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<blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 4953606" data-attributes="member: 82106">By that logic why did they publish monster design guidelines? Lets actually look at this in a fairly logical fashion. A hard and fast set of numeric rules for power design would be pretty iffy. Its not really all that hard to create a basic vanilla attack power and any published guidelines for that would be so trivial as to hardly need stating (as demonstrated by the fact that they've already been pretty much stated in this thread already). More complicated situations or powers which don't mainly do damage and place a status condition really aren't going to be quantifiable in the same way and I don't see how you could write useful guidelines for them that didn't amount to a compendium of all the design principles of 4e. On top of that the main reason why homebrewed powers create problems is either unintended synergy with other powers/features/items/feats/etc or poor wording. Both of those can't really be addressed by guidelines and are just the hazards of homebrew and need to be addressed by the DM using the power.The final real question is &quot;why do you need to homebrew powers?&quot; There are now what 18 (at least) complete published classes, each with between 120 to 300 powers or a total of something approaching 4 THOUSAND published powers (and if anything this is a conservative estimate). I find it hard to imagine in all those 4000 powers you can't find what you want in terms of mechanics. I guess its POSSIBLE, but chances are whatever power you want to create has already been written and all you need to do is steal the mechanics and do what you want with it. The best guidelines for creating powers really are the existing powers themselves. I think similar arguments apply to items too.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="AbdulAlhazred, post: 4953606, member: 82106"] By that logic why did they publish monster design guidelines? Lets actually look at this in a fairly logical fashion. A hard and fast set of numeric rules for power design would be pretty iffy. Its not really all that hard to create a basic vanilla attack power and any published guidelines for that would be so trivial as to hardly need stating (as demonstrated by the fact that they've already been pretty much stated in this thread already). More complicated situations or powers which don't mainly do damage and place a status condition really aren't going to be quantifiable in the same way and I don't see how you could write useful guidelines for them that didn't amount to a compendium of all the design principles of 4e. On top of that the main reason why homebrewed powers create problems is either unintended synergy with other powers/features/items/feats/etc or poor wording. Both of those can't really be addressed by guidelines and are just the hazards of homebrew and need to be addressed by the DM using the power. The final real question is "why do you need to homebrew powers?" There are now what 18 (at least) complete published classes, each with between 120 to 300 powers or a total of something approaching 4 THOUSAND published powers (and if anything this is a conservative estimate). I find it hard to imagine in all those 4000 powers you can't find what you want in terms of mechanics. I guess its POSSIBLE, but chances are whatever power you want to create has already been written and all you need to do is steal the mechanics and do what you want with it. The best guidelines for creating powers really are the existing powers themselves. I think similar arguments apply to items too. [/QUOTE]

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