What one thing would you take from 4E into a different game?

[johnbragg]

I'm not here to edition war. You're here because you like 4th edition.

I'd like to know what your favorite thing(s) about 4th edition are, so that I can see if I can steal any of them and bring them into my 3X games.

(As an example, I've plundered Morale from 2E and before, I'm stealing the concentration-duration, one-concentration-as-free action from 5th.)

Lair effects may be something I've adopted from 4th via 5th, I'm not sure.

So what's great about your game? I'd like to steal it for my game.

[Dimers]

Healing surges, first on the list. Having a different number of surges per class sets up more fundamental differences in their durability than hit points do, without the situation where your max per day is identical to your max per fight. Adding in Constitution bonus to the number of surges makes Constitution valuable but not as crucial as in 3rd or 5th ed. And surge value being tied to max hit points means that a Cure Light Wounds cures a light wound no matter who it's applied to, a first-level wizard or a 27th-level fighter.

[ThePurple]

Am I only allowed to state just one thing? 4e made a *lot* of significant deviations from normal D&D (which is one of the reasons why so many people dislike it) that were massive improvements.

Healing surges, first on the list.

If I'm only allowed to say one thing, it's definitely this. The HS system creates a long resource management construct to compliment the HP system working as a quite effective short resource management construct. The advantages of this are numerous, but, for players, it basically amounts to being able to go through multiple encounters in a single day without having your combat effectiveness in any single combat dramatically penalized by poor performance in previous ones. If you allow for non-magical HS use (which you should), it also allows for parties that *don't* include a magic-using healer to actually work.

Other stuff that I'll refer to but won't discuss overmuch would be the elimination of class specific adventuring mechanics (like Rogue trapfinding) so that you aren't *forced* to have a Rogue just to deal with traps, the inclusion of mark and retribution mechanics for defenders (i.e. any class that is supposed to be designed with excellent defenses) to allow them to actually get some real use out of high defenses in a tactical situation, the generic rather than specific skill system (e.g. Thievery rather than Open Lock, Disable Device, Use Rope, and Sleight of Hand; Acrobatics rather than Balance, Escape Artist, and Tumble) so that you don't have to track a massive number of different skills that belong to the same complementary skill set.

There's other stuff I'd bring in but they require complete and total rebuilds of a system, like the removal of "linear-fighter quadratic-wizard" problems by actually balancing classes out across more than the first 5 levels of the game, getting rid of Vancian magic as a whole (which is a plague upon PnP gaming, imo, and one of the worst design decisions that Gygax and Arneson ever made), the robust encounter level system that gives a *much more accurate* view of how threatening a given entity actually is because it uses math rather than abstractions, etc.

[MoutonRustique]

That could be ported to 3X...

HS (as has been said - not 5e HD : these do NOT offer the same effects)

marks - for characters that want to tank

active unit rolls (i.e. attacks vs saves) - already a proposed variant (in SRD?)

martial characters get nice things (ToB:BoNS covers this fairly well)

"one and done" skill proficiency : it's almost never a good idea to split your skill points anyway...

if you're playing on a grid - square fireballs : you may think I'm kidding, but I'm not. Having shapes that match the actual game geography goes a long way in removing the "can I target that dude? can I exclude that dude?" etc.)

[ThePurple]

if you're playing on a grid - square fireballs : you may think I'm kidding, but I'm not. Having shapes that match the actual game geography goes a long way in removing the "can I target that dude? can I exclude that dude?" etc.)

The bigger idea here is to *simplify* tabletop measurement. It's not that big of a deal in an online tabletop with rapid calculations and templates that can be easily used to make these determinations, but, in a physical game, getting bogged down in measurements and conversions for diagonal movement kills the pace of combat.

[Yakk]

Note that 5e took 4e's healing surges, renamed as "hit dice" for the traditionalists. (There is an important difference in that your 5e HD come to about half your max HP, while 4e healing surges come to 2-5x your HP).

