Why do you think it’s difficult? Is it the building of all your NPCs?
D&D General How would you redo 4e?
You aint getting the strongest healing and buffing potions without siphoning off some divine magic. Artficers aren't priests but many magic items have divine magic coursing in their "veins".
You don't want to be a weaker Potion Seller who sell weak potions to travelers.
W'rkncacnter
Hero
well now somebody's gotta make the obligatory deus ex machina joke. what have you wrought upon this world.
Sanglorian
Adventurer
As my 4e retroclone, Orcus has a lot of what I would change about 4e.
- Shared power lists, so classes with overlapping scopes can use the same powers.
- "Threats", the awkwardly named collection of hazards, traps and other terrain and encounter features, so GMs can quickly build thematic, dynamic, level-appropriate encounters.
- Extended challenges with timers to avoid the problem of "aid another" being a preferable strategy. I really dislike skill challenges; I don't think extended challenges really fix what I dislike about them, but it's a step in the right direction.
- Powers with clear out-of-combat uses that are still useful in combat (particularly poisons and shapechanging powers). I thought the assassin's daily power poisons were so clever in providing for an out-of-combat use without diluting the combat effectiveness at all.
- An alternative to feats (kits, which also fill the theme design space; noting they only cover the first 10 levels worth of feats).
- A completely different approach to skill challenges, drawing on Spycraft's dramatic conflicts and challenge crawls. Perhaps rituals could be folded in to this category at the same time.
- Converting maintain powers to stances, so there's a single "concentrate on one power" mechanic.
- Tags for weapons and cantrips, inspired by Dungeon World (messy, forceful, fiery, etc), which would have consistent riders across PCs and monsters, and replace at-will attack powers.
- Adventure and dungeon pacing mechanics, to encourage a four-encounter day without making it mandatory. I reckon a lot of the difficulty converting modules/adventures from other editions to 4e would disappear if an encounter typically took place over a few different rooms.
- The escalation die from 13th Age, to make combat wrap up faster but also discourage "going nova" early.
- No magic items except artifacts, wondrous items and consumables.
- Action points allow you to take a reaction or interrupt, based on a trigger you specified earlier. This would make combat much more dynamic, without requiring fiddly and circumstantial immediate action powers.
- A way to convert monsters of higher levels to elites and solos and lower levels to minions, instead of having different stat blocks for each group.
- Condition ladders, so a dazed monster is easier to stun, a higher-level monster might only be charmed instead of dominated, etc.
- "Long" actions, which are declared on a player's turn and activate at the start of the player's next turn, provided they haven't been disrupted in the meantime. This would completely change combat tactics and trying to anticipate the enemy - if the goblin sorcerer starts casting a spell, do you target them in an attempt to disrupt it? With or without spending a minor action trying to identify it first? Or do you assume it's a bluff and go for the hobgoblin captain as you originally planned?
- Players all acting, then monsters all acting. With action point-based immediate actions, combat would remain somewhat of a back and forth. My untested theory is that it would make tactics easier, and it'd make "end on your [the target's] next turn" conditions a bit cleaner.
- Rethinking utility powers. There's no particular reason why these all have to be powers; making them a mix of powers and static features would open up the design space. I'd also gate utilities mostly behind skills, but allow for ancestries, classes and feats to unlock utilities too.
- Merging themes, paragon paths and 3e-style prestige classes into PF2e-style archetypes (feat trees).
- Morale rules to speed up combats.
- Simplifying buffs down to just two: bless and fortify. These would be represented by dice that can be added to attacks/damage and saves/defenses respectively.
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The Artificer is a priest of Gond, obviously.
Red Castle
Adventurer
I don't think it would have change much. The Forgotten Realms Campaign Guide released just 2 months after the release of the core books and it didn't stop them from thinking that 4e didn't support roleplay and was focused on combat.
I think it has more to do with the presentation and organisation of the Player handbook than anything. If you just look through the PHB, it's true that it really reads like a rulebook with just rules and very little in terms of immersion. And then if you start to read the rules and classes, the section on combat rules is much longer than the part on skills (30 vs 15) and that every class description is 14 pages of pretty much combat only powers. Then, except for the rituals, the spells has a lot less description than in other editions.
But it basically come from a misconception that lore equal roleplay. The idea that the more lore there is, the more roleplay you can get. Which is not true. It's two totally different thing. You could play in a world with a rich lore like Star Wars and just do spaceship combat after spaceship combat and there would be no roleplay, regardless of the lore of the game. Just like you could play a game with no lore at all and just talk in character and react to what the storyteller tells you and that would just be roleplay without any lore given by the system.
And that's where 4e is different than other editions. The system doesn't tell the players what exactly happens, it ask the players, within some boundaries, what happens. It encourage creativity. It's not a game full of lore that you can learn about and be a scholar about its ecosystem, divinities or different kind of magic. It tells the players to make it their own, to decide how exactly the creatures behave or the Gods interact with mortals. This is your game, your table, so make it what you want it to be instead of relying on books telling you how it is. If you want lore, buy the campaign books from the premade world like Forgotten Realms or Dark Sun.
