Just out of curiosity, do you find 4E works well for doing RE Howard and Excalibur style fantasy?
How well does 4e do suspense and horror, would be a follow-up question...? Personally, I think that both of these are essential to a true "pulp" feel, and can use 1e - 3e (and Pathfinder) pretty well to add these flavors into a game, but wondered how well 4e did with creating a sense of dread
4e is a lot more versatile, genre-wise, than it is given credit for. For instance, the Feywild is rife with Dark and Fairytale fantasy themes that play right into 4e's machinery. Mechanically, the trick is knowing which knobs to turn. Those knobs typically being either making (1) Extended Rests more precious at the metagame level (eg, turn daily refresh into some other kind of refresh...like adventure or quest related). Alternatively, you can make it more difficult to come by at the level of the fiction. For the latter, you can treat it as the Dungeon World Recover move (you cannot rest and recover until you have
both comfort and safety). Attaining that is typically by succeeding at a difficult, (2) ablative Skill Challenge (charge Healing Surges for all failures). Another knob that expressly induces the horror element is the (3) Disease Track. Because divine magic options to remove horror-related ailments, curses, or wasting diseases (magical and otherwise) are not as proliferate in 4e (and expensive to use if you have them), unnerving the players by leveraging the Disease Track is a potent tool. Then there is the precise (4) Encounter Budget. If I want to make borderline lethal (and exactly that) combats non-stop for the players, it is trivially accomplished.
With those 4 things, you can put the PCs on the ropes and keep them there and unnerve them with debilitating effects.
Quick example. I've run a sort of combo Dark/Fairytale Fantasy at high heroic tier/low paragon tier in a single-player game (also more versatile in that you can certainly play single-player games, with or without companion characters). The premise of the game was based on the character's Background (Moonstruck Hunter) and Theme (Ghost of the Past). She was an elven ranger (Bow + 2-handed sword Fighter w/ Bear Companion Character, Nature/Perception Skills, Jack of All Trades, Nature Rituals) who was in the special forces for her people in Brokenstone Vale (Feywild). She chased a spectral stag through a portal on a full moonlit night and ended up in a strange, ancient world.
The default lore for this in the Feywild is that a werewolf lord forged a kingdom of lycranthropes in Brokenstone Veil and waged a decades-long war against the elves/eladrin there. The Court of Stars (the Feywild "government") conceded the territory the lycanthropes had conquered. Many/most of the elves/eladrin eventually left but a small, peripheral element still persists there. This concession enraged The Maiden of the Moon as lycanthropes are her sworn enemy. However, she couldn't attack the lycanthropes or their sovereign nation directly as it would have been in violation of The Court of Stars dictates. So she had to find a way around it. Hence this game.
- The spectral stag the PC chased was The Maiden of the Moon, the players patron Archfey in the Feywild.
- The portal sent the player back in time.
- The place she went to was the initial prime world where lycanthropy was conceived by the Primal Elder Spirt of Beasts. At that point in time, it had not left that world so it was a sort of quarantine zone.
- Her "Ghost of the Past" was herself. Her spirit had been sent there multiple times before, each one of those spirits an elf/eladrin who lost something precious to the lycanthropes of Brokenstone Vale, only to perish in the effort.
- The world was basically a harsh, lycanthrope apocalypse scenario where civilization had never been able to arise due to the pervasiveness of the were-disease. She set about uncovering the whys and wherefores of her being there and then attempted to stamp out lycanthropy forever. When she finally had the opportunity, it would have involved slaughtering several young children who were infected, against their will by their parents, with the disease. She ultimately couldn't kill them but her sparing them changed the dynamic in the present day.
Games like this are pretty easily accomplished I think. Further, brutal wilderness attrition is easily accomplished if you use 1-4 above and insert punitive wilderness hazards (which of course can't be bypassed via HP ablation) as a part of your encounter budget.
Here's a
link to a PbP that [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] GMed for me and some other posters, with 12th level PCs, that I think had a good romantic fantasy vibe. (I played a STR paladin.)
Lloyd Alexander's High Fantasy and Heroic Romance is a good primer for 4e I think. Classical themes of Romantic Fantasy and Greek Mythology are clearly embedded throughout 4e's default and are meant to be leveraged (transparently so with the mechanics of Paragon Path and Epic Destiny) in Paragon and Epic tiers.
That one-off we did was obviously laden with that. Rooting out of dark evils from a kingdom, dragon-slaying, the harshness of war and the inspirational recovery due to the shining beacon of heroism, the reconciliation of old allies lost, and probably a claim to the throne (by deed and possibly by blood). All that sort of stuff. That is 4e's bloodstream north of Heroic.
It's one thing if you dabble (pick up a feat, multiclass, etc.), because that's explicitly adding just a dash of that stuff. Like ordering an entree, and choosing to get a single egg roll as a side. You're not there for the egg roll, so it's okay that it's not the main part of the dish--though you will still enjoy eating it. It just seems to me that certain classes' "entrees" are so small that you run out before everyone else has finished eating, yet you're paying exactly the same "price" everyone else is.