You could beef up 5e's HD to match 4e HS sort of like this:

1) Whenever you are healed, you can roll half (round up) of your HD on top of the healing effect (half of your dice, you pick which kind).
2) When you roll a HD, if you roll a 3 or higher, it is not expended.

Now on average d4s get 2 uses, d6s get 3 uses, d8s get 4 uses, d10s get 5 uses and d12s get 6 uses.

If we also replace HP with "max" at each level, and this corresponds to 5 to 13 healing surges in 4e (depending on your HD size) at 10 con, and 6.64 to 16.24 at 20 con (in terms of full HP healed between long rests).

(And yes, in-combat healing becomes more powerful because it unlocks a HD roll, yet healing matters less because players carry with them HP recovery.)

(Can you tell I've been thinking about this one?)

A level 5 fighter with 16 con (65 HP) now has 212.5 HP in HD-based healing instead of 49 HP and 42.5 in HD-based healing.

The difference is that now, big tough characters don't need a healbot to fight more than a few times per day.

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4e encounter balance mathematics, while far from perfect, are not the complete trash 3e and 5es are. Learn from it.

At its core, it is about damage budget (threat) and toughness budget (timer) of foes. Threat*Timer is how many resources you require to defeat a foe. They then map it on a quadratic scale, so something worth 2x the XP is roughly as good as 2 of the smaller creature.

Balancing encounters then consists of following some rules and adding up the "XP value" of the creatures in the encounter.

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Affine advancement. 4e's HP and damage budget is roughly (3+Level)*K for a different K depending on what exactly you are talking about.

4e's accuracy and defences is rougly Level+X, where X varies by attack type and defence type.

Twice as many HP makes you twice as tough. Twice as high defence makes you unkillable. 4e understands the amazing power of target numbers and modifiers and keeps them under control. 4e's solution was to embrace the power curve of to-hit and defence scaling, 5e kept the power curve from getting too large.

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Scaling numbers of dice instead of modifiers. Instead of blurs of hits or huge static modifiers, 4e added multiples of your weapon damage dice. It didn't always succeed, but it worked very well.

The failure to control action budget (more "taps") and damage modifiers (per-hit extra damage) caused this to fail over time.

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It doesn't take magic to be awesome. 4e's "martial" classes have systems that let them simply break the assumptions of the base game. They are "fiat" abilities; they say you can do X, and you can do X. The X described is dramatic, and has significant mechanical impact.

They are powers that change the story.

Other versions of D&D grant "mundane" characters modest bonuses in terms of "swing count" or "+skill modifier" or "+damage". None of these fundamentally change the fiction. Getting +5 to Jump requires you negotiate what a +5 point higher Jump means (or, sometimes, the rules say what it means, and it means nothing dramatic); an ability saying you can jump 30' means you can jump 30'.

In 4e they are formatted "like spells" and are called powers; they need not be. The core lession here is to give characters *mechanical hooks* that *change the rules* and let them do awesome stuff. This means they can basically narrate "X happens". Spells do this in most games, as do 4e powers even those that are not spells.

An example of a non-power like example of this might be "I can unlock any lock in 6 seconds". Or "I can pickpocket anyone without them noticing". Or "I can jump as far as I can run in a turn from a standing start. By expending 1 unit of resources, I can double that".

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[johnbragg]

Am I only allowed to state just one thing?

I'm the thread starter, not your mom.

[quote]4e made a *lot* of significant deviations from normal D&D (which is one of the reasons why so many people dislike it) that were massive improvements.

the inclusion of mark and retribution mechanics for defenders (i.e. any class that is supposed to be designed with excellent defenses) to allow them to actually get some real use out of high defenses in a tactical situation,

I'll research and ponder.

the generic rather than specific skill system (e.g. Thievery rather than Open Lock, Disable Device, Use Rope, and Sleight of Hand; Acrobatics rather than Balance, Escape Artist, and Tumble) so that you don't have to track a massive number of different skills that belong to the same complementary skill set.

Pathfinder moved in this direction, and 5th went whole-hog. (I already steal the PAthfinder Class Bonus instead of 4x skill points at first level.)

