/4eg/ 4th Edition General

Should we put up a link to the Discord? Posting one on Veeky Forums is basically painting a target on you but at the same time most regulars have gone there.

That's fair. I think it might be a matter of perspective and focus as well. You very much emphasises 4e's combat system as a challenge, and while it's very good at that, groups I'm in use it just as much, if not more so, as an awesome fight scene emulator, powers acting as cool narrative things, with mechanics that influence the flow of the fight as a secondary consideration a good chunk of the time.

I believe those Sarlona guys had 1 up like 2 threads ago.

I'll add this to my notes.

There are a lot of changes, but the overall play experience produced remains similar to RAW in the official books.

There are plenty of ways of pressuring through terrain setup, enemy movement options (teleport, flying, jumping, high speed values, spider-climbing and dropping down, charges and long shifts, etc), enemy artillery types with area burst powers. If the DM isn't using enough variety then you can get stuck in a pattern where you never feel vulnerable.

This is a good point: there are a bunch of ways to scale difficulty through changing the number of enemies, or increasing PC hit points, or granting extra action points. In general I haven't found the need to do this, but the methods for changing difficulty is something I discuss in another design document. I don't think the game needs to be too hard for most people to play, but I think it's important that we can adjust the difficulty level with a good degree of certainty so that the game can be challenging for groups that want either easier or harder encounters.

wasn't there a non expiring link

I have to establish a premise for the argument and it might sound more intimidating than what I mean. I think games benefit more from having a focus, and if they can do other things in addition to that, then that's great, but I'd prefer to try to do at least one thing well before I extend it beyond that.

Well it's hard to hit that damn Wizard, someone forgot to tell them that Controllers sacrifice defense for offense and has about 26 AC at level 9 and has both Shield and Staff of Defense, but he is not untouchable. I believe in the past 3 sessions he's gone negative but hasn't died like 4 times. I've had to up the difficultly a little bit since the Warpriest joined, so my solution has been to add 1-2 more standards per fight or add an elite. The fights with elites tend to be memorable because they have cool abilities and are rather threatening. 2 days ago the 9th encounter of the day (Comrade's Succor is a wonderful Ritual) was in a small cramped room with statues blocking parts of the battlefield with a Medusa Archer, Ogre Warhulk, and a Snaketongue Warrior that I slapped the Barbarian template on, who got to use the wonderful Feast of Violence power doing an absurd amount of damage.

discord.gg/c4Vny9u

So my friend is running a three shot for lv 1-3. What's the best leader at those levels / early heroic? Warlord?

I examined the scaling methods for attack bonuses and defense scores and derived a simpler and flatter way of determining those so that it's much harder to create invulnerable characters. After doing that, I realized that magic items were largely unnecessary, aside from those items created to patch parts of the game. Instead of using magic items (or feats) as patches, I'm changing the class features and other things that cause problems at the root.

It sounds to me like the situation is being handled decently if you've got PCs going negative, a variety of terrain, and the number of enemies are adjusted to keep encounter difficulty where you want it.

Friggin everyone in this party has a fuckton of AC but I've dealt with it by just increasing all the monsters to hit by 2. Combat tends to be dramatic because it plays out like this: First round enemies use all their cool stuff and start putting the party in a bad situation, party responds with popping all the defensive abilities, and when it's their turn they start turning the tides with various marks and whatnot, also lots of crits because Roll20's "quantum dice" are hilarious. I did take the general recommendation I see in a lot of places and handed out pre errata Melee Training to everyone and gave them a free expertise (or if they already had 1, refunded them for it) everyone liked it as they weren't worried about having to make basic attacks anymore because only like 2 people were good at MBAs.

That encounter flow is the kind that was intended from the start of 4e's development, so it's good to see that part is working as intended for you.

I got rid of ability scores and replaced them with some modifiers that just scale with level, so I don't have to patch things with stuff like Melee Training. It works out in play to doing the same thing, but the system side of it is less complicated.

I was always aware of the whole handing out Melee Training but I was loathe to do it at first but this game has changed over time and certain house rules have been made in response to situations. But in the end, we're all still having fun and that matters the most.

Clerics and Warlords are always solid

Either Warlord or Bard. Though in truth it's actually Warlord|Artificer.

Defender gameplay theory often interests me - how do you properly defend as time goes by? Your punishment has to be upgraded in many ways for it to be useful, and you have to present bad options when attacking you or an ally. Oh, and range is a big thing, too.

