Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lord_Blacksteel" data-source="post: 5429413" data-attributes="member: 53082">Keep looking and you will find more - they're called Utility Powers. At any given level many of them are related to combat in some way but there's almost always one that isn't. They're usually something like darkvision for 5 minutes or a bonus to a certain skill for one roll or a movement boost like feather fall, jump, spider climb, etc. In fact if you want out of combat mechanics then I would say between rituals, the skill system, skill challenges, and the various class features & racial features that affect those things, there is more mechanical support for non-combat activity in 4E than in any edition, and they are more widely available than in older editions. I will grant that 3E had some pretty detailed crafting rules that may have been more to some players' tastes than 4E. Other than wands and potions I only saw them used twice in 10 years of playing and DM'ing so I tend to see them as a minor thing.However if the comparison is to 1E then there is very little mechanical support in the PHB for anything outside of combat - storongholds and followers is about it and even then it's more along the lines of "a linkboy costs 1cp per day" than how to actually get stuff done. Sure, we did all kinds of crazy stuff back then but there weren't any rules for it. It's no more of a barrier to play or a failing of the system for 4E than it was for 1E.I've been running a Basic D&D game and a D&D 4E game for different groups over the last year and it's surprising how similar they are at a high level - in short, combat is where all the detail is, then out of combat it's a lot of free-form DM interpretation. The details (especially in combat) are very different but the overall design approaches are interestingly similar.</blockquote>

Verification