Removing homogenity from 4e

[Fanaelialae]

As an adjunct to my previous post, the simplest method might simply be to assign one or two "background perks" at character creation.

For example, the aforementioned noble might occasionally be able to call upon a political favor using his family's clout by making a successful Diplomacy check. A cleric of nature might by able to summon seeds and accelerate plant growth with Nature. The fighter might be an enforcer for the thieves guild, giving him access to a reliable fence in most towns using Streetwise, as well as knowledge of thieves' cant. So on and so forth...

These ties would probably come, of course, with their own obligations.

I realize that this might not be defined or crunchy enough for some, but it would open player options beyond whatever list of "kits" the DM might otherwise come up with.

 

[ExploderWizard]

This is never a problem for me. I've never seen a session ruined by too many players getting in on the action, whatever the 'action' might be.

Agreed. The opposite problem is far more common. Everyone just lets the X monkey do his thing. The problem is that almost all systems promote the "specialize or perish" method of resolution. Skill challenges at least attempted to fix things with multiple skills usable in a challenge. Even with that, there are times when a party member has no applicable skill and sits out a skill challenge for fear of bringing down the team.

Some kind of mechanic that rewards taking action over inaction regardless of applicable skill would be a great way to encourage more participation.

Would there be any huge problems with the game if every class got the same number of trained skills, none of which were restricted?

Maybe this is because I've traditionally DM'ed more that I've played. I don't like to have to worry who's going to shine during any particular part of the adventure. I don't like having to script 'rogue encounters', so the rogue has his moment in the spotlight. I like to let the adventure go where it (ie the players) will, and having to plan around narrowly-defined, niche-protected characters makes that more difficult.

Nothing needs to be scripted if the DM concentrates on creating the problems and lets the players come up with the solutions. No matter how much you may plan for a certain ability to shine, players will find a way to get around the problem in a completely different way.

You shine when you have your character do something clever or entertaining.

I agree 100%. It's too bad that game designs these days equate clever and entertaining with " 100% as damaging/badass as the player to the right."

AFAIC, it's bad to have classes that by design can't make meaningful contributions in a given encounter type. You differentiate character classes by how they take action, not by whether they can take action at all.

Agreed again. The trick is overcoming the player mentality of "optimal action or no action at all." If the game has to maintain a minute to minute balance of equality then everyone shines equally bright in every situation and homogenization is the natural result.

 

[Rechan]

This is never a problem for me. I've never seen a session ruined by too many players getting in on the action, whatever the 'action' might be.

The extreme example of "not enough people in on the action" is Shadowrun. Its classes are very specialized in a compartmentalized fashion. If you have a combat guy, a decker, and a rigger, then you have one hour where the combat guy gets in combat while the hacker and rigger sit on their hands, one hour where the decker hacks while the combat guy and the rigger sit on their hands, and one hour where the rigger drives and fiddles with machines while the combat guy and hacker sit on their hands.

Monsters with enormous hit point totals and comparatively low damage output cause the grind.

Indeed.

And with PCs that have a LOT of ways to heal, it becomes a game of whack-a-mole. "He hits you for 20 damage." "The paladin grants me a surge and adds his cha bonus, I get 17 back." Things don't start getting tense until there's a limited amount of surges/ways to heal left.

 

[NoWayJose]

When all you have staring down the pipeline are more/better attack powers and a 1/2-dozen utility powers (most of which are just combat abilities minus the attack roll) The classes seem to blur. Who cares if the daily power you got was Fireball or Flame Strike; they're both Atk vs. reflex cubes that deal Xd6 + stat amount of fire.

Maybe some of us are bothered by the "illusion of choice" which conflicts with the reality of mechanical homogenity?

What if your wizard, for example, chooses to learn fire magic and that's that. As the wizard advances, he doesn't choose different fire-based spells with different names. He just gets better at fire magic (in terms of damage and/or control) and any spell name he wants to apply to his newfound ability is completely arbitrary and subjective.

So from the get-go, you know what to expect and nobody is trying to pretend that you're learning radically new powers. Now you can singlemindedly advance in fire magic, or branch out to new arcane paths.

I think this is also in line with reality and maybe even with Diablo-style games and ability trees. People generally don't gain brand new abilities all the time. Although its never too late to learn new tricks, people usually get better at what they already do by building on previous skillsets.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is what's happening anyway in 4E except that the rules trying to gloss over this fact. However, if you don't feel that someone is pulling the wool over your eyes, you'll be more content with the system.

 

[Remathilis]

The problem (referring to the above something that only x can do) with this is that you can easily end up with circumstances that negatively impact the game, all for the sake of niche protection.

