Please review my house rules on recovering powers and ritual casting in combat

[Dragonblade]

Please comment on my house rules. First of all, I wanted rules for recovering powers and also casting rituals in combat so I came up with something I liked. I also loved the Wound system that 77IM came up with (and he attributed to Keith Baker).

I also made a tweak to how skills and actions points work. I am aware that this makes PCs a bit more powerful in that they now can possibly use their expended powers more often. I'm ok with that since one of my goals is to slightly decrease combat time without going as far as I have seen some other posters who have suggested such things as doubling all damage in order to speed up combat and make it grittier.

I have also always disliked the notion that you cannot recover powers. It has always jarred my suspension of disbelief.

Anyway, let me know what you think:

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Skills – When selecting trained skills, characters are not restricted to their class list. They can choose any skill as a trained skill.
For example, a cleric PC would be trained in Religion (per the class description) plus any three skills of their choice. Currently they would be limited in choosing trained skills from the cleric skill list.

Action Points – The current rules for gaining and accumulating action points no longer apply. Instead, a character always starts every encounter with 1 action point they can spend during that encounter. Unspent action points cannot be saved.

New Actions:

Refocus
Characters can recover expended powers and ready them again by clearing their mind and focusing their will.
Refocus: Standard Action

Encounter powers – A character can regain one expended encounter power of their choice.
Daily powers – By spending a Standard Action AND 1 healing surge, a character can recover one expended daily power. During a short rest, characters can expend as many healing surges as they like to recover as many daily powers as they like.



Ritual Casting
You can now speed up the casting of a ritual and cast rituals more effectively in combat.
Ritual Casting: Standard action

Can only perform Minor Actions – While using the Ritual Casting action, the only other actions a character can perform are Minor actions.
Combat Advantage – Until the beginning of your next turn, you grant combat advantage.
Provoke Opportunity Attacks – Ritual casting provokes opportunity attacks from adjacent enemies.
Casting time – The default time required to perform a ritual is outlined in the description of the ritual. This time can be reduced by performing skill checks.
Skill check – Make a Moderate difficulty skill check using the key skill specified in the ritual description. If you succeed, the Standard action you spent casting the ritual counts toward the time required to perform the ritual as if you had spent 1 minute performing the ritual. Every 5 points by which you exceed the DC counts as another minute. Once you begin performing a ritual you must continue to use the Ritual Casting action every round until you fulfill the time requirement, at which time the ritual takes effect. Otherwise, the rules for interrupting a ritual apply normally.
Final effect – A completed ritual takes effect at the end of the turn you fulfilled all the time and other requirements. Follow the rules under the ritual description as normal. If a skill check is required to determine the effect, make that skill check separately from any skill checks made to reduce the time requirement.
Aid Another – Up to 4 others can assist you in performing the ritual per the Aid Another action. They do not need to know the ritual to assist you.

And the awesome Wound rules are here:

http://www.enworld.org/forum/4e-fan-creations-house-rules/240891-wound-system.html#post4463100

 

[greyscale1]

Everything looks okay. I like how you let everyone get any skill.

REGENERATING A DAILY POWER LIKE THAT IS FAR FAR TOO GOOD.

 

[Dragonblade]

Everything looks okay. I like how you let everyone get any skill.

REGENERATING A DAILY POWER LIKE THAT IS FAR FAR TOO GOOD.

Like I said, I'm ok with regenerating the daily powers. I want to speed up combat by making the PCs a bit tougher and able to deal more damage. And it costs them healing surges and a whole round where they aren't doing anything if they want to recover the dailies.

One of my players liked the Daily recovery by spending surges during short rests, but suggested not allowing recovery of dailies in combat. So, I'm considering that.

 

[Emirikol]

Big question: What's the reasoning in your campaign world for this? How is your world different from standard D&D that these rules apply?

jh
[edit: just so I'm not some cheezeball bag of wind like the people that lay into the stuff I post..I'd like to post some suggestions on how I intend to blatantly steal your rules and use them in my Warhammer game:

Skills: In the Warhammer world, characters are more diverse than the rigid rules skillset of D&D.

