Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5434493" data-attributes="member: 82106">Well, Essentials characters aren't super tweakable. Basically though if you don't need any of the 'fluff' you might be best off to buy a Rules Compendium, which contains all the core combat rules, skills, and some basic encounter building rules. From there you could just sign up for DDI and you have the online Compendium, which has ALL the crunchy stuff in it. You also get Character Builder. Presumably Monster Builder is returning in an online form as well, hopefully soon. However monsters are pretty much whatever you want them to be and there are 1000's of them in the Compendium, which you can tweak as much as you want. The full up monster building guidelines are in DMG1 with added stuff in DMG2, but it is safe to say if you look at a bunch of stat blocks you will get the idea, assuming you even need to build much totally custom.One thing you will find with 4e. It isn't REALLY designed for PvP. So if you will be doing that you may find that combats are fairly swingy. PCs have a LOT less hit points than monsters (not so much at low levels, but high level solos can have 4-5x PC hitpoints). Thus at high levels you'll find a PC can often single-shot another PC, and this is even true at low levels for strikers. PCs have a lot of healing potential, so over the long term they are quite durable though. In a single fight that doesn't matter much. Powers are another area where single battles are a bit odd. PCs are designed with the idea in mind they will fight 5 fights in a day before an extended rest. In an arena style "go full at it" single fight you'll need quite a bit stronger opponents (again more so at high levels) as there's no reason every PC can't just drop daily powers one after another in a row. Now, if you fight out basically a 'delve' sort of format where PCs go up against 4 or 5 encounters one after another with monsters it will work quite well, as that's just normal play with the fluffy bits hacked out. Heck, some groups basically do that now. There could be other interesting options though. You could design stat blocks specifically tweaked for pure tactical play. Basically monsters with less hit points would make pretty good tactical wargame units to fight against each other. Adjust them all to have MM3 level damage output and shave off maybe 25% of their hit points and that would probably be a decently interesting game. You'll probably have to tweak a bit. There are some design decisions that were made in the combat rules that exist really purely in order to simplify things a bit and for purely gamist reasons. Like archery ignores your allies because otherwise it would kind of suck to be the archer of the group and constantly be trying to deal with avoiding firing through your own party at the enemy. In a pure skirmish game where both sides are controlled by a single player that kind of consideration isn't an issue and you could perhaps houserule things a bit to make it a bit less gamist, depending on your preferences.</blockquote>

Verification