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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5598295" data-attributes="member: 54877">4E put in some support for that idea, in that it made heroes that can really deal out the hurt.  But then it consciously moved away from it, in that it removed "save and die".  So this whole discussion now has me wondering, in an ivory tower way, what you could do with a 4E design/mechanic in service to an earlier ethos. Let's start with at-will, encounter, and dailies.  But we aren't going to call them that, because they will really just be about dividing up responsibilities in the mechanics.  The in-world meaning is moving quite a bit away from 4E: Normal (At-will) -- stuff everyone can do as part of their class.  Fighters swing swords, mages cast magic missile, etc.   Stunts (Encounter) -- stuff you can pull off a few times a fight.  You can have some predone ones to pick from, or you can have ad hoc ones, or you can mix.  But main thing is that your number of times per fight is limited by given number of stunts at a given power level, not by what you have on hand.  (E.g. a mage "stunt" might be casting fireball or dimension door or any number of traditional mid-level spells.  But he'd cast more or a 4E model. If he wants to make up a magical stunt to fit the circumstances, he can do that instead.  Fighters might have "exploits."  But see later.)   Heroes do stunts.  Normal people do not, at least not in tough situations. Narrative control (Dailies) -- stuff you can pull off when you've got the plot device handed to you, via any number of means.  These things can be tougher than 4E dailies, sometimes even save and die.  By definition, they short-circuit the earlier system.  Anyone can do this, even a mook, if the story warrants. You don't subdivide powers, skills, equipment (including magic items), rituals etc. into a given niche, but have all of them in every category.  There are normal swords.  There are magical swords that can do stunts.  And there are swords of prophecy or fate that can exert narrative control.   When you hand a hero one of the latter, you have explicitly handed them some narrative control in the game. And for the final twist, you base all the core math mostly off of the normal level, such that the game can work a lot like, say, Basic D&D, if you have very little of the stunts and narrative portions exercised.  Stunts and narrative control run off of independent tracks--dialed by campaign.  So, for example, you can not give out stunts much at all, but hand out an arrow of dragon slaying (narrative device) to a normal, and get a certain kind of take on Bard versus Smaug.  That is, the stunts and narrative portions are entirely about how much and what kind of control you want the heroes (and villains) to exert via mechanics. Hope that made some sense. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /></blockquote>

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