I think all Defenders should have a ranged punishment or way to keep enemies close. At high levels the Fighter should be able to throw his shield or dagger, or handaxe like Captain America to try to prevent ally damage or punish an enemy after the damage. Or the Swordsage, that can teleport close to the enemy having an option to Gravity Well around himself, denying enemies to fly or teleport away from him.

I believe like the melee strikers are supposed to deal with artillery and controllers. And Defenders can easily lockdown someone if properly built.

The thing isn't so much the punishes, as it is tht enemies have more and more options to ruin the days of the party. The higher you go, the more monsters have range or can teleport or do a nasty status condition.
More of a rethorical question, they all have different ways of handling it - Paladins apply Weakening and sometimes even heal it back, while Fighters will absolutely love a good Feyslaughter Weapon to stop enemies from getting away. There are other examples.

I address this in my homebrew by carefully scaling damage, rewriting the marked condition, and rewriting the defender class features so they work better without requiring patch feats or hybrid combos.

I changed the fighter's punishment feature to use a kind of super OA that asks for a "basic attack" but not a "melee basic attack," so the fighter can do things like throw a spear or shoot arrows to punish marked enemies from level 1. This also allows feats that modify OAs to apply to the fighter's punishment, so if you want a little more damage or an extra control effect, that's still an option.

Hmmm, the Defender is always going to be challenging - it's the role that wants to force the DM into mindgames the most, and thus it's super subjective.

I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at. Ensuring that there actually is a mindgame at all is what my essay is about, so that we're more likely to see mark violation and punishment sometimes instead of it just being a latent threat.

To expand on giving the fighter the ability to punish with a ranged basic attack, this isn't a carte blanche for the fighter to always punish without considering the situation. The fighter's RBA can still provoke OAs like normal. If the fighter is using that RBA because they were forced away from their marked enemy, they can still end up adjacent to a different enemy, and then there's a further mindgame about whether they should punish and risk an OA against themselves, or not punish and not take the OA against themselves. This can be further complicated when there are conditions in play that disallow OAs, like dazed. Since fighter punishment is always performed through attacks, that punishment is also gated behind getting a good attack roll, which is compounded by variation in enemy roles (soldiers are harder to punish than brutes because soldiers have better AC). Modifiers to the attack roll is another way to complicate the situation (a bonus from an ally's power, a class feature bonus, penalties from enemy conditions on the fighter, obscured squares, etc). A side effect of all of this is that the fighter doesn't absolutely need any patches like feyslaughter weapons to perform the functions of their role, though I do grant them class features at higher levels that help them with teleporting enemies. Because those are class features instead of an item, they're guaranteed to remain effective instead of requiring a degenerate form of system mastery where you have to know that you need a specific item to do your job.

What I mean about that is the Defender is the role that relies most on DM interaction, so it's the toughest one to properly balance.

Oh, yes, I agree, and that's why I took a relatively radical step in redefining how defenders and controllers work in an otherwise functionally conservative homebrew. I felt strongly that the DM interaction was either too predetermined or too heavily arbitrary, and it failed to strike a balance between those. Most of the other changes I've made are about revealing more of the underlying math, reducing awkwardness of builds, making sure that powers are appropriate to the role of a class, measuring damage vs. effects of powers, removing or upgrading bad options, and resolving long-standing issues with class features that never seemed to work quite right (e.g. paladin marking and punishment, or the ever-present desire to poach powers like twin strike). All of this is the product of wanting to systematize the kind of house rules that get recommended often, like handing out free feats so that they aren't taxes.

Hey, why is your rewrite missing the Warlock? Is it just to-be-done?
It looks like you've all the other PHB1 classes, which is why I ask.

pastebin.com/690WwtPD

It's just to-be-done. I'm working on the druid right now to help balance out the selection of classes. I'm incorporating a few things from some of the essentials classes into my homebrew version of the O-classes, and I'm not sure how difficult the PHB3 classes will be. There are some like the seeker and O-assassin that would need a lot of work, and I'm not sure if I can meaningfully fix those or if I'll end up just incorporating parts of them into other classes.

It can take me a while to get through all the editing I want to do of a class because I'm trying to be as careful as I can. I'm trying to maintain breadth too. For example, if you look through my Remix version of the wizard, you'll find that I have a fuller set of options at all levels, like how I've introduced enough acid powers to be able to run a wizard that specializes in that. Another option that should be worthwhile now are beastmaster rangers.

