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I'm not really sure getting rid of armor needs to be a thing for a starwars 4e game. Most of the characters either already wear armor, or would be represented by a class that uses cloth or leather. So just call leather armor reinforced clothing. Hand crossbows are blaster pistols, longbows are blaster rifles. Han and Lando are both ranged build Scoundrel Rogues. Leah is maybe a Bard with a nobility based theme? Boba Fett is a ranger. The jedi are swordmages. It's a pretty good fit right out of the box, right down to getting a defense bonus when holding a sword, and being able to call it back into their hand when disarmed. Call their teleportation powers force powered back flips. Vader is a warforged revenant Swordmage with one of those warforged only attached armors.
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Jan 18, 2015 22:09
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thespaceinvader posted:But then, AC and Reflex have long been accused of occupying way too similar a set of design space, so just axing AC entirely and killing proficiency bonuses to compensate would probably do the trick. It seems to me like (conceptually) "Reflex" should be something closer to Touch AC and "AC" should be like Flat-footed AC; having DEX add to AC is "Makes Sense"™-design and effectively makes AC into "Reflex +prof"
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Jan 18, 2015 22:26
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Stormtrooper armour actually works though Stormtrooper armour saves man in real life
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Jan 18, 2015 22:48
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Just make chain/scale/plate into scavenged/stormtrooper/mandolorian? Axe is now vibro axe, etc., Also look up the Worgen race, and you have Wookies.
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Jan 18, 2015 22:49
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Star Wars suffers from constantly having their games written by ttg veterans, so they often ignore the actual themes and feel of the movies and instead you get combat systems with detailed ranges and big lists of important gear and mandatory cover mechanics and the like.
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Jan 18, 2015 23:05
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wallawallawingwang posted:I'm not really sure getting rid of armor needs to be a thing for a starwars 4e game. Most of the characters either already wear armor, or would be represented by a class that uses cloth or leather. So just call leather armor reinforced clothing. Hand crossbows are blaster pistols, longbows are blaster rifles. Han and Lando are both ranged build Scoundrel Rogues. Leah is maybe a Bard with a nobility based theme? Boba Fett is a ranger. The jedi are swordmages. It's a pretty good fit right out of the box, right down to getting a defense bonus when holding a sword, and being able to call it back into their hand when disarmed. Call their teleportation powers force powered back flips. Vader is a warforged revenant Swordmage with one of those warforged only attached armors. I think Battlemind and Avenger (and maybe Monk) probably cover Jedi too.
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Jan 19, 2015 03:17
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thespaceinvader posted:I wouldn't go with 'APs are better in the first round' as a house rules because... APs are already best spent in the first round. The focus fire nova is a huge part of getting 4e tactics right, and APs are a massive part of that. Spend them early, spend them often. The only time I've not used APs explicitly to nova is when I am playing a low-damage Iron Vanguard and can spend the point to attack someone and spend a surge as an effect line when I am at 0. Most of my friends use them either to nova or when they get pissed because they missed.
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Jan 19, 2015 03:41
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UrbanLabyrinth posted:I think Battlemind and Avenger (and maybe Monk) probably cover Jedi too. Jedi are super easy to make, to be honest. You don't even have to do a ton of refluffing. Are you shifting things? Telekinesis. Buffs are various amounts of using the force to help your allies (battle meditation, I think it was called?). Mind effecting or domination style powers are going all Obi-Wan and confusing them. Go evil Invoker and zap enemies with your force lightning. Etc, etc.
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Jan 19, 2015 04:39
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Is it feasible to try and run 4E if I don't have DDI, but I do have the books, but I don't have any assurance that the players will? Even if I use Inherent Bonuses and DTAS and Essentials to simplify gear and character creation I still need to let them pick out feats. I suppose I could create handouts. Other questions: 1. Are books like the Monster Vault and MM3 still complete no-no's, even if they're supposedly already using updated monster math? 2. Were the "Class Compendium" Essentials classes from the Dragon magazines any better than the book ones?
