Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8950008" data-attributes="member: 82106">There is no such thing as a 'face class', particularly in 4e. Its a bad concept to start with and good riddance! Any character can potentially be a good negotiator or whatnot (note that there are several CHA primary builds in PHB1 which are likely to excel at this task). Core D&D had Fighting Man, Cleric, and Magic User. I'm happy to count the added Thief as a 'big 4'. 4e PHB1 has all of these classes in fine form, as well as the classic Ranger and Paladin classes (and if Paladins aren't a 'face class' I don't know what is).They are not off to the side. They are in a category where the players are not forced to pick one or the other. You get Ritual Caster (Wizard and Cleric in PHB1 get it free) if you want access to the rituals. Honestly, while most PHB1 characters have a solid first feat choice, the options are fairly limited from there and its no big deal to take Ritual Caster at first or third level. You can also buy/find scrolls, they are actually pretty cheap, and add a nice element of pre-planning (and the GM can always give you ones that are effectively required or highly thematic in ongoing play). The first 4e character I really played was a ritual specializing utility wizard. It was a simple build and was amazingly effective. The publication of rituals in 4e material was also quite substantial, there are currently  almost 400 listed in my compendium.Where I might agree with you is in terms of the material not highlighting their use much. That is, you won't find situations in published adventures where "wow this is why you want to have the X ritual!" Certainly plenty of opportunities to use them exist, but it isn't highlighted enough.The other problem is what I call the "Consumable Problem" of 4e, which is that human mentality is oriented towards scavenging and hording. So if it costs 10gp to cast a ritual players tend to try to avoid it, since in 4e you get a fixed amount of treasure. In classic D&D play, you might say to yourself "Oh, I'll expend this scroll so I can get some better new treasure!" You could see it as an investment, or at least a 'bet', and people love to bet! They don't love to spend however, so this tended to reduce the use of any 'pay-as-you-go' resource like rituals, potions, alchemy, etc. Thus I think treasure parcels are 'bad salesmanship' and should be written out of the game somehow, whilst preserving the IDEA that the game generally gives out a range of treasure values/level.but again, I deny the existence of this concept in 4e.First of all, the chromatic dragons (which are the far more classic and commonly used ones, metallics as a concept didn't even exist in the first iteration of D&D) are portrayed as creatures, which, while generally evil and selfish CAN serve as allies or patrons when it serves their, uniquely dragonish, interests. MM2 has full stats for Metallic dragons, and I believe some appeared in Dragon Magazine and thus the Compendium before that. Draconomicon: Chromatic Dragons was released EARLY, in November of 2008 and it has a LOT of 'dragon stuff', which will certainly let you use them in a wide variety of roles.There are tons of non-evil creatures. The sorrowsworn, the azer, the elementals, bears, owlbear, Cyclops, most dungeon 'creepy crawlies', low level undead, rats, gricks, kruthiks, Wyverns, griffons, hippogryphs, elves, halflings, gnomes, dwarves, spiders, many types of construct, Dark Creepers, Shadar-kai, Satyrs, Nagas, most humans, ettercaps, drakes, lizard folk, mummies, githzerai. Heck, there are literally 100's of unaligned things in MM1! The above list merely scratches the surface. In fact I would say the opposite, that 4e is the edition in which the potential for a range of moral stances amongst monsters is MOST allowed. 5e provides many fewer such creatures in its core MM AFAICT.Fair enough, but as with many issues in life, if we are unable to examine the current state of things objectively we will be unable to produce any meaningful solutions, won't we? I think 4e fell short in ENCOURAGING the use of consumables, and put rituals in that category, which is a shortcoming. GMs can solve it themselves by tossing out the actual 'parcel system' and scaling rewards to risk. The game should also go with that idea, or the 'abstract wealth' model that I use in HoML, which also rids us of this sort of issue.I guess you could place rituals inside class descriptions, mixed with powers. I think that might have initially made them a little more noticeable, but since most people approach 4e using electronic references I'm not sure there would have been a huge impact. Certainly the fact that there are around 500 published rituals seems adequate. As for other non-combat... I mean, they had SCs, they had a tight, thematic, and useful skill system that has clearly explicated use cases, as well as a system for handling non-defined uses (page 42, though it talks a bit too much about improvising attacks). The keywords system, and the rich set of character elements and lore associated with a lot of stuff is also quite significant here. Its generally much easier than in earlier editions to know with certainty for instance that "yes indeed, hitting that curtain with the flaming sword will light it on fire" (a bit obvious, but it works well for less obvious situations too). I mean, I've thought about this, but I don't know what it is that you would add! WotC found a couple niche things to add in, Power of Skill, and the Practices system (non-magically-themed rituals basically). Those don't hurt, but they were at best editing around the edges of what is really a pretty solid "general action resolution" system.</blockquote>

Verification