D&D: Heroic House Rules
Aug. 1st, 2013 11:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerinWhen I first got into D&D 4th Edition, I was excited because it came closer than any previous edition to giving the experience I'd always wanted from a roleplaying game, something that actually resembled the traditions of heroic fantasy that had inspired (and been inspired). Player character death was possible but rare and never completely random/unforeseeable, player characters were larger-than-life heroes who could perform incredible feats, and wizards used magic wands and staves as an integral part of their schtick and didn't have to lay down after every battle to turn into a wizard again.
The things I don't like about it mostly revolve around the way it's still stuck stuck in the model of earlier games. The fact that one-shot kills have been largely eliminated is good. The fact that missing is still the most likely outcome of most attacks isn't. The fact that players can pick the dramatic moment to use their hard-to-pull-off moves instead of relying on an 11% activation chance and failing most of the time is a significant improvement. The fact that they still have to roll to hit normally when they pull out the big guns and don't have any better than the normal about 40%-ish (been a while since I immersed myself in the numbers) hit chance is a bad thing.
(The designers clearly knew this, which is why most daily attack powers still do something on a miss. But this still lends itself towards anticlimax.)
The hybrid character class system? Great idea, great addition to the game. Exponentially increases the types of characters available... only not, because classes with wildly different attribute requirements are hosed by it.
Skill powers and optional racial utility powers? Add a lot of depth and color to the game. Except that you have to give up a class utility power to use them, and in a lot of cases the utility powers are where your class's flavor comes from... and while there are a lot of skill utility powers that you can look at and go, "Yes! Yes! This is the awesome kind of thing someone with larger-than-life tracking (or whatever) skills should be able to do!!", there aren't a lot that you'll look at and go, "This is superior (or even equal) to anything I could already choose at this level."
Of course, these sorts of things are a large part of why I'm working on A Wilder World, but D&D's always going to be a nostalgic favorite of mine. So I think a lot about what house rules I would use to rectify these.
The tediousness of combat, I would alleviate by making it so that heroes and important villains roll a d10 and add 10 to it for their hit rolls, instead of rolling a d20. The result is treated as the natural/raw die roll, so a roll of 10 counts as a critical. Result: Everybody on the battlefield would still take the same number of hits, on average, to drop (with a slight increase in deadliness due to crits being twice as common), but those hits would be spaced out wider. A player's tactical choices (i.e., where to use their encounter and daily powers) would matter more because the results of those choices would be more predictable.
Along those lines: encounter attacks have a +1, daily attacks have a +2.
(I might also have each player pick a skill to be their character's primary skill. Primary skills also benefit from the d10+10 rule. Rogues, Bards, and Artificers would pick two primary skills. Rangers would have their Dungeoneering or Nature pick plus one other of choice as primary skills.)
Solving attribute dependencies gets a little more complicated, but the way the game is played in the wild tends towards "sink attribute points where the game engine expects them to be and then roleplay the character you want to be regardless of stats" anyway. So I'd add two stats to the sheet: Primary Competency and Secondary Competency. The values of each would be +5 and +3, or +4 and +4, player's choice. Primary Competency would be subbed in for one attribute of your choice for purposes of attack rolls, class features, etc. Secondary Competency would be subbed in for all others. This does have the tendency to boost things that are clearly meant to be a tertiary attribute (as the Fighter's Wisdom-based abilities, or the Wizard's implement-dependent class features), but I'm not sure that giving a couple points' boost to a once-per-encounter thing like Wand of Accuracy would be a devastating change.
The progression for Primary Competency and Secondary Competency would both be based on the normal attribute progression with the assumption that you're raising the same two attributes every time you get to choose. You would also separately raise your actual attributes as normal.
As for the intriguing yet not necessarily "worth it" skill powers... the designers clearly understood the basic problem they presented because they added a feat that gives you a skill power, which suggests they understood that trading a utility power slot for a skill power would not seem like a good deal to most players. The problem is that 1) that doesn't go far enough and 2) most players wouldn't trade a feat for one, either. Especially since most skill powers, like a lot of the interesting utility powers, are totally situational... if the situation doesn't come up, you might as well not have it.
