Yikes I'm glad I copied the text of this one to notepad. It failed to post the first time.
WARNING. There is a lot of math in this post. I apologize for that, but this is a complicated subject that can't be analyzed easily. That's pretty much the point of my entire post. That it isn't as simple as some people are making it sound.
Understood.
You are attempting to recreate the imbalance that 4e worked so hard to fix? Well, then it's no problem at all. Just change things and don't worry about the consequences. But it seems rather strange to take the carefully balanced 4e core and purposefully remove the balance. At that point, it really is easier to run 3.5e with some house rules to make it more like 4e than it is to houserule 4e to be more like 3.5e.
I come from the school of thought that DnD doesn't require that balance to be fun, and is in fact more fun if everyone contributes at different times, rather than always being equal. Yes it's easier to stick with 3.x. Which is precisely why I'm starting a pathfinder game tonight. However, I was not the OP of this thread, to me this is more of a though experiment to identify any remaining 4E elements that might improve my 3.x games. The OP appears to actually want to run 4E with such changes as suggested so far.
It may have been play group dependent, but it was play group dependent in the same way that Fighters using weapons instead of their bare fists was play group dependent.
Not to the same scale, but I know what you're getting at. Bear in mind that I never expanded beyond the core 3 books, so a certain amount of 3.x's emphasis on magic items was ruled out that way.
But if you were already making changes to 3.5e to support this style and you didn't care about the imbalance caused then. I don't see why the solution needs to be more complicated than turning all at-wills into encounter powers and doubling their damage. Anyone with high strength or dex will hit with their attacks. No one else will except for their one encounter power per battle. Magic will become even more special because it won't be able to be used more than once per combat. Everyone will be ordinary until the higher levels.
And when those few encounter powers kick in they should be the kind of effects that turn the tide of a battle. Or so the theory goes...
Once again, this reads: "I want the game to be exactly like 3.5e". If that's the case, I'm still failing to see why 4e is the better option.
For me, yes. As above, I'm in this thread to see if we can identify;
a) a way of me actually enjoying 4E
b) any points about 4E that are worth porting back to 3.x, that I haven't already considered.
Fair enough. If you find an entire group like that who honestly doesn't like being more powerful better, then go with it. However, be careful not to project your likes and dislikes on your group. I've seen more than once when someone can just assume their group likes their way of playing more than any other simply because they've never asked them, they've never exposed them to other types of styles, or they just went with the group preference even though they were against it.
A worthy warning, and I'll try to keep that in mind.
And now you've managed to remove one of the core tenants of 4e. It shows a lack of understanding of the problems 4e was trying to correct. Now, if none of those were problems for your group, fair enough. However, that's just one more part of 4e you need to reverse to get back to 3.5. Implying that it's still easier to start with 3.5e and work forward.
Given my lack of game time in 3.x, a lack of understanding of the problems is to be expected. I haven't worn out 3.x the way other groups have. I'm still going through that '3E Rules!' phase, trying to catch up with the rest of the RPG crowd. Until I've experienced the problems that are so often lamented on these boards I'll be unable to appreciate the benefits of 4E.
In case it needs explanation, the core of 4e is created around the idea that all the players are working together in the same game, toward the same goal in the same way. In 4e, this is lowering hitpoints. Any round you are not lowering the enemies hitpoints is a round you aren't contributing meaningfully to defeating the enemies. So, in order to do interesting things, you need to be able to do damage AND something else cool. Otherwise you're back to "I make a basic attack. I hit, I do 7, go."
I understand that this is the intent. I don't happen to like it... HP were already abstract, and 4E has taken that abstraction further than I'm comfortable with.
The ultimate fun must be when you never get to use powers ever. Then they are so rare as to be the most interesting.
I know what you're driving at, and you're not far off. Holding the trump card that hardly ever comes up is something I find fun. Having it never come up, not so fun. I recognize that such a point is tricky to achieve. Compare the following:
Building a house out of lego, and building a house out of cards.
Which is more accessible? The lego.
Which is more impressive and exciting? The cards.
Keep in mind, if you are attempting to make the players more mundane, you need to remove the assumption that all commoners in 4e die in one hit without even having an AC. It was based on the idea that the PCs were heroes. In order to rebalance this, I'd suggest either giving all commoners the stats of a 1st level monster or reducing all PCs to one hitpoint so they can feel like a normal person.
I have no problem with commoners having more than 1 HP. Minions too for that matter.
Fair enough. You didn't change your calculations every round in 3.5e? Oh, right, you didn't make it over 6th level. That explains it. Not enough spells to change it all the time.
Correct on all counts.
However, I can tell you this was much worse at even medium levels in 3.5e. The average combat for my fighter tended to go like this:[snip]
Yes, I'd be only too happy to have some of that removed from 3.x. But that doesn't make me like 4E's solution.
This is a dangerous assumption. I've never seen anyone take Righteous Brand without having an 18 strength. So, +4. But, let's move on.
I was basing this on my own 4E cleric... Or we could use lance of faith with is a flat +2, not based on the clerics stats at all.
That's correct. In a group of 6 people, it gives an extra hit every 3 rounds or so. Assuming the average hit does 10 damage, your action just did 30 damage in a 9 round combat.
-10 for the fact the cleric wouldn't be hitting anyone while he casts bless (which below you also worked as an average of 10). Still at +20. The cleric has sacrificed 10 damage to generate 30, for a result of 20.
4e is balanced around an action economy.
Which is precisely what makes it so bland to play. Everything is always the same, or so similar as to make no difference.
One action gets you X benefit. That's why there's all the repeating of actions. If you want the benefit again, you need to spend more actions.
Whereas it used to be that you had to substitute an attack to do a different type of action (still focusing on buffs like bless here, we'll handle fireball some other time!!)
