Legends and Lore: Modular Madness

[AbdulAlhazred]

The less the game siloes, the harder it becomes to design a game around this sort of presupposition.

Hmmmmm, not sure this is necessarily true. Could be a point of further discussion.

I'm not saying that Rolemaster is the be-all and end-all of diminishing returns as a design approach - but I think that 4e's more explicit siloing, based on a clear conception of the place of combat in the game, does a better job at supporting, out of the box, coherent party design, coherent encounter design, and coherent play.

Something closer to 4e's design, that I think someone mentioned upthread or one of the other related threads, would be to replace Feats and Utility powers with skill powers - so use skills as the starting point for siloing. And then think about what mechanic you use to require every PC to at least have some modicum of ability in each skill area (perhaps using stats to help characterise the areas - STR, DEX, CON, WIS for "exploration", INT for "knowledge", CHA for "social").

4e accomplished this last point pretty easily, just add 1/2 level to every skill and focus pretty much all task resolution on skills (and combat is really just a slightly more elaborated variation of the opposed check mechanic).

So, the issue with 4e is simply that because the game is focused around the combat activity to organize character concept/role you are motivated to add to your combat capability, but I'm not sure actually that this is a truth that must be absolute. Certainly if you used Diminishing Returns it would still be TRUE, but the two things would offset each other if it were properly implemented.

My motivation here is that hard siloing with keywords or explicit siloes of any sort is a 'big stick' approach. In some ways it is NICE that you can't be a useless lump in combat, but is that really so vital it has to be forced? I'd think the better approach would be to make it the easy way to do things, and provide good strong build support so you can simply start with a workable character and customize if you want. Something similar to an E-class character, then if you REALLY want a wallflower you can craft one.

 

[Frostmarrow]

So, 1st level characters cannot climb walls? And 3rd level+ characters can only climb walls 1/day?

Sorry, not gonna work.

This is a valid point. Continuing the vein of using Utility Powers in lieu of skills and feat,. I agree that there is a small disconnect problem of the once per day model of financing actions. But we already have a pretty neat currency in the game that is somewhat grounded in reality - The Healing Surge. (-You there stop that eye-rolling).

What if encounter powers run on the tapping of an active surge. You untap every turn. Activating a surge is a free action. Picture that you can have a short rest and recover a small amount of HP by deactivating a surge. You can also exhaust a surge and regain lots of HP or fire off a daily power. Now, an extended rest recharges all your surges. In this way you have a working economy that allows you to use three power levels worth of action and pay for them in three different ways. I also like to add that if you tap your surge to charge an encounter power attack you forfeit the opportunity to charge an encounter power defense or move action in the same round. The language needs a lot of work; "activating a surge" should perhaps be called "putting one's heart into it" or "giving it an extra effort".

The sought modularity comes from that you can rearrange the contents of your (see earlier post) role, class or race. You can pick just the three and be good to go or you can customize each one. I find that all that customizing (while fun) creates less tangiable characters. A Human Sage Wizard is a clear cut concept while a charcter built on a diverse selection of powers is not quite so recognizable.