Instead of the -4uccess project....

[Judging__Eagle]

Kaelik wrote up something interesting.

Pretty much.

If you just said "All rituals, as they are currently, cost exactly zero cash of any kind and take one standard action to perform."

You would have a mediocre out of combat ruleset that at least had some pretty cool effects, even if they were only situational.

What you'd also have is a game that explicitly violates 4e's design.

Just like if you said "Everyone knows every encounter power, and encounter powers can all be used at will." You might be able to create a more tactical combat system (after removing some of the better encounter powers that completely invalidate all the others) that doesn't suck as much.

It was also cause the actual game designers a stroke because it starts by trashing half their ideas about the ritual/combat system.

How would that work? Pretty straight forward?

I'd also personally tie the "bonus" to your special ability rolls to your level. Probably 1/3 your level +3, rounded up.

You can buy all sorts of magic swag, but it gives you no "Plusses".

The At-Will, Encounter and Daily powers get changed into the Simple->Special->Super system that I was working on for the 4uccess project.

Any ability that gets used more than X amount of times will have to be reviewed; potentially removed, or modified.

Skill challenges....

I don't know the details of what is wrong with them enough that I can explain the problems they have to someone else.

I'll use the 3.0/3.5 skill system stuff; all characters get their "classes" skill list.

At this point "class" determines skills, and apperance.


How does that look? It's rough as hell, but I'm lazy, and I might 'some time' be called to DM for 4e. I want an easy set of guidelines that I can throw at players.

[Josh_Kablack]

I want an easy set of guidelines that I can throw at players.

1. This is 4e, not 3e. Out of combat effects are rituals, which I am making much cheaper. Everything else is going to be hand-wavery/DM Fiat/Magical Teaparty. Deal. Or if you can't deal, I'm happy to run 3.x D&D instead.

2. In an effort to reduce the "padded sumo" effect, all monsters have half the listed hit points, and are considered to be one level lower than listed for XP and encounter challenge purposes.

3. We will not be using skill challenges. At all. Skill tasks are resolved on a single roll. Time and effort tasks are resolved using whoever that was's every-number-on-a-d20 research system.

Those three will cover 85% of the issues most groups will have with 4e.

[mandrake]

2. In an effort to reduce the "padded sumo" effect, all monsters have half the listed hit points, and are considered to be one level lower than listed for XP and encounter challenge purposes.

In my experience with 4e the only monsters which have a noticeable glut of HP are solos from the first monster manual.

Also, how the hell are you supposed to pronounce 4uccess? Fucksess? Hucksess? This is actually worse than 4.fail which makes no sense whatsoever. Why not 4F for the same meaning but intelligible derivation and reasonable flow?

[RandomCasualty2]

In my experience with 4e the only monsters which have a noticeable glut of HP are solos from the first monster manual.

Well at low levels the Hp for normal monsters is pretty well balanced and set up. It's only I think once you start getting higher up into paragon and epic (maybe even later heroic), that the monster HP beats out damage noticeably.

1st level 4E actually is a pretty fun game to play. It's not too padded sumo-y, it's not too rocket tagy. It's just about right. The problem is that the math doesn't exactly stick. About the only thing I'd really change is the final fantasy pheonix down combat healing bullshit.

[MartinHarper]

You don't even need to tell people that skill challenges are removed. Just never use those rules.

Also, how the hell are you supposed to pronounce 4uccess?

Fuck-cess. It's the Den, obviously the rude pronunciation is correct.

[mandrake]

Well at low levels the Hp for normal monsters is pretty well balanced and set up. It's only I think once you start getting higher up into paragon and epic (maybe even later heroic), that the monster HP beats out damage noticeably.

My experience does only go to early to mid paragon for what it's worth.

1st level 4E actually is a pretty fun game to play. It's not too padded sumo-y, it's not too rocket tagy. It's just about right. The problem is that the math doesn't exactly stick. About the only thing I'd really change is the final fantasy pheonix down combat healing bullshit.

Phoenix down BS? eh?

