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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Zustiur" data-source="post: 4699008" data-attributes="member: 1544">Yikes I'm glad I copied the text of this one to notepad. It failed to post the first time.Understood.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.  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.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...For me, yes. As above, I'm in this thread to see if we can identify;a) a way of me actually enjoying 4Eb) any points about 4E that are worth porting back to 3.x, that I haven't already considered.A worthy warning, and I'll try to keep that in mind.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.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.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. I have no problem with commoners having more than 1 HP. Minions too for that matter. Correct on all counts.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.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.-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.Which is precisely what makes it so bland to play. Everything is always the same, or so similar as to make no difference.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!!)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?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 toa) select the right opponentb) select the right companionc) hitd) have your companion miss by X (2 or str mod)It's a utility in 4e philosophy. i.e. a bonus you grant by giving up your attack. Not a daily.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.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.On many rounds with RB you achieve nothing becausea) the target is deadb) your ally cannot actc) your ally cannot attack the specified targetd) 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 droppedSo 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 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 I cannot argue with.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.</blockquote>

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