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1 year ago ::
Jan 16, 2012 - 3:07PM
#21
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I'm hoping they'll keep the Theme as the third choice for customizability for a class as Core.
I want them to keep themes, but they MUST be balanced better. There's only a handful of themes that most characters would ever consider, and several of those you only take if you're a specific class or race.
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1 year ago ::
Jan 16, 2012 - 3:21PM
#22
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Date Joined:
Oct 25, 2007
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The themes are fine, as there are always 3 to 5 unpopular things to every popular one.
For example, I have 2 guardians, 1 fey beast tamer, 2 scholars, 2 yakuza, 1 cavalier, 1 hordelands nomad, 1 wilder and I can't remember what the rest are right now.
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1 year ago ::
Jan 17, 2012 - 11:35AM
#23
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Date Joined:
May 11, 2009
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You could allow for a certain amount of systemic complexity variety if you design your races and classes with a baseline value shared by all members of the race/class and a variable portion that determines the rest of the crunch/fluff. Then you make the variable portion optional. Let's, for argument sake, call it Race and Heritage for races and Class and Kit for classes. Here's a racial example. Elf - +2 Wisdom, Medium size, Speed 7, Low-light vision, Speak Common and Elven, Fey Origin, Trance. As an elf, you may choose one of the following heritages:
- Dark- +2 Cha, +2 Intimidate and Stealth, Darkvision, Cloud of Darkness/Darkfire
- High - +2 Int, +2 Arcana and History, proficient with longsword, Eladrin Education, Eladrin Will, Fey Step.
- Wood - +2 Dex, +2 Nature and Perception, proficient with long and shortbow, Wild Step, Group Awareness, Elven Accuracy.
If you play WITH heritages, you get the full 4e experience with an elf. If you play WITHOUT heritages, your elf looks and feels a whole lot more like a 1e/2e elf. The same thing goes with classes. You get a base set of features and abilities for choosing fighter. Then, if you use kits, you pick from Knight, Slayer, or Duelist and get some additional abilities/powers. With kits, the game plays like 4e. Without kits, the game plays like 1e/2e. The trick, naturally, is assigning enough of the class abilities to the class versus the kit to ensure if your group is mixed, the person without a kit doesn't feel entirely robbed of the fun. Plus you can reduce the number of semi-duplicated races and classes in the system. The 4e Eladrin, Elf, and Drow are easily reduced to a single elf race without the loss of their distinctiveness. Likewise you could make Human and give them heritages of Mankind, Half-Elf, and Half-Orc. Gnome could include tinker, earth, and fey varieties. Halflings can be both shirefolk and kender.
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1 year ago ::
Jan 17, 2012 - 12:01PM
#24
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Date Joined:
Aug 27, 2002
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One of the problems with stat penalties in earlier editions meant that your class was often limited by that penalty, you could play it, but at a disadvantage. For example the halfling fight coudl start with a 18 in str, reduced to 16, and this would put him behind fighter with that penalty, and more so vs. half-orc that had a bonus.
When they put out the bonus system and eliminated the penalty you actually lost more options than the penalty. Rather than being restricted from just str based classes for a halfling, you had to look for Dex or Cha classes. So a Halfling warrior could even start with a 18 in str, but only by sacrificing his other ability scores and still being behind the half orc that could stack the 18 in str and have a 20, and still have the dex bonus that was useful to the class.
Some people probably disagree that with the idea that WotC has that you have an 18 primary and 16 secondary than as long as you have a bonus to one or the other you can be functional but compare a Halfling Druid, with 18 Wis, 16 Dex to an Elf Druid with 18 Wis, 18 Dex, 13 Con, the Elf has more ac, ref, hp, fort, skills etc..
For roleplay it works but I felt that their system really narrowed your character's focus rather than increased it. I also think you have to be very careful on which stat you pick for a primary if you do use Estlor's system. If you look at the Elves, Dex is far more common than Wis as a racial stat, I imagine it would be more likely to be Dex Primary, Cha/Int/Wis for the class variants.
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1 year ago ::
Jan 17, 2012 - 2:21PM
#25
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I felt that their system really narrowed your character's focus rather than increased it.
Agreed.
Also, I feel we should try to point out examples in fiction for what a non-magical hero should be able to do relative to the magical ones, Conan is a solid heroic tier, Herculese depends on the story. Buffy probably ends up somewhere in late paragon by the end of the last series, but definitely starts way down around level 1 in the first series.
If anyone has ideas for a character that would fit Epic Warrior Without Personal Magic, I'm sure it would do the system a *lot* of good to share. Thor from the comics maybe?
