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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 3858069" data-attributes="member: 42582">To make it possible to play a wizard who is able to perform a meangingful and wizardly action every round. The current game inherits from 1st ed AD&D the assumption that wizards will spend a lot of the time doing nothing meaningful. As a result, when that assumption is disregarded and the wizard goes nova, we get the 15-minute adventuring day and the overshadowing of fighters by wizards.Mabye in some books. And that's fine. But at the game table, "precious" just equals "my PC has nothing to do, so I just sit at the table watching my friends have fun". Or else, "precious" equals "I've just nova-ed all my precious resources - let's rest for 8 hours".The mix of at-will and per-encounter abilities will be a crucial aspect of this, as they will provide the framework in which meangingful choices (ie trade-offs between tactical options) must be made.4e will have less in common with earlier editions than 3E does. It will continue the 3E trend of emphasising mechanics (both character build and action resolution) over GM-mediated resolution. Hopefully, the action resolution mechanics will be better (less clunky, more balanced, less prone to leave players with nothing to do at the table) than 3E.Just confining myself to d20 games, there is the Conan RPG's Base Magic skill, which all classes get (thus facilitating multi-classing into Sorcerer).There are two issues here. First, we don't know what it means, in-game, to take a level in a class, other than that the PC gets better at something. As someone else pointed out, taking a level of fighter opens up more options for a high-level wizard than a low-level fighter. It's not obviously inconsistent with this in-game reality for the same to be true of a high-level fighter taking a level of wizard.Second, the aim of any character build mechanic should be to make it as hard as possible for players, in pursuit of a legitimate character concept, to build a second-rate character. There is nothing illegitimate about the concept "casts a little bit, fights a little bit" - just see Gandalf, for example. It is a flaw in 3E that it is incredibly easy to build a second-rate character in pursuit of that concept.Or to put it another way, why is it good for the game that players only get to play effective PCs if those PCs are specialists?RuneQuest is not very generic - apart from anything else, all characters are spell casters, which some players used to D&D find shocking. D&D will not be generic either - it will still be a game in which the reward mechanism is one of levels gained for challenges overcome. So it will continue to be a game of over-the-top heroic fantasy.Like 3E, 4e will assume as the default metagame priority "overcoming challenges". Within this default framework, I imagine there will be as much scope as in 3E to impute PC motivation, build up a gameworld in which those challenges arise and must be overcome, and so on.Also, the addition of mechanics to support "social challenges" should broaden the range of challenges that the action resolution and reward mechanics support, and thereby broaden the range of activity that might make up a typical session, and in particular increase its significance at the table, by increasing the amount of mechanical attention, and therefore playing time, that it receives.As far as I know, 3E has no rules for determining, during a single social interaction, how various successful skill checks by various particants (beseeching PCs, wicked viziers, etc) will determine the final outcome of an NPC's decision. The effects of CHA skill checks are presented as absolutes, and so this sort of "social combat" has to be handwaved by the GM. The idea of social challenge mechanics is to eliminate that handwaving. This is one way in whic it supports players in choosing non-combat action resolution: such alternatives become less dependent on GM interpretation, and more robustly supported within the mechanical framework of the game.This is not the first time I've seen it suggested that social challenge resolution mechanics will undermine roleplaying. If this claim were true, it would tend to imply that games like The Dying Earth, HeroQuest/Wars and so on conduce less to roleplaying than D&D. Which I think is pretty obviously implausible.On the other hand, I've read somewhere on these boards that basically any d20 material can be ported into SWSE. So I would expect most monsters to be fairly easily converted: just correlate their hits, attack and damage with a similar monster in the MM to get the challenge level.I frequently GM Rolemaster, a game with very little level of GM support. I therefore frequently convert modules from other systems, mostly D&D. It takes between 5 and 10 minutes to convert a D&D monster into RM - I'm sure it will be much easier to convert it to 4e, as most of the numbers will not need to change.</blockquote>

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