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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 7440794" data-attributes="member: 82106">I think this was a design flaw in 4e, brought on by a need to keep AC as a primary defense in order to avoid a total break with existing D&D practice. In HoML I removed AC as a defense, at which point the whole dichotomy between weapon and implement powers and all its difficulties goes away (because now their are only NADs). So a power like CaGI can now be a CHA attack against WILL, with a weapon damage rider or secondary. It becomes much more logical.I will note that 4e doesn't have 'non-magical' attacks. In fact it lacks a definition OF magic! All power sources are stated to be forms of 'magic'. I thought this was a cool thing as it obviates this whole 'how does this non-magical thing work' from consideration. It doesn't, it IS a magical effect. Its just clunky that 4e has to make it a weapon-based effect and cannot make those work against a NAD without math problems.This is the kind of reason I say there are a HUGE number of little things that can be done to improve 4e! Once you go back and erase the obvious mistakes, the power lists actually fall into line pretty well. PHB1 has a total of about 80 pages of class powers (plus another 20 or so pages for PP/ED which includes a mix of powers and other stuff). I've cut that by 1/3 simply be compressing 30 levels to 20 levels, and then further reduced it by eliminating some redundant powers, creating some common pools of powers, etc. In HoML I can implement about 20 classes in less space than 4e did 8 classes in PHB1. Each CHARACTER however can still pick from pretty much the same number of powers they could in 4e, and the range of things they can do is equally great.Now suppose that a non-power-based approach like U_K's could produce each class' equivalent list in 5 pages. I don't think that gains anything over what I have, but it is at the cost of doing away with explicit powers, which I still say makes the game a lot different!</blockquote>

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