A prime example of this was 3.x rogue Trapfinding (which, IIRC, stated that only classes with trapfinding could find traps with a DC 20 or higher- most traps). Your character could be a master trap maker with a +50 search check, but unless you took a level of rogue (or one of the few other classes with Trapfinding) you could locate only the crudest of traps. It neither made sense nor benefited the game (IMO).

It was problematic because if you didn't have a trapfinder in the party, traps became that much more deadly (most DMs I knew simply would avoid using them without a trapfinder, because we weren't the biggest "Gotcha!" fans).

I think that a better approach would be to accentuate something that a particular class excels at. For example, rather than declaring that only rogues can find traps I think it would be better for the game as a whole to simply give them a bonus to finding traps. Of course, the pitfall of this is that it can easily lead back into the situation where either the rogue is the only one who can find the trap (because the DC is adjusted for a rogue with trapfinding) or the rogue automatically succeeds at trapfinding even when blindfolded (the DCs are calibrated so that anyone has a chance for success).

One solution might be to offer the rogue a small bonus (such as a +2 which doesn't much unbalance the DCs), or a feature that guarantees he's one of the characters with the highest trapfinding ability (such as allowing him to use his highest ability score in place of Wisdom when searching for traps) to reflect his expertise, but I imagine most would consider this insufficient differentiation.

Funny you mention trapfinding; out of all the games I've played recently, this is one of the areas 4e botched when it came to "improving" on 3e.

The best trapfinder in the game is not a rogue; its a druid. The Druid is wisdom-prime AND has perception on his class list. Tack on a +2 wis race and/or a race with +2 perception (hello elf) and you have a trapfinder that can't be beat (extra cheese: throw on a background with a +2 perception boon).

A rogue can't compete with that. Wisdom is a dump-stat for rogues (since it shares a load with charisma, which is infinitely more useful to all rogues, even brutals) and rogues get no bonus specifically to searching traps out.

After 3 games with a minotaur druid and a human rogue, trapfinding became "Minotaur, do you see any traps I need to disable?"

I'll give you two examples on how trapfinding could have been better handled without resorting to "you must have this class ability to find traps".

Pathfinder: Anyone can use perception to find mechanical traps. Only rogues can find magical traps without resorting to spells. In addition, a rogue gets a bonus equal to 1/2 their level to find traps of any type, insuring they'll always have a higher bonus than another class with a similar rank in perception.

Basic Fantasy: All classes can find traps 16% of the time (1 on 1d6). Thieves get the ability to find/remove traps (which begins at 15% on a d100) but increases with level, so that a 2nd level thief has 20%, a 3rd level 25%, etc. So while a fighter and a thief have roughly the same chance to find traps at 1st level (16%, +/- 1 pt), a 10th level thief has a 55% chance, while the fighter still only has 1 in 6.

Both allow non-rogues/thief to search for traps, but maintain niche protection for the rogue/thief to be better at trapfinding. Ironically, 4e doesn't provide said niche protection to rogues, and thus rogues make worse trapfinders than any other class with a high-wisdom and perception training.

 

[Fanaelialae]

Funny you mention trapfinding; out of all the games I've played recently, this is one of the areas 4e botched when it came to "improving" on 3e.

The best trapfinder in the game is not a rogue; its a druid. The Druid is wisdom-prime AND has perception on his class list. Tack on a +2 wis race and/or a race with +2 perception (hello elf) and you have a trapfinder that can't be beat (extra cheese: throw on a background with a +2 perception boon).

A rogue can't compete with that. Wisdom is a dump-stat for rogues (since it shares a load with charisma, which is infinitely more useful to all rogues, even brutals) and rogues get no bonus specifically to searching traps out.

After 3 games with a minotaur druid and a human rogue, trapfinding became "Minotaur, do you see any traps I need to disable?"

I'll give you two examples on how trapfinding could have been better handled without resorting to "you must have this class ability to find traps".

Pathfinder: Anyone can use perception to find mechanical traps. Only rogues can find magical traps without resorting to spells. In addition, a rogue gets a bonus equal to 1/2 their level to find traps of any type, insuring they'll always have a higher bonus than another class with a similar rank in perception.

Basic Fantasy: All classes can find traps 16% of the time (1 on 1d6). Thieves get the ability to find/remove traps (which begins at 15% on a d100) but increases with level, so that a 2nd level thief has 20%, a 3rd level 25%, etc. So while a fighter and a thief have roughly the same chance to find traps at 1st level (16%, +/- 1 pt), a 10th level thief has a 55% chance, while the fighter still only has 1 in 6.

Both allow non-rogues/thief to search for traps, but maintain niche protection for the rogue/thief to be better at trapfinding. Ironically, 4e doesn't provide said niche protection to rogues, and thus rogues make worse trapfinders than any other class with a high-wisdom and perception training.

Actually, I did note this (though I admit it may have been easy to overlook):

...or a feature that guarantees he's one of the characters with the highest trapfinding ability (such as allowing him to use his highest ability score in place of Wisdom when searching for traps) to reflect his expertise...

