Neonchameleon
Legend
There are various people working on a “continuation 4e” (including myself) - but in order to design anything, a plan for what we are designing towards is necessary or we will end up with an extremely confused mess. So here are the points I think are useful to produce a good continuation 4e game, and explanation of those points. Note that I'm putting these out there; I'd like credit if someone uses them, but not as much as I'd like a game published with these principles (and am working on some of them myself).
Mechanical Compatibility
Mechanical compatibility is absolutely necessary if any one version is to spark the market rather than having most people stick with 4e. What mechanical compatibility means is that a player needs to be able to play their old 4e character in the same way they did in 4e to the point they are completely happy saying that it is the same character, and a DM needs to be able to pick up a monster manual and use it with no more difficulty than using the MM1 currently takes. This doesn’t mean that the rules need to stay exactly as-is. But it needs to be as close to current 4e as Pathfinder was to 3.5. Probably closer as we are not going to be able to rely on the core being OGL.
OGL
We want a continuation 4e to be OGL. And the only material we can use directly is OGL content - anything else needs to be re-written almost from scratch. Of course this means we have the whole of the D20 SRD, the whole of the PF SRD, and hopefully the whole of the forthcoming 13th Age SRD to play with. And I believe it is the case that you can not copywrite mechanics, merely the implementation of those mechanics. (I am not a lawyer - but there is precedent for this interpretation, and OSRIC follows it; 4e is no further mechanically than OSRIC is from 3.X).
It is critically important that no text makes it in from 4e. The whole game needs to be entirely re-written or plagiarised from OGL material as mentioned above. It is equally important that no one uses the approach of having a 4e book open in front of them and merely changing the words. Breach of copyright would kill the entire project. (So, alas, might nuisance lawsuits).
Clearer Explanations
One of the most common comments about 4e from 4e fans is that “It plays better than it reads”. We have a perfect opportunity to fix that. A perfect opportunity to write a rulebook with enthusiasm, that communicates what an excellent game 4e is rather than makes the reader’s eyes glaze over as they see lists and lists of powers, possibly with obnoxiously much flavour text added to the single line descriptions. The quality of the writing is one way we can vastly improve the game and attract people despite this being ultimately a retroclone. One of the biggest goals of any continuation project is to make it an improvement over the original in that someone can pick up the rulebook, and see the type of game we are both trying for and get. And should walk away from it saying “I want to play that”.
Incremental Improvements
Is 4e a good game? Yes. Or I wouldn’t think that this project was worth it. Can it be improved? Of course! There’s a lot of cruft that needs to go (over a thousand feats for a start), and many things that could be done much better with four years of experience. This is my (non-exhaustive) personal list, and fits into two categories: Tweaks, and Options. A tweak actually IMO improves the rules. An Option is something that can be done to the game to make it better fit a playstyle - or something that is decided at character generation. I’ve draft rules for all the below if anyone is interested.
Tweaks:
Options:
Tweak: Pacing - Scene and Story Based
4e makes an excellent narrative game replicating many stories - but the thing that stands out the most is that the daily rest mechanic doesn’t fit - and does even more damage to 4e than the wizard recovering all spells overnight does to 3.X’s pacing. If you make the extended rests happen on special occasions (either DM controlled, player controlled but taking a significant amount of time - like trudging back to base camp and then spending a few days carousing/meditating/praying/being healed/researching, or player controlled and taking a significant loss) they become significant - and this also makes healing surges significant. And if you must have a daily resource you can always shift your scene based powers to daily by redefining a short rest (although I wouldn’t bother). This also makes plotting and planning adventures much tighter as you can write a module as one story - and one extended rest.
Tweak: Ritual Casting
Ritual Casting is one of the best narrative ideas 4e had. But it breaks when useful rituals get a trivial cost. If healing surges are now significant (because extended rests are significant) then we can add a healing surge cost to most rituals - and this means that there is always a risk to casting them and they certainly can’t be spammed. Or we can flatten the gold cost so it actually remains significant - see the flattening the costs tweak. I also propose removing the Ritual Caster feat from the game; anyone with the associated skill trained and right level can learn a given ritual. (Of course with inherent bonusses we can keep the cash much tighter if we want to). Also add a sidebar on non-adventuring rituals such as the ritual to Aesclepius (or your God of Healing of choice) that involves passing surgical implements through candle flames.
