D&D 4E 4E Retroclone

[Kariotis]

It's always said that 4e had good maths, but has someone ever tried to reverse engineer it? In the end they must've been using some kind of algorithm to come up with monster defenses, hit points and the damage powers do at a given level. Looking at that math in concrete formulas would be extremely interesting.

 

[Composer99]

I can't speak to PC-side math, but IIRC 4e monster math, as of MM3, can be just about reduced to a business card. Literally: Monster Manual 3 on a business card.

 

[darkbard]

Here's a good thread on the topic: Benchmarks

 

[Undrave]

-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..

Of the latter day classes I think the Warden was INCREDIBLY good and pretty darn cool. It was a living black hole on the battlefield, nothing could escape it. And the Swordmage was fairly popular. I dunno if the expensions in the various power books were on the same level, mind you.

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?

I always thought it would be interesting to have a game with a Stamina system, where stamina could be spent on all sorts of things, such as powerful attacks (wether they be mundane OR magical, I'm personally a big fan of caster types expending their own body's energy as they use magic) or expended to buff your defenses. In such a system, I'd see HP as being pretty low, because you could spend your stamina turning hits into misses.

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.

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.

I've been thinking about it myself, and rather than recrete 4e as it was I would really like to just zero-in on the pure elements of 4e that I really enjoyed, and see about streamlining them mechanically while keeping the rough feel of it. I don't, for exemple, really need my characters to have a boatload of different powers. Just enough for customization, with less levels where you pick stuff, maybe handing out some passive buffs instead to pad out the progression. I'd probably cut class-based utility powers and just have everybody pick Skill Powers instead so there's a smaller pool of those. They also wouldn't be level-gated so it would just be up to preference what you want to pick when.

I know I'd lean more into the identity of each power sources, each having it own unique 'Thing', and try to develop a proper Controller basic power to give the role more bite.

 

[GreyLord]

Hi all,

I am trying to convert the 4e system into a dungeon crawler board game engine. I'd like to translate the feel of 4e to a board game as much as possible, knowing that it is not an easy matter.
This requires to simplify all non-combat stuff and make combat faster.
My main concern about combat is to reduce the length of encounters and increase the amount of combats a player can endure before dying or resting. Reducing monster hit points seems to be the solution, but I am quite unsure the way it could affect the balance of the game. Does anybody know if somebody has made an attempt before me?

Thanks in advance.

Look at the D&D adventure Board Game system (Wrath of Ashardalon, etc...especially Dungeon of the Mad Mage as it goes up to level 4) for inspiration on how it could be done.

 

[eyeheartawk]

Look at the D&D adventure Board Game system (Wrath of Ashardalon, etc...especially Dungeon of the Mad Mage as it goes up to level 4) for inspiration on how it could be done.

Didn't they sort of "un-4e" the later ones? Like, when they got rid of the 4e trade dress and tied them into 5e APs? I remember playing the Tomb of Annihilation one and it was notably different in rules and terminology then the earlier ones I had played like Wrath of Ashardolon and the Drizzt one.

 

[GreyLord]

Didn't they sort of "un-4e" the later ones? Like, when they got rid of the 4e trade dress and tied them into 5e APs? I remember playing the Tomb of Annihilation one and it was notably different in rules and terminology then the earlier ones I had played like Wrath of Ashardolon and the Drizzt one.

Tomb of Annihilation (and Ghosts of Saltmarsh) were ones I didn't get, so I don't know on those. Dungeon of the Mad Mage seems basically like the older ones though and goes up to level 4. You have your character, you select your powers, and you go.

 

[Undrave]

So a random thought came to me... one of the biggest problem of 4e is the stacking of effects, positive and negatives. I think everything should be classified as either a buff, a debuff or a condition and a character/monster could only ever have 1 of each ('Marked' would go into the debuff category instead of condition). Conditions would be arranged in a sort of hierarchy (with maybe positive conditions being a thing?) and so the worst one would always be the one applied. You could keep conditions et al. on cards to make it easier to keep track.

And, I think all of them should just be 'save end', including the positive ones! I'd probably modify the save number of positive ones so they're skewed to last longer (If I didn't want to simplify things I would make it so Leader can make buffs more difficult to lose and Controllers inflict penalty to shake off their conditions). No counting of turns.