D&D 4E Character conversion problems for 4e (Short Essay)

[ryryguy]

Stepping away from the subject of specific character conversions for a second...

Hasn't it been stated that there is going to be a lot of attention in the DMG about how to customize the rules? Perhaps even specifically about making custom classes? Assuming there is a lot of discussion and explanation of the nuts and bolts of the system, that should help tremendously with using even the limited set of stuff in the initial PHB to accommodate many far-flung concepts.

 

[muffin_of_chaos]

Hasn't it been stated that there is going to be a lot of attention in the DMG about how to customize the rules? Perhaps even specifically about making custom classes? Assuming there is a lot of discussion and explanation of the nuts and bolts of the system, that should help tremendously with using even the limited set of stuff in the initial PHB to accommodate many far-flung concepts.

That'd be sweet but I can't see how it'd be profitable.

As for yer brawler, sounds to me like he acts as a defender, which sort of makes him one, but that it isn't really built into the class. I mean, Grapple was always fun, but it only worked on a small range of enemies, and only one at a time. You can still do it in 4E, and I'd say it's pretty much like defending, but I don't think you'd actually need a specific ability to reinforce the provisional Role.

 

[PrecociousApprentice]

I can't cite any specifice info, but the whole reason to create a new edition was to create a transparent system where the math all works. This is both an effort to create internal consistency at WotC, and an effort to create consistency in sources external to WotC. I think we will be clued in to design principles pretty well.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

And I'll simply give up on my 1st level power? Wouldn't it be better if I had a broad field to choose from? That would include attack powers, for those who prefer them, and utility non-combative stuff for players with characters of non-combative concept, fair enough to me.

This was done on purpose.

Compare the situations:

DM: The dragon runs towards you and swipes at the fighter, taking him to -8 with the hit.
Player 1: Oh no! We are in bad shape. We are all low on hitpoints from that last breath weapon, but I think the dragon is almost dead. We need to kill it NOW.

Player 2: I'm a bard who is a diplomat. I have an 8 strength and don't have a magic weapon because I don't fight normally. I could try to hit it, but I'd need a natural 20 to do so. I hide instead and hope it doesn't eat me.
DM: Well, the dragon uses his breath weapon again and kills you all. Roll up new characters.
Player 1: Come on, it was down to 10 hitpoints, all you had to do was hit it once.
Player 2: I'm sorry, I didn't want to play a combat character!

vs.

Player 2: Alright, I smite it with my daily since it gives me +3 to hit and I want to make sure this works. I do 45 damage to it.
DM: The dragon drops as his last breath escapes his throat.
Player 1: Woo hoo. We did it. It was really close, but we all worked together and survived. It was really fun, though.

And that's the point. D&D IS a combat game and combat is more fun the more tense it is for most people. In order to create tension, you need to walk a fine line between winning and losing. In order to make a system that enforces that tension it requires a good method of predicting the power of the PCs. So, because of that, 4e gives every character at least a baseline amount of combat ability.

So, yes, being a character without any combat abilities is not allowed in the system, since it only really has one effect: getting the entire party killed.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

That'd be sweet but I can't see how it'd be profitable.

Not every rule, not even every page in the books is judged by the measure of profitability.
R&D has the most say of the content. They don't get to decide whether they want to create D&D 5E, or if they want to bring out a Complete Warrior 2, but they are the ones writing the rules once these decisions have been made. If WotC was micro-managed such strong, they would barely be able to create any good products...

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Yeah, well the thing is, in our campaign, the monk is more defendery than he is anything else. He's high strength, and half-earth elemental. He has the most hit points, close to the best AC (maybe the rogue has him barely beat). He does dish out some damage, but as I mentioned, his most common tactic is to grapple.

Perhaps he is better described as a "brawler" than the Jackie Chan archetype. And undoubtedly, his role in our game is in part a function of the fact that there is no other PC that can tank at all (monk, rogue, sorceror, archivist).

We'll see. Maybe there will be some feats and other goodness in the full books that will help. I do think some kind of grapple/marking combo might suit this character well.

