one of the many radical ideas I have that would require a lot of tweaking and playtesting. But this is just one example to help me make a point. At what point does it go from a couple of tweaks to a few house rules to a full revision to another retroclone to something completely different? And when does it become more practical to keep using the game as it is? The answer to that last question, by the way, is usually when the work becomes greater than the reward.

I'll be watching this thread to see how things go. It will be hard for me to comment on some ideas because I have very specific ideas for my own project. But it's always good to see 4e getting some attention.

 

[eyeheartawk]

I guess the first decision will be if this will be a retroclone or not? I would be hesitant to make a number of mechanical changes if the idea is to revive the 4e ecosystem. The "4e but better" things can probably wait until that's established. I don't even really think a "fixed 4e" would be viable without establishing a baseline clone that brings everything into line under the OGL and you start seeing interest in the space.

Another thing that was brought up in the thread was the character builder. Here there is a conundrum. By not making mechanical changes you make character creation a bit onerous and perhaps overwhelming without also having some sort of character builder utility available.

 

[TwoSix]

Every attempt to make a minimalistic 4e clone I've seen over the past 9-10 years has generally bogged down because a) the core system has a lot of crunch and b) the urge to tweak it to fix those obvious issues means the project becomes an evolution, not a clone.