The other misconception is that you need a lot of rules to roleplay. What is roleplay actually? Is it just not to take the role of a character for a time, act as if you you were someone else? What rules do you really need for that? You don't need rules to pretend to sit in a tavern with your fellow adventurer and talk with the locals. You don't need rules to explore a city or sits with the king preparing a defense plan against the horde of undead coming your way. You only need a way to resolve the occasional conflicts, and just a couple of skills and attribute will do, you don't need to have 40 skills. So it's only natural that a player handbook won't have a lot of rules for roleplay, because it doesn't need to.
Now regarding combats, it's different.
Since it's a direct conflict between the players and the storyteller, you need solid rules, or the players will feel cheated and there will be a lot of arguing about what you can and cannot do. It's the part that reminds the most the players that it is a game. You can spend an entire session doing just roleplay and not throw any dice, you can't in a combat. There will be lot of dice thrown. And since it's the action part of your movie, you don't want it to be boring, you don't want it to be just two group standing in the middle of a battlemap just attacking and doing damage. So what you do is create a system that encourage movement and gives a lot of action options to players and monsters, this way the combat will be dynamic. But the more option you give, the more space it takes in a player handbook. So instead of being 3-4 pages of text, the classes become 14 pages of different powers that you gain by leveling up.
So, when looking through the player handbook, the first impression you'll get is that it has a lot more pages about combat than roleplay. But does it means that the game focus more on combat and neglect roleplay? Absolutely not, but you need to play it to find out. So it was easy for some to convince people that never played it that 4e was just about combat, just look through the player handbook and you'll see! And now it became common knowledge, when you talk about 4e, a lot person that never try it will believe that the edition focus only on combat, because that's what they've been told and looking through the books will support it. I'm currently running a 4e campaign with players that never tried it exactly to show them what the edition is really about, and so far they are loving it, they don't think it focus only on combat or that combats are too long. But they're a little bit shaken when I ask them what they think happen or let them help me create the lore, because they're not used to that in DnD.
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AbdulAlhazred
Legend
I would not leave out Runepriest nor Seeker, as they are true classes. You did seem to miss Swordmage, so 26 at least.
However, I don't think its worth, in any sort of design sense, to call e-classes subclasses in MOST cases. Slayer and Knight, for instance, share nothing mechanically with the Fighter, don't play like it, etc. Now, the e-Wizard OTOH, sure, its just a variant set of wizard builds. I'm not going to split hairs too much on the other e-classes, some of them borrow more heavily (or can borrow) from their technical 'base' class, like the Warpriest, Sentinel, and to some extent the Cavalier (though its lack of really common mechanics makes it pretty much its own class de facto if not de jure). The post-E experiments like Berserker and Skald are harder to classify, they certainly lean on the core class power lists, but have fairly variant mechanics. Witch OTOH is just another Wizard build, as are Necromancer and Netheromancer. Blackguard being an odd one, as it falls in the same place as Cavalier, though thematically far from Paladin.
And despite its claim to being a 'wizard', Bladesinger, having nothing in common with Wizards at all, is definitely a class in all but name. I mean, it has pretty much an entire list of its own powers that are not really overlapping with wizard powers, and even if you DO use one, it works differently than normal.
My point is, there is a bunch of that stuff I would just drop, which is basically the e-classes. Most of them are not that well thought out, or just don't seem needed. Mage is just redundant, for instance, and Scout, Sentinel, and thief are just bleh. I have more mixed feelings about the Skald and Berserker, they just seem like weird experiments who's point I don't understand, though AFAIK they aren't mechanically bad. I loved Vampire, though it could use a wider power list.
AbdulAlhazred
Legend
Sounds good, my Holmes Basic has a whole hand-written codicil that incorporates the LBB stuff and fixes the rules, lol. I guess I was a 14-yr-old rules lawyer!
I'm happy to extend it to PP and ED too, though I think that won't add a ton. Feats may also help here now and then, and that might be a slight attraction for some of the more thematic but less substantive ones (but not much). I am liking the whole suggestion of Heroic Origin though, as a kind of fusion maybe of Theme and Background, with a bit of added story. HoML is supposed to be more about becoming a legendary/mythical figure, so it will fit in as a better version of background there, and I'm kicking myself for not thinking of it a long time ago now, lol!
I do take your meaning on the 'all over the place' and things like Arcana are a bit less clearly in the 'approach' vein. Still, if I know a lot of weird esoteric secrets and stuff, I probably rely on study and superior knowledge as part of my toolkit. Plus knowledge skills never really fit well in the 'skill' category either! So my thinking was "well, knowledge and approach (or talent) don't fit together any WORSE than knowledge and skill..." lol. So, I actually called skills 'knacks' in HoML, but its all just terminology anyway, call them '4e skills' and leave it at that, hehe.