There's other stuff I'd bring in but they require complete and total rebuilds of a system, like the removal of "linear-fighter quadratic-wizard" problems by actually balancing classes out across more than the first 5 levels of the game,

Well, that's what E6 is for.

getting rid of Vancian magic as a whole (which is a plague upon PnP gaming, imo, and one of the worst design decisions that Gygax and Arneson ever made), the robust encounter level system that gives a *much more accurate* view of how threatening a given entity actually is because it uses math rather than abstractions, etc.

[johnbragg]

That could be ported to 3X...

If there's something else, go ahead. The thing about 3X is that you can bolt on new subsystems--whether they work with other subsystems, or work properly in the first place....

(DELETED) a bunch of me telling you why I don't mind those things. I'm not here to argue.

EDIT: Thank you, Yakk.

[ThePurple]

Scaling numbers of dice instead of modifiers. Instead of blurs of hits or huge static modifiers, 4e added multiples of your weapon damage dice. It didn't always succeed, but it worked very well.

The failure to control action budget (more "taps") and damage modifiers (per-hit extra damage) caused this to fail over time.

One of the other advantages of scaling numbers of dice is that it really allows for more weapon diversity. If you don't scale the number of dice properly (which 4e didn't do) or at all (which 3.X did), accurate weapons become the only real viable options because (as you previously stated) accuracy is a proportionate increase in output while the size of your weapon damage die is basically static. If you actually cause powers to scale *properly*, with weapon damage die representing a majority of the damage dealt by a power (or, close to 50%) at all levels, weapons with lower accuracy and higher damage (like axes and hammers) become viable options without requiring overpowering feats/tactics/etc. (which generally just end up creating niche builds rather than true diversity).

Real diversity in options is important. One of the biggest problems I've got with the absolutely huge lists of equipment (both mundane and magical) is that a vast majority of them are explicitly suboptimal choices. You can talk about having millions of options all you want but, as long as there are only a handful that are explicitly better than all of the others, you don't *actually* have millions of options; you have that handful that are actually *good* and another option of "explicitly sub-par".

The core lession here is to give characters *mechanical hooks* that *change the rules* and let them do awesome stuff. This means they can basically narrate "X happens". Spells do this in most games, as do 4e powers even those that are not spells.

To me, rather than using the effects you describe, the takeaway is moreso about giving martial characters something special to make them something *other* than "a magical class without magic", and, most importantly, ensuring that this "something special" is actually strong enough to allow non-magical PCs actually compete with magical characters.

This also requires tacit recognition from whoever is running the game that PCs are *special*. Just as not every priest is a cleric, not every hedge mage is a wizard, and not every hermit is a druid, not every city guard is a fighter nor is not every pickpocket is a rogue. Adventurers are weird and special, which is why they're able to do the stuff they do.

This folds nicely into another awesome thing that 4e did: PCs and NPCs *do not use the same design rules*. In all versions of D&D, everything PCs do basically scales at the same rate: as a PC gets better at combat, they get better at non-combat too. This is good for adventurers for all kinds of reasons; this is bad for NPCs for a bunch of others (that I go into here).

Another important distinction that will allow you to keep campaign worlds *sane* is that NPCs don't use the same advancement rules that PCs do. It doesn't matter how much most people practice/train/etc., they'll never be Olympic caliber fencers. Most real people hit plateaus in their skill levels for anything that they might do but the rules for 3.X don't state this anywhere because this isn't fun for PCs who want to constantly get better the more they do stuff because they're heroes in a game of escapist fantasy.

However, if you apply the same growth rates for NPCs that you give to PCs, you end up with a world like the Forgotten Realms, which is stocked to the brim with ridiculously high level NPCs that, in all logic, make it completely pointless for PCs to exist most of the time (since they could solve whatever low level problem might exist with the barest extension of their will). It's hard to explain why X low-level problem is around when you've got characters like Elminster sitting on their behinds doing nothing (unless you want to use the "well, he's giving low level people stuff to take care of so that they become stronger" excuse, which becomes difficult to marry with anyone with a Good alignment since they're basically allowing evil that they could easily stop triumph for an extended period of time until some random people they don't know appear and take care of it after the fact; I can see a Neutral character take that view but it's hard to see a Good character do so; it's as if Batman simply decided to give low level criminals free reign again because he needs to save his energy for the Joker).