One of the games I'm in currently has both a goblin rogue and an elven druid, so I've seen the issue firsthand.

Nonetheless, it would be easy to fix if you simply allow the rogue to use his highest ability score in place of Wisdom. With that feature in place an elven druid would be, at best, a marginally better trap detector than the rogue (whereupon both would no doubt successfully search for traps).

The problem with the Pathfinder approach is that it still limits what a "fair" DM can use in the absence of a rogue. Admittedly, I'm not familiar enough with Pathfinder to know how trap detection via spells works, but it seems to me that many DMs would simply avoid using magical traps if the party has no rogue because the traps are otherwise unavoidable (assuming the party doesn't have easy access to spells for magical trap detection).

Additionally, the 1/2 level bonus is also problematic. At 1st level it doesn't guarantee superiority of any sort (since 1/2 of 1 is 0) and by 20th it grants a +10, meaning that an average check for the rogue becomes essentially impossible for the next best trapfinder (if the rogue needs a nat 10 to succeed the secondary trap finder requires a nat 20) and if the secondary trap finder has a reasonable chance of discovering the trap, the rogue cannot fail at all (if secondary guy needs a 10 then rogue cannot fail; I'm assuming Pathfinder doesn't use critical successes or fumbles for skills, though I can't be certain as I've only skimmed the Pathfinder rules).

Basic fantasy falls into the same problem. A party without a rogue (or even with a low level rogue) is one that is more likely to stumble into a trap than to have a realistic chance of finding it. Additionally, it seems reminiscent of 1st and 2nd edition in that one's character can't improve in certain areas regardless of how hard he tries (my fighter's main hobby and fascination might be traps, but unless I multi/dual class rogue, he'll never get any better at finding them). That always used to annoy me back in the day.

Keep in mind, I'm not saying that the 4e approach is perfect (see above). Just that (IMO) the Pathfinder and Basic Fantasy approaches aren't very good ones, at least for my gaming preferences. While I have no problem with a trap-focused rogue having the best chance to find a trap, I don't believe that it should be massively greater than that of a trap-focused non-rogue, and I certainly don't agree that there should be traps that only a rogue can find.

 

[drothgery]

Funny you mention trapfinding; out of all the games I've played recently, this is one of the areas 4e botched when it came to "improving" on 3e.

The best trapfinder in the game is not a rogue; its a druid. The Druid is wisdom-prime AND has perception on his class list. Tack on a +2 wis race and/or a race with +2 perception (hello elf) and you have a trapfinder that can't be beat (extra cheese: throw on a background with a +2 perception boon).

Really, it's probably the monk. You need the perception and thievery skills and good dex and wisdom to be a good trapfinder. There are wisdom-primary classes that get perception (Avenger, Shaman, Druid). There are wisdom-secondary classes that get perception (Ranger, Monk, Warden, Psion). There are dexterity-primary classes that get thievery (Rogue, Monk). There aren't any dexterity-secondary classes that get theivery (and aren't all that many classes that get thievery at all; rogue, warlock, artificer, and monk are it). You'll note the monk is the only class on both lists (artificer, monk, and rogue are the only classes that get perception and thievery, and monk is the only class with primary and secondary stats that line up right).

 

[Nikosandros]

Nonetheless, it would be easy to fix if you simply allow the rogue to use his highest ability score in place of Wisdom. With that feature in place an elven druid would be, at best, a marginally better trap detector than the rogue (whereupon both would no doubt successfully search for traps).

My personal fix is to allow a thievery check to find traps.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

The extreme example of "not enough people in on the action" is Shadowrun. Its classes are very specialized in a compartmentalized fashion. If you have a combat guy, a decker, and a rigger, then you have one hour where the combat guy gets in combat while the hacker and rigger sit on their hands, one hour where the decker hacks while the combat guy and the rigger sit on their hands, and one hour where the rigger drives and fiddles with machines while the combat guy and hacker sit on their hands.

Shadowrun is bad, but the problem is mostly the Decker and to a lesser extend the Mage.

There is no problem in using a combat drone alongside the combat guy. But the Decker better takes cover during that. But then, Rigger, Combat Guy and Mage can twiddle their thumbs when he does the Matrix stuff. The Mage can be problematic if he travels through the Astral Plane for scouting, but this is usually not taking very long. It would be fatal if he would engage spirits or something like that, though. (Probably for him, too. )

Maybe that's the reason why at least in Shadowrun 3E Shotguns were ridicilously overpowered - you're normally not a combat guy? Take a Shotgun, open the choke and shout "Dodge This" and murderize everyone in the spread.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

My personal fix is to allow a thievery check to find traps.

That is a pretty good idea, I might even use that.