In a way, this Monk is result of a game that doesn't have a strong link to roles. From my experience, Monks are bad at tanking (and anything else, too, but I digress). But with a lot of work, you can make him work. At least, most of the time. Grappling is very powerful, but unfortunately, usually the advantage goes to the monsters which are larger, have a higher strength, and more hit points then the Monk can bring to bear.

I definitely think Monks fit the striker role better. They are unarmed, agile fighter. This isn't a good starting point for being a defender, but it's got for a Striker. So I suppose, he won't translate that well - either he is no longer a Monk, or he is no longer a Defender. Though you might be able to use an eventuall Monk class and multiclass it with Fighter to get some Defenderish abilities with your Striker. This won't replace a real defender, but I'd say that is also true for 3E.

 

[Graf]

Wish we could rank posts so I could vote OP five stars.

 

[ProfessorCirno]

So if you look at my original post, I did say that most character concepts would be convertible, and I stand by that vehemently. I also think that with a little flexibility of thought and some creativity, very nearly all character concepts should be workable in 4e right out of the gait. There will be a few holes at first (heavy enchantment, necromancy, or shapechange characters for example), but there are relatively few character concepts that are necessisarily mechanics based, and these mechanical holes are slated to be filled within a very short time. The swashbuckler is definitly playable as a rogue, and even better than anything that 3.x did. Backstab is just a metagame name, the mechanics are for extra damage whenever the character has combat adventage. That sounds like every swashbuckler fight I have ever seen. Nothing in the asserted list of bard necessities is absent from 4e, with the addition of effectiveness that 3.x never had. Creativity has always been necessary for character creation, and many of the 4e detractors are trying to claim that 4e stiffles creativity because they don't want to have to think outside the box (flavor text and metagame names that is).

This all comes down to the fact that some people are unable to come to terms with the new paradigm of combat role, and what that both means and doesn't mean for character creation, and they combine that with the inability to release themselves from other games' particular gamist/metagame constructs, and insist on importing them to a new game. Maybe this would all be easier if WotC had named the new game something else, and used slightly different terms for the new gamist/metagame concepts, but that does not change the fact that it would essentially be the same game. A rose by any other name and all. And I think that D&D is the most appropriate thing to call it anyway.

Apparently I was a bit too optimistic in my article. Translation of anything requires intelectual flexibility that is difficult for many. I had assumed that if people had the intelectual flexibility to think pretending to be someone else was fun that this intelectual flexibility would be enough to facilitate what is a relatively easy translation. For those who found my advice useless, I appologise for wasting your time. I am sure there are others who have found the thought excercise highly useful.

First of all, let's stay away from the ad hominem, yes? It doesn't help your argument to attempt and take the intellectual high ground simply because I disagree with what you're saying. What it does do is disrupt things and overall make it unpleasant to debate.

Secondly, I disagree. Again, closing your eyes and pretending the fighter is REALLY a barbarian doesn't make it a barbarian. That's not roleplaying. Roleplaying is is making a barbarian then playing it as a barbarian. Now, can you make a fighter and pretend he's a barbarian? Sure! I actually HAD a player do that. It was hilarious. He was a prim and proper civilized man who earnestly believed barbarians had it right, and tried to emulate them. He never once took a level in barbarian, because he wasn't one. He couldn't rage. But that character proves me point - he was never a barbarian. He THOUGHT he was one, but the other barbarians would gather around their tents and laugh at him behind his back.

Your entire argument is based on this belief that "ignoring in game mechanics = creativity." It's not. The game exists to supply those mechanics. The roleplaying exists to supplement those mechanics, not replace them. You can't say "It's not the game's fault it doesn't supply the mechanics," because that's quite literally the purpose of the game. As I said earlier, that doesn't inherintly mean the game is a bad one, or that it's horribly flawed - I don't play D&D if I want a Call of Cthulhu game, because D&D wasn't designed for that niche. But to argue that a game works just fine so long as you ignore its shortcomings is problematic. If you separate the game from the mechanics, I ask you, what's left of the game? And it's true that, if you ignore the shortcomings of something, it's absolutely perfect; but you could say that for *anything*.

