What 4e might have had if it was D&D.

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tussock
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What 4e might have had if it was D&D.

Post by tussock »

Monte's old note that they had to make 4e basically be "not D&D" to get away from the SRD (thus creating Pathfinder, like a bunch of idiots) ... it got me thinking about what 4e might have had if they'd tried to make it D&D.

But that turned into a 3000 word stream of consciousness debacle. So here's some wild-ass guesses.
  • 15th level Maximum. 16+ saved for an expansion. No spells above 7th level for anyone, other than in the epic book, which breaks the game in half like 16+ always has.
  • Casters that can only prepare one slot per spell level at a time. This gives you "encounter powers", only you can keep picking new spells through the day. It limits NPC complexity and advantage. Cuts back nova-casting. Bla, bla, good.
  • Everyone gets +1 to everything per level, and all the monsters do too. Saves are backward like 4e, but durations are simpler (all sustained by the casters with their limited actions). Long-duration buffs become Wizard feats instead.
  • Feats that are stunts/spells, with no prerequisites other than class and level, like 4e Fighter powers, but nothing ever stacks with anything. So you either use your Cleave feat, or your Whirlwind feat, or your Trip feat, but never more than one per round. Sorcerer is a feat-caster, Fighter a feat-sworder.
  • Everyone gets a 5-level prestige class at 6th level, but they work like Kits (aka Paragon Paths). There's also other 5-level "epic destinies" you get at 11th. So the core classes are a bit boring, and everyone gets their flavour from the Kits.
  • Fights that last 3-6 rounds, usually 4. So monster hit points that aren't stupid.
  • Five or ten monster classes, like Dragon, Outsider, or Giant. So a storm giant is a 15th level Giant with some spell feats, and they give a couple of examples of each type, with custom feats for the odd ones. Horde monsters are low level and have trouble hitting the PCs, which is a good thing.
  • PCs with Con score + d10/level hit points (max 1st, optional 5/level). Fighters that get bonus hit points when being healed, everyone with limited personal healing (like a 3e Monk), but also most classes with some team healing capacity (like a 3e Cleric).
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Post by CapnTthePirateG »

They actually tried "wizard buffs are feats" in the 3e Psionics Handbook on a small scale. Then they went away.

I'd guess more stupid alignment mechanics.


What they seriously could have done is taken Tome of Battle as the main fighting classes, toned down some of the wish loops, replaced shapechange & co with trollform and friends, gotten rid of the Christmas tree, given casters at-wills, and made save-or-dies/sucks require a few rounds to kick in and eliminate opponents (said opponents getting multiple saves) and that could have been 4e right there. Early sources indicated that this was where they were going...sigh.
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Post by shadzar »

im not sure those things would work.. but im more not sure that those in charge of 4th had any interest or even liked D&D to begin with.

i mean Bill was in charge of lots, and he seemed to always want to force the Alternity method into D&D after his game failed with TSR. im seriously thinking he had a grudge agaisnt D&D and felt he could jsut turn D&D into Alternity-like so he could claim he made a working game...or a game that didnt fail.

Also you got Mearls involved and he only understand numbers. he cant comprehend language enough to know anything but numbers and how to make something have anything other than more pluses.

Noonan like others were patsies just brought along on the leash and like the underling did what they were told.

i would be interested in seeing Noonan's version of D&D all by himself, because he has some interest in the game.. but probably this is just my morbid curiosity.

Baker.. wasnt he another Alternity flunky of Bill's?

Tweet.. did he do anything on 4th? I think he was more interested in New Age games than D&D. he would probably have some good ideas at designing races for Games Workshop games, but for D&D.. he wanted to reinvent the wheel it seems.

with this colelction of people and the control heirarchy i doubt the idea of:
Fights that last 3-6 rounds, usually 4. So monster hit points that aren't stupid.
would have gone beyond just a mention like:
What if combat was quicker instead of just trying to make everything bigger numbers
the idea of more fights that take less time would have been over the majority of the groups head, but could SURELY solve the 15 minute workday in parts....for those that have that problem.
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Post by Username17 »

Honestly, while they did do some things for "product identity purposes", most of those were pretty meaningless. In 4e they created the "Implements" system for that reason, but it wasn't a terrible idea and really wasn't that different to what came before.

The things that made 4e terrible were going to make it terrible no matter what their design document told them they were supposed to make. Remember: in 4 years of fucking with skill challenges, they haven't had the mental breakthrough of tracking successes exclusively and limiting challenges by rounds rather than team failures. Four actual years, despite that having been fucking obvious from day 1. And they never did it. Skill challenges still objectively punish participation in the same way and for the same reason as the initial failed release from 2008.

I mean yes, the methodology for generating design principles was fucked. They asked the CharOp board for what they wanted and then demanded that each and every subsystem they made to address that list of demands was incompatible with the SRD. That was fucking stupid because the CharOp board wants things that are not representative of the needs of the fanbase and ditching the OGL was an awful idea. But that pales in importance to the fact that the methodology for attempting to reach those goals that they had were straight fucking disastrous.

I mean, let's consider a perfectly reasonable request from the CharOp: Cut Down The Christmas Tree. Nobody fucking likes Amulets of Natural Armor. Nobody. Sure, we'll use them, but they don't do anything that anyone likes. And so the CharOp board asked the 4e designers to make the Christmas Tree go away. And we got... the 4e magic item system. Seriously.

I think I may need to go into more detail here. The 4e designers decided that the way to solve people feeling that they needed to cover themselves in lots of pieces of stacking magical bling in order to compete was to make three magic items "mandatory" (in that the numeric bonuses they provided were already calculated into level appropriate challenges), and to make all your other magic items give out advantages that weren't exactly numeric bonuses at all (and thus generally speaking stacked just fine). That made everything worse.

If they had decided that they were keeping the OGL and didn't need to make every single thing be incompatible with the SRD, then you'd get stuff like Fireball doing 1d6/level and other legacy crap that no one really cares about, but all the design goals would have been failed just as spectacularly because the people at the top were a bunch of morons.

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