In some cases a power or paragon path is really better suited to another class, so I'll move it there if I feel like it makes sense. With a lot of the more generic utility powers, I'm moving those over to being skill powers so that they're available to anyone without trouble. I also have to consider which class-specific feats I'm keeping, changing, or getting rid of. Many of them are now unnecessary because I've corrected the core math and class features.

This sounds interesting. How would it work?

I think I remember this one; you basically take a tactical warlord and spam magic weapon when you aren't doing the tactical warlord stuff. There's also something with crossbows.

How about instead of distracted having the "except against the controller" clause, you just lower the defense of the controller classes a bit? This simplifies the distracted effect and further distinguishes controllers as "the squishies". It should mathematically have the same effect on the "distracted" monster too.

This is a good suggestion for an alternative method! The real difference here between this and how the distracted condition works is that it's equivalent to attacking all enemies every turn. That means there's less of a distinguishing factor between single target and multi-target controller powers, and a further difference between multi-target powers that let you choose targets within a range vs. area effects. It also means the controller player is shut out from a form of player skill: positioning, choice of targets, and choice of powers doesn't matter as much now, and the controller's ability to manage this kind of soft "aggro" also stops existing. Since distracted would not be a condition, it also means that interaction between that and enemies that can end the condition on themselves or their allies is closed out (compare with enemies that have the ability to shed the marked condition).

One of my design goals is to move some of the player skill over from character building to decisions made during encounters, and this change is in favor of a more passive choice on the build side of that, effectively a very simple "pick controller." However, you are right that the net effect in terms of the numerical values is the same, so I'm willing to include this as an optional rule that simplifies combat, with the warning I've given about how it changes the game.

Well, all that positioning stuff is still important, except instead of being especially important for the guys that you have distracted, it's important for every enemy equally.

There's also the math fact that the lower someone's defenses are the less the -2 matters (on a target you hit 11-20 it matters for 20% but on a 16-20 it matters for 40% of your rolls), so having naturally lower defenses means you are an even important-er target when you have distraction up.

Tangentially, this principle of trying to move player skill from building to decisions in the encounter is also why I've made combat advantage harder to get from just picking the right build. For example, I've moved the vicious advantage feat from heroic to paragon, and I've eliminated all options that result in a kind of permanent CA, like the frostcheese combo. At the same time, I've made the base chance to hit a little lower, and default damage is relatively higher. While that results in proportional outputs similar to vanilla 4e, it also means that bonuses and penalties to hit are more meaningful, so getting CA is more significant, and making players rely a little more on positioning (flanking) rewards players that make better tactical choices instead of build choices.

My drive for this change comes from my experience with games like Magic:tG, where a large portion of the player skill comes from deck building. While deck building is stimulating in the way that engineering is stimulating, it's a very different kind of activity than one like poker, where a player's knowledge of how best to make choices during play is emphasized. I don't want to go so far as to eliminate the building portion of the game, but I do want to shift the emphasis from building to choices made during play.

Magic Weapon, Direct the Strike. Use a Superior Crossbow. You have Punishing Eye as your daily which is bonkers; while your encounters are also absurd like Powerful Warning and Shocking Feedback.

Why are all ours OP pics anime catgirls and other pfg trash now?

Unsurprisingly a decent amount of 4rries are weebs and it's a way to get some attention.

I'll stay vigilant and try to snipe the next one.

Why are catgirls pfg trash?

because the last thread had an Eberron picture and nobody posted in it.
Clearly this is what you faggots want

The Dark Sun one went pretty far, and it didn't even have a subject line...

I am one of the 100 anons making a miniatures skirmish game, thought my focus is more on dungeon rooms than open spaces.

What mechanics do you think are necessary in this genre, and what do you think should be avoided?

1. Use a resource system instead of a time limit system. Let players determine how often they blow the wad and need to stop to have lunch before they continue on for the next round. I'd argue to make resources fully recover between fights/events rather than at a slow pace. Slow pace can still work for in fight though.

2. No OoT actions. Constant passive effects are fine, but don't let players or enemies interrupt the flow of the game. Instead, give players or enemies multiple turns through the use of these limited and rare sort of abilities.

3. Perks, feats or whatever you want to call it should avoid static flat bonuses to rolls or stats. Provide more tactical bonuses through changing how powers work, or what they can effect.

I'm planning on using an Action points system like in og Fallout, where the points reset each round. While I'm not using attacks of opportunity, the reactive system is based off of MtG's stack, where attacks target and give the target a chance to respond.

When in doubt, subject line can be a punishing thing, and Eberron's thread had issues with the Discord as well.