Oh, and for the upteenth time, I'm not some horrible miserly old geezer who hates 4e and wants to see everyone turn away from it. I'm on the fence for it, mechanics wise. But this idea of "If you don't like it, you hate it and are trying to make others hate it" is getting very tiresome. One of the biggest detractors from the system is this idea where "you must agree with it on everything, or else!" Here's the thing; everything in the world needs criticism. That's how you know what to improve. 4e wouldn't exist if people didn't criticize 3.x. I truly fear for a world where it's a moral crime to try and improve things.

 

[katahn]

Secondly, I disagree. Again, closing your eyes and pretending the fighter is REALLY a barbarian doesn't make it a barbarian. That's not roleplaying. Roleplaying is is making a barbarian then playing it as a barbarian. Now, can you make a fighter and pretend he's a barbarian? Sure! I actually HAD a player do that. It was hilarious. He was a prim and proper civilized man who earnestly believed barbarians had it right, and tried to emulate them. He never once took a level in barbarian, because he wasn't one. He couldn't rage. But that character proves me point - he was never a barbarian. He THOUGHT he was one, but the other barbarians would gather around their tents and laugh at him behind his back.

"Barbarian" can be a class, or it can be a description of a culture like it was for millenia prior to D&D or other RPGs being invented.

Prior to 3e, in fact even prior to 2e, there was only "fighter" (well, ok, there was "elf", and "dwarf" too ). Fighter was used as a class to portray everything from a knight in shining armor to a frothing-at-the-mouth beserker. I respectfully submit that one does not need a class called "barbarian" to role-play a barbaric character in general or a barbaric fighter-type specifically.

The example in the quote above is a very clever role-play of a foppish fighter failing to emulate a specific cultural warrior. It has absolutely zero bearing on whether or not I can use the fighter class to portray a genuinely barbaric warrior unless I was going to be absolutely married to the idea that game mechanics are required for role-play to be accurate.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Secondly, I disagree. Again, closing your eyes and pretending the fighter is REALLY a barbarian doesn't make it a barbarian. That's not roleplaying. Roleplaying is is making a barbarian then playing it as a barbarian. Now, can you make a fighter and pretend he's a barbarian? Sure! I actually HAD a player do that. It was hilarious. He was a prim and proper civilized man who earnestly believed barbarians had it right, and tried to emulate them. He never once took a level in barbarian, because he wasn't one. He couldn't rage. But that character proves me point - he was never a barbarian. He THOUGHT he was one, but the other barbarians would gather around their tents and laugh at him behind his back.

What he and some others are saying is: What is a bard? Is it someone who sings and inspires people? Is is someone who has the class ability Inspire Courage? Is it someone who has the word Bard at the top of their character sheets?

If you weren't able to talk to plants and animals and transport via plants you certainly aren't any Bard I know. 1st Edition taught me what a Bard is.

If I take Warlord as a class and I am capable of singing and inspiring people and I want to call myself a Bard how does that not make me a Bard? Simply because the game mechanics name me something else? The game mechanics are simply rules to explain how things work.

In the case of barbarians, the word used to mean anyone who was "uncivilized". Which doesn't mean they all raged. It doesn't mean none of them can cast spells. I can be a wizard who is a member of a barbarian tribe and has lived all his life outside of "normal" civilization. I'd be a "barbarian". I just wouldn't be the class with the same name.

Your entire argument is based on this belief that "ignoring in game mechanics = creativity." It's not. The game exists to supply those mechanics. The roleplaying exists to supplement those mechanics, not replace them.

It's not ignoring game mechanics. It's ignoring the fluff that goes WITH the game mechanics.

The game mechanics of Barbarian say "This class fights well and can use their anger to make them stronger and tougher a couple of times per day. They are illiterate."

The fluff says "They live in tribes wearing the skins of animals and are good hunters. They aren't used to civilization."

Creativity is being able to make up new fluff that still fit the game mechanics. Say, you are a really stupid guy, prone to fits of rage. You grew up in a city with a wealthy family, but due to your learning disability you were never able to read or learn a normal profession. Eventually your parents paid to get you military training in the use of weapons figuring that it would be the only way you could make a living and maybe you could channel your anger.

Now, you are Barbarian in class but not Barbarian in fluff.

And that's what everyone is suggesting. That with the right amount of creativity, you could make a Warlord into a Bard. You might be constrained by the mechanics, but...if you are willing to change your concept just slightly, you can use them to make whatever you want.