D&D 4E Ron Edwards on D&D 4e

[Garthanos]

Right, so IMHO practices should be a bit scalable, and maybe that includes "pay more, get more"

Yup rituals too see also my design ideas on Marshal Troops or my ideas about taking Alarm and making it so in Epic your alarm has to be well epic to detect some of the interdimensional and similar issues.

and I have linked them in my design to consumables, so a consumable is just a 'condensed practice/ritual' in effect (4e already has that with scrolls, I just assume that potions are similar, you can also consider them to be 'one time use boons').

 

[pemerton]

The DMG2 basically put an auto success on a significant skill check at 1/10 the cost of level appropriate magic item or 1 healing surge or 1 appropriate ritual. T

By my recollection, the first two of those are +2 to a check.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yup rituals too see also my design ideas on Marshal Troops or my ideas about taking Alarm and making it so in Epic your alarm has to be well epic to detect some of the interdimensional and similar issues.

Yeah, well, in that sense a lot of rituals just "sort of scale by virtue of what you're dealing with." That is, a heroic PC is not going to need to detect an Epic threat with Alarm. The game simply doesn't DO that, so it isn't really necessary to spell out some of these things. That, IMHO is pretty much what @pemerton is talking about when he discusses an appropriateness test for fiction, heroic PCs generate and interact with heroic fiction, etc. 4e doesn't spell out a ton of level restriction stuff that was explicit in earlier editions (I mean, in 1e technically there's no reason not to suppose a level 1 PC couldn't come up against an elder dragon or something, and his party could be 12th level except for him, so it is kind of needed there!). Likewise you never see in 4e things like "immune to weapons of less than +3 enchantment" because it just won't ever come up.

 

[Garthanos]

Yeah, well, in that sense a lot of rituals just "sort of scale by virtue of what you're dealing with." That is, a heroic PC is not going to need to detect an Epic threat with Alarm. The game simply doesn't DO that, so it isn't really necessary to spell out some of these things.

I meant cost wise sort of. The benefit of not being surprised if its worth 20gp at low levels is it the same at high levels no at high levels 20gp is meaningless but the benefit is not.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I meant cost wise sort of. The benefit of not being surprised if its worth 20gp at low levels is it the same at high levels no at high levels 20gp is meaningless but the benefit is not.

I guess the question is if those costs were intended to represent some sort of 'spam deterrence' or if they were just color. Maybe in the later case the color is "low level guys are money grubbers, high level guys are not." I don't know. I suspect nobody really thought it all out thoroughly.

 

[pemerton]

I guess the question is if those costs were intended to represent some sort of 'spam deterrence' or if they were just color. Maybe in the later case the color is "low level guys are money grubbers, high level guys are not." I don't know. I suspect nobody really thought it all out thoroughly.

They definitely didn't think it all through! The cost for Phantom Steeds becomes negligible at Epic, and the PCs fly everywhere! Whether that's a feature or a flaw is probably table-specific.

 

[Garthanos]

I guess the question is if those costs were intended to represent some sort of 'spam deterrence' or if they were just color. Maybe in the later case the color is "low level guys are money grubbers, high level guys are not." I don't know. I suspect nobody really thought it all out thoroughly.

I think you convinced me. Now for too much analytic details FTW, Lets examine the impact of that color... rituals arent used at many tables and maybe that flavor is too harsh at low end I do think that kind of color discourages ritual use which I find problematic.

Of course I think the thing that really needs fixed on a alarm is the cost without gain issue we have discussed. But that can be a case of the more expensive components only are expended when the alarm is triggered flavor. I kind of scaling the cost of those expensive components can be important. Here is an example using Marshal Troops to set up a Night Watch.

You want to use higher level scouts for more dangerous situation so they should cost more in some fashion. One way of representing that is when one of them dies guarding the party their death price will be higher at higher level. I do not want to discourage spamming necessarily but your elite squadron needs to feel elite. We could scale the price for instance that 20 GP of the alarm spell become ...at lowest level a price kicks in 1 in 10 times the alarm is signalled ie so this is 200gp that represents paying the death price. Now comes the scaling without scaling we could level it after 5 levels so 1 in 20 times it kicks in but the price is 400gp. both have the same median. The money could always be 20GP and is a hazard pay bonus, and you might have instead of a squad you have a fireteam of more resilient ones. Fewer heads but each is paid more effectively scaling within the same level just different composition.
Obviously none of this has to really be written down LOL

My gut actually says maybe at high level surprise or avoiding suprise scale the same so having our cost unscaling except in flavor is fine.

 

[Garthanos]

They definitely didn't think it all through! The cost for Phantom Steeds becomes negligible at Epic, and the PCs fly everywhere! Whether that's a feature or a flaw is probably table-specific.

I think the foundations of an Arcane Power II could include thinking rituals through

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

They definitely didn't think it all through! The cost for Phantom Steeds becomes negligible at Epic, and the PCs fly everywhere! Whether that's a feature or a flaw is probably table-specific.

Right, in my work I would simply scale the prices. Actually, HoML has a neat way of doing that, abstract costs. So any given 'cost' is simply a check, its trivial, non-trivial, or substantial. Exactly what that means doesn't matter in that we know it is tier-relative. So things like Phantom Steeds just work, the cost is, for example, non-trivial. Since the EFFECT scales, that all works fine, you have say 50gp fast horses for heroic PCs, 500gp Pegasi for paragon PCs, and 5000gp Astral Chargers for epic PCs.

There actually isn't even a need to note ANY of that, because the effect of the ritual is to provide the narrative license to the player to describe, in a fictionally appropriate manner, how the characters are transported by their steeds in whatever way earns them a success on the check in whatever challenge it came up in. As I was talking about above, action is assumed to always be fictionally appropriate, so your heroic PC won't end up with an Astral Charger, because his area of concern is "some orcs down the road" or something where that wouldn't be meaningful. I guess it would be OK to describe the results of his ritual that way, it wouldn't break the game, but I am guessing there would want to be some deeper reason for that to be done (IE it is foreshadowing that the character has some sort of powerful patron or something).

 

[Helpful NPC Thom]

I think you need the first bit I've bolded to get to the second bit I've bolded.

Skill challenges were dismal in both explanation and implementation.