Tweak: Healing Surges
Those things need renaming. My preferred option is that we simply dump the names - and call healing surges hit points, and hit points stun. But if that fails and 13th Age goes OGL we at least can call them recoveries or something.
I favour calling healing surges hit points because it underlines that the remaining surges show exactly how battered the PC is over the long term, not just what it will take to make them fall down.
Tweak: Skill Challenges
Skill Challenges are a very good start, but the guidance needs to be a lot better. I propose also adding a second skill challenge - as well as the one against cumulative failure, the one against time (the PCs have 2 or 3 rounds to accumulate the successes required, and failures are just not successes). Also outlining the maths. And providing much better illustrations of how to frame skill challenges to resolve scenes.
Tweak: Removing +X from items
The supposed boring nature of 4e items is IMO largely down to the spreadsheet-like appearance. Just have a robe of distortion, not six at six separate levels. And you’re also off the WBL treadmill at that point - which allows you to do all sorts of interesting things like even bringing back XP for GP.
Tweak: Overhauling Epic
Let’s face it. Epic … isn’t. And I’m not the person to write this. Go watch some anime warriors, and read Orlando Furioso or the Faerie Queene, or some Celtic Myth or the Ramayana - or anything else OTT. That’s where we balance fighters. Ability to create a wall of destruction with a sword should be the sort of thing a fighter is looking at - and rogues can steal thoughts out of peoples’ heads. (For wizards we just start poaching high level spells from the 3.X SRD). Possibly just go 1-20.
Option: Level Scaling
This needs to be optional. Either standard, sloped (no +1/2 levels bonus), or flat (eliminate feat and enhancement bonusses as well - just leaving the stat bumps). And a discussion of the effect all three have on the game. Any character creator or monster generator needs to be able to handle all three. I suggest the default becomes sloped as monsters are usable over a wider range, which (paradoxically) will reduce the treadmill effect.
Option: Paladin and Blackguard are the same class
4e Cavaliers get the Paladin archetype right. Their power isn’t divinely inspired, it comes from their idealism. Which makes them great and terrible whether exemplifying an ideal or whether being a shattered idealist who takes it out on the world in some way and if virtue doesn’t bring rewards they have the resolve to delve deeply into their vice of choice. The rules for falling/attoning are simple. Once per tier each way - at the player’s discretion other than for truly base acts.
Option: Feat and Power Packages
We stop presenting powers as individual powers, and instead present them as part of packages (styles, domains, pacts with specific entities etc.) And by being a specialist of that style or domain rather than a generalist you are given a not-insignificant bonus power or feat or two. This helps keep characters as both easy to create and very fluffy, while presenting more options for those who like carefully detailed characters.
One side benefit of this this is presentation and differentiating the game from 4e. And another part is the ability to create a character in under a minute. A third is that we don’t need to mess around with the math-tax feats; the main bonus for most feat packages is a free +1 feat bonus to hit/tier and to NADs/tier - whereas if you want to mess around with custom crafting your feats you need to find the space to pay for Expertise and Improved Defences.
Option: Quick Combat Resolution
Sometimes a fight should be an epic set-piece. And sometimes it should be fast, bloody, and over in a few minutes, game time. 4e does spectacularly well at the first, but completely botches the second. My proposal therefore is that for quick combat resolution, damage is measured in healing surges (which are now more important), and you do only 1-3 surges worth of damage per attack (most monsters having 4 surges to start). 4 surges of damage puts you down but not out, and anyone may call for the battlemap at the start of their turn or their side’s turn. I’ll expand if anyone’s interested. But we’ve made surges matter earlier by limiting extended rests.
Option: XP
How do we give out XP? It’s not just for monsters these days so a full discussion of ways including DM fiat and half a dozen options are wanted.