Cute anime girls grab attention far better than pretty much anything else. You either love them or you hate them, but at least you noticed the thread. Now, you wanna talk 4e?

Clearly not, because the thread hasn't broken 100 posts.

Right, back into roles - the Warden is an interesting class because of how weird it is; past a certain level it's a really good defender, before that level it's really mediocre. The thing is - how do you optimize a Warden so it doesn't suffer from the Warden's main issue (unable to punish shifting)? It's more of an optimization challenge than redesign challenge.

Hybrid the fuck out of it

How, though? Fighter suffers from a lack of marks and Battlemind overloads the same defense. Paladin can manage marking alright, but it's not exactly sticky.

You just need to give a +mobility option

One of the Elsir Hammer feats?

funin.space/compendium/feat/Elsir-Hammer-Champion.html (there's one for ranger and warlord too).

It takes your immediate, but you still have an opportunity if the guy does a ranged attack.

I noticed the thread because I search for 4egs, nerd.

I thought Wardens had their threatened spaces count as difficult terrain to stymie shifting?

Difficult terrain only costs extra squares to enter, not leave. So even if you could make your adjacent area difficult terrain, enemies could still shift away from you.

Well, I've been doing it wrong for a while.
Honestly, I think I'll keep doing it wrong, as the blade is double sided, works for and against the pcs.

I'd rather do something like attach a "can't shift" effect to slow. Seems reasonable.

Anyway, Form of Winter's Herald reaches 2 squares, but it is daily.

Only on certain things such as Form of Winter's Herald and Treacherous Ice.

Why is this a problem exactly? You have slows, which make any charging shenans mitigated by simple positioning, and any ranged attack you can just punish with a reach weapon.

Make any unspend AP do something. Anything. If Role based, even better. Increase a specific defense, can be used to deal extra damage the next turn... It sucks to see potential actions wasted.

10

The issue is how many people can a Warden threaten, which is a big part for Defenders. Anwser is - not many.

Action economy balance is flimsy as hell.

Use a polearm

No shield, though.

What's the right way to build a charisma-based a paladin. Wouldn't my lack of attacks of opportunity hurt my ability to defender? I'm looking at Cha/Wis but that looks like it would tank my defences.

It would if you don't use Divine Power. Thankfully, Divine Power makes the Paladin a very, very good Defender.

I don't think CHA/WIS is a thing

There are about 20 powers that are Cha Primary/Wis secondary for Paladins.

are they good tho?

Of course; 4e is very balanced game.

AP on an off turn is meant to be used for blocking and movent dodge (more ap spent farther dodge)

Quick question, wouldn't just adding something like "teleports also provoke" and maybe some sort of resistance against forced movement as class features at some level also fix Aura defenders?

Some are the best Paladin Powers (-Wis to hit on everyone you marked in a burst 3, for example), also it has a scary good Paragon Path.

Bump.

(1/2)
I was mulling over this option for a long time too!

I give "marked creatures that teleport provoke" as a fighter feature at level 21, which I believe is on par with "shifting provokes" at earlier levels.

If you use a defender aura class in 4e then I'd follow the old charop recommendations of using anything that lets you ignore (in part or in whole) forced movement on your character.

I considered using defender auras too, at least as variants, but ultimately I decided against it. I have no interest in trying to rehabilitate most of the Essentials stuff though; I think that came from Mearls' attempt to recapture the people that preferred 3.PF, and a lot of the writing is callbacks and simulationist stuff that I'm trying to move away from. I think we have other games that do that stuff better anyway. There are bits and pieces I'm willing to keep in some form, like a version of the blackguard's striker mechanic for the paladin. Defender auras in particular are something that I don't like because they interact poorly with the rest of the system. For example, I'm trying to keep classes broad enough that all of them have ranged options, so I have plenty of fighter powers that let you use ranged weapons. With auras, I can't use the defender mechanic at range, or else I have to write something that looks very awkward compared to just using a condition. Same thing with monsters that can shed marks, or anything else that interacts with conditions.

(2/2)
The reason why I decided not to give the fighter resistance to forced movement as a class feature was that I would know exactly how many squares would be needed in a power in order to effectively negate a mark (get out of the defender aura). For example, if I give the fighter 2 squares of resistance to forced movement, I would know that if I ever gave a monster 3 squares of forced movement, they would also be negating the mark with that. So how many squares do I pick? It's a bad binary situation. It also means there's a magic number hidden in the system, and I try to avoid that because it's a bad design principle in general.

