D&D 4E My 4e problem.

Obryn · Mar 19, 2009

You won't get everything to work just like it did under 3.5, since these are very different games. With that said, I think you could pretty easily do a four-tiered approach.

(1) Backgrounds. Everyone picks a background which goes along with their alignment. This gives a pretty minor bonus, like +2 to a skill or something of that nature. However, it qualifies you for ...

(2) Feats. Characters can take feats which enhance their alignment's specialty, so certain ones could get feats which enhance healing; others might get better damage on weapon attacks; others might improve elemental attacks of various sorts; others might work as element-swap feats, so you could change (for instance) fire damage into acid damage.

(3) Power-swap feats. Each alignment could have multiple powers. You could take a power-swap feat to trade it out - kind of like Spellscarred feats, only without a Multiclass Feat requirement.

(4) Paragon paths. Give each alignment 1 or 2 paragon paths which work with their stuff.

If this is done well, I wouldn't bother making any restrictions on what alignments can be which classes. The feat chains, powers, and paragon paths will make it pretty clear which ones work best. Additionally, reflavoring the existing powers shouldn't be too rough... Take the Cleric E1 power, Healing Strike. A holy character would smite their foes and heal their ally with the grace of their god. An unholy character would attack their foe, and siphon that foe's life energy to their ally. Same game effect, totally different flavor.

-O

Cadfan · Mar 19, 2009

Michael Morris said:
This isn't a trust issue - I don't know where you're getting that at. The point of the setting as it is currently written is that spells and the like are attached to color.

I know its not a trust issue. What I'm saying is that it COULD be a trust issue if you LET it be a trust issue. And letting it be a trust issue may be the best choice.

In a regular game, the DM might talk to a player and say, "Ok, so your character has a royal background and was trained in the royal knight's academy, which means he's a bit pretentious, very militaristic, and not much of a scrapper. That's great. When you make your character, pick feats, skills, and powers that realize your goal." And then the player does.

This doesn't have to be that different. If your characters understand your vision for each alignment, they'll be able to make something that matches your world.

The advantages are,

1. A lot less work for you,
2. Gets the players directly involved and directly invested in their alignments,
3. Can be used with absolutely any class created at present or any time in the future with no additional effort by the DM except reviewing the player's character,
4. From an player perspective, its exactly as good as if you had gone through every power in the game and matched it with an alignment. Because after all, while powers no one is using won't have an alignment, that doesn't really matter, does it? Trees in the forest when no one is around to hear, and all that.

The disadvantages are,

1. Less control. A player might make a decision you do not like. This is where the trust comes in.
2. Less immersion for the DM. The players won't be able to tell that there's no assigned alignment for Power X from Class Y that no one has taken. But you will, and maybe that will bug you. I'd encourage you not to care about that sort of thing, since, you know, you're the DM and immersion in my opinion should be something you worry about creating instead of having, but if there's anything this forum has taught me, some DMs really, really care about their own sense of immersion.

PrecociousApprentice · Mar 19, 2009

Here is a good source I would use for just what Cadfan is recommending.

Here is a short summary.

Overview

You can change the power source, energy type, and trained skills of a class.
You can swap which ability scores a class uses for its powers.
You can change around class features somewhat, although it's best to keep them as similar to the existing features as possible.
You'll need to rename a lot of your class features and powers.
All this monkeying requires strict DM oversight! It's not an excuse to swap a class skill for no reason, or consolidate all your powers to use the same ability score.

Just tell the players to create their characters and cutomize their classes with these principals in mind. Then ask that you be able to review anything that is changed before play, and then make sure that they know that the game is in a perpetual state of playtesting. Reserve the right to ask for changes or removal of problem mechanics later.

Check out the examples. They illustrate a lot of this. Don't worry about remaking the entire PHB. Just do the things that you are going to be using. A campaign wiki with the altered powers would work great, and highlights that the powers are in an unfinished state.

4e is super easy to homebrew. Start small, only create what you will use, and build upon what you already have. This is all just generic advice for worldbuilding. Most people do this by taking a game system and mapping a world to it. You will be taking a world, and remapping a game system to it. The same principals should apply, as long as you are comfortable homebrewing at all.

Plane Sailing · Mar 20, 2009

PrecociousApprentice said:
4e is super easy to homebrew.

Personally, I'd say it is the most difficult to homebrew ever... and I've got over 30 years experience of homebrewing everything under the sun. 4e locks things down pretty tightly, and although you could homebrew by, say, omitting all divine power source classes, anything more dramatic (like MM is attempting) is much harder than it has ever been.

Cheers

keterys · Mar 20, 2009

I'd say that it's just as easy to make a new power as it was to make a new spell... and it's much easier to make a monster. I'd say that making new classes is much more difficult, since _all_ classes have a spell list like clerics/wizards/druids used to.

I will say that I think people could copy powers with cosmetic changes more than they do.

PrecociousApprentice · Mar 20, 2009

PS, what you call "locking things down pretty tightly", I call making design goals explicit. By reskinning what I can, or slightly altering what can't be adequately reskinned, I have less need to create things from whole cloth. When I do need to design from a blank slate, I have a ton of examples as a guide for what will work well in 4e. The fact that they have tighter tolerances in 4e has actually made it easier for me to feel like I can make a choice.

Since you don't really need all new classes for your campaign, homebrewing will be less difficult than recreating the PHB. Since you only need those classes that the players will play, you only need to homebrew those classes. Since powers that are too high in level for the characters to use are not needed, this also cuts down on your work load. Since you have a whole gaming group to get this done, your individual work load is again limited. Since you have a very prominent role in the worlds premiere D&D website, you can harness the creative juices of a good part of the RPG community. Your needs are limited and your resources are great. You just need to decide on a systematic approach.

