D&D 4E How easy is 4e to house rule?

[Dragonhelm]

This question is primarily for the playtesters, but open for anyone. I'm curious to know how easy 4e will be to house rule.

In 3e, it was hard at times to make changes as one change could impact the game profoundly. If, for example, you took out attacks of opportunity, you would have to kill several feats, class abilities, and so on.

Will 4e be more open to house rules?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Dragonhelm]

Bump

Pardon the bump, but this post got lost in the flurry of info coming out this last weekend. Just curious what thoughts are.

Thanks!

 

[Lord Zardoz]

Not that I have actually played the game, but as always it will depend on what you want to house rule. I have read a fair bit of the feedback and reports through this board though. Here are my completely unqualified impressions.

- Many combat powers are going to be movement / positionally dependent (or outright mini-dependent). Trying to houserule away these aspects for the purpose of not needing a grid or mini's will probably be even more futile than trying to remove AoO from 3rd edition.

- movement on the grid its self is non euclidian (diagonals are 1 square instead of 1-2-1). I suspect that using hexes or enforcing 1-2-1 should not cause any significant problems.

- The per encounter abilities seems to be pretty easy to houserule to prevent players from using them to fully recover all HP outside of combat, or to houserule it so they can.

- Player characters are a great deal sturdier than they used to be. Lots of HP to start, and its not hard for a cleric to stand them up if they are dropped. I expect modifying this through house rules will depend on how you approach it. Preventing a cure cantrip from standing up a guy at -30 hp by requiring that you heal all the way up through the negative HP wont be too hard. Messing around with the HP total or how much damage is healed will probably not work so well.

- If you want to run a low magic campaign, doing so ought to be easy, since the bonuses from magical items for a given level can be 'baked' into the level progression. The removal of many of the stacking bonuses (think Magic Armour + Ring of Protection + Necklace of Natural Armour + Whatever Ability bonus you can add to AC) keeps the total bonus lower. The difference in abilities of a Level X character with magic items and a Level X character without those items is nowhere near as large as it used to be.

- If your attached to the idea of a wizard casting a spell for massive damage while the warrior does 1d10+8 because the wizard is a wizard, then no amount of house ruling 4th edition will make you happy. The good news is that 3rd edition gaming materials are going to experience a pretty steep discount, and 1st or 2nd edition materials are not too hard to come by if you know where to look.

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