Action points: In the WH world, all characters are ordinary souls with opportunistic potential. All characters go into an encounter with ONE AP. Other AP rules are not used.

Refocus: I probably won't use this one, as I dont' want the PC's to have more power, however I might allow PC's to use TWO surges if they're desperate enough (which always makes for a more grim and gritty game

Ritual spells in combat: In the WH world, the forces of Chaos have tempted spellcasters into using their Rituals more often than in standard D&D. (your rules here). Chaos taint rules apply on a natural 1 on the skill check roll.

Hope this helps

My house rulebook: http://gallery.rptools.net/v/contrib/emirikol7/
jh]

 

[Dragonblade]

Big question: What's the reasoning in your campaign world for this? How is your world different from standard D&D that these rules apply?

jh
[edit: just so I'm not some cheezeball bag of wind like the people that lay into the stuff I post..I'd like to post some suggestions on how I intend to blatantly steal your rules and use them in my Warhammer game:

Skills: In the Warhammer world, characters are more diverse than the rigid rules skillset of D&D.

Action points: In the WH world, all characters are ordinary souls with opportunistic potential. All characters go into an encounter with ONE AP. Other AP rules are not used.

Refocus: I probably won't use this one, as I dont' want the PC's to have more power, however I might allow PC's to use TWO surges if they're desperate enough (which always makes for a more grim and gritty game

Ritual spells in combat: In the WH world, the forces of Chaos have tempted spellcasters into using their Rituals more often than in standard D&D. (your rules here). Chaos taint rules apply on a natural 1 on the skill check roll.

Hope this helps

My house rulebook: Jay Hafner
jh]

Thanks Emirikol.

So for skills, I felt that limiting skills to a class skill list was limiting what players could do to customize their character's backgrounds. For example, why shouldn't a wizard be able to choose training in Acrobatics for example, if that is their character's background?

It seems by making a simple change, I can give my players a lot more freedom to customize their PCs.

When playing 4e, we have also run into situations where we had multiple encounters, and people were forgetting how many action points they should have and so on. Since you can only spend one per encounter anyway, and since we found that action points allow for some cool and dramatic combos in a fight, I decided to just say, ok, you get 1 action point in every encounter. No more bookkeeping needed.

Does it give PCs a bit of a boost? Sure, but I'm ok with that because one of my other issues with 4e is that I feel combat is just a little bit too long. I want to give players a bit of an edge. And that brings me to my rules for recovering powers.

I don't want to double damage or halve hitpoints, but I want to make a PCs a bit tougher and have combat get over a bit quicker. I tend to run the PCs against opponents a bit tougher than they are and what I have found is that the combats tend to take too long. After about 5 rounds, combat starts to get boring. I want to alleviate that.

I also found that it disturbs my suspension of disbelief when players expend powers and simply have no in-combat way to recover and use them. I think resource recovery in combat adds excitement and drama to the game and lets players use their favorite powers more often. Will some players want to go to an old standby power? Sure, its possible. But by doing so they are trading off a round where they basically do nothing in order to recover their powers. I think that is a reasonable tradeoff.

And finally, I think rituals should be castable in combat. We had a situation come up where the players had their backs against a chasm and were fighting against tough opponents. One PC had the Shadow Bridge ritual and wanted to cast it, but it took 5 minutes!

So an extremely dramatic scene where the defenders valiantly try to hold off the enemy while the mage stands in the back casting his spell wasn't possible. And that really bugged me. D&D SHOULD be about dramatic moments like this. Especially 4e. So on the fly, I came up some rules similar to what I posted here. I allowed that PC to use that ritual after a few rounds of frantic skill checks and the party managed to cross to safety and escape.

It was an awesome scene with a lot of tension and drama. But it would not have been possible with the ritual rules as they stand.