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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DM_Blake" data-source="post: 4290781" data-attributes="member: 57267">Remove 1/4 of the PHB? And replace it with other stuff?Why even have a PHB at all? Just write your own.Besides, if you replaceall combat powers exept those of races, items, and spells, won't you just be reversing the problem? Won't all characters (especially melee characters) be defined entirely by their out-of-combat role?This is doable. It will shorten combat a little. Each player will die in one less hit, and so will each moster if you reduce them correctly. Except minons - they're still one-hit-soapbubbles either way.I'm fairly sure this will shorten most battles, but I don't know how it would make them more dramatic. Doesn't the drama come from exposure to risky live-or-die situations? If everything is dying faster, you will still have those battles where the players kill off a weak encounter with no real risk or danger, which means no real drama.If you want drama, then build each encounter, or at least each dramatic encounter, so that there is a believable risk that the player characters will die, or at least lose. If the players believe this risk exists, then the drama exists. This can, of course, be done with the exisiting HP rules too.Your proposed standard array has a net bonus of zero. Adding racial mods, this gives a maximum net bonus of 2.This will result in very weak player characters. Combined with reducing their HP and stripping their powers (your points in 1 and 2 above), you will surely be killing them off left and right.The game as written, and as balanced, is to allow each PC to have between +5 and +8 net ability scores. Encounters are balanced on this assumption. Breaking this assumption would be very dangerous and woudl put the PCs at great risk of ending their adventuring career very young in an unmarked grave.Unless you also redesign every encounter to allow a party of PCs to encounter single orcs, kobolds, etc., all just one or two at a time. Which also means redesigning the entire reward system (coin, magic, and xp).That's a lot of work.True, they are expensive. But fun. At least for me.Imaginitive players can visualize the map without needing a real map or figures before them. I can personally play an entire game of chess without a board or pieces, and even win some times.Regardless of whether a fighter is "hacking the orc with my axe" or "using my at-will Reaping Strike to hack the orc with my axe",either way, the DM and all players need to know where the fighter is, where the orc is, whether the fighter can see and reach the orc with his axe. They also need to know where the rest of the PCs and monsters are, where the walls, trees, furniture, pits, lava, etc., is, and how they can move around and engage the enemy.I don't see why the 4e abilities require more or less of this, other than the mental conversion between "squares" and "inches".You're right about marking. That can be a pain. I've already told my players to keep track of their own marks, and if I tell them they have been marked by an enemy, they keep track of it too. Otherwise I lose track amidst all the other stuff I'm tracking. I think tracking the marking without a map can be done with the same imagination as tracking locations without a map, so if you are used to 3e, or 2e, or whatever, and not using maps or figures, then 4e is much the same. "Fred marks the kobold with the big hammer. Fred, you remind me when I'm making that kobold's actions that he's marked so I don't forget." - that doesn't seem to require a map any more than anything else.Knowing them isn't a problem. It's been well over a decade since I had a group of players in which nobody knew the magic items in the DMG. There's always someone that says "Ahh, magic boots. Could be springing, could be speed, could be levitation, could be spider climb, could be..."Doesn't matter to me whether they're in the PHB or DMG, except now I can tell all my players to look up their own magic items, since they bring PHBs but don't bring DMGs.As for identifying them, sure, the old way added a lot of mystery. But, all too often, many magic items sat in someone's backpack through an entire dungeon until they got back to town, identified them, then finally divvied them up or sold them off. While that is certainly more mysterious, items collecting dust and cobwebs in a backpack are not nearly as much fun as items being put to use.Arguably, an adventuring spellcaster in a world even remotely like D&D, is expecting to find magic items, is counting on it, is even fantasizing about it. Heck, the whole adventuring group is dreaming and drooling over the idea. Those spellcasters would be chomping at the bit to prepare themselves with all the tools they need to recognize and identify every magic item they find. Assuming they don't is like assuming a mountain climber (in our real world) sets off to climb a mountain without a rope or pitons.Previous editions made that assumption, and the players muddled through it, acepting it as part of the mystery. This edition kills that mystery, but opens a new door to the fun of actually using the items you find when you find them. And, isn't that what a real spellcaster in a real world of adventure would try very hard to find ways to do?I agree with you about residuum. My jury is still out on that whole concept.Damage and healing has always been simple HP in all versions of D&D. Admittedly, in all previous editions, it has usually taken longer to heal after a hard battle than it does in 4e.Beware of penalizing characters in ways that hinders their ability to conduct battle. Remember that each monster has to fight only one battle. What difference does it make if you cut off an orc's hand or stab out a kobold's eye? Either way, he's going to die and you'll never see him again. But do this stuff to your players, even giving them just one lingering injury (that causes combat penalties) every couple of encounters, and by the middle of a dungeon they might be too crippled to go on.That might be more realistic, and might simulate the kinds of injuries we in the real world associate with swords and axes and balls of flaming inferno. But when your PCs have to abandon the adventure because their lingering injuries have whittled them down to helplessness and they cannot beat any monsters any more, then you've gone too far.And beware of using lingering injuries too rarely. When a player gets hit 5 times with an axe, and one of those times it lops off his arm but the other times it only scratches him, he's going to wonder what was wrong with the other 4 axes. If axes chop off limbs, then you better do it all the time, or the rest of the axes are broken and your attempt at realistic combat injuries just becomes random and punishing, a way for the DM to arbitrarily exert his will and torture his players at a whim, for no consistent reason. That kind of game will drive away your players in a heartbeat - even if you're not doing it that way, they will still see it that way.As for healing surges, remember the game is balanced assuming you will surge multiple times a day, and at least once per encounter (more if you have a healer letting you do it more often). Limit this and you are making your PCs even more fragile.I think, like others have said, D&D 4e is not for you. Your house rules would be longer than the combined core rulebooks, and nobody you met would know your system. Muche easier to find a system more to your liking and then find players who know that system.And, put all these house rules together, and you will have a group of hopelessly weak PCs who at best can barely survive a few easy encounters and who will accumulate debilitating wounds that make them weaker and weaker until they die. And die they will.So all that said, I'm really feeling like you were not serious in your original post, and that you were trolling to begin with. Which is fine by me, I've enjoyed the mental exercise, and had the time to kill.But if you were really serious, then I wish you the best of luck and hope this post has helped you at all.</blockquote>

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