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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 4881080" data-attributes="member: 82106">I do see where your coming from, in general. One thing I would suggest is to do some searching on this and probably other boards to see what people have done before. I know there have been a number of people playing with the disease track in various ways. Always good to take a look at the work of some other people to see how they did it.It is a bit hard to comment on the example disease you posted. Certain things didn't seem to quite make sense. Like the movement penalties. 4e movement is normally specified in squares and typical characters will range from 5 to 7 squares movement. A -5 to movement rate is pretty much "you can't move at all" and nothing aside from a few very oddball epic character builds can move at speed 10, so -10 is definitely "you are now a plant". Perhaps you mean -5/10 feet per turn? If so it should be specified as -1/-2 in 4e to match with the square based distance standard.The other bonuses/penalties seemed pretty extreme. One issue you'll run into is that slapping a +4 STR/-4 CHA onto a random character will probably be a pretty good benefit to one build and a giant nerf to another. A fighter with this 'penalty' would probably be very happy about it. An artful dodger build rogue would be practically crippled. That will be something to consider if you want to apply attribute modifiers. You may want to study some of the monster functional templates in Chapter 10 of the DMG (around page 180). They are designed to let the DM quickly customize a monster by giving it a package of features. So for instance a PC afflicted by vampirism might progress in the direction of taking on certain of those characteristics. How you'll balance that out with disadvantages is hard to say exactly. Most advantage/disadvantage type trade-off mechanics in games tend to break down pretty easily and its a type of mechanism that has gotten a rather bad reputation amongst game designers. 4e is particularly notable in rejecting the whole concept in the core rules.Depending on the type of group you play with explicit mechanical disadvantages may not even be needed. If the benefits of the disease are fairly modest then the rest can be dealt with by RP. Of course this won't work well in a lot of groups, but it is worth considering. I'm not exceptionally fond of the concept of making disease tracks that are tied to level either. I know it is an obvious way to keep the advantages of being a vampire or werewolf somewhat in check. On the other hand it sort of seems like a fairly blatantly mechanical kind of approach. "Oh, you're 11th level now, your disease progresses...".In any case, I think the general approach might work. Such characters are likely to be a bit more powerful than average, but ah well. One possibility would be to treat it like having a multi-class. The player would essentially do some power swaps. Having the disease would just give you access to these swaps. Taking the swaps might also represent some type of progression of the condition. In other words, you got bit by a vampire and if you want to start sucking blood, well, you can, but you're on the road to someplace! One nice advantage of that is it puts control of the process in the hands of the player to a large extent, which is always a good thing if it can be done in a reasonable way.</blockquote>

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