If you recognize that NPCs *don't* progress like PCs, this becomes much simpler to explain since entities with extreme potential like the PCs are so rare that the few of them that exist are tied up with more threats than they can handle, so they are *forced* to prioritize and ignore the lesser evil in order to combat the greater one.

TL:DR don't insist that NPCs and PCs follow the same design rules for progression *or* for performance. NPCs should have the capabilities that the story necessitates, even if it makes no sense within the confines of the rules set down for PCs.

[Duff]

The way the party roles are supported by the system - especially the use of defender marks, but also strikers and leaders

[Yakk]

So I'll be more clear about why healing surges are a game changer.

With healing surges, the big beefy warrior is a source of toughness.

Without healing surges, the HEALER is the source of toughness.

A fighter has X HP/level, per day. A cleric has a growing number of increasingly large healing spells per day. Throw in affordable wands...

The only thing the big burly warrior brings to the table, HP-wise, is sometimes they take a bit less damage (only sometimes), and they can take more damage between heals (deal with spikes *slightly* better).

Now, you could instead just give the big burly warrior a ridiculously huge pile of HP, all of it active. Like, imagine if fighters had level^2*10 HP. Then a level 20 fighter would have 4000 HP. Now (barring spells like "Heal") the fighter also provides HP on a similar scale to a healer.

Unfortunetally, this can break the tactical part of the game. Damage less than 10% of a Fighter's HP in fights that last less than 10 rounds doesn't seem all that threatening, and at 4000 HP that is 400 HP. In effect, this just renders the fighter immune to HP damage, and as the fighter's main attack is HP damage it ends up being a back-door nerf to the fighter when NPCs mimic the fighter's immunity to HP damage (through huge HP pools).

A reserve/healing surge system doesn't change the tactical situation, but enables fighters to fight in more than one challenging fight in a row without a healbot. This benefits fighters story-wise and strategically, not tactically.

[johnbragg]

So I'll be more clear about why healing surges are a game changer.

With healing surges, the big beefy warrior is a source of toughness.

Without healing surges, the HEALER is the source of toughness.

A fighter has X HP/level, per day. A cleric has a growing number of increasingly large healing spells per day. Throw in affordable wands...

.......

A reserve/healing surge system doesn't change the tactical situation, but enables fighters to fight in more than one challenging fight in a row without a healbot. This benefits fighters story-wise and strategically, not tactically.

Thank you. This is the sort of thing. 5E has this, but I don't think the books did a great job of explaining it in terms of fluff.

Porting into 3X--HP is a measure of how tough it is to drop you in a fight. "Healing surges" are a measure of how many times you can fight and go to your limits, and recover and keep going in a day. Spending a "healing surge" is a full-round action which restores (one-half? one-quarter?) of your HP. (Full round action--can't do anything else that round except defend yourself, you're spending the 6 seconds catching your breath and doing your best to have some "me time" in the middle of combat. Not optimal, but it shouldn't be.)

How many "healing surges" do you get? Off the top of my head, I'm thinking Base Attack Bonus plus Con modifier, and each "healing surge" gives you 1/4 max hp. (So 1st level beatstick with +2 con has 3, can get back 75%. 6th level squishy-caster with +1 Con has 4, so he can get back from near-zero to full once. 6th level beatstick with +2 Con has 8, so he can go from near-zero to full twice. That feels like a good spread.)

I don't exactly like the name "healing surge"--I've fluffed it pretty mundanely, in a guy-at-the-gym way. "TAke a breather" is TOO guy-at-the-gym. WIP. Maybe "quick rest"? EDIT: "Second Wind" is actually perfect here. It doesn't break the guy-at-the-gym paradigm, and it still feels badass-hero, something The Rock or Conan would do. The guy at the gym isn't the guy at YOUR gym, after all.