Broadness is fine. I just don't necessarily see some things as really that closely associated at all. Thievery seems like a kind of classic 'technical' skill to me, and Bluff is much more of an 'approach' or 'talent', for instance. Mostly though, the 19 item 4e list is already pretty short, and seems really well-thought-out. I like short, but there could be TOO short! That's why I don't really hold with the idea of just having ability scores represent 6 'talents'. I mean, we had that in OD&D, but clearly it wasn't adequate.
I think its pretty well agreed that in the real world there's no very clean divide between Strength and Agility/Coordination, they generally go together to some degree, and few tasks test only one and not the others. I just see the game as more of a 'depiction engine', it isn't trying to simulate how the world works, much, but is instead giving the player breadcrumbs and incentives (depictive characterization I called it in another thread). So, the purpose of the two ability scores is more to differentiate which characters are 'strong men' (OK, forgive the gender thing there, lol) and which are more 'quick on their feet'. At the same time I don't really desire the greater complexity of 5e's insistence on decoupling ability score from skill, because at the table it just slows things down and the plus side is marginal at best. In HoML if you want to say you achieve something due to your agility, well, you undoubtedly had adequate strength to pull that off. I guess if you REALLY want to play a super clumsy oaf or some sort of weird weak fast person, then maybe 4e/5e/HoML isn't doing it quite so well, but I think you can manage.
I think most people simply looked at it and, like a lot of things, wrote it off without even bothering to dig. Getting access to cross-class stuff was always pretty nice though. Like I remember the Half-elf Starlock in my first campaign took Commander's Strike for his bonus 'use once per encounter' racial benefit power. He used that sucker in a LOT of fights too! At low levels it was a pretty good choice, as he could 'borrow' the Rogue when she was in a really good spot and hammer out a much nastier hit with her MBA. Later they tweaked the rogue so she could even benefit from that every turn, instead of every round, though by then that campaign was over. Anyway, there's a lot of those crazy things you can do, either with MC or Hybrid, though the lack of need to burn feats on it with Hybrid is a pretty big attraction in a lot of cases, and will usually make up for any 'watering down' of class features.
Yeah, my first group mostly wrapped up before PHB3 came out, or at least they didn't try a lot of new stuff by that point as they were rocking their epic story. Oddly nobody touched a hybrid in any of my later games. They spent a lot of time playing around with Pixies and stuff like that, but honestly IME most players were pretty happy with the 2 core PHBs (1 and 2) and maybe a few Power book options now and then. There was one friend of mine that did run a Cavalier once, IIRC and had fun with that. They all seemed mostly happy to avoid PHB3 though! lol.Absolutely. More than once when I was DMing I'd casually suggested a hybrid idea to a player who ran with it and who then, later, would foil my plans or current action, and I'd jokingly say "Who told you to play that character? Oh, right, I did...." Loved it every time.
EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
Perhaps, in attempting to be systematic, I messed up. So here's the list in alphabetical order. Using the original names, not the new subclass names; extra Essentials subclasses in parentheses.
- Ardent
- Artificer
- Assassin (+Executioner)
- Avenger
- Barbarian (+Berserker)
- Bard (+Skald)
- Battlemind
- Cleric (+Warpriest)
- Druid (+Protector, Sentinel)
- Fighter (+Knight, Slayer)
- Invoker
- Monk
- Paladin (+Blackguard, Cavalier)
- Psion
- Ranger (+Hunter, Scout)
- Rogue (+Thief)
- Runepriest
- Seeker
- Shaman
- Sorcerer (+Elementalist)
- Swordmage
- Vampire
- Warden
- Warlock (+Binder, Hexblade)
- Warlord
- Wizard (+Bladesinger, Mage, Sha'ir, Witch)
I make no exceptions for any Essentials subclass; some would be removed (e.g. Berserker, probably Binder), some would be folded into the base class one way or another (e.g. Elementalist, Knight, Hexblade), and some would be folded into some other class (e.g. Slayer to Ranger.) Bladesinger always came across as simply bad design: turning Wizard encounter powers into its dailies? Really? So...that always sounded more like a subclass for cutting than for folding in. Even if I did, it would be into the Swordmage, not the Wizard.
The Elementalist is, in my not so humble opinion, one of the best things to come out of Essentials. It is the first truly, actually SIMPLE spellcaster in D&D history. Warlocks were always fiddly, and regular casters have a bunch of stuff to memorize. The Elementalist, at least to a more meaningful degree than any previous attempt, actually made good on the idea of a class that was unequivocally magical, undeniably doing magic, but in really straightforward, easily digested ways. The only other rulesets I've seen achieve this are 13A and (to a lesser extent) PF Spheres of Power, and even then I don't think either did it quite as well. I would not promote the Elementalist to being its own class though. It would simply be one of the main build options for Sorcerer: a more fixed, linear model for those who want to make just a few choices and then get to the MAGIC baybee!
Kannik
Hero
Which is very much the thing miss about 4e, is the thematics (and the cinematics) built into each class. They had style.
Case in point... the flavour and feel of the Warden is great.
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