Sleight of hand: what have your 3e games stolen from 4e?

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

If I ever go back to DM'ing 3e games, I'm going to try my darndest to steal and convert the way they do monsters & NPCs in 4th edition. I haven't been this happy with DMing since running level 1 characters through 3e back in 2000.

The biggest problem is going to be tweaking the math, because the bonus progression curve is going to look REALLY weird after the first four or five levels -- players start really racking up the plusses after that.

Iron Heroes villain classes might give you some good pointers. But the math in 3E is... difficult to predict. IH is by no means perfect.

I didn't realize bloodied was in MMV. Where can I find that?

I don't think it was explicit. But I remember some design article mentioned that some monsters got a different set of abilities when they reached half hit points. I don't think they introduced the term "bloodied" in any official way.

 

[blargney the second]

Found it! It's the Magmacore Golem with its shattered armor ability.
-blarg

 

[Derulbaskul]

Skill consolidation is one, although I was already planning on doing this after playing Star Wars Saga. Skill challenges & the minion concept are easily portable. I hadn't thought of it until reading this thread, but changing poisons to deal periodic HP damage is a good one, too.

We're cut from the same cloth. I've already implemented the skill consolidation and expect to include skill challenges and poison damage very soon. I'm still thinking about minions.

 

[EricNoah]

I'm going to give Minions a shot on Wednesday. Some slightly toned down ghoul minions to be exact (no long paralysis -- they either stagger or stun, and only for 1 round).

I've been using a hit point reserve which is kinda like healing surges but only done out of combat.

 

[Whimsical]

I didn't realize bloodied was in MMV. Where can I find that?

I don't think it was explicit. But I remember some design article mentioned that some monsters got a different set of abilities when they reached half hit points. I don't think they introduced the term "bloodied" in any official way.

I think this is what you are looking for. (Scroll down to Specific Toys We Designers Played With.)

 

[Knightfall]

Skill consolidation is one, although I was already planning on doing this after playing Star Wars Saga. Skill challenges & the minion concept are easily portable.

I've considered consolidating skills but I'm more likely to go the Pathfinder route, if I do decided to do it at all. Consolidating the skills means modifying all the skill related feats.

I'm interested in taking a look at the new Manual of the Planes to see if there is any good fluffy planar stuff to steal for my custom cosmology.

 

[EricNoah]

I'm going to give Minions a shot on Wednesday. Some slightly toned down ghoul minions to be exact (no long paralysis -- they either stagger or stun, and only for 1 round).

Old style magic missile + new style minions = 3 minions auto-killed per round. That wasn't something I planned for. I could easily have tripled the number of minions in my encounter with no ill effect.

 

[blargney the second]

Yeah, that'd be a side effect.

 

[That One Guy]

If I went back to 3e, I'd put all the house rules I had back in and then throw in 4e skills. Probably port over the magical items (I'm actually trying to figure out how to port over 3e loot to 4e effectively because I have a lot of 3.x books in my closet...).

So, I used to have enemies in 3.x that had 8 to 10 hp. I had decided (or read somewhere?) that commoners (or non-heroes) had that much hp. So, I figured that the much damage would flat out kill a normal person - so they were old school minions. With that assumption, I would describe 3.x damage in groups of hits that would normally kill (or knockout) a regular person. I used the hell out of Bo9S, and gave everyone (regardless of class) one attack maneuver (I'd probably make it so that each character gets a series of Level one maneuvers as @Will powers).

I would also give rogues everything combat-related Dex-based for free... I mean, c'mon... why not?

EDIT: I might do the more than one stat determines a save... not sure, though.