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1. Every class being able to contribute at every level. I'm playing in another edition game currently, and its just painful to go back to spellcasters that suck most of the day at low levels.

2. Being awesome out of the gate. Another thing thats super painful to go back to: having to wait to for your character to eventually reach the point where its mechanically fun to play.

Oct 19, 2011 -- 9:50PM, The_Ubbergeek wrote:

Oct 19, 2011 -- 9:15PM, Salla wrote:

Oct 19, 2011 -- 8:53PM, The_Ubbergeek wrote:

Power Sources... Reworked for how they work, if needed, but I like this idea.

(I'd be sad, honestly, if D&D dropped the very concept of Clerical, Divine powers-magic BTW... I must be a rare fan of this side of D&D.) 

I would like to see power sources reduced to pure fluff consideration.  Pick a class, slap whatever power source you want on the powers, and be done with it.

Then, why have power sources at all, if it is kinda replaceable, meaningless fluff?

That works too.

Your powers come from wherever the frig you want them to.

i would basicly want to see the same system as it is now but to me it currently feald dumbed down a bit.

so instead of 5TH edition i would like to see advaced D&D 4th edition.
maybe even more like skills and powers was for 2nd edition

chose race
chose background/theme (these would weigh in even more on the rp side then they do now )
chose power source
chose class powers  ( point buy including hp per level and what armer you can wear but also mecanics like marking and sneak attack)
assign skills
chose powers ( only limitation in chosing powers would be that they would have to be from your chosen power source)

this would alouw for making intresting characters, but it would also alouw for characters that woulden't work so not for beginning players

so it would become

essentials for begining players
4th for avarage players
advanced 4th for experianced players

What I'd like to keep?


1) Character balance. I like that you can build a character and have it contribute easily and without much trouble. The optimization gap is not as big as it once was and everyone helps in a combat situation, and only ever getting positive modifiers from races has created much better racial balance (human is no longer the best choice for any class, it is now only a competetive choice for any class).

2) The monster XP budget/encounter design system. As a DM this is a life saving feature, being able to predict roughly how an encounter will go much more accurately than the old CR system.

3) Something resembling the way that characters enter battles ready.

What I'd specifically want changed? That's not quite the question, but it'd be equally important to me -

1) Encumbrance system is dumb. Please just change it to "whatever the DM thinks is reasonable" or come up with one that makes more logical sense. Also, please do something about some of the ridiculous fantasy equipment conventions - wearing 50 pounds of plate armor should not encumber you just as much as carrying it in a backpack, and there are simple fixes to some names like turning longsword (a proper name for a specific kind of two handed or hand-and-a-half sword in real life) to long sword (just that space fixes it, since a long sword can be any sword that is long... not the specific typologies that are designed for use with two hands), or things like that. Mostly "cosmetic" system fixes along those lines.

2) It is very difficult to see the effects of earlier struggles in later encounters (i.e. lower than full HP, missing encounter powers, etc). The milestone mechanic is not as strong as it should be to offset the need for rest, and the only "true" daily resource are daily powers since you get so many surges every day and show up to the next battle always at full HP.

3) The power and class system seem to be getting very top heavy and complicated without something akin to true multiclassing (the new multiclassing in 4e is very... minimal). You release fighter powers? Only fighters will ever really be able to use them since hybrid options and new multiclassing are not designed with enough potency to be popular, which means the workload for the power system is huge (as every class needs support, and the powers released for one class will probably only ever be used by that class).

4) Just a minor fourth thing, I'd like to see a suggested rules focus shift from XP from monsters to XP from quest completion. This was a big problem in 1st edition as well IIRC, where fighting monsters gave a ton of XP and in a later release (the greyhawk supplement I think?) they cut that down by a LOT to encourage people to get away from the "kill monsters and take their stuff" mindset and get into more creative problem solving ("Well, we can avoid the monsters and take their stuff with no risk, and the monsters don't give as much XP as the stuff, so this makes logical sense to do").