Fuck-cess. It's the Den, obviously the rude pronunciation is correct.

See, that's what I thought, but it feels like that means "fuck success" more than "4 successful," implying that you don't care about it working.

[schpeelah]

Phoenix down BS? eh?

Until a character actually dies, their wounds can't be described as lethal/non-lethal due to how the dying rules work.

[mandrake]

How's that different from 3e?

[schpeelah]

In 3e damage is explicitly lethal or non-lethal b/c those types are tracked separately. A dying character can stabilize and stay at whatever negative HP he happened to be. In 4e until the final check there is a chance the character will spontaniously get better, get up and continue fighting or a Warlord can come up and say "You can keep fighting! Believe it!" for the same effect.
In 3e you can describe the positive-to-negative-HP as a serious wound. In 4e you can only do it retroactively after they die.

[mandrake]

Tracking lethal and nonlethal damage sucked as a mechanic, so they got rid of it.

I can see where you're coming from, but it's the heroic trope of suffering a severe wound, but still getting up and fighting that's seen in books and movies long before 4E.

[schpeelah]

Not when they have spent the last 8 rounds (translating into several minutes of realtime) then gets up with no damage taking a 5-minute break can't fix. Also no wound penalties, no NOTHING.

[Username17]

I want an easy set of guidelines that I can throw at players.

1. This is 4e, not 3e. Out of combat effects are rituals, which I am making much cheaper. Everything else is going to be hand-wavery/DM Fiat/Magical Teaparty. Deal. Or if you can't deal, I'm happy to run 3.x D&D instead.

2. In an effort to reduce the "padded sumo" effect, all monsters have half the listed hit points, and are considered to be one level lower than listed for XP and encounter challenge purposes.

3. We will not be using skill challenges. At all. Skill tasks are resolved on a single roll. Time and effort tasks are resolved using whoever that was's every-number-on-a-d20 research system.

Those three will cover 85% of the issues most groups will have with 4e.

All that and dump the economy and you'd have a perfectly serviceable if not terribly interesting game.

As soon as you make every character get the bonus of having level appropriate swords, armor, and cloaks built in you could take all the bullshit economics crap out of the game. And yeah, then there's nothing to do with your gold but magical teaparty, but that's a huge improveent over what they are trying to get you to do. Having medusas not drop their glowing bows and shit is offensive.

-Username17

[Josh_Kablack]

Well at low levels the Hp for normal monsters is pretty well balanced and set up. It's only I think once you start getting higher up into paragon and epic (maybe even later heroic), that the monster HP beats out damage noticeably.

1st level 4E actually is a pretty fun game to play. It's not too padded sumo-y, it's not too rocket tagy. It's just about right.

That's a subjective judgement, but here's some analysis:

In 4e, a 1st level fighter with 20 str, a +1 Greatsword, and weapon focus. Has a +5stat+3prof+1enhance+1 weapon talent = +10 to hit and deals 1d10+7 damage.

Let's pit him against a 1st level opponent, the goblin warrior, has 17 AC and 29 HP.

The fighter thus has a 65% chance per round of dealing 1d10+7 (avg 12.5) damage to the goblin plus a 5% chance of dealing 17+1d6 (avg 20.5) damage. And if he uses the best fighter at-will for single-target damage, he also has a 30% of dealing 2 damage.

Thus the fighter deals an average of 9.75 damage per round, and in head on exchange of blows he will on average take three rounds to put the gobbo down with his at wills. Not bad.

If he uses his 2W encounter power, his damage jumps to 2d10+7 (27+1d8 on crit) which averages out to 13.275 damage. It's a step up, but not enough to make the fight over quicker, as the fighter still needs two more rounds of at-wills to finish the gobbo.

If he uses his 3W daily. his damage jumps up to 3d10+7 (37+1d8 on crit), which averages out to 17.35 damage, which is a big step up. But it still takes two more rounds of at-wills to finish the gobbo off, or he could follow up with his encounter and end it in two rounds.