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Jan 20, 2015 18:42
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If you're going full DTAS, then using DDI is pretty much out the window anyway. The main thing DDI does is save you and your players a crapload of busy work copying power descriptions. So if you and your players are okay with some bookkeeping it'll be fine. Personally I can't stand it, which is why I never went full DTAS. MM3 and the Monster Vaults are actually the ones you want to use, so I'm not quite sure what you're asking there. If you're planning on running 4e out of the books you should pick up the MV at least. What classes are you talking about? In general though, the main issue with e-classes is that they get kind of boring as you level up since you're mostly doing the same thing forever. If you're just planning on doing a heroic tier game most of them are just fine. Though if your aim in running 4e is to showcase/try out the depth of the tactical combat system, they're kind of working against you in that regard. Honestly, if you're just getting into 4e today and testing the waters, I'd still recommend a month or two of DDI plus a Rules Compendium all the way. 4e isn't really a game for every group, and if it turns out it's not for yours you've got a lot less invested. Plus you cut out a ton of busy work.
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Jan 20, 2015 19:07
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Having a character builder is massively convenient but yeah you can still do it with just the books, even without DTAS and Essentials. Without Inherent Bonuses too but keep those anyway, they're just a good idea in general. It'll be a bit more prep work and maths for players. I'd recommend something like power cards for them - every power on a card with the attack bonus and damage precalculated, and you're good to go. Only thing is it probably gets a bit difficult to keep track of options across all the books, but then you can run a perfectly good game with limited books. Only the PHB was good enough at one point! Monster Vault and MM§ are far from no-nos. They're the only books you should use. (Well anything released after MM3, really, but those two are the big ones there.)
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Jan 20, 2015 19:07
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Also, I'd actually be a little cautious with house rule overload. Obviously you know your group best, but I've personally found that trying to pitch a new game with "And theses are all the house rules THE INTERNET told me I needed to make this game fun!" can bias people against a game before you even start. Definitely keep Inherent Bonuses (if you're using DDI it's just a checkbox, otherwise you can wait until level 2 to bring it up since that's when it kicks in), but these days with new groups I even save things like free expertise for a level 5ish story reward (which is when they technically need it to keep up with the monster math anyway).
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Jan 20, 2015 19:31
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Yes, I'd recommend against using Essential classes. It's Mike Mearls at its finest, where the Fighter can only use Power Attack but the Wizard is just the same. Use the standard PHB classes, it will be fine - they aren't any more complex.
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Jan 20, 2015 19:38
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Thanks for the advice! Yeah, I will probably dial it down to just using Inherent Bonuses and the straight PHB classes and trust that the players are smart enough to figure it out. If we're starting from level 1 it's not like there's going to be huge choicedumps anyway.
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Jan 20, 2015 19:53
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Make sure everyone's using the errata too, before someone trips and falls into an infinite damage loop. I've had a lot of success with people being more comfortable learning 4e with Essentials style classes for one or two session, then switching to the AEUD equivalent later if they found it limiting or boring.
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Jan 20, 2015 20:04
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I'd consider PHB2 as well - a bit more variety particularly on the controller side, good mix of classic D&D classes and new ones (really fun ones as well), and most of the item and feat options it adds are exclusive to its own classes so people who pick a PHB class don't necessarily have to look through two books for stuff. Seconding the errata and the Rules Compendium - just take all the game rules from the Compendium and use the books only for character options and items. Errata link: http://archive.wizards.com/dnd/Article.aspx?x=dnd/updatesarchive My Lovely Horse fucked around with this message at 20:15 on Jan 20, 2015 |
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Jan 20, 2015 20:12
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A houserule to consider when your campaign is more established is Drama Cards, as long as you're comfortable ceding some narrative control to your players.
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Jan 20, 2015 20:24
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Why not use the excellent offline character builder instead of the DDI one?
