D&D General How would you redo 4e?

[bert1001 fka bert1000]

I like Feats too, but the more you have, the harder it is to keep them balanced. I mean, look at 5e. There's what, 75 Feats, and the gulf between the top tier and the utter trash is huge.

If you are going to have a lot of feats, I like the way PF2e does it. Feats are split into Racial, Class, Skill, and General; you get specific slots for each; and feats are level gated. It is slightly less customizable than 4e but at least you don't have to balance and compare taking a feat that modifies a Class ability vs. one that modifies a Skill. It also makes decision making at level up easier -- there are a ton of feats but your relevant set to pick from at any given level up is significantly reduced.

That said, I wouldn't mind slightly less and chunkier feats in a 4.5e.

 

[bert1001 fka bert1000]

I don't hate the idea of extensive keywording to tie in effects.

I just find the existing schools to be bad keywords to hang things off of. We have conjuration and evocation, which are the same thing but one also summons, we've got abjuration, which is a lazy catch-all that used to mean 'wards', only wards also used to be a thing but not a school, necromancy, which has been mutated and devolved into evil undead school while enchantment is 'evil school the game doesn't have the stones to call evil', and... the other ones that are fine, I guess.

The need to force spells into the schools causes more harm then good, IMO.

Like necessarily, anti-magic field should not be a school spell. Or a spell at all, but that's getting into others issues not limited to 4e.

Agreed, the implementation has never been good.

I think there was some intention of limiting certain effects to cetain schools and having you sacrifice those effects as a specialist wizard but it never really worked. And in 3.5e/PF1 in particular you had this spell library so large you could almost always find a spell that did what you wanted in your school.

Big AOE damage? Oh yeah here's this Alteration spell that does it

Teleport? No problem, I'll just walk through shadows with this Necromancy spell.

etc. etc.

 

[Kannik]

Material components aren't a thing in 4e, sure. They're also almost completely superfluous in both 3e and 5e, given a component pouch obviates them in the former case and a spell focus obviates them in the latter. I don't understand what RP benefit that provides, when it's so easily cast aside.

FWIW, from the day I started playing AD&D (1e), unless the material component was something costly and consumable we all assumed the casters had a spell component pouch and moved on. A little bit of flavour, and something that could be taken away from you if you were captured, but otherwise not all that incorporated into the game.

4e made the spell focus a thing, which I think is just as flavourful -- are you a wand user? Staff? Orb? Rod? Symbol?

1e fireball has a lot of that (2-5) but uses inches instead of feet, so you can do the battle mat thing directly.

View attachment 277052
Funny how the entry is missing the M notation for the Components: V, S, M and includes it in the description.

Ah, the good old 33,000 cubic feet that, per the text, should be filled by casting the spell, meaning casting it within a confined space, like a dungeon, pretty much meant everyone, including yourself, would get roasted...

We also never included that part in our games.

 

[Kannik]

That works too. The "do something cool" (encounter) and "do something awesome" (daily) was just a way to balance interacting with the set powers and the "improvised powers". If people are improvising all the time then it's a different game. We felt this struck the right balance for us. We also let the dailies be shared -- so it was more like 4 extra dailies amoung 4 players in any which way. I also really leaned into the power -- these improvised powers got at least as good if not better dmg and effects as regular powers.

Interesting idea to share the daily version of it, and that it's an explicit invitation to create a new power.

The reason I put it there is that 4e seems to have these different abstractions of mechanics using the same game elements like skills and rituals depending on the framing. In some circumstances a skill has very specific uses of a skill spelled out -- "lets you jump X more squares", etc. This is this the tactical combat use but also often the "single use" effect. Single use with DM deciding the next step and when the scene "ends" tends to use skills as descrete effects. For a skill challenge it really doesn't matter if you jump X or Y -- the success indicates you made progress. Normally I don't describe things that precisely in a SC but rather -- it's a long jump but you could probably make it. Or if it is higher Tier play you can just let the PCs do mythical stuff with the same check. Or if it is unrealistic to jump that far in Heroic Tier -- success indicates that circumstances still let you make progress somehow -- the dragon swoops by at the right time and you jump on its back and get thrown off across the chasm, etc.

Same with rituals. It will always do X. But in the context of the skill challenge that gets you 1 or 2 successes, it may or may not lead to complete success. There will be an added complication if there are successes left.

True that too, in an SC the specifics do tend to drop away more than during combat or a single skill roll. Could be why it threw people even more for a loop -- it was using the same mechanic foundation for one part of the game (skill check) but without the result of it to instead feed into a different mechanical construct....

 

[Voadam]

I made tracking all equipment a big deal in AD&D, components included. I had PCs asking what color the sand was on a beach as they tried to get their three different colors for color spray, also whether it was coarse or fine grained for use in sleep. As a kid I did not know what gum arabic was, but I knew it was necessary for casting invisibility.

 

[Kannik]

If you are going to have a lot of feats, I like the way PF2e does it. Feats are split into Racial, Class, Skill, and General; you get specific slots for each; and feats are level gated. It is slightly less customizable than 4e but at least you don't have to balance and compare taking a feat that modifies a Class ability vs. one that modifies a Skill. It also makes decision making at level up easier -- there are a ton of feats but your relevant set to pick from at any given level up is significantly reduced.

