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Yakk
2010-03-08, 02:46 PM
4e Houserules

This is an attempt at a slight rotation of the 4e rules. I tried to make nearly all of them relatively easy to deal with using the character builder (the worst of them requires that you right-click and edit the fields in the character sheet).

Character Creation:
Character gain an extra floating +2 to assign to any attribute they don't gain a racial bonus to.
Justification: This breaks most of the race/class rigidity I've witnessed

Banned Feats:
Expertise, Robust Defences, Paragon Defences, Epic Will, Epic Fortitude, Epic Reflexes
I am going to provide bonuses that these patch feats made up for

Banned Equipment:
Masterwork Light Armor, Belt of Vim, Boots of Quickness, Circlet of Indomitability.
I am going to provide bonuses that these item's bonuses made up for

Equipment Modifications:
All magic belts grant a +1 per tier item bonus to Fortitude. All magic boots provide a +1 per tier item bonus to Reflex. All magic head items provide a +1 per tier item bonus to Will.
While this does add to equipment dependency slightly, it is small enough that players just have to keep half-assed up-to-date versions of their items.
Advancement Changes:
At level 4, 8, 14, 18, 24 and 28, you gain a +2 to two stats and a +1 to a third stat instead of +1 to two stats.
This ends up making up for expertise and the like

Rest changes:
Extended Rest rules are changed. They are identical to short rests, except they take 6 hours and you can make an endurance check with a bonus equal to your max healing surges against DC 10 in order to regain a healing surge. For every 10 you beat the DC, you gain another healing surge. (Extended rests no longer recharge daily powers).

Milestone Changes:
When you reach a milestone, you roll 1d6 for each expended daily power. On a 456 the power recharges. You also regain 1/2 (rounded down) your max healing surges. In addition, if the milestone occurs without a short rest at the same time, you recover all encounter powers and can expend 1 healing surge.
The two of these mean that 10 encounter days, or 1 encounter days, both provide the players with sufficient, but not absurd, resources

Defence changes:
To calculate your fortitude, reflex and will defences, add your highest stat bonus from the appropriate pair of stats to 1/2 of the lowest stat bonus (round down). So someone with 18 wisdom and 8 charisma has a 13 will defence at level 1.
This provides a modest NAD scaling boost, and makes "double dip" builds (like axe fighters) less anemic in their total NADs. Note that axe fighters end up being nigh-immune to fortitude based attacks: the cost is that their reflex and will is poor.

Min attack bonus:
Your attack bonus, not including situational and proficiency modifiers, but including enhancement, level and stat bonuses, is never lower than 3 plus your character level for any class, multiclass, or racial powers. Additional bonuses baked into powers are considered situational, unless the power is a non-implement, non-weapon power.
This is a "no, you cannot screw your character up" rule. It does mean that wizards can get by with a really low int, for example: a character with 12 int who is a wizard is viable...

Warlock Patches:
Warlocks can deal curse damage at most once per turn to a given target. When a warlock misses all targets with any encounter or daily power, they can choose to take damage equal to the power's level, skip any miss effects, and the power remains unexpended. (this new feature is called the Pact Bargain)
Many warlock daily powers have no miss effect, and are not reliable. Sacrifice to Caphion became a feat tax. The above makes both multi-target warlock powers viable, and fixes the many "fails to be reliable" warlock daily spells.

Spellbook Changes:
When a Wizard or a Swordmage has a spellbook, and has it equipped, they can expend a daily attack spell as a move action and be able to use a daily attack spell from their spellbook one time later in the encounter. They may not use this to use the same daily attack spell more than once per day.
This is just because I think it is cool. No, really -- Wizards really didn't need the help!

Con to HP
At level 11 and 21, add your con score to your current HP.
This reduces the degree to which con becomes utterly irrelevant to your HP score as you reach high levels. At level 1, a 20 con dwarf wizard has 32 HP, while a 8 con elf fighter has 23 -- by level 30, the dwarf wizard has 158 while the fighter has 199. With this change, the dwarf wizard has 218 and the fighter has 219: the importance of Con is increased, but not as high as it was at level 1.

Additional Errata:
Feytouched (and similar teleport auto damage) can be used once per round. Fey Charge's teleport during a charge doesn't count as Fey Stepping, but does use up the power if you miss.

Avenger Oath applies to 1 attack/turn, and also grants a critical on a 19-20.

Powers that hit the same target multiple times have their non-explicitly mentioned damage contributions obey stacking rules. Unnamed bonuses from the same named source apply at most once (ie, if you have an unnamed +5 bonus to damage that applies to all hits, and your power hits twice, you only get the +5 damage once).

Lasting Frost is banned.

