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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dragonblade" data-source="post: 4475680" data-attributes="member: 2804">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.</blockquote>

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