Ltheb Silverfrond
Explorer
U_K!
1. Sounds good.
2. I have a concern here: Multiple Aura Effects: A character might decide to pick portfolios and focus on having his or her aura do 4 different things at once. Not terribly effective (I'd rather have 1 effect at a higher strength) but this could become tedious to track.
2b. Sounds good; My concern for point #2, above, applies here too.
3. Awesome. A Primal advantage without reworking the system. Might want to specify when the action point is 'replenished' or if they just are always treated as having one in an encounter.
3b. Also neat. Sort of a 'you can't fully escape Surtur's Aura of Flame' type thing.
4. A good idea; mechanics might be tricky - Could become too easy/too hard to die.
5. Makes sense.
6. Magic items should still continue to scale (and most have conveniently predictable progressions in the DMG) with level at normal rates, unless you want to rework all sorts of other progressions. 4E makes some nice strides towards having all your items matter; IE if a level 40 deity wanted to use the daily power of his level 5 magic items, its his loss, since he only has 3-~7 total magic item uses each day. A 40th level character could certainly carry boots of cat-fall, but really they are not going to be of much use compared to their +8 Vorpal Falchions.
7 & 8. Honestly, with the exceptions of working on epic mounts, I think avatars/aspects and minions should not really grant much combat advantage at all. Its the same kind of reason people in 3E didn't like leadership - too many characters to track that don't matter. Now, if there is an ally-summoning power, then it's OK to have it create meaningful combat effects. But a system wide capability to have each character have all sorts of cronies?
Now, how to approach minions/henchmen(henchdeities?)/mounts? Adventurers vault, from the preview article on WotC.com (Don't have the link sadly) Previewed several items that summoned minions (Figurines of Wonderous power and Bag of Tricks). Mechanically, they were an (At will?) Standard Action to summon an minion of appropriate level (From a set or randomized list depending on the item), but you had the option of, as a daily magic item use, to spend a healing surge and give the minion the equivalent temporary hit points. (So if your healing surge value was 100, your summoned squirrel has 101 hit points) This looks like a pretty sound way of doing things, and may likely be how WotC prints conjuration powers in the future.
1. Sounds good.
2. I have a concern here: Multiple Aura Effects: A character might decide to pick portfolios and focus on having his or her aura do 4 different things at once. Not terribly effective (I'd rather have 1 effect at a higher strength) but this could become tedious to track.
2b. Sounds good; My concern for point #2, above, applies here too.
3. Awesome. A Primal advantage without reworking the system. Might want to specify when the action point is 'replenished' or if they just are always treated as having one in an encounter.
3b. Also neat. Sort of a 'you can't fully escape Surtur's Aura of Flame' type thing.
4. A good idea; mechanics might be tricky - Could become too easy/too hard to die.
5. Makes sense.
6. Magic items should still continue to scale (and most have conveniently predictable progressions in the DMG) with level at normal rates, unless you want to rework all sorts of other progressions. 4E makes some nice strides towards having all your items matter; IE if a level 40 deity wanted to use the daily power of his level 5 magic items, its his loss, since he only has 3-~7 total magic item uses each day. A 40th level character could certainly carry boots of cat-fall, but really they are not going to be of much use compared to their +8 Vorpal Falchions.
7 & 8. Honestly, with the exceptions of working on epic mounts, I think avatars/aspects and minions should not really grant much combat advantage at all. Its the same kind of reason people in 3E didn't like leadership - too many characters to track that don't matter. Now, if there is an ally-summoning power, then it's OK to have it create meaningful combat effects. But a system wide capability to have each character have all sorts of cronies?
Now, how to approach minions/henchmen(henchdeities?)/mounts? Adventurers vault, from the preview article on WotC.com (Don't have the link sadly) Previewed several items that summoned minions (Figurines of Wonderous power and Bag of Tricks). Mechanically, they were an (At will?) Standard Action to summon an minion of appropriate level (From a set or randomized list depending on the item), but you had the option of, as a daily magic item use, to spend a healing surge and give the minion the equivalent temporary hit points. (So if your healing surge value was 100, your summoned squirrel has 101 hit points) This looks like a pretty sound way of doing things, and may likely be how WotC prints conjuration powers in the future.
