doctorbadwolf
Heretic of The Seventh Circle
I chose atwills, skill challenges and other.
Atwills I chose to mean the entire power type structure of 4e, and the round by round variety/custimizability. IT's the main thing that made it so that even two members of the same class, with the same feature selections, could play miles different from eachother in game.
Skill challenges are a thing I now use in every game, especially the advice on how to combine them with combat to build an encounter.
Other. Encounter building. I guess this is related to consistent math, but IMO it's a thing in itself. The ease of encounter building is amazing. The system is robust enough that I can wing it with complete ease. I target the level of the characters, check my cheat sheet for how much XP the budget should be, and throw monster at it until I'm within a kobold or so of that budget, up or down. Yeah, I ended up halving all monster hp to make combat shorter and the math scaling work better, but that's a tweak.
But it's not just the math that makes it so easy, or so fulfilling. It's also the monster roles, especially solo and minion (although at mid to high levels you gotta houserule solo in some way to make it keep working. I chose extra save attempts and using action points between player turns) roles, and the general setup of monster stat blocks.
Oh, and number 4, because why not, is power structure. By which I mean the way powers are formatted. I love being able to eyeball powers and know what they did, to the point where I can look at a collection of powers and know within moments what a character can do, what will challenge them and what they'll stomp all over.
Sure, I wish that more of the powers were shared resources between power sources, and thus there were just fewer of them, and I wish the progression gave an extra atwill or two per tier and definately more utility powers, but that's all quibbly little stuff I'd fix if building a 4.5.
Atwills I chose to mean the entire power type structure of 4e, and the round by round variety/custimizability. IT's the main thing that made it so that even two members of the same class, with the same feature selections, could play miles different from eachother in game.
Skill challenges are a thing I now use in every game, especially the advice on how to combine them with combat to build an encounter.
Other. Encounter building. I guess this is related to consistent math, but IMO it's a thing in itself. The ease of encounter building is amazing. The system is robust enough that I can wing it with complete ease. I target the level of the characters, check my cheat sheet for how much XP the budget should be, and throw monster at it until I'm within a kobold or so of that budget, up or down. Yeah, I ended up halving all monster hp to make combat shorter and the math scaling work better, but that's a tweak.
But it's not just the math that makes it so easy, or so fulfilling. It's also the monster roles, especially solo and minion (although at mid to high levels you gotta houserule solo in some way to make it keep working. I chose extra save attempts and using action points between player turns) roles, and the general setup of monster stat blocks.
Oh, and number 4, because why not, is power structure. By which I mean the way powers are formatted. I love being able to eyeball powers and know what they did, to the point where I can look at a collection of powers and know within moments what a character can do, what will challenge them and what they'll stomp all over.
Sure, I wish that more of the powers were shared resources between power sources, and thus there were just fewer of them, and I wish the progression gave an extra atwill or two per tier and definately more utility powers, but that's all quibbly little stuff I'd fix if building a 4.5.