This also means I can cut down on the HP bloat for iconic monsters like dragons and fiends in 3X, keeping them E6-viable. And boss-monster actions mean I can dodge the action economy and use it to make BBEG fights Big and Bad. I'm looking forward to the players realizing that the BBEG just used a healing surge in the middle of combat while still doing stuff. So they might need to down him in one round before he does it again.

[Yakk]

For 3e, consider the HD hack I did above.

Hit Points: Use the max value of all HD you earn to calculate your HP (plus con bonus).

Hit Dice: You keep track of your HD separate from your HP, both size and count. This is a dice pool.

You can "Roll your HD". When you roll your HD, you take some subset of your HD pool and roll it, adding up the value, and adding your con bonus to each die. Typically "Roll your HD" results in healing.

Any dice that land on a 1 or 2 are considered expended, and cannot be rolled again until you recover them.

You can roll up to half (rounded up) of your HD whenever you recieve non-regeneration based magical healing.

A break is a 1 minute period without combat or other strenuous activity. At the end of a break, you may choose to roll your HD.

In addition, when taking the total defence action, you can roll half (rounded up) your HD. You may not do this again until you take a break. This is known as "getting your second wind back".

Every night after a night's sleep in a safe spot roll your expended HD, but do not heal from it. Every 10 the roll results in is one expended HD that is recovered. If your roll under 10 and fail to recover any HD at all, keep track of the amount and add it to the next night's total.

(A character with 20+ con and d10 HD will basically fully heal from a night's rest: they have superhuman recovery. A character with 10 con and d4 HD will recover 1/4th of their expended HD every night.)

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This is a 3e-ish way to emulate 4e healing surges.

A roll of HD is 50%-80% of your HP back at a cost of some HD. A half-roll is 25%-40% of your HP, and corresponds to "spend a healing surge" in 4e.

The half-roll is intended to make your toughness matter as much, or more, than the cleric's healing spell size.

The average total amount of healing you have varies from 1.25x your total HP (uniform d4 HD character with 10 con) to 3.9x your total HP (uniform d12 HD character with 24 con). More con makes your HD rolls a larger % of your max HP, higher HD makes your HD less likely to get expended per roll.

[Wasteomana]

If I'm allowed only 1 thing, it is the standardization of monster math and statblocks.

Seriously, do not give me a list that says "This NPC monster knows fireball and firebolt and etc etc" and then make me look those things up, then what levels they can cast them at and then... no.

Stat out things I'll use in an easy format so I don't have to hunt for crap to run a game. Your monster does this, the spell DCs are these, clean cup move down. One of the adventures for AL had an item in it that, if I recall, functioned like a power from the Monster Manual. Looking it up in the Monster Manual had me go to the DMG for an item which told me what I was looking for was in the PHB and when I found it in the PHB it referred me to a different page in the PHB. (If memory serves it was something to do with Enlarge or Entangle). It was a silly over-the-top example that made me go "wow... monster stat blocks and math that is completely transparent, I miss 4e"

[Zardnaar]

Some of the weapon abilities (brutal etc), some of the starting class abilities, DDI, and some of the monster abilities.

[Kurald Galain]

I'd say death saves.

So you don't have players saying "I'm only at -X so I won't die for Y more rounds, you don't need to heal me yet". When somebody is down and dying, the players should have a sense of urgency to help him before he bleeds out. Of course I mean the concept of death saves and not the implementation, because 4E's version is "I've only failed one death save so I won't die for Y more rounds, you don't need to heal me yet".

[johnbragg]

If I'm allowed only 1 thing, it is the standardization of monster math and statblocks.

Seriously, do not give me a list that says "This NPC monster knows fireball and firebolt and etc etc" and then make me look those things up, then what levels they can cast them at and then... no.

Yeah, this is something I'd never thought about in terms of game design, but if I'm using a monster with an ability (like a wolf with trip), I go find those rules and put them in the same index card/powerpoint slide I use for the monster stats. I see how it would inflate the MM page count, but that's definitely something to consider.
OR at the very least have the entry read "Special Attacks: Brutal Grappling (page 123)"

Some of the weapon abilities (brutal etc), some of the starting class abilities, DDI, and some of the monster abilities.

