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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9566934" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Oh, thank the good Lord. I had written up a bunch of stuff on my phone, and then it got eaten by the "Site is Updating" thing. Thankfully, at least a portion survived.<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Improve the thematic distinctiveness of the power sources, trying to give each a cool, distinctive mechanic.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Emphasize as much as humanly possible that roles are about baseline competencies, NOT straightjackets.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Improve rituals and make more of them draw on thematics (esp. of power sources).</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Integrate Backgrounds and Themes into a single "Heroic Origin" so that there is continuity across the 30 levels: Heroic Origin, Paragon Path, Epic Destiny.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Create rigorous and well-built "novice level" rules, coupled with stealing the "incremental advance" concept from 13A so that OSR fans can spool out levelling almost indefinitely.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Create "Skirmish" rules, which condense combat down to a fast, snappy, low-granularity affair; explicitly intended for conflicts like "two goblins in a hallway" stuff that is popular in early edition playstyles.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Thoroughly review and improve Skill Challenges, particularly in light of my personal experiences with really good ones.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Provide many, extensive, well-described examples of SCs entirely for free so folks can see what they're good for.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Make absolutely ferdamsher that the first 3+ adventures published for it are unassailable solid gold experiences. The impact of early adventures cannot be overstated.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Trim down the number of powers and make sure every published power has a clear, desirable use-case. "Powers" in general are going to be very numerous,* but a third to half of the powers in existing 4e are crap not worth publishing.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Likewise, trim down feats and work to fix some of the pretty obviously garbage categories thereof. 4e was stupidly profligate with feats, much to its detriment.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Finish up the "build your own weapons" rules I've been working on for the past...five-plus years.... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f612.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":cautious:" title="Cautious    :cautious:"  data-smilie="13"data-shortname=":cautious:" /></li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Show in the DMG the benefits of reskinning, minor reworking (e.g. letting a "cryomancer" Wizard reflavor fireball as endothermia or the like, with the Cold keyword, so long as it isn't exploitative), and "off-label" power usage (e.g. setting things on fire with the Sorcerer's burning spray attack)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Ideally, publish a free "How To 4e Mk II" document which covers how to use its various components (e.g. "page 42" rules, SCs, Skirmishes, combats proper, off-label power uses)</li> </ul>*Just do the math. 25 classes averaging ~2 powers per level across 30 levels. This is a lowball because there are (and should be) FAR more PPs than classes, and definitely more EDs than classes. 25x2x30 = 1500 powers at bare minimum. Considering I am vehemently opposed to any notion of combined power pools (except, possibly, as the One Special Thing identifying a particular power source), a pool of 2000-3000 powers is simply going to happen.Well, "bloat" is in the eye of the beholder. If you felt a number being big was good and productive despite a general preference for smaller numbers, you would not call it that; at worst, you might call it a necessary evil. Loaded terms like this presuppose that the numbers are necessarily and always a problem, and that reducing them is necessarily and always a better experience. IMO, you cannot make any such assumptions. They have to be actually playtested. And if the playtesting bears out the principle, awesome! Go where the data leads. Just don't assume that smaller numbers are definitely always better than bigger numbers no matter what. That sort of assumption is one of the things that directly contributes to deeply flawed game design, leaving a core principle completely untested.Does it though? Or does it simply induce rocket tag? Smaller number growth does not guarantee viability, nor is it a choice made without cost. One of the biggest problems 5e as a whole has faced with its combat system is that it largely eliminated any form of numerical escalation of threats other than bigger damage dice and/or bigger HP. This directly contributes to the general "boring fat sack of HP" design problem that at least 5.0 deals with. (Without having the official 5.5e MM to examine, it's not yet appropriate to claim 5.5e has the same problem...but I kinda suspect it will, given some of the other statblock issues we've seen in the previews.)Oh yeah, 4e-style rituals are wonderful. I'm still deeply frustrated at how 5e managed to take that concept--which was empowering and encouraged creativity and diversity!--and corrupt it into something that 99.9% of the time only serves to empower spellcasters even more. Oh, and not only that, but investing into it as a non-spellcaster is actively denying yourself the ability to get better at being a non-spellcaster to boot! 5.5e didn't even fix this when it could've by making Ritual Caster an Origin feat. Instead, it requires level 4.Yeah...I thought about doing something sort of like this. Divorce combat stats from "adventuring" (=non-combat) stats, make 3 of the former and 4 of the latter. Power (=damage/Fort), Finesse (=riders/Reflex), and Resolve (=class+subclass effects/Will). Then your adventuring stats are Might (=Str+Con), Dex (unchanged), Wits (Int + observation/awareness aspects of Wisdom), and Presence (Cha + willpower/intuition aspects of Wisdom).</blockquote>

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