- Mechanical Compatibility
- OGL and a re-write of everything not in the OGL
- Clearer explanations
- Incremental improvements and options
Mechanical Compatibility
Mechanical compatibility is absolutely necessary if any one version is to spark the market rather than having most people stick with 4e. What mechanical compatibility means is that a player needs to be able to play their old 4e character in the same way they did in 4e to the point they are completely happy saying that it is the same character, and a DM needs to be able to pick up a monster manual and use it with no more difficulty than using the MM1 currently takes. This doesn’t mean that the rules need to stay exactly as-is. But it needs to be as close to current 4e as Pathfinder was to 3.5. Probably closer as we are not going to be able to rely on the core being OGL.
OGL
We want a continuation 4e to be OGL. And the only material we can use directly is OGL content - anything else needs to be re-written almost from scratch. Of course this means we have the whole of the D20 SRD, the whole of the PF SRD, and hopefully the whole of the forthcoming 13th Age SRD to play with. And I believe it is the case that you can not copywrite mechanics, merely the implementation of those mechanics. (I am not a lawyer - but there is precedent for this interpretation, and OSRIC follows it; 4e is no further mechanically than OSRIC is from 3.X).
It is critically important that no text makes it in from 4e. The whole game needs to be entirely re-written or plagiarised from OGL material as mentioned above. It is equally important that no one uses the approach of having a 4e book open in front of them and merely changing the words. Breach of copyright would kill the entire project. (So, alas, might nuisance lawsuits).
Clearer Explanations
One of the most common comments about 4e from 4e fans is that “It plays better than it reads”. We have a perfect opportunity to fix that. A perfect opportunity to write a rulebook with enthusiasm, that communicates what an excellent game 4e is rather than makes the reader’s eyes glaze over as they see lists and lists of powers, possibly with obnoxiously much flavour text added to the single line descriptions. The quality of the writing is one way we can vastly improve the game and attract people despite this being ultimately a retroclone. One of the biggest goals of any continuation project is to make it an improvement over the original in that someone can pick up the rulebook, and see the type of game we are both trying for and get. And should walk away from it saying “I want to play that”.
Incremental Improvements
Is 4e a good game? Yes. Or I wouldn’t think that this project was worth it. Can it be improved? Of course! There’s a lot of cruft that needs to go (over a thousand feats for a start), and many things that could be done much better with four years of experience. This is my (non-exhaustive) personal list, and fits into two categories: Tweaks, and Options. A tweak actually IMO improves the rules. An Option is something that can be done to the game to make it better fit a playstyle - or something that is decided at character generation. I’ve draft rules for all the below if anyone is interested.
Tweaks:
- Pacing - Scene and Story based rather than Encounter/Daily.
- Ritual Casting needs an overhaul
- Healing Surges
- Skill Challenges
- Removing +X from items - inherent bonusses
- Overhauling Epic
Options:
- Level Scaling
- Blackguard and Paladin are one class
- Feat and Power Packages
- Quick Combat Resolution
- XP
Tweak: Pacing - Scene and Story Based
4e makes an excellent narrative game replicating many stories - but the thing that stands out the most is that the daily rest mechanic doesn’t fit - and does even more damage to 4e than the wizard recovering all spells overnight does to 3.X’s pacing. If you make the extended rests happen on special occasions (either DM controlled, player controlled but taking a significant amount of time - like trudging back to base camp and then spending a few days carousing/meditating/praying/being healed/researching, or player controlled and taking a significant loss) they become significant - and this also makes healing surges significant. And if you must have a daily resource you can always shift your scene based powers to daily by redefining a short rest (although I wouldn’t bother). This also makes plotting and planning adventures much tighter as you can write a module as one story - and one extended rest.
Tweak: Ritual Casting
Ritual Casting is one of the best narrative ideas 4e had. But it breaks when useful rituals get a trivial cost. If healing surges are now significant (because extended rests are significant) then we can add a healing surge cost to most rituals - and this means that there is always a risk to casting them and they certainly can’t be spammed. Or we can flatten the gold cost so it actually remains significant - see the flattening the costs tweak. I also propose removing the Ritual Caster feat from the game; anyone with the associated skill trained and right level can learn a given ritual. (Of course with inherent bonusses we can keep the cash much tighter if we want to). Also add a sidebar on non-adventuring rituals such as the ritual to Aesclepius (or your God of Healing of choice) that involves passing surgical implements through candle flames.