Another bad or difficult design feature is absolute effects. This is another lesson from games like M:tG. Making game elements into things that you can't interact with turns the situation into an all or nothing. You either have the answer or you don't. I think this saps tension from play, and that makes it boring. M:tG can get away with that in part because you don't know what card you'll draw next, but that kind of uncertainty doesn't exist in a game like this. I prefer to give everyone things that work, and then the other side has to find a way to deal with it, instead of just flatly negating things.

None of this is a problem for Essentials, which doesn't care about the same things that I care about, but I don't think there's a point in reproducing a separate defender mechanic when I can use the marked condition for all of them.

If you're writing your own homebrew, your tastes and design ideas might be far apart from mine, and these issues might not concern you. There are other ways to resolve the issue that I didn't use. You could make forced movement random, like rolling 1d3-1 and using that as the number of squares. I simply chose not to do that for my homebrew.

I find that the idea of a "pure" melee class is pretty interesting, and if I made one, it'd necessarily need to have shit to deal with repositioning and teleporting things, because otherwise it could be easily kited anyway.

You could just say "immune to forced movement X times/encounter" (I sorta like this one, since it might lead to hard decisions), or maybe a move reaction (something like Battlemind's Lightning Rush, but it's only a move), or possibly "ignore X squares of forced movement" where X is stat, or something to that effect to keep the "unknown" factor.

Not to mention other cool things like dragging an enemy with you when being forced to move (I think that's a dwarf feat actually).

How would you homebrew a shield based barbarian?

Hmmm... I'd go with something like giving that one an emphasis on forced movement and charges.

Play a warden.

I don't like pure melee because it narrows down the types of situations I can present in encounters. I think in other design schemes where the emphasis is on strategy instead of tactics, or sim games, or story games that use a meta spotlight for characters, all of those are better at handling situations where one or more of the players don't have much to contribute. A tactical game in the style of 4e is something where I'd want to avoid that, so that's why I made the decision to broaden the classes with ranged options. In my homebrew you can still choose to limit yourself to only using melee powers though, so if you're looking for that challenge, it's still there.

Ablating powers or resources is something I've been keeping, like the wizard's shield power, so I wouldn't be opposed to a power that lets the character do something in that style.

I like grabbing and dragging too. I'll make a note of that feat for when I'm reviewing all the racial feats and other support.

But what if I what to be a striker role?

Which makes more sense, rewriting powers for 30 levels of a class that doesn't support shield use at all, or picking a class that's closer to the concept and focusing on damage? If you are going to homebrew something, it's easier to change small features of the class (for example, you could just replace the wardens class feature with the barbarians striker feature if you are really married to that idea) then to try to make a homebrew that doesn't have any usable powers.

In this case, the point is moot because there IS an easy way to play a barbarian striker that wields a shield. The whirling slayer feature in primal power supports dual-wielding barbarians. All you have to do then is buy a spiked shield (adventurer's vault). Presto, you have a shield-wielding barbarian with usable powers.

>I don't like pure melee because it narrows down the types of situations I can present in encounters

That's exactly why I follow it up with how IF you made a class like that, it'd need something to handle situations where the concept would be inherently at a disadvantage, such as very high mobility. Besides "pure" (note quotation marks) melee doesn't mean ranged weapons explode in his hands, only that he doesn't get any extra support using them.

Please note that you will need to take a feat to become proficient in shields, and then another to become proficient in spiked shields.

Two feats sounds like a heavy burden, but here it should work out pretty nicely. Spending two feats is better than having no powers at all. This option also gives you a bonus to AC and reflex, and a nice increase in magic item options.

Oh, yes, I see now. I was thinking of situations like a dragon flying overhead and refusing to land, and that isn't generally a scenario supported by 4e, so I wasn't sure if that's what you were also imagining.

Basic attacks in my homebrew also use a standardized scaling where their proportion of damage to HP stays nearly the same over 30 levels, and everyone can use a bow, so there's always that fallback option.

I don't know anything about 4e but 13th age borrows from it? I wasn't aware

13th Age was made by one of the main designers of 4e.

Co-developed by some of the biggest creative designers behind 4e and 3.5. Conceptually it borrows from 4e, but ditches the tactical combat for what are essentially range bands. It's a bit "leaner", in that it attempts to cut down number bloat, too.

I am lucky to have a group of creative players as a DM, but they are not experts with the system. What are some of the coolest rituals available in the system? Also are there any examples of really well done skill challenges I can steal from other modules?

The trick for a Skill Challenge is to never announce you're doing one.