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<blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7751842" data-attributes="member: 996">Yes.&nbsp; It's easier to drop elements - ban a class or source or race or not use magic items - than to add them (though monsters were particularly easy to re-skin or create), but that's really broadly true, it's always easier to pick what you want than to create it from scratch!&nbsp; Since most options in 4e were reasonably balanced, dropping or re-skinning some for flavor/theme/whatever was relatively painless, while creating a new one, you'd feel obliged to make it as balanced as the existing options, which was a fairly high bar by D&amp;D standards. Creating a full class, with the attendant Paths, features, and most of all, scores of powers, for instance, was a daunting undertaking - one, in fact that MM never undertook from Essentials on.My personal reaction was, well - kitbashing a balanced system is like trying to keep your jenga tower from falling, while kitbashing an already-broken one is, well, everything's already fallen over, stack it up however you like.&nbsp; When you might be tempted (oh, I'm going to run steampunk, let's see if I can kit-bash something from 4e...) I often found that re-skinning, alone, covered it.&nbsp; Because all those little italic text blocks on every power (and thus every spell, item, etc) could just be changed willy-nilly without impacting mechanics, re-skinning was just very easy compared to re-designing rules.Oddly, it'd've been pretty easy to re-skin the disease track to add lasting wounds &amp; complications to the game.&nbsp; I'm not sure what would be accomplished by dropping 'bloodied' - it's just a keyword that means &quot;1/2 hps,&quot; in essence, if you dropped it, anything that keyed off bloodied would just say &quot;... reduced to half it's maximum hps...&quot; instead of &quot;...bloodied...&quot; (...just like 5e, actually)There were very few commonly-used, or even commonly-discussed-hypothetical variants for 4e, but one I recall was to increase the time it took to recover surges (like 1 surge/long rest, say), and remove overnight healing, so you always used surges to heal, and could run out of surges over a longer time frame than the usual day.&nbsp; I suppose that's adding (tweaking, really), something a bit like wounds-vitality, and it was pretty straightforward to do, and would only have impacted pacing, something 4e was fairly robust to, anyway.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Tony Vargas, post: 7751842, member: 996"] Yes. It's easier to drop elements - ban a class or source or race or not use magic items - than to add them (though monsters were particularly easy to re-skin or create), but that's really broadly true, it's always easier to pick what you want than to create it from scratch! Since most options in 4e were reasonably balanced, dropping or re-skinning some for flavor/theme/whatever was relatively painless, while creating a new one, you'd feel obliged to make it as balanced as the existing options, which was a fairly high bar by D&D standards. Creating a full class, with the attendant Paths, features, and most of all, scores of powers, for instance, was a daunting undertaking - one, in fact that MM never undertook from Essentials on. My personal reaction was, well - kitbashing a balanced system is like trying to keep your jenga tower from falling, while kitbashing an already-broken one is, well, everything's already fallen over, stack it up however you like. When you might be tempted (oh, I'm going to run steampunk, let's see if I can kit-bash something from 4e...) I often found that re-skinning, alone, covered it. Because all those little italic text blocks on every power (and thus every spell, item, etc) could just be changed willy-nilly without impacting mechanics, re-skinning was just very easy compared to re-designing rules. Oddly, it'd've been pretty easy to re-skin the disease track to add lasting wounds & complications to the game. I'm not sure what would be accomplished by dropping 'bloodied' - it's just a keyword that means "1/2 hps," in essence, if you dropped it, anything that keyed off bloodied would just say "... reduced to half it's maximum hps..." instead of "...bloodied..." (...just like 5e, actually) There were very few commonly-used, or even commonly-discussed-hypothetical variants for 4e, but one I recall was to increase the time it took to recover surges (like 1 surge/long rest, say), and remove overnight healing, so you always used surges to heal, and could run out of surges over a longer time frame than the usual day. I suppose that's adding (tweaking, really), something a bit like wounds-vitality, and it was pretty straightforward to do, and would only have impacted pacing, something 4e was fairly robust to, anyway. [/QUOTE]

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