Tweak: Healing Surges
Those things need renaming. My preferred option is that we simply dump the names - and call healing surges hit points, and hit points stun. But if that fails and 13th Age goes OGL we at least can call them recoveries or something.
I favour calling healing surges hit points because it underlines that the remaining surges show exactly how battered the PC is over the long term, not just what it will take to make them fall down.
Tweak: Skill Challenges
Skill Challenges are a very good start, but the guidance needs to be a lot better. I propose also adding a second skill challenge - as well as the one against cumulative failure, the one against time (the PCs have 2 or 3 rounds to accumulate the successes required, and failures are just not successes). Also outlining the maths. And providing much better illustrations of how to frame skill challenges to resolve scenes.
Tweak: Removing +X from items
The supposed boring nature of 4e items is IMO largely down to the spreadsheet-like appearance. Just have a robe of distortion, not six at six separate levels. And you’re also off the WBL treadmill at that point - which allows you to do all sorts of interesting things like even bringing back XP for GP.
Tweak: Overhauling Epic
Let’s face it. Epic … isn’t. And I’m not the person to write this. Go watch some anime warriors, and read Orlando Furioso or the Faerie Queene, or some Celtic Myth or the Ramayana - or anything else OTT. That’s where we balance fighters. Ability to create a wall of destruction with a sword should be the sort of thing a fighter is looking at - and rogues can steal thoughts out of peoples’ heads. (For wizards we just start poaching high level spells from the 3.X SRD). Possibly just go 1-20.
Option: Level Scaling
This needs to be optional. Either standard, sloped (no +1/2 levels bonus), or flat (eliminate feat and enhancement bonusses as well - just leaving the stat bumps). And a discussion of the effect all three have on the game. Any character creator or monster generator needs to be able to handle all three. I suggest the default becomes sloped as monsters are usable over a wider range, which (paradoxically) will reduce the treadmill effect.
Option: Paladin and Blackguard are the same class
4e Cavaliers get the Paladin archetype right. Their power isn’t divinely inspired, it comes from their idealism. Which makes them great and terrible whether exemplifying an ideal or whether being a shattered idealist who takes it out on the world in some way and if virtue doesn’t bring rewards they have the resolve to delve deeply into their vice of choice. The rules for falling/attoning are simple. Once per tier each way - at the player’s discretion other than for truly base acts.
Option: Feat and Power Packages
We stop presenting powers as individual powers, and instead present them as part of packages (styles, domains, pacts with specific entities etc.) And by being a specialist of that style or domain rather than a generalist you are given a not-insignificant bonus power or feat or two. This helps keep characters as both easy to create and very fluffy, while presenting more options for those who like carefully detailed characters.
One side benefit of this this is presentation and differentiating the game from 4e. And another part is the ability to create a character in under a minute. A third is that we don’t need to mess around with the math-tax feats; the main bonus for most feat packages is a free +1 feat bonus to hit/tier and to NADs/tier - whereas if you want to mess around with custom crafting your feats you need to find the space to pay for Expertise and Improved Defences.
Option: Quick Combat Resolution
Sometimes a fight should be an epic set-piece. And sometimes it should be fast, bloody, and over in a few minutes, game time. 4e does spectacularly well at the first, but completely botches the second. My proposal therefore is that for quick combat resolution, damage is measured in healing surges (which are now more important), and you do only 1-3 surges worth of damage per attack (most monsters having 4 surges to start). 4 surges of damage puts you down but not out, and anyone may call for the battlemap at the start of their turn or their side’s turn. I’ll expand if anyone’s interested. But we’ve made surges matter earlier by limiting extended rests.
Option: XP
How do we give out XP? It’s not just for monsters these days so a full discussion of ways including DM fiat and half a dozen options are wanted.
