NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8946212" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I hear this an awful lot, and I still don't understand it. 4e is no more "a combat game" than either 3e or 5e--and in several ways, significantly less of one. Skills are both much more powerful and much more accessible than either 3e or 5e. "Spells with non-combat purposes" ARE in the PHB. They're called rituals. They chose to put only 8 classes in each book to keep the books focused. PHB2, which came out all of 9 months later (June 2008 for PHB1, March 2009 for PHB2), covered all the missing baseline classes except Monk. I've no idea what you're talking about regarding the MM, since it's got plenty of typical neutral creatures (owlbear, berbalang, manticore, griffon, shambling mound, etc.) It's got angels, unicorns, storm giants, and (yes) dryads...who ARE plant-beings, why is that an issue exactly? The ancient Greeks thought "hamadryads" were semi-divine trees, after all (with some myths positing the "dryad" alone as merely the projected spirit of the hamadryad tree body.) Specifically they are "medium fey humanoid (plant)." All "(plant)" does is tell you that dryads breathe and eat, but do not need to sleep; they're still humanoids.I don't at all blame you for being put off by the presentation, but like...a whole bunch of this stuff is simply false, and some that isn't false is pretty willfully ignoring what's actually there in the rules (e.g. rituals, SCs, Bard showing up less than a year in, etc.) Is there any wonder people get frustrated with the way folks talk about 4e? You're talking about fixing problems that weren't there and addressing absences that weren't even absences!This is like the thing someone else mentioned, about letting anyone with the relevant skills learn rituals...that's literally already a thing. All you need is the Ritual Caster feat, exactly the same as 5e. And you don't even strictly need that if you don't want it--you CAN buy consumable ritual scrolls that provide one-off uses!--------As for my own stuff:4e, as a system, is mostly fine. With all due respect, screw all that "call it something other than D&D" nonsense--that's crappy gatekeeping at absolute best and honestly 99% of the time just the same old horrible "It's an MMO on paper"/"it's a boardgame not an RPG" tripe repackaged for the modern, discerning edition warrior. DOUBLY so all the pearl-clutching about "grid-filling" which wasn't even a thing.What it needs is:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Vastly better presentation. The power cards make powers easy to read, but too monotonous. Find a way to keep almost all of the clarity and specificity of the existing powers, while restoring some of the reading-a-parchment-tome "feel" of 3e.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">More playtesting on skill challenges, Stealth, etc.--stuff that got tuned up post-release but shouldn't have needed to be tuned up. Run all of that through another pass or two just to make sure.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Run a high-pass filter through all the powers and feats. People make WAY too big a deal about the number of feats etc. 4e had, but it was excessive and should be trimmed down. Cutting out somewhere around half of all feats and class powers would improve things immensely.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Improve and expand on both Skill Challenges and Rituals. They're both great ideas, the former just needs a tune-up and examples of how it can really shine, while the latter needs to be pushed harder as part of "this is how you do cool magic things."</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">An actual gazetteer/field guide/etc. for the "Points of Light" setting. Because it's honestly a really cool setting and a lot of people would never have poo-pooed 4e nearly so hard if they understood the lore grounding for a number of the classes (and races, albeit to a lesser extent.)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Fewer first-level choices by giving characters good starting options. Give everyone a rock-solid At-Will, so they can pick a contextual one as their second. Possibly, give each class a specific starting Encounter and Daily power, maybe allowing them to be changed later, but again making sure these things are rock-solid good options. Smooth the road to a starting character WITHOUT taking away power or strategic depth.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Integrate Themes and Backgrounds into a single thing: "Heroic Origins." These explain where you came from, what got your adventure started, why you're choosing to be a hero. Potentially, they might offer an alternative stat increase choice, so long as it isn't the same as what you get from race (e.g. a Dragonborn with the "Former Farmhand" Heroic Origin could not choose +2 Str from race and +2 Str from her Origin, but an Eladrin could have +2 Str and her choice of +2 Int, Dex, or Cha.)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Add rules for "Zero Levels"/"Novice Levels" which spool out the "Heroic Origin" to variable degrees. At slowest, you start with almost nothing Well-designed "Novice Level" rules are extremely important for addressing divergent and potentially contradictory desires from different cultures of play for D&D.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Useful tools for home-brewing your own powers, races, HO/PP/ED, etc. Page 42 is great for improvisation, but having a tool that would give you reasonably balanced powers/etc. you create yourself would be enormously helpful, and would make a major rebuttal to the only-half-true claim that it's hard to homebrew for 4e.</li> </ul></blockquote>

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