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Jan 20, 2015 20:52
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Don't know if these files are still up to date, wrote this 18 months ago, but here:quote:Offline Character Builder
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Jan 20, 2015 23:04
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Azran posted:Yes, I'd recommend against using Essential classes. It's Mike Mearls at its finest, where the Fighter can only use Power Attack but the Wizard is just the same. Use the standard PHB classes, it will be fine - they aren't any more complex. Au contraire - if you build them right they can be very effective, and I've found that they let me kick back and focus on what I enjoy - the tactical combat game - rather than what I don't, which is picking out powers. My Knight is great, what he does is hit stuff when it does anything, and usually stop it doing whatever it was trying to do. My Slayer is great, he blends stuff. Rapidly. But they're definitely not for everyone, and you definitely can;t make them interesting with ONLY the essentials material.
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Jan 21, 2015 23:48
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starkebn posted:Don't know if these files are still up to date, wrote this 18 months ago, but here: Looks right to me.
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Jan 22, 2015 00:16
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thespaceinvader posted:But they're definitely not for everyone, and you definitely can;t make them interesting with ONLY the essentials material. Good point, this is what I should have added 
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Jan 22, 2015 01:22
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gradenko_2000 posted:Thanks for the advice! Yeah, I will probably dial it down to just using Inherent Bonuses and the straight PHB classes and trust that the players are smart enough to figure it out. If we're starting from level 1 it's not like there's going to be huge choicedumps anyway. If it turns out you enjoy running 4E, after you get comfortable I recommend reading through the Dark Sun Campaign Setting book because it has some pretty useful DM tools you can borrow wholesale (Including a kind of better look at how Inherent Bonuses work). If it turns out your players like playing 4E you can introduce them to Themes and Backgrounds as well as the various "Powers" books (Arcane Power, Martial Power, Divine Power, etc). A note on Feats: I'd recommend the Essentials books first for your players to look at for Feat selection, since its a pretty safe bet that at least the first two PHBs' Feats are either completely revamped in the Essentials books or made outright trivial by them. Heck, limit them to JUST the Essentials books for Feats if you want to have a concise list of Feats that are in the category of "These Feats are amazing and good". About the only Feats I actually look at in the PHB are the multiclass Feats nowadays.
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Jan 22, 2015 01:51
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thespaceinvader posted:Au contraire - if you build them right they can be very effective, and I've found that they let me kick back and focus on what I enjoy - the tactical combat game - rather than what I don't, which is picking out powers. The big thing that drew me to 4e was that my basic fighter had powers and poo poo and I wasn't just saying "full round attack" every turn. Learning that I had the options for all these different things other than "optimized basic attack" as non-mage classes was what made me fall in love with 4e in the first place. I might be a bit biased because of this, but I think that the "holy poo poo I can actually do things" feeling makes a fairly good argument for starting newer people off with the PHB stuff.
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Jan 22, 2015 05:59
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Yeah. I really hated the essentials fighter options. I guess I'm a 4E grognard, but I felt that it was really regressive and boring. I mean it's cool that people like it, it's just that every page dedicated to making it attack harder was one less page of interesting standard fighter abilities which I thought was really bad for the game as a whole.
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Jan 22, 2015 06:54
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The funny thing is that you don't even need to get into "magical" or "superhuman" territory for variety. The 40k RPG games allow you to do stuff like parrying, dodging, lightning attack, all out attacks, normal attacks, aimed attacks, full auto shots, burst shots, etc etc from the get go in most cases.