I am not saying that this will be plug and play. I am not saying that the only ways to do it are the ways suggested here. I am saying that the task is not as difficult as it at first might appear, and that the satisfaction with the product upon completion will likely be huge.

Good luck, and if you have questions about how to create specific character concepts from your campaign in the 4e ruleset, I would be happy to help you homebrew.

AbdulAlhazred · Mar 21, 2009

This is overall an interesting concept, and in some ways a lot like some of the things I do in my game world (which I've been using for 30 years now, since before AD&D even existed).

First maybe I should take a shot at interpreting the gist of what you're doing here, because I think while a lot of the previous posters have some very good points they may either not have explicitly articulated the basic assumptions or they may have missed some of the key elements of what the ethoses do.

The way I interpret it characters do not so much HAVE an ethos as that their character building choices and in-game actions organically evolve AS an ethos. That is a PC doesn't 'pick an ethos', they simply are what they are and their ethos arises from that. As you say, it may be that many/most characters don't pigeonhole into one particular ethos, but their choices will tend towards a theme, and some characters may be fairly narrowly defined, to the point where they might be considered to be of a particular ethos.

I don't know exactly how you mechanically factored in the effects on the PCs of ethos. You mentioned there were implications for the characters, such as perhaps greater or lesser vulnerability to magic associated with another ethos, or ethos associated items, etc.

In game mechanics terms I think 4e can handle this without a drastic amount of work. There are a few different tools at your disposal, some of which are already being used with the existing 4e alignment system (which I agree is basically not worth much).

1. Reskinning - As other people have mentioned, a LOT of the powers (especially the non-melee attack powers) are pretty easy to reskin. This can be used in 2 ways. You can go through and reskin powers in order to more clearly differentiate the predilections of certain classes for certain ethoses. Secondly it can be used to provide greater flexibility, so a player can reskin his/her character's powers to make the PC more thematically unified.

2. Specific feats - Existing feats can be reskinned or new variations created which allow you to reinforce the player's choices. The Divinity feats are an existing model of this, to some extent, though I think a lot more could be done with it. Instead of being Divinity feats they can be ethos feats. They won't be tied to a particular class feature necessarily, but they could be.

3. Class features - These can certainly also be reskinned in various ways. "Fey Pact" can become "Initiate of the World Tree", etc. Nothing really needs to change mechanically. The Fey Pact related Warlock powers can themselves be reskinned a bit to provide a flavor that works with the reskinned pact. The reskinning could be more abstract than that as well, where Fey Pact becomes more like "A Warlock that uses life energy". What ethos they advance with that can be a different question.

4. Paragon Paths and Epic Destinies - These are all really very malleable. The existing ones can be pretty easily reskinned or you can pretty easily write new ones. They are designed to be pretty lightweight for just this reason. Epic Destinies are really even simpler. There is very little in the way of game mechanics associated with them to start with.

I also agree with other people that have suggested that this is best approached as a process that happens as the game evolves. There is little need to try to define everything from the start.

I would get together with one or two of the players that are most interested in doing it and work out the most basic stuff with them. Just sit down with the 4e PHB and noodle it around. Consider what a particular character build might look like. What feat development would be needed to translate character X into 4e terms? Then you have an idea what you need. In a few hours you should be able to get to the point where you can construct a few low level test characters and work out what some decent power skinning looks like, etc. I think pretty soon you'll have figured out the general approach and then both you and the players can go on and extend that as far as they need to in order to build the characters they want to play.

They may even have as much or more fun playing around with the rules as they do playing their characters! I know it would be the kind of thing that would interest me as a player, but of course I don't know your group.

One thing is for sure, 4e is a lot easier system to DM than older editions in a general way. It has issues, but they are more issues of fitting a bit narrower style of play at the table than of being inflexible WRT the atmosphere of the world.

Michael Morris · Mar 21, 2009

Well, I got the PHB II today and I have some ideas to work through in my head. So we'll see.

Goumindong · Mar 21, 2009

Michael Morris said:
That's a thought - but currently any class can be any ethos though admittedly some are a stretch (Sodran Druids). I don't particularly want to break that up if I can avoid it.

Consider ignoring all fluff and names. Look at the powers and classes entirely mechanically and then justify the powers with whatever background you want from there.

For the most part, power names and fluff serves to anchor the mechanics to an idea in your head. The reason this is done is because most people have an easier time relating to the common fantasy tropes. I.E. Clerics heal, Wizards throw fireballs, fighters hit things with axes, etc. But at the end of the day, all a cleric is is a system of choices that a player makes within the tactical framework of the game.

DnD has this funky "if its in DnD its in 'this campaign setting'" thing going on. And while that makes sense for the general DnD(I.E. living realms, most games in common fantasy troped worlds) because it gives everyone an idea of what is happening in most games they might find(increasing the network effect), it might not work for your specific game. In which case you should just abandon all the fluff.

That being said, the "points of light" idea is very handy for a system to abandon that fluff. "Points of Light" basically says that stuff is unknown until the DM makes it known. In this case we can expand that to the players. You don't need to formulate a system for the entire system, you just have to say to the players "you need to create your own fluff for whatever class you choose that fits with your power source". They will go and make characters that do that. E.G. they might be a "black" cleric who uses the warlock or wizard class template. All they have to do is realize that any time the game says "arcane" it means "Black Diving Magic" or whatever.

That will take a lot of the work of creating a system off of you, and just leave the parts that you don't need undefined while making everyone more happy than they would be(since they get to decide what they do and how they justify it, giving them a bit more flexibility with their class and power choices)