D&D 4E Things You'd Like to See in 4e that haven't been mentioned yet

[Greg K]

Requiring training or purchase for new spells seriously screws wizards who gain a level far from civilization.

There's always finding scrolls and other wizard's spellbooks to gain access to new spells.

 

[AdmundfortGeographer]

Coming late to the thread:

I'd like

Improved aerial combat rules. Right now its can be worse than grappling as far as needing to stop everything to read up on the rules.

Domain rules. Sure, it could be in its own supplement. But BECMI did totally workable rules in a handful of pages. If the 4e designers and developers are all that, they can do workable domain rules in as short a space as well. The benefit of getting domain rules in the DMG1 or other DMG# is the rules get out to the largest possible segment of the market. Reserving an entire accessory for domain rules will ensure the product dies like the Stronghold Builder's Handbook.

Chases

Vessel combat. Ship-to-ship, aircraft-to-aircraft, whatever, so that it was easily expandable for imagining a workable spelljammer-to-spelljammer combat.

Cosmology building advice. How to build a pantheon, who to create a planar cosmology, and what an intrepid DM needs to be aware of in terms of spell effects when DM tinker.

 

[AdmundfortGeographer]

There's always finding scrolls and other wizard's spellbooks to gain access to new spells.

Assuming scrolls and spellbooks grow on trees or under rocks, then yeah. Otherwise . . .

 

[Greg K]

Assuming scrolls and spellbooks grow on trees or under rocks, then yeah. Otherwise . . .

Well, I am with those against letting wizards just have new spells in their spellbook beyond the starting spells.

 

[Felon]

I wouldn't mind seeing new rules for poisons. Handling them as doing does nothing (if you save) or inflicting some ability score damage (if you fail), but never really killing anybody is kind of lame.

 

[Lanefan]

I wouldn't mind seeing new rules for poisons. Handling them as doing does nothing (if you save) or inflicting some ability score damage (if you fail), but never really killing anybody is kind of lame.

Funny you should say that, as part of why they're so lame now is people thought older editions' poisons that *only* Killed or Did Nothing were kinda lame as well.

This is one place where a gradated save system would make sense. An example, for a rather nasty poison:
- Make your save, no problem.
- Fail by less than 5, lose that many points off your Con. (i.e. fail by 3, lose 3 Con. points)
- Fail by 6-10, lose half that many points off Str., Dex., *and* Con. (i.e. fail by 8, lose 4 off each)
- Fail by more than 10, you die.

Also, the amount you fail by could also represent a variable on how difficult it is to reverse the effects or neutralize the poison.

Lane-"I think I might have to steal my own idea here"-fan

 

[Plane Sailing]

I'd never give new wizard spells without either training or purchase, though. You can't just wake up in the morning and find 2 new spells in your spellbook that weren't there last night...

The idea is that the 2 'free' spells the wizard gets each level are spells that he has been tinkering with and trying to get right for a while, so waking up in the morning with the inspiration about how to debug and get working 'those two spells he's been thinking about for days' seems just fine to me.

In the same way that a sorcerer could wake up with the inspiration about how to bend magic to do things in a new way that morning

 

[Plane Sailing]

Funny you should say that, as part of why they're so lame now is people thought older editions' poisons that *only* Killed or Did Nothing were kinda lame as well.

This is one place where a gradated save system would make sense. An example, for a rather nasty poison:
- Make your save, no problem.
- Fail by less than 5, lose that many points off your Con. (i.e. fail by 3, lose 3 Con. points)
- Fail by 6-10, lose half that many points off Str., Dex., *and* Con. (i.e. fail by 8, lose 4 off each)
- Fail by more than 10, you die.

Also, the amount you fail by could also represent a variable on how difficult it is to reverse the effects or neutralize the poison.

Lane-"I think I might have to steal my own idea here"-fan

I think I'd prefer to see something more like a real world poison, e.g.

make save - sickened until treated,
fail save - nauseated, die in 1d3 days unless treated.

 

[Li Shenron]

As I said, I'd rather use training rules - as incongrous and inconvenient as they are - than have new feats, skills, languages, spells and whatnot appear instantaneously in mid-adventure.

Training rules could be nice but they absolutely need to be optional.

For most groups, it's enough to imagine that the character has been training the ability for weeks/month during downtime, even if the ability itself (or the bonus increment) manifests significantly only at a certain point in time.

And honestly, I think that training rules, while sometimes nice, are actually less realistic once they are tied to levelling up...

 

[Hussar]

As far as poisons go, well, the simplest way is to borrow from the disease rules. Instead of a single save, you need to make two consecutive saves, with each failure dealing damage. (Particularly virulent poisons could require 3 saves). Depending on how nasty you want to make the poison, you can space the saves apart at different lengths - per round, per minute, per hour, per day.

There, now you have your lethal poison.