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Jan 22, 2015 08:38
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Khizan posted:The big thing that drew me to 4e was that my basic fighter had powers and poo poo and I wasn't just saying "full round attack" every turn. Learning that I had the options for all these different things other than "optimized basic attack" as non-mage classes was what made me fall in love with 4e in the first place. I might be a bit biased because of this, but I think that the "holy poo poo I can actually do things" feeling makes a fairly good argument for starting newer people off with the PHB stuff. That's fair enough, but I didn't come from that background. And it's also pretty inaccurate because 'I full round attack' is not a thing in 4e. Even with ONLY the essentials basics, it's not a thing. You have fewer options, but you still have to play the game of positioning and target selection, decisions about whether you use your utility powers, etc etc. You have fewer things written on your sheet, but you still have 3 actions and you're likely to want to spend all of them doing interesting things, even if one of those things is 'hit a dude'. I wouldn't deny that it was regressive and dull design, mind, nor that it was crappy to make the fighter the basic attack spammer and the mage the guy who gets options. Though, at the same time... the PHB fighter already had more options than it was ever likely to use. They have like, 5 to 8 solid powers at basically every level, then another 20 or so lovely ones. The Slayer and Knight added some decent utilities, but there really isn't a whole lot of design space left to improve the PHB fighter's attack powers. The PHB fighter has more and better powers just at heroic tier than some whole classes which were published later (defender Berserker, particularly, not to mention Vampire (never mention Vampire)). Same with Wizards, it's why the Mage mostly I dunno, basically, there's multiple sides to it. It's not just 'essentials was lovely design lol'.
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Jan 23, 2015 10:17
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My issue with Essentials classes is not that they have less options on their character sheets, it's that they have less options that are activated in complicated ways. How is "activate a power and then a different power gains this effect" simpler than "activate a power and get this effect"?* I think my biggest gripe was the Sorcerer encounter power that was one huge paragraph which explained how it interacted with his basic At-Will, which essentially boiled down to "attack two targets". Basically you got the same effects as a normal power, but you have to read way more text to resolve the effect. *Yes, I know that the slayer-knight powers affect his basic attack which has more versatility than at-wills. That thing should have been fixed in other ways.
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Jan 23, 2015 10:53
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Essentials wasn't an attempt to make 4e simpler, it was an attempt to make it more like 3e and any statements otherwise are trasnparent lies.
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Jan 23, 2015 11:02
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Yeah, the "simplification" argument dies the moment you look at the Essentials wizard, which is the standard wizard with extra things on it.
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Jan 23, 2015 18:56
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It was a nice gesture to try to standardize the basic attack instead of the kludge of the original concept. I cannot count the number of times I've had to tell a new player "No, don't use your basic attack, it's bad because reasons." I don't think making the basic attack "the only thing you do, really" was a good solution. With the caveat that maybe it's not the only thing you do if you find a way to tack it on to a more interesting class framework.
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Jan 23, 2015 19:06
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Gort posted:Yeah, the "simplification" argument dies the moment you look at the Essentials wizard, which is the standard wizard with extra things on it. I'd argue the Mage features are actually better in some cases. Then again, I hate wizards and got tired of a gnome illusionist almost immediately.
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Jan 23, 2015 19:32
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The Mage features are generally held to be a pretty even trade for the Wizard ones as long as you pick a good build of Mage. Warpriests are the weirdest ones for me though. It's like... all the fiddliness of 4e combined with the no choices at all in building of what came before. I never really got them - although some of them had some neat features.
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Jan 23, 2015 19:52
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Yeah, mage is pretty drat solid- enchanter/illusionist may be one of my favorite classes in the game since you're a master of manipulation and misdirection. Knight can be pretty good as well once other books are added in, since Overwhelming Impact at epic means that all your MBAs now daze, which is pretty amazing, and since the knight is MBA focused your standard action isn't quite as important as your opportunity actions if you don't use Martial Cross-Training to pick up a fighter encounter power, so you really have no problem grabbing the Battle Standard of the Hungry Blade and just going to town in your black hole box of pain (especially if you're a half-elf with Eldritch Strike). Slayer can likewise take advantage of a ton of good fighter support and feats to lay down some hurt. If you're rolling Warpriest it's usually because of the features (Oghma in particular has good powers and good to stellar features), otherwise you could just go Wis/Con normal cleric and pick up Battle Priest's Lore, then mix and match powers to your heart's content.