Additional Errata will be added here to cover broken combinations.

erikun
2010-03-09, 02:50 AM
I think the most recent WotC errata nerfs Lasting Frost into only affecting the first target hit each turn, rather than every target.


Rest changes:
Extended Rest rules are changed. They are identical to short rests, except they take 6 hours and you can make an endurance check with a bonus equal to your max healing surges against DC 10 in order to regain a healing surge. For every 10 you beat the DC, you gain another healing surge. (Extended rests no longer recharge daily powers).
So an extended rest (sleeping for 8 hours) only recovers 2-3 healing surges, and does not recover daily powers. On the other hand, getting into 2 bar fights (milestone, below) will recover half of your healing surges, anywhere from 4-8, and recover around half your daily powers.

This seems... very unusual, and makes me wonder even more what the daily power and healing surges are supposed to represent.


Milestone Changes:
When you reach a milestone, you roll 1d6 for each expended daily power. On a 456 the power recharges. You also regain 1/2 (rounded down) your max healing surges. In addition, if the milestone occurs without a short rest at the same time, you recover all encounter powers and can expend 1 healing surge.
Well, it will certainly allow parties to keep on going. However, like I said before, it's confusing that sleeping overnight doesn't recover you as well as kicking in an orc's face.

Also, how does it interact with X uses per day powers? (ie. Paladin's Lay on Hands)


Defence changes:
To calculate your fortitude, reflex and will defences, add your highest stat bonus from the appropriate pair of stats to 1/2 of the lowest stat bonus (round down). So someone with 18 wisdom and 8 charisma has a 13 will defence at level 1.
First, I'm a bit confused. 10 + 4 (18 Wis) + 0 (8 Cha = -1 / 2 = 0 rounded down) sounds like it should be 14 Will defense. Is this meant to penalize players who stick 8's into stats somehow?

Most characters I've seen normally have 10-12 in their secondary stats, so this would generally only add +1 in most cases (for a 14 in one stat). As you said though, it would help out the Str/Con, Dex/Int, and Wis/Cha builds.

Yakk
2010-03-09, 10:26 AM
I think the most recent WotC errata nerfs Lasting Frost into only affecting the first target hit each turn, rather than every target.
*nod*. I can still break 4e using Lasting Frost without using it on AOEs.

So an extended rest (sleeping for 8 hours) only recovers 2-3 healing surges, and does not recover daily powers. On the other hand, getting into 2 bar fights (milestone, below) will recover half of your healing surges, anywhere from 4-8, and recover around half your daily powers.

This seems... very unusual, and makes me wonder even more what the daily power and healing surges are supposed to represent.
Part that I removed was renaming "daily" to "inspired".

Sleeping for 8 hours will recover a handful of healing surges. To fully heal up, you'll need about a week of rest.

This is intended to allow for gameplay where there are multiple encounters/day (with no real upper limit), in which resource expenditure in those fights matter (you don't get everything back between fights), and in which you can also have multiple days/encounter fights where resource expenditure matters.

You get back healing surges/inspired powers by advancing the "plot" as it where and reaching milestones.

Also, how does it interact with X uses per day powers? (ie. Paladin's Lay on Hands)
Consider it X independent 1/day powers. Roll 1d6 for each expended lay on hands -- regain one for every 456 rolled.

First, I'm a bit confused. 10 + 4 (18 Wis) + 0 (8 Cha = -1 / 2 = 0 rounded down) sounds like it should be 14 Will defense. Is this meant to penalize players who stick 8's into stats somehow?
Round down, not towards 0.

It was intended to close the gap between Str/Con character total NAD and Str/Dex character total NAD slightly, especially at high levels.

It also reduces the degree to with High/Low stat pairings in each NAD is optimal.

Most characters I've seen normally have 10-12 in their secondary stats, so this would generally only add +1 in most cases (for a 14 in one stat). As you said though, it would help out the Str/Con, Dex/Int, and Wis/Cha builds.
First, note that most characters do that because there is little reward otherwise. Your stats are better if they are following the High/Low pattern. The degree to which they are better is slightly reduced under this system.

Second, note that a 12 in a secondary stat ends up granting a +1 to the NAD at epic, while someone with an 8 in the stat by epic no longer has a penalty.

Third, it slightly boosts the expected growth rate of NADs from level 1 to level 30 such that I approach the target +29 over 29 levels better (and, as it closes the gap between Str/Con and Str/Dex players, it helps solve that issue).

Crossfiyah
2010-03-10, 01:12 AM
Half of these are standard, the other half are silly.

Lasting Frost is not that big of a deal. My Sorcerer crits for 450 damage. Our Rogue's lasting frost is, in no way, more broken than that.