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1 year ago ::
Jan 17, 2012 - 2:57PM
#26
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Date Joined:
Mar 23, 2009
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I think what they are trying to say in this article is that you will be able to make good characters both in a simple way (IE Essentials from 4e or an Archer Ranger) and that are simple to play, while at the same time being able to do the nonsense we come up with on these forums and still have both be reasonably balanced against each other under the same rules system.
I would like it if they were able to do this, as it would make it easier to hit "optimized" numbers, while at the same time giving us here at Charop the option to do lots of wacky things. If it works, it would be a very good thing IMO. (Emphasis intentional)
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1 year ago ::
Jan 17, 2012 - 3:36PM
#27
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Date Joined:
Apr 27, 2009
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I felt that their system really narrowed your character's focus rather than increased it.
Agreed.
Also, I feel we should try to point out examples in fiction for what a non-magical hero should be able to do relative to the magical ones, Conan is a solid heroic tier, Herculese depends on the story. Buffy probably ends up somewhere in late paragon by the end of the last series, but definitely starts way down around level 1 in the first series.
If anyone has ideas for a character that would fit Epic Warrior Without Personal Magic, I'm sure it would do the system a *lot* of good to share. Thor from the comics maybe?
Haraclese is very firmly in the epic tier, even if he doesn't show it right from the get-go.
Other than him: Gilgamesh fought gods on roughly equal footing, Beowulf killed ogres and dragons and sea-monsters left and right, largly singled handedly, Roland (from the Matter of France, the guy who weilded Durandal) once cut a massive hole in a cliff-face entirely by accident because of his raw awesome and that of his sword, The Green Man from Authurian myth demonstrates no magical power beyond being impossible to kill, Arthur could not be defeated so long as he had the scabbard to Excalibur (his wounds wouldn't bleed), and the rest of the Knights of the Round Table were all varying descriptions of the Best Ever (Lancelott especially).
The Bible has Samson, who fought armies by himself with an improvised weapon. Celtic Mythology has Cuchulainn, a mighty warrior who did numerous mighty and amazing things with strength alone (he also went into mad frothing rages where he killed indescriminately and with terrible speed, so makes a good example of an epic barbarian).
Looking at pop culture: Kratos is probobly the best example of an epic-tier fighter in recent memory (possibly only prior to becoming the God of War, if you think deity counts as personal magical power), if not a sterling example of a decent human being. The first thing he does in the game is kill a giant three headed sea serpent, by himself, after its just finished slaughtering its way through an entire greek naval fleet. If that's not epic tier, I don't know what is.
There's a lot of examples of mighty heroes without personal magic, all over the place.
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1 year ago ::
Jan 17, 2012 - 4:05PM
#28
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Date Joined:
Apr 25, 2005
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As long as all the +x magic items are an optional module and not a fundamental aspect of the game I'll be happy. In fact there should be two magic item modules, one for those that want all the +x magic items and one for those that want magic items that grant new abilities but have no numerical effect on combat stats.
This is my one major complaint with D&D. Magic items should be about cool/interesting abilities, rather than having a numerical impact on key combat stats. For instance, if I gain a magic longsword at level 5 I want it to do something awesome, I want it to still be relevant at level 20 and I don't want to be penalised in combat if I ever have to use a non-magical longsword.
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1 year ago ::
Jan 17, 2012 - 4:48PM
#29
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Date Joined:
Jul 16, 2010
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When they put out the bonus system and eliminated the penalty you actually lost more options than the penalty.
You're right about the effect, but not about the cause. The issue is that boosting your primary attack stat is far more important in 4e than in 3.5. Given the fact that 3.5 (for a Fighter) has a Base Attack Bonus that scales as 1/lvl vs. 1/2lvl in 4e, your attack stat contributes proportionally less of your attack bonus in 3.5 than it does in 4e. And then your ability score will only increase by one every few levels, which means the modifier grows more slowly as you level, as well. Combined with multiple attacks per round, that made the system more forgiving of a 16 starting stat.
If all that changed between 3.5 and 4e was that all races were normalised to get two bonus stats instead of a mix of bonuses and penalties, the relative preference for certain races toward certain classes wouldn't have changed. Instead, the fact that the ability score contribution to your attack bonus gained in relative importance between the editions is what causes 4e to have tighter class/race couplings.
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1 year ago ::
Jan 17, 2012 - 6:20PM
#30
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Date Joined:
Mar 19, 2004
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If anyone has ideas for a character that would fit Epic Warrior Without Personal Magic, I'm sure it would do the system a *lot* of good to share. Thor from the comics maybe?
There're various Hindu and Siamese myths that involve a lone hero doing impossible things. I remember reading about an otherwise normal human who can pull some crazy stunts with a bow, such as firing arrows so fast it burns in the air, or shooting an entire volley as effectively as a thousand trained archers. No magic, no divine intervention, no artifacts, just raw skill and power.
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