Compare that to a Righteous Brand that adds +4 to hit. It adds 20% more damage to one attack(essentially), meaning that it does its own damage(let's say 10) and 2 more damage on someone else's attack for a total of 12 damage for one standard action.
So, sticking with our 9 round combat as for bless, you're expecting 18 HP damage? Where as I was expecting 20 from bless? Did I follow your maths right here?
Not only that, but Bless is swingy. If nobody misses by 1 it has no effect. If Righteous Brand hits, but its bonus is useless, you still did 10 damage with the hit.
Yes, Bless is swingy, but you only need to set it off once. Because you do not need to roll to hit (every round) it will be actively providing that chance of a bonus to your allies every round. The bonus from RB & LoF are equally swingy, if not more so, because they require you to
a) select the right opponent
b) select the right companion
c) hit
d) have your companion miss by X (2 or str mod)
The other thing to consider is that Bless automatically succeeds. Which is a no no in 4e philosophy. You don't have to make an attack roll to give the bonus unless it's a daily.
It's a utility in 4e philosophy. i.e. a bonus you grant by giving up your attack. Not a daily.
Whereas Righteous Brand essentially reads: "You have a 60% chance to activate this power" simply by having an attack roll. Because of this, you need to factor that chance into the resulting damage. Which means it normally does 6 damage(60% of 10 damage), with the possibility of 8. Compare that to the 30 damage Bless did and you see how much more powerful it is.
This looks wrong again.
60% is the cleric's chance of hitting, and 10 is the average damage we were assuming from the cleric hitting.
Which translates to an average of 6 damage from the cleric each round.
Assuming from earlier that the bonus to hit works out to be 2 damage when your ally hits, it's now 60% x 2hp, or 1.33 damage.
For a total of 7.3 damage 'from the cleric'. Per ROUND.
You're comparing a RB cleric's single round vs the bless cleric's effect across 9 rounds. 1.3 is the figure to compare with the 20, except that it's 1.3 * 9, or 11.7 damage across 9 rounds. Slightly better than your 8, and 30.
Or I've completely flipped out and not understood your figures at all.
So, you are basically saying, assuming an average 10 round combat, that we Bless should be about 14 times more powerful than RB due to the number of actions it takes. That's assuming they both had an initial hit in order to do damage. If you mean that RB still gets a 60% chance to do 10 damage PLUS giving someone else a hit once every 10 rounds while Bless only gives the hit chance, then I'll use RB every round rather than Bless, which would suck.
HUH? You were just arguing that bless would be too powerful, now you're saying you'd choose RB in favour because it's more effective.
It's nearly impossible to balance these two effects. Bless has too much of a swing effect. On a good round where all 6 party members get a hit because of the Bless bonus, it does 60 points of damage in one round. Which is more than some of the highest level dailies. In a bad round it does nothing.
On many rounds with RB you achieve nothing because
a) the target is dead
b) your ally cannot act
c) your ally cannot attack the specified target
d) your ally did not roll within the margin of Str Mod -1 (the difference between str mod and the bonus from bless)
e) you missed and therefore the benefit is dropped
So every round you get to think 'dammit, my RB didn't achieve anything again'. With bless you have the satisfaction of knowing that whenever that margin of 1 AC occurs in the combat, bless will have achieved something.
You do have a point though - bless can achieve much more in that the party might all miss by one (ie hit because of bless), every round, where RB cannot have the same effect. What I'm saying is bless is more swingy in its potential damage, but no less swingy in it's potential to be a complete waste of time on any given round. We need to examine that top end of swingy further, but that's a big part of where the +1 to hit balances against the +StrMod to hit. The number of 5% chances you're talking about is statistically small.
You said 6 hits in one round, that's a chance of 0.000000015625.
The thing with RB is that you know they can use it every round. So, it's going to hit 60% of all rounds for the whole combat(if that's all they use). If it has no effect, they have another chance next round. No big deal.
The thing with bless is that once you've activated it you can go and find something more useful to do than trying to hit the same specific target as the ally you're trying to assist. Particularly when the benefit of +
anything to hit is usually targeted by players towards the hardest to hit creature (boss creature for example). Making that 60% of it activating far lower.
That's one of the reasons that nearly everything in 4e requires an attack roll and why there is at-wills. It is easy to measure the average damage of a fighter against a wizard if you know their approximate chance to hit and average damage of both using at-wills. If you know their average damage, you can also figure out the hitpoints the enemy needs in order to survive the number of rounds you want them to. And you can predict this no matter what the makeup of a party is.
That I cannot argue with.
On the other hand, if one class is doing attacks that always work(like 3e magic missile), or something that has extremely swingy effect, then the calculation goes out the window. One combat might end in 2 rounds due to the party being entirely wizards and able to auto hit with their magic missiles every round. While another combat might take 20 rounds because the party is entirely clerics with spells that don't actually do damage, they only enhance each other. That was one of the problems from 3e that was fixed in 4e.
And that final point is one of those things we disagree on.
Yeah, it's far easier to figure everything out for the game designers the 4E way. Easier for the DMs too.
But variation in the length of combat due to the make up of the party? You call that a problem. I do not. I call it variety. Interest. FUN. Any number of other synonyms.
I find 4E to be dull, unexciting and tedious. Grind is the term often bandied about. It comes from the idea that combats should last for a fixed number of rounds, regardless of what the players do. It makes no difference how much effort they put into their tactics because the combat will still turn into a slug fest while they grind down the HPs of the bad guys.
Variability wasn't problem that was fixed. It was a design philosophy that was replaced with another design philosophy. 'Balance' at the cost of variety. Predictability at the cost of the excitement you get from the unexpected. Game mechanics before story.