That said, I wouldn't mind slightly less and chunkier feats in a 4.5e.

Less and chunkier would be my recommendation as well. It makes gaining a feat feel substantial/worthy/noteworthy, and helps weed out filler or 'lame' feats.

And just having dipped my toe into some PF2e, there appears to be a third thing with having a lot of feats is, with so many slots, there seems to be (through reading various threads about it) cases of the game limiting characters in a way so that there can be a feat to 'fix' the limitation. And as such, there's a list of 'must have' General feats for every character, and certain classes also seem to have to have reduced choices to get the proper class feats (and others are not worth bothering with/make no difference).

Let the characters be capable, I say. Then allow feat choices to add significant chunks of new abilities or flexibility. (And try to avoid the type that adds more pure power/damage/etc.)

 

[MichaelSomething]

The number of 4E feats should equal the number of 3E spells.

 

[Vaalingrade]

The number of 4E feats should equal the number of 3E spells.

Spells should be made into feats.

Delete Vancian Casting.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I always felt like appraisal (and architecture) should have been explicitly rolled into Dungeoneering (or even Streetwise when it comes to resell value) and acting should have been specifically be folded into Deception. We did have a ritual to craft magic item AND a feat to craft alchemical recipe later down the line.

I loved the Mc feats! they gave you a unique water downed version of a class feature. My Cleric took the Paladin one to get a Divine Challenge once per encounter. I think there should have been multiple MC feats per class so you could invest more of your resources into it, with only the first one gate keeping the rest. I could see a MC Paladin feat that gives your another use of Divine Challenge and one that gives you some Lay on Hands charges. And I think those feat should be enough to qualify you for the Paragon Path of that other class.


Ya know, next time I'm DM-ing, the 'Square' will be an actual in-world unit of measurement mostly used for indoor room plans. 1 Square will be equal to 25 Tiles, with the Tile being originally a legal standard for slate flooring tiles in a Capital city that was known for those and wanted to protect its citizens from being swindled by undersized tiles. Inspectors would go around the various shops with a model and make sure the tiles were within an appropriate margin or the merchant would lose their sale licence.

Not unlike how rooms in Japan can be measured in units of tatami mats.

Who cares?

Spell schools are stupid. Magic Schools and traditions should be setting specific.

I was thinking that Skill Powers could be accessed through a feat. Everytime you take one you add a different Skill Power to your repertoire, from a list of options.

I think every Feat should have an active component. They either let you do something new, or offer an enhancement to something you're already doing. No feats that just grant an always on bonus. Except maybe proficiency feats for armor (weapon prof would count as 'improvement to something you're doing')

I hated that. So transparently pandering to grognards.

I think 4e's philosophy to lore is best exemplified by it's default pseudo-setting: Points of Light. You don't get a complete view of anything and it is your job to fill in the dark parts!

Once you understand that, everything else just falls into place.

It is nicer even than that, because PoL (and the general nature of 4e lore) is very much in the Dungeon World tradition of "draw maps, leave holes." The characters can start in Fallcrest (the city in the back of DMG1) and it gives you a number of pretty solid hooks. The players can shape things from there! Do they visit the crypts? The wizard tower? Pay a visit to Lord Marklehey? Maybe they get a quest from the Temple (I think there's actually 2 or 3 temples, I forget), or from the shopkeeper that sells supplies, or perhaps they tangle with the ruffians who inhabit the lower town and hire out as stevedores. Maybe they meet some wandering halflings that live on the river. You can play all this out in a very narrative low myth fashion, to whatever degree you want.

The other cool thing about the lore is how its scattered all over throughout the books, and it even contradicts itself on at least some points. Is Sehanine Lolth's sister, or her daughter, or her mother? Which god actually created humans? Is he really dead? Who IS the Raven Queen, really? And what is her relationship with Bane? You're an Eladrin? How exactly did you end up in the World?! There is stuff we think we 'know', but you can spin pretty much any aspect of the setting different ways. Every person that has read some of the books, they will have different information! Once some of the pcs got into a dispute about the origin of the Drow (it became a relevant question in one of their quests) and both players had books open and were busy 'proving' there version of the story was true! lol. The PCs went to the famous library and hashed it out, but they couldn't decide. Later when they messed with the seal that kept the Drow underground they decided both stories were propaganda made up by different factions. Turns out the seal was enforced by Torog! A third player invented that when he tried to break it...

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

What I've learned from this thread is that a decent number of people seem to hate spell schools. It's odd to me since, other than 4e, spell schools have always been tied into multiple crunchy bits of the rules.

I don't really hate them, they were just never really done much with that mattered. I also found, in every edition that had them, that they were pretty much arbitrary. Is something an 'evocation' or a 'conjuration', <shrug> who knows? And once 2e started actually using them for something, then it got really problematic because every school now MUST have a good mix of spells, so things got put here or there when the logic wasn't even that good for it. It just seemed a bit muddled to me.