The Gaming Den

I have before me a copy of the 4ed rules.

Still reading over it; too soon to say about balance issues. Working on it; feel free to ask of specifics.

Initial Thoughts:

1: Alignment has become stupid. There are now five alignments: Lawful Good, Good, Unaligned, Evil, and Chaotic Evil. Why this was done, I have no idea.

2: Races seem more balanced, now. There are no racial penalties, only varied bonuses. Half-Elves no longer suck, for instance.

3: Utility magic appears to have been more or less thrown out completely. Their idea of a utility spell is stuff like Shield or Expeditious Retreat... you know, something that isn't blasting, yet is still useful in combat. Fly is seriously a 16th level spell now.

4: The game explicitly ends at 30th level. Seriously, your character gains 'abilities' that dictate the end of his life's story, and you are instructed to begin again with 1st-level characters.

5: Armor Proficiency is now a feat chain 5 feats long, representing the 5 armor types that aren't Cloth. It looks like anyone can take the feats, and there's no kind of 'arcane spell failure'; it's just that Wizards will need to take 5 feats to wear Plate Armor.

6: What was once known as 'utility magic' is now called 'rituals'. These aren't character abilities of any class; anyone can perform such magic, if they can make a skill check or have a scroll.

7: Magic items can only be made at a loss. The cost to manufacture a magic item with a ritual is equal to the market value of the item. You're out the cost of the unmodified item and the ritual.

8: Raising the dead doesn't cause level loss; it's just more expensive to raise high-level characters. Oh, and you get a piddly -1 penalty to everything you do until you kill some things.

If you get stat bonuses for light armors and not for heavy armors, won't high level characters all end up wanting to wear the heaviest light armor anyway? Once you get Leather or whatever the fuck is higher level than that, why would you care except at the lowest levels (when you couldn't buy heavy armor proficiency anyway?

That is the old Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Alignment System. They finally accepted that Lawful Good was just "more good" than other Goods and put it on a line. Whatever.

Cross Class Feat: Do you spend a feat to gain a cross-class power, or do you spend a feat to gain the option of spending your powers on cross class powers? Do you have to spend a feat for each power you take? And does it scale when you get to high levels and your powers expire, or does it rape you in your rape holes and demand that you spend more feats just to keep from falling behind?

-Username17

What happens if a character wears armor that they are not proficient in?

The penalties associated with armor are actually quite mild, and the martial characters start with most (but not all) the feats. Heavy armor gives a -5 foot penalty to speed, and plate mail gives a -2 penalty to physical skill checks. Whatever.

If you wear armor you are not proficient in, you take a -2 penalty to attack rolls and reflex saves.

Multiclassing Feats do indeed "rape you in your rape holes". At the first stage; you gain a first-level power in exchange for a feat. If you want it to scale, you get to lose a feat to lose abilities of your own class and gain abilities of that other class. Which scale as much as you lose more feats and abilities.

I just re-read that, thinking it couldn't possibly be that bad. It's actually worse; the first-level feat only lets you gain the power that other class has at-will as a once-per encounter power. You can also give up your 'paragon path' (read: prestige class) entirely to gain more of the other classes abilities.

9: Feats are still unbalanced. Although divided into 10-level tiers like just about everything else in the game, Evasion (same as before, but it also works on AC now?) is considered equivalent to Great Fortitude (the same old +2 to Fort saves).

10: Actually, most feats are really awful. Improved Critical (Weapon Type) is apparently an Epic feat, as is Blind-Fight.

11: Nonproficiency with a weapon doesn't give you a penalty; proficiency grants you a bonus.

12: You can't make attacks of opportunity at any range beyond adjacent, unless you are a monster with a bullshit ability that breaks this rule.

13: All monsters and traps are worth a set amount of XP. No clunky tables, just exponential XP/level values. If you can kill 10,000 Orc Warriors, you reach level 30 and win D&D. Of course, this also means you retire immediately.

14: Retraining is actually a built-in facet of the game; every time you level up, you can replace one feat, power, or skill you have with another one that you now qualify for. This is the entirety of the whole game's scaling mechanic; the Wizards forget all their low-level spells and gain more awesome ones, the Fighters gain better exploits and stop using their old ones. This actually makes multiclassing somewhat less crappy then was originally envisioned; as the built-in scaling comes to your aid. You're still burning up your feats to do the same thing your single-classed counterpart does unpenalized, though.

15: Wizards have a special ability to know lots of Rituals, and can otherwise change around their daily assortment of spells in a more traditional sense. This ensures some remnant of their traditional role, although they're bleeding money if they're doing anything noncombat.

16: Ability scores are all-important. Piles of modifiers in no sense accrue to ridiculous tiers; there is no BaB, and class bonuses to saves are minimal. Combat is more or less based entirely on ability scores; Wizards attack with their Intelligence versus their targets saves, which are also based more or less entirely off their ability scores.

