Naszir said:
I'm not sure why people are saying that healing surges wouldn't work in Midnight. From what I can tell healing surges are not magical. It's a game mechanic trying to represent that when an attack is successful you aren't necessarily taking physical damage. It's the abstract nature of the D&D combat system. A majority of your hit points take into account combat endurance, scrapes, bruises, and turning a deadly strike into a minor one.
A healing surge just represents, in a lot of ways to me, that you can get an adreneline rush or catch your breath. A healing surge represents that after a battle is over you can regain some of the endurance you lost and then press on.
I guess this does take some grit away from the Midnight setting though I think if you played it right, healing surges would work fine.
Warlocks would probably become an NPC only class.
I think the biggest problem is the difference in the magic systems. I am not sure how you'd could convert Midnight magic into 4e magic.
You'd have to create the Channeler class and create a new power list. Probably make the class heavily dependent on rituals.
The Barbarian, Fighter, Rogue, and Wildlander would all be somewhat simple to convert.
The healing surges are designed upon different underlying assumptions about how the game will work. That's part of the problem. In Midnight, healing is very hard to get....either you heal naturally, which is *supposed* to take a while, or you heal magically, which requires a channeler, and is very likely to result in a Legate hunting you down, and exterminating your party.
The healing is hard to come by, because the underlying assumption of the game is that the world is against the PCs, and you're *not* supposed to be running into fights, or challenging the servants of Shadow directly, all the time. Healing is rare so that you're faced with the choice.....rescue that peasant woman about to be assaulted by a bunch of orcs, or leave her to her fate, and proceed with your mission, which is getting important information to someone who can use it to strike a larger blow against the shadow. If you save the woman, you might be able to do so.....but now you're wounded, and have to rest....and when those troops don't report in to their officers, a second squad is being sent to investigate, so now you're going to be hunted by fresh troops while your resources are expended. Midnight is very much about hard choices, and *not* fighting if you can avoid it...and the system is designed to enforce that.
I've been running my game for months, and it's quite common for the PCs to be running around at half strength, and the last time they intervened to help a woman fleeing slavers, it almost got the entire party killed.....and they've been hunted since.
4E's healing surges just disrupt that, because whether you figure that they're magical, or simply a "second wind" the end result is that the PCs can get their HP back *relatively* easy. They can afford to get into a fight, knowing that they can get healing afterwards. In Midnight, you generally *don't* know that you can get healed.
You're right about the Channeler. It would need to be entirely redone....it's definitely not a blaster class, so the 4E Wizard would be unsuitable. You might be able to do it somehow with rituals....but how to balance that? I assume it's possible, but it would take work.
As to the others....well, in Midnight, you've got fighters, barbarians and rogues.......and yes, you have Heroic Paths....but largely, PCs are under-equipped, and under trained compared to the soldiers of Shadow. It's the servants of darkness who have the big fighter academies, access to the best weapons etc. The PCs are often farm hands who've picked up a weapon after their village was raided for people to feed a passing orc army or something along those lines...they have access to neither the training, or the equipment that the enemy has. The 4E classes assume that the PCs are the best trained, and the best equipped, and are born heroes from the beginning, correct? Their abilities have been designed to match that play style. Maybe I've misunderstood that aspect.
Much easier to simply use the setting with the system for which it was designed.
Banshee
