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Under the bad side of things you should probably put bad math. I think most people have a fairly good understanding of why but I'll write a little capsule explanation. Dysfunctional Numbers: Monster to-hit and defense numbers scale by their level, while PC numbers scale by half their level. The gap is filled by requiring everyone to have magic items and feat bonuses and an 18 or 20 in their primary stat, which a) doesn't help with the bloat, b) deprecates rewards (getting the boss monster's magic sword feels less like an accomplishment when it's the +1 upgrade you need for level 11), and c) punishes players for taking creative options. Fixing this requires tearing the math apart and rebuilding it from the ground up. Not the hardest of tasks in and of itself, but it does require rethinking magic items significantly. Under the good side of things, I would put down that classes are much more distinct in play. Sorcerors and wizards play very differently.
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Aug 2, 2014 02:50
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 10:38 |
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I'm going to doublepost and tear apart the skill system at length. 4e's skill system is a mildly modified version of 3.5's skill system, with advancement rules being the biggest change. There are a total of 17 skills. One is dependent on Strength, one on Constitution, three on Dexterity, three on Intelligence, four on Charisma, and five on Wisdom. We could go into more detail about why a muscular dude is worse at intimidating people than a scrawny charmer, or how a fighter is likely worse at knowing the streets than a paladin, but these are mainly quibbles comparatively. More pressing is that classes have unequal access to skills, and where those sorts of critiques become meaningful is that certain classes are required to be trained in certain skills "appropriate to the concept" and all of them have more or less limited access to the skill list, more for martials and less for arcanes. Even this is secondary. Yes, it is bullshit that fighters are required to be dumb jocks, but even without these awful and stupid restrictions, there is still the basic structure of the skill system to contend with. People have argued, in my view convincingly, that the thing which doomed the fighter was the introduction of the Thief with unique "skills" and the ensuing belief that skills had to be defined or else you didn't have them. That is interesting but irrelevant to the core problem. It's not so much the math (although the suggested way to have epic-level challenges is something that falls apart for many skills within the base game and really is just a Red Queen's Race without significant work on the part of the DM) as it is the core concept. 4e's skills, on an abstract level, are gatekeepers and not keys. They serve as passive barriers to be unlocked rather than tools to solve problems. This is really the problem with skill challenges as well: they are just a string of gates you have to unlock in a row. How to fix this? Not without (partly) undoing unified resolution if we want to keep something that's basically 4e. What's necessary is removing pass-fail resolution (which already has been partially removed from 4e's combat system) and replacing difficulty class with a system where your numbers let you do things. This may look minor, but the difference between "you must roll a 20 or higher to unlock this lock" and "A 25 in Thievery allows you to unlock any lock within a turns's time" on a psychological level is big. This should also be coupled with a system of graduated results, so that a 20 requires two turns, a 15 five minutes, a 10 a couple hours, or whatever. This would be difficult for some skills, and that goes back to the minor problems, and addressing them by producing a cleaned-up list of skills. Or ditching rolling entirely, or something even more dramatic, such as building a D&D 6e by baking granular resolution into the core mechanics. Additionally, removing treadmills in general, though getting away from the tool/sandbox style of D&D, is something that would make the game more coherent, so that you can have a tactile understanding of how a Heroic, Paragon, and Epic character differ.
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Aug 2, 2014 03:39
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Maxwell Lord posted:What's the consensus on costs for rituals? I know they're too drat high RAW but should they be chopped or totally done away with? Are rituals balanced just by not being able to be cast on the fly? If you're doing a full redesign, chop the cost entirely. Instead, all rituals need a Focus, which is related to the ritual itself. Divine rituals almost always just need a holy symbol, possibly a holy book. Bardic rituals generally can be performed with just an instrument or voice as the Focus. Other arcane and primal rituals require various interesting bits and pieces. Powerful rituals burn the focus in the process (for example, the Focus for a powerful divination ritual could be a feast for the entities you're asking, which is eaten in the course of the ritual), or they require surges from the participants (a bardic song which drains vitality from the singers to direct people's attention away from them), or they take extended lengths of time or space to complete (summoning the Rambling Citadel of Airygard requires drawing out 1:8 scale silhouettes in chalk). Obviously, you need a way to rank the power of rituals, at least internally, but it shouldn't be by level. The main advantage of this is that it's something that provides flavor and gives a more concrete sense of how the players do things (especially by making the main Focus for simple rituals be the character's implement) and also allows for gates that seem less arbitrary, particularly by focusing on the practice end rather than the fetch-quest end.
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Nov 20, 2014 03:20
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