I'll take a look at brutal. (Even if the 4E Brutal doesn't port to 3X, there should be a "Brutal Attack"/"Brutal Critical"/"Brutal Rage" somewhere in the game).

EDIT: Ok, I can't find Brutal in the index or table of contents of my 4E PHB. what is it?
EDIT: It's a weapon property. I don't see it as game-changing, but I obviously haven't had experience with it

[obryn]

The #1 thing is self-contained monster/NPC stat blocks that are built specifically for in-game usage. They don't require reference to outside material, they don't need to interact with feats/spells/etc., and they are both easy to use and easy to balance.

Yeah, this is something I'd never thought about in terms of game design, but if I'm using a monster with an ability (like a wolf with trip), I go find those rules and put them in the same index card/powerpoint slide I use for the monster stats. I see how it would inflate the MM page count, but that's definitely something to consider.

You pare down ability counts, too. A good, solid enemy doesn't need more than a handful. I don't think anyone here would recommend "3e stat blocks, only more verbose." For the Wolf, you just give them an attack and then add the rider - for example - "Hit: If the wolf has combat advantage, the target falls prone."

[Yakk]

Brutal X says "if you roll an X or under, reroll that die".

A dY brutal X has an average roll of (Y+1)/2 + X/2.

It also has a min roll size of X.

What it was used for in 4e was to create intermediate die sizes. So d6B1 has an average damage of 4, half way between d6 and d8.

In 4e this mattered because you sometimes roll multiple [W] and it adds up.

It was also used to create weapons with damage higher than 1d12 or 2d6: 2d6B1 (average 8) or 1d12B2 (average 7.5).

The min damage of a roll also goes up, preventing "wiffs" (especially when static bonuses are small).

---

I personally find Brutal relatively boring. I've played with replacing it with "when you roll X or lower, treat it as the max value for the die".

Then dYB1 has an average value of (Y+1)/2 + (Y-1)/Y, and dYB2 (Y+1)/2 + (2Y-3)/Y.

It doesn't get you a die size half way between d6 and d8 anymore. On the other hand it gives you more fun when rolling, as you get to pick up those low dice and stick them on the max value.

I find this version ... more Brutal.

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The real lession here is to explore dice mini-games. Don't just roll dice and add them up.

Roll multiple and discard lowest or highest. Look for duplicates. Reroll on odd/even.

[Kurald Galain]

I personally find Brutal relatively boring.

Well, yes. Brutal is a clever mechanic in that it gives players the sense of getting a meaningful bonus without actually giving them a meaningful bonus (2d6B1 + 20 sounds MUCH better than 2d6+20 but it's less than 4% difference). Changing player perception without affecting game balance; it appears that lots of people like those because 5E also implements a number of them. Of course that doesn't work on players that understand the math...

[Yakk]

To be fair, 4e seemed to have been designed to assume static bonuses are usually <= die rolls.

And 6d6+20 vs 6d6B1+20 is a 15% damage increase.

That doesn't happen because 4e static damage was easier to stack than getting more dice is. And ease of stacking when you have 20-30 opportunities to pick things to stack together tends to dominate.

[Kurald Galain]

To be fair, 4e seemed to have been designed to assume static bonuses are usually <= die rolls.

Based on just the PHB1 I find that hard to believe.

[Yakk]

Re: 4e balance

Spoiler

Show

Stat, Enhancement, Feat bonus is (very) roughly:
4+level/10 (stat) + Level/5 + Level/10
= 4 + 0.4* level

At-wills deal [W] increasing to 2[W] at level 21.
Baseline ncounter powers deal 2[W] increasing to 4[W] at level 30.

If [W] is about 5, then we get
5 + 5*Level/20 at-will damage = 5 + .25*L
10 + 10*Level/20 encounter attack damage = 10+.5*L

So on at-wills, static damage outpaces dice slightly. On encounter powers, damage dice outpaces static damage. But both of them are in the same zone.

