Reflavoring/Reskinning Abilities

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Wed Dec 23, 2009 1:13 am

One of my players for a 4E game wants to do the Jojo's Bizarre Adventure thing and have a stand. But they also don't want to be a shaman and I don't really blame them since Shamans are lame. But Beastmaster rangers are even lamer, so...

But anyway they want their Beast to be a stand like Silver Chariot where it is actually a knight that stabs with their rapier and does sword maneuvers rather than just biting. Their character's weapons are actually an extension of the stand (with the whole magical item economy handwaved) when they attack and all that.

It seems okay, if a bit far-fetched. But my question is... when the mechanics don't go far enough to support a concept, what is, in your opinion, the limit of it?

Mask_De_H · Post by **Mask_De_H** » Wed Dec 23, 2009 3:04 am

Well, I'm of the school of thought that the sky's the limit for reflavoring if you can make it make sense. Like with your player wanting to be a Stand user in the vein of Silver Chariot, SC usually stuck close to Polnareff and attacked for him. As such, you just say that his Twin Strike Ranger abilities or whatever are just his Stand attacking quicker than the human eye or the Ruffling Strike being the character threatening in one place, while the Stand harries the opponent.

What you write on your character sheet and what you say you are as a character can be mutually exclusive. It's taking the "Pally 3/Rogue 3/Ranger 2 is a Swashbuckler" idiom to it's logical extreme.

Sunwitch · Post by **Sunwitch** » Wed Dec 23, 2009 3:50 am

The only limits are your imagination, really. I've got a guy planning to play a character using Leadership exclusively to have a ghost following him around, and I've been experimenting in using the Soulborn as a sort of "tech-knight" by having the soulmelds actually be "tools", like those of Edgar from FF6. It works surprisingly well.

There are sometimes little issues like energy types not being accurate, but minor little mechanical adjustments that don't really affect the balance of things aren't necesarily a bad idea either. Making the warlock's eldritch blast deal cold instead of fire damage isn't going to adversely affect the game in any way, after all.

A Man In Black · Post by **A Man In Black** » Wed Dec 23, 2009 5:04 pm

Mauver wrote:Making the warlock's eldritch blast deal cold instead of fire damage isn't going to adversely affect the game in any way, after all.

The converse of this is that you need to make sure that all you're changing is flavor. For example, in 4e, the margins are so tiny that even changes like this can have relatively big changes. Using Mauver's example of changing eldritch blast, you've increased the expected damage of eldritch blast by about 25% just by making it cold-typed, because cold is one of the winner damage types.

This assumes you care about that sort of thing, admittedly.

Caedrus · Post by **Caedrus** » Wed Dec 23, 2009 9:58 pm

There are basically two aspects to the flavor of any given ability: Its inherent flavor, which is actually mechanically integrated, and all the other fluff, which you can totally change all you like without really impacting the mechanics.

Inherent flavor is stuff that derives directly from the game mechanics and *nothing else*. Stuff like "Disintegrate leaves a dead target without a terribly usable corpe" or "Disintegrate, for whatever reason, requires a fortitude save to partially reduce its potency" is inherent flavor, while stuff like "Disintegrate turns you into a pile of ash" or "Disintegrate is a green laser beam" is not.

Whether you use fire or cold falls into the inherent flavor category, assuming fire and cold are actually mechanical damage types with actual meaning in game mechanics, etc etc. Of course, you can totally change inherent flavor too... you just need to actually think about the mechanical impact in that case.

The limits are your imagination.

Sunwitch · Post by **Sunwitch** » Wed Dec 23, 2009 10:18 pm

A Man In Black wrote:
Mauver wrote:Making the warlock's eldritch blast deal cold instead of fire damage isn't going to adversely affect the game in any way, after all.
The converse of this is that you need to make sure that all you're changing is flavor. For example, in 4e, the margins are so tiny that even changes like this can have relatively big changes. Using Mauver's example of changing eldritch blast, you've increased the expected damage of eldritch blast by about 25% just by making it cold-typed, because cold is one of the winner damage types.

This assumes you care about that sort of thing, admittedly.

Eh, eventually I bit the bullet and picked up that Versatile Eldritch Blast feat that some guy posted a while ago anyway. I actually used Acid, since I thought it suited my poison-themed warlock better than fire did. I doubt it had any real effect on the way the game played out in the end.

Avoraciopoctules · Post by **Avoraciopoctules** » Thu Dec 24, 2009 6:54 pm

Oh really? Did you grab the one that scaled to character level or the one that lets you trade damage dice for effects, but gives you all the options at once?

I think I preferred the first version, partially because the second was kind of overwhelming in terms of the options it gave. I wanted Warlocks with the feat not to have access to every energy type. If I let the PC pick any type, there wouldn't be much point to the Hellfire/Unholy blasts later on.

Sunwitch · Post by **Sunwitch** » Thu Dec 24, 2009 10:57 pm

The scaling one. The presence of negative energy makes it pretty close to evading ER too, though; if you just get fire and negative energy there's not a lot out there that has resistance to negative energy and against undead you can just destroy them with fire instead.

In any case, I took acid and negative energy, and used the latter to blast myself for healing since I had the Death sphere. 8)