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: 5577905" data-attributes="member: 82106">It goes far beyond combat and right to the heart of my character concept. A 3.5 high level fighter running around thinking he's going to lord it over anything even approaching his level has got to be a darn fool. Now, a 4e fighter DOES start with 3 skills, not a design decision I would consider one of the best thought out in the history of 4e. OTOH the class skills lists in 4e are rather irrelevant since you can pick up any old skill you want simply by telling the DM you had a background element that made it relevant to your character. And given that all skills are broadly applicable almost any skill is potentially relevant in a wide range of situations.Again, my 4e fighter works CONCEPTUALLY and in an RP sense because he does have equality with wizards, 'spell' using monsters, etc. Sure, the equality is in combat, but his whole concept is based around that. He's genuinely deadly and effective and he knows it. Likewise he could (also) be a renowned explorer, a respected leader, etc. One of the big issues that 4e actually addressed WRT 3.5 was PLOT power too. Notice that my fighter can easily have quite a bit of traction here over all levels. His 3.5 counterpart was also gimped on this front. Not only by a skill system that punished him horribly, but simply by the fact that again casters easily made trivial any pretense he had to using even the abilities he did have out of combat. 4e did a pretty decent job of opening up a lot of space for more interesting plots and storylines by reigning in the caster's ability to address practically every problem with magic. Once again we see that by providing a good balance between different classes the game is opened up a lot. There are many more valid choices and approaches to solving problems now and thus many more character concepts which actually work in play. It isn't perfect and the system did have to tone down magic in some respects to achieve it, which certainly removes a few options, but I think it was a logical and carefully considered design decision.</blockquote>

Verification