At level 21, we get a 12.4 static bonus, a 10.25 at-will roll, and a 20.5 encounter roll.

4 encounters and 2 at-wills with 50% hit rate comes to 37.2 static and 51.25 rolled damage, totalling 88.45.

A level 21 monster has 192 HP; notice it is only 46% dead after 6 rounds of combat. A party of 5 kills 2.3 of them (well, more, because 2 strikers do more damage even unoptimized). So 6 rounds of combat and all encounter attacks exhasted, and there are 2-3 monsters left.

It now takes 2-3 rounds to kill *each* remaining monster, resulting in a combat length of 12 rounds.

And yes, this is unplayable. To make this playable you have to optimize your characters.

Up players to 1.5 taps each (a 2[W] at-will with a 2[W] encounter minor/off turn tap is a 4[W] encounter with 2 taps under this model). Find a source of extra +10 extra static damage. Up weapon die size by 1. Increase accuracy to 65%.


Then at level 21, we get a 22.4 static bonus, a 12.25 at-will roll, and a 24.5 encounter roll.

6 rounds is then 131.04 static 79.625 dice for 210.665 ; the level 21 monster is dead at or before round 6.

All from a slight increase in accuracy, static damage, and focusing on multi-tap.

The thing is, early epic play complains was that combat took 12 rounds and was boring as all heck. To pull off decent play speed you *had* to use a narrow set of "cheese" options.

I think epic 4e was poorly "balanced". They underbalanced it then assumed players would optimize moderately, then intended to patch over over-optimizations.

[Kurald Galain]

At level 21, we get a 12.4 static bonus, a 10.25 at-will roll, and a 20.5 encounter roll.

The thing is that even with just the PHB1, any character with a bonus from his class, paragon path, daily power, or party leader (or more likely, several of those) is going to have substantially more bonuses than that. For instance, a rogue easily gets +10 more damage in heroic tier. So even without heavy optimization, a character that cares about damage is going to get much more from his bonuses than from his [W].

Probably not enough to make Epic tier playable without further splatbooks, but enough to marginalize the 'brutal' feature.

[MwaO]

The #1 thing is self-contained monster/NPC stat blocks that are built specifically for in-game usage. They don't require reference to outside material, they don't need to interact with feats/spells/etc., and they are both easy to use and easy to balance.

I actually rewrote the 5e NPCs into 4e-style NPCs using the 5e CR chart. Then generated some similar ones for various other creatures.

I expect I'll get effectively minimum wage for them in about a year or so due to what seems to be a very long tail effect. People keep buying about a copy or two a month it seems, even though they've been out for 2 years.

[Wasteomana]

Re: 4e balance

I think epic 4e was poorly "balanced". They underbalanced it then assumed players would optimize moderately, then intended to patch over over-optimizations.

As someone who has run a lot of Epic 4e, is currently running Epic 4e and has written for Organized Play 4e, I disagree here.

The initial default epic monsters were very very underwhelming. The pendulum did swing back and forth between too far and not far enough, but there are very few monsters originally made for epic that were even moderately threatening unless the group was using the 'choose for me' option for every choice in the character builder. Even putting stat bumps in the right places, taking an ok paragon path and an ok ED with minimal investment in paying attention at the table made epic pretty easy.

That being said 4e, and really any edition of any game I've played that is D&D or D&Desque has the issue that the gap between low, middle and high optimization gets wider and wider as you level. By the time you are paragon, the ones that are higher op are clearly a good bit stronger than those who are medium op while those that are medium op are clearly a step up from those who are low op. In practice it means that the DM and the group have to keep an eye on optimization to make sure everyone is on the same page and then the DM can just adjust the slider. One of the things in LFR that I enjoyed and take over to the 4e community I run for on Roll20 is the "Glory" system. All the adventures are written for the low end of the spectrum and then there are adjustments made to scale up from there. In heroic there are only 'aggressive' modifiers as having a 'normal' and 'harder' is really all you need. Paragon adds a 'Glory' tier which means it normal/harder/hard. Epic adds a further Glory+ tier which lets the DM scale their encounters as normal/harder/hard/very hard. As long as the group is all roughly the same optimization level (You don't have a Dex 12 Sling Rogue in the same party with a Rebreather) it is pretty easy to challenge any group by just moving the slider one way or the other on the adventure.