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Jan 23, 2015 20:21
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I'm a weirdo who actually liked the Essentials line. Maybe it was because I found it easy to reverse engineer and find out how they used the 4E framework to rebuild the classes without actually breaking the framework itself. For Essentials Fighters, Power Strike is their Encounter Power at first level, so you could easily allow a player to either take Power Strike or a Fighter Encounter Power from another source. At 3rd they gain another use of Power Strike and since its the same level any other class gains another Encounter Power you could take it or leave it again. At 7th Level you gain another Stance, which you could take OR, you guessed it, take a Fighter Encounter Power of 7th Level or Lower in its place. Dailies is where the Essentials classes start to get tricky. Note that all the E Classes still get stuff at levels 1, 5 and 9, the same levels pre-E classes would gain new Dailies, only they happen to be passive or static things instead of Powers. The trouble is figuring out WHICH 1st level passive ability the class gets that equals the Daily. In the case of the Knight, it's probably the Shield Finesse Feat, so you could either take the Feat as a freebie OR take a 1st Level Fighter Daily in its place. In the case of the Slayer, it's probably the Heroic Slayer class feature you could swap out for a 1st Level Daily instead (Though this would kind of defeat the entire purpose of stepping into the Slayer option in the first place). The Utility Powers follow the exact same progression they always have, so there's nothing to worry about there. The same exchanges can be worked out of the Paragon and Epic level progressions too (E Classes, again, get things on the levels that could be equivocated to Encounters or Dailies like 11th, 13th, 15th, 19th and so on). I can understand why people don't care for the Essentials classes, but under the hood I find them an interesting experiment with what you could do with the system's framework without completely destroying it in the process. These are all things you would have to take into consideration were you to say, homebrew something for 4E. I suppose its fair to enough to say Essentials is a developer crafted expansion that shows those familiar enough with the system how to properly homebrew 4E without causing it to tumble down like a Jenga tower. Edit: I SHOULD note the one oddball thing Essentials classes do that DOESN'T follow the 4E framework. They get abilities at Level 8, which is the only thing that can't be equivocated to something else. This is the only real monkey wrench I can find in the reverse engineering idea. Agent Boogeyman fucked around with this message at 20:50 on Jan 23, 2015 |
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Jan 23, 2015 20:44
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I wish they'd just forked development instead of doing Essentials -- do a D&D 4.5 that built on what they'd learned called "D&D Encounters" (since encounters are the building block of 4e anyway) and release what became 5e as "D&D Realms" or "D&D Classic" or something. Release adventure paths with stats for both lines, so nobody buys "the wrong product." If you try to please everybody, you end up pleasing nobody.
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Jan 23, 2015 21:04
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LightWarden posted:Knight can be pretty good as well once other books are added in, since Overwhelming Impact at epic means that all your MBAs now daze, which is pretty amazing, and since the knight is MBA focused your standard action isn't quite as important as your opportunity actions if you don't use Martial Cross-Training to pick up a fighter encounter power, so you really have no problem grabbing the Battle Standard of the Hungry Blade and just going to town in your black hole box of pain (especially if you're a half-elf with Eldritch Strike)... This paragraph right here is good example of what burned me out on 4e; your character is either overly-complicated and fiddly, or it doesn't rate.
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Jan 24, 2015 03:10
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How do you guys find good games to join these days? All the places I know to look are either doing play-by-post, 5e or pathfinder. Wanna play more 4e.
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Jan 24, 2015 19:38
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My LFR group is still playing LFR, which is nice. Once that's over, I'm not sure where I'll go for my 4e fix.
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Jan 24, 2015 19:44
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I really, really shouldn't do this... But I've been considering getting back into 4e DMing, and I could be convinced to run a Skype/Virtual Daivve (or Skype/Roll20) game.
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Jan 24, 2015 19:51
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