So a fairly damage-oriented lvl 1 fighter against a lvl 1 gobbo is going to have to either trade 3 rounds of blows or use a Daily and/or an action point to end the fight in 2 rounds.

****

Now my subjective issues with that are

• This is a pretty damage-optimized fighter. He's forgoing a shield, he took the highest damage highest proficiency weapon, he put his feat into more damage and he picked the most damaging single-target powers for this matchup. If any of those decisions are different, it takes at least 4 rounds of slugging without expenditure of dailies or action points.
• While the Skirmisher tag is rather arbitrary, the goblin warrior is not a slug-it-out sort of monster. In most cases it's going to open with mobile ranged attack and try to stay out of melee with the fighter. This is unlikely to work, but it will add a round or two to the combat.
• If you do look at lvl1 slug-it out monsters like the Stormclaw Scorpion they have enough additional HP to extend the slugfest by at least a round. The Stormclaw has 16 AC and 32 HP while the Dire Rat has 15 AC and 38 HP.

Now subjectively, that all adds up to combat that feels a bit too grindy to me as as DM and makes me look very hard for useful non-damaging effects as a player.

[Josh_Kablack]

All that and dump the economy and you'd have a perfectly serviceable if not terribly interesting game.

As soon as you make every character get the bonus of having level appropriate swords, armor, and cloaks built in you could take all the bullshit economics crap out of the game. And yeah, then there's nothing to do with your gold but magical teaparty, but that's a huge improveent over what they are trying to get you to do. Having medusas not drop their glowing bows and shit is offensive.

-Username17

Ahead of you on that one too:

Items:
To reduce the magic item dependency, items no longer have enhancement bonuses of their own. Instead characters automatically receive a +1 enhancement bonus to AC, Non-armor defenses, Weapon attack rolls, and Weapon Damage rolls. At 6th and every additional 5 levels, this bonus increases by one. (This means that for PCs, thrown weapons never ever run out of ammo, just like the assumptions for ranged weapons and you cannot benefit from masterwork armor's higher armor bonus until you are a high enough level)

As for weapon and item abilities, treasure will be handled as upgrades of players' choice instead of pre-determined by the DM or rolled randomly. At each upgrade, each character will find a single item of (equal to or less than (level +N) where N ranges from -1 to +3. Old/obsolete items are assumed to either be upgraded into the current item or to be given away, lost, traded, melted for residium or left in the batcave.

[mandrake]

Not when they have spent the last 8 rounds (translating into several minutes of realtime) then gets up with no damage taking a 5-minute break can't fix. Also no wound penalties, no NOTHING.

I'm not sure what you're meaning by real time here, do you mean that the players have spent several minutes or that the characters have spent several minutes?

If it's players, I fail to see the relevance.

If it's characters, 8 rounds is just over a minute.

Since when has D&D ever had wound penalties? In addition this is only a problem in the specific instance of a warlord, which most parties will not have.

Josh: Fighters are defenders, why not try with a striker instead, as they're the main source of damage, and remember that 4E is a team game, so other characters will have an effect on how much damage is done as well.

[Morzas]

Josh: Fighters are defenders, why not try with a striker instead, as they're the main source of damage, and remember that 4E is a team game, so other characters will have an effect on how much damage is done as well.

I'm sure they're intended to be defenders, but I remember hearing that when built right, they can dish out damage way better than a Rogue. Anyone have a link to that? I don't have any experience with Fighters.

[mandrake]

It's probably possible, but I think for first level, rogues are likely to be better. Let's see?

Level 1 Rogue with Backstabber and a +1 dagger 20 dex and 16 str

Attacks at +5 dex +3 prof + 1 enhance + 1 rogue bonus to daggers (+2 combat advantage, which is important for them) +10(12) to hit against reflex 15 giving him an 80% (90%) chance to hit

His attacks do 1d4+6 damage average 8.5 (1d4+2d8+9)

His encounter does 2d4+9 (2d4+2d8+12)

His daily does 3d4+6 and slides the target 1 square (3d4+2d8+9)