The sad part is that the old DEFAULT for epic monster math put those adventures below standard with the 'powerful examples' being maybe usable in the lowest tier of play.

[Kurald Galain]

As someone who has run a lot of Epic 4e, is currently running Epic 4e and has written for Organized Play 4e, I disagree here.

If I understand correctly, Yakk's point is that epic combat takes way too long, and your point is that it isn't threatening to the PCs. These two points aren't exclusive; in my experience they're both true.

[Wasteomana]

If I understand correctly, Yakk's point is that epic combat takes way too long, and your point is that it isn't threatening to the PCs. These two points aren't exclusive; in my experience they're both true.

Entirely possible. The non-threatening nature of epic combat also meant the fact that the monsters had higher HP / Defenses normal was a contributing factor. A long, dynamic and threatening encounter is less of an issue than a long, static and trivial encounter.

I've found that the baseline assumptions for everything past Heroic should be that, without special mechanics Round 4 shouldn't usually exist. By Round 4 the dramatic question should be answered (even if all the monsters aren't dead or the skill challenge complete etc). If you are finding that your encounters are routinely lasting for 4-6 rounds there is likely to be either a ton of special mechanics involved (and if everyone is enjoying it, more power to you) or there is likely a mixup in the math/optimization/basic assumption in the game.

[Yakk]

Yes; monsters where non-threatening large piles of HP at initial 4e release.

If you highly optimized for damage (even at 4e release), they became non-threatening small piles of HP.

MM3 helped; it increased monster damage and modestly reduced solo HP. Expertise feats helped; it generated higher baseline accuracy for players (which massively reduced optimization gap at high levels; the gap remained large, but before it was ridiculous).

There is still a problem; monster toughness at high levels relies far too heavily on HP (solo, elite) and on ATK/DEF (higher level); higher level monsters at epic have no significant increase in HP damage or HP. This is in constrast to low heroic, where higher level monsters gain *both* significant HP and damage *and* ATK/DEF.

I've tried to patch 4e/modify so the feeling you get at level 1-3 for higher level foes remains. Because when you do that, the range of monsters power scale you can engage with *grows* at epic. It is challenging.

One idea is to have HP go up super-linearly at higher levels. This results in problems; level 30 characters have 1000+ HP quite easily. And unless you go full exponential the gap remains.

From level 1 to level 5, monster HP doubles. If every 4 levels this happens, we get 7 doublings from level 1 to level 29. 2^7 is 128; so if a level 1 monster has 20 HP, a level 29 has to have 2560. And if monsters have HP similar to players, this gets cumbersome.

If we retract the level range back down to 20, level 21 monsters are 5 doublings or x32 HP. 32*20 is 640; closer to reasonable, but still really large.

An idea I have thought of is to make level X monsters *weaker* than players by default (HP-wise). So a level 1 monster has 5-10 HP. Then x128 is 160 to 320 HP at level 21.

Still, we run into the problem that players end up with 500 HP at level 20 if they start with 20.

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Another approach I've considered is to make ATK/DEF bonuses logarithmically, and HP grow linearly. And maybe use HD instead of Level for monsters.

Then have players face up against 40-60 HD monsters. With logarithmic ATK/DEF increases (say, double HD means +1 ATK/DEF on average) they become harder to hit (on average), so they stay "in scope".

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But this is off-topic. Other than the idea that you should ensure that d20s matter by keeping modifiers and target numbers under control.

3e gives up, and you quickly get auto-hit and auto-miss abilities. They try a bit harder for spells than attacks; but even there, casters reach auto-hit and auto-win pretty easily.

[obryn]

I ended up switching to the First Level Damage Forever calcs in epic tier. We had 2 defenders and 2 leaders, so it worked pretty great.