17: Speaking of saves, they don't actually exist. Fortitude, Reflex, and Will all work like AC; the attacker rolls all the dice. Defensive powers tend to have the effect of forcing your foe to reroll his attack. It is possible to score a critical hit with a Fireball.

Endovior wrote:15: Wizards have a special ability to know lots of Rituals, and can otherwise change around their daily assortment of spells in a more traditional sense. This ensures some remnant of their traditional role, although they're bleeding money if they're doing anything noncombat.

16: Ability scores are all-important. Piles of modifiers in no sense accrue to ridiculous tiers; there is no BaB, and class bonuses to saves are minimal. Combat is more or less based entirely on ability scores; Wizards attack with their Intelligence versus their targets saves, which are also based more or less entirely off their ability scores.

17: Speaking of saves, they don't actually exist. Fortitude, Reflex, and Will all work like AC; the attacker rolls all the dice. Defensive powers tend to have the effect of forcing your foe to reroll his attack. It is possible to score a critical hit with a Fireball.

Well, at least we can get more kapow! ou of attribute buffs. Is there any more good points?

Most wizards are going to end up taking light armor feats. Light armor lets you add dex or int to AC, heavy armors don't. While spending a feat for +1 AC isn't al that exciting, seriously, almost every single heroic (lvl 1-10) feat is really, really, lamely boring.

I have to say, the system actually looks very balanced. Seriously, nothing really jumped out at me, and I was EAGER to find something that did.

It just doesn't look fun to play as an RPG campaign. It doesn't look like it lends itself to 3 dimensional characters, or clever roleplay. The system just seems very "Flat".

However, it looks totally AWESOME for con and beer and pretzel games. I would gladly sit down and play 4e at a con. I would gladly invite my friends over for 6 hours, eat pizza and related snacks, and chop the hell out of monsters while we socialize and bullshit.

I wouldn't use this game for my online campaigns. It's just not appropriate for anything that's not a hack and slash, dungeon crawl, con game, or socializing game. That's not really a dig - what it does, it does well. It just doesn't do what some people necessarily want.

Attribute buffs do not appear to be a happening thing. Hell, even the traditional ability-score-increasing items don't actually increase your abilities anymore; they give bonuses to checks with that ability that explicitly do not apply to attacks.

This appears to be an anti-breakingthegame measure.

So the only way the could think of to not break the game was to make sure no one could do anything?

To clarify; differing bonuses to such things don't exist. Essentially as a hard and fast rule across the board, everyone gets half their character level as a bonus to all dice rolls. Within that spectrum, bonuses are carefully restrained to keep things within the RNG.

You gain +1 to all stats at levels 11 and 21. You gain +1 to two different stats at levels 4, 8, 14, 18, 24, 28.

So as characters level up, yeah, they'll probablly be hitting more often. But if we assume everything else scales, it'll be a +3 bonus tops. And the damage bonus will be tiny.

And the "not doing anything" comment is about dead on.

For what it's worth, I looked at the books for anything even vaguely resembling a Save or Die or Save or Suck. Web and Black Tentacles and such are just Immobilizing ones, and I haven't really seen any way to make them more than 50% reliable. The only save or dies is Orcus's instant death touch, and the Bodak's death gaze (only works if you're wounded), both of which drop you to 0 HP.

Also, hippogriffs are now a type of griffon, and are a typical level 5 monster (a heavy warhouse is level 3, a nightmare level 12 or so) and the book totally says they're trainable, and they in fact give a bonus to a mounted rider. Lesigh.

[The Great Fence Builder Speaks]
Post deleted because it promoted illegal activity.
[TGFBS]

DragonChild wrote:You gain +1 to all stats at levels 11 and 21. You gain +1 to two different stats at levels 4, 8, 14, 18, 24, 28.

Hmm. That isn't the same as what others have reported. I've seen it posted as +1 to 2 at 4,8,12,16,20,24,28 and +1 to all at 11 and 21.

Also, hippogriffs are now a type of griffon, and are a typical level 5 monster (a heavy warhouse is level 3, a nightmare level 12 or so) and the book totally says they're trainable, and they in fact give a bonus to a mounted rider. Lesigh.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing, though. (And all mounts give some sort of bonus to trained riders, even warhorses). D&D has handle exotic mounts...oddly in the past, to the point that even though the wizard could fly all day and conjure up all manner of exotic beasties, many DMs would balk at letting the fighter ride a griffon. So taking it into account could very well be a good thing.

And Endovior- I do appreciate that you're going to some effort to post this stuff, but a lot of what you're posting is, well, readily available info, and some of its been out there for months.

Anything interesting out of the books?
Powers that are just fucking scary, or completely not? Monsters that got uber or hit with the nerf bat?

Endovior wrote:If you wear armor you are not proficient in, you take a -2 penalty to attack rolls and reflex saves.

From what you can tell, will it be advantageous for some characters with no armor proficiencies to run around in full plate?

Since pretty much everything is an attack, largely no. Even healbots can't manage that, because there is only so much healing you can do during an encounter.