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@Mysteria

That is an excellent point. I could just houserule the player characters' attack and damage (I could just build a whole new game from the basement up), but then I would need to houserule all the monster stats. I'm planning on an eventual 4 or 5 campaigns (stories) with more than 100 unique monster encounters each. I really don't want to have to houserule that much.

This way I use my very simplified combat rules within the existing system and I just adjust the encounter level as needed to provide a challange for the characters in my story. I want the randomness of the dice to have some affect on how the narrative plays out. I know in general how I want the stories to go, but I want to leave many of the details up to chance. Are the players captured at some point; do they have to run away? Does somebody die and need to be brought back to life?

The player characters and monsters both only get to use at-will standard action powers. I don't worry about daily or encounter powers or such things as auras, combat advantage, stances, status effects, ...etc. I will divide the combat area into one or more zones instead of using a precise grid and keep track of everything on paper. I don't have and won't be using minis or those cardboard tokens.

I'm also genuinely curious to see how well the existing 4e (particularly Essentials) edition works with my simplified combat system. I have an interest in DnD Next, but that won't be out until Nov/Dec of 2013. It also seems pretty clear from the posts about the playtest that I would even need to modify some things in the "kernel" rules. I may very well be the only person on the planet who wants to play the game this way. I'm cool with that and don't expect WoTC to bend over backwards to accomodate me.

I do want all my characters to have nearly the same max damage with the obvious exception of two-weapon attacks. A two-weapon fighter should do significantly less damage than a single weapon fighter if just the first attack hits. If both attacks hit, the two-weapon fighter should do significantly more.

I want all the characters to have an equal role in combat. They do roughly the same damage, just in a different way. The hexblade (for example) uses eldritch bolt magic and the pact weapon (which I think of as a magic lightsaber). The slayer uses a bow and a sword. The two weapon ranger alternates between medium damage single weapon attacks and high damage if both melee attacks hit home.

As I said in my previous post, I am likely in a very small minority of RPG players if not unique. I don't have a problem with that and I don't think my way is boring.

With those conditions, probably the Scout with Dual Weapon Attack, imho. If you're just spamming at-will, no crits, no multi-attack encounters, no minors, a class that can reliably lauch two attacks in one turn wins over any single attack class, just because you add the static modifiers twice. Which means either TS or DWA, pending for DWA (granted you have a high enough hit chance - which you should) simply because you also add your main stat to it.

Sep 20, 2012 -- 3:28PM, Fardiz wrote:

If I might make so bold, isn't what you are discribing basically playing the martial classes from 3e/3.5?

Would that not be an easier starting point than 4e characters? All the 3e monsters that have been statted out still exist. 

That would be even more broken than 4E tbh. At least we got rid of Pun Pun.