I think what they needed to do was just make skill powers an optional part of the progression... if you use them, you get them automatically in a second set of power slots. Obviously this makes characters more power, but they didn't care much about power creep when they added character themes to the game, or when they gave bards a set of "social cantrips" in Heroes of the Feywild. And no skill power is really game breaking.
So I would just make skill powers an automatic part of progression... I'm not sure exactly what rate I'd use, but I'd like to see something where the number of skill powers you have relates to the total number of skills you have, so that "skill monkey" characters get a little more razzle-dazzle out of that aspect of their character. The skill power slots could also be filled with utility powers taken from a theme or racial power set.
Obviously the upshot of these changes is that characters would be more effective/powerful (hit more often, have more efficient abilities, have more powers), but I don't think it would quite be enough to turn the game into God Mode, it would just do a bit more to emphasize that 4th Edition is already in Potential Demigod Mode.
I don't know that I'd go all-out and include the Competencies and extra skill powers for a group that's heavy on beginners or people who just don't care that much about customizing a character past the off-the-shelf versions, but I'm definitely using the d10+10 attack formula.
Also note that while skill powers are entirely an artifact of 4th edition, the d10+10 thing is portable to any d20-based game (and for that reason, I'm probably not the first person to propose it), and a version of Primary Competency/Secondary Competency could be used to solve multiple attribute dependency in earlier editions... though this might make multiclassing even cheesier in 3.X.
There's a good chance that any or all of these changes might open up holes that a dedicated char-op'er could drive a tank through, but these rule changes are meant to appeal to players who want the heroic stature experience without having to perfectly tailor their character choices for it.
The things I don't like about it mostly revolve around the way it's still stuck stuck in the model of earlier games. The fact that one-shot kills have been largely eliminated is good. The fact that missing is still the most likely outcome of most attacks isn't. The fact that players can pick the dramatic moment to use their hard-to-pull-off moves instead of relying on an 11% activation chance and failing most of the time is a significant improvement. The fact that they still have to roll to hit normally when they pull out the big guns and don't have any better than the normal about 40%-ish (been a while since I immersed myself in the numbers) hit chance is a bad thing.
(The designers clearly knew this, which is why most daily attack powers still do something on a miss. But this still lends itself towards anticlimax.)
The hybrid character class system? Great idea, great addition to the game. Exponentially increases the types of characters available... only not, because classes with wildly different attribute requirements are hosed by it.
Skill powers and optional racial utility powers? Add a lot of depth and color to the game. Except that you have to give up a class utility power to use them, and in a lot of cases the utility powers are where your class's flavor comes from... and while there are a lot of skill utility powers that you can look at and go, "Yes! Yes! This is the awesome kind of thing someone with larger-than-life tracking (or whatever) skills should be able to do!!", there aren't a lot that you'll look at and go, "This is superior (or even equal) to anything I could already choose at this level."
Of course, these sorts of things are a large part of why I'm working on A Wilder World, but D&D's always going to be a nostalgic favorite of mine. So I think a lot about what house rules I would use to rectify these.
The tediousness of combat, I would alleviate by making it so that heroes and important villains roll a d10 and add 10 to it for their hit rolls, instead of rolling a d20. The result is treated as the natural/raw die roll, so a roll of 10 counts as a critical. Result: Everybody on the battlefield would still take the same number of hits, on average, to drop (with a slight increase in deadliness due to crits being twice as common), but those hits would be spaced out wider. A player's tactical choices (i.e., where to use their encounter and daily powers) would matter more because the results of those choices would be more predictable.
Along those lines: encounter attacks have a +1, daily attacks have a +2.
(I might also have each player pick a skill to be their character's primary skill. Primary skills also benefit from the d10+10 rule. Rogues, Bards, and Artificers would pick two primary skills. Rangers would have their Dungeoneering or Nature pick plus one other of choice as primary skills.)
Solving attribute dependencies gets a little more complicated, but the way the game is played in the wild tends towards "sink attribute points where the game engine expects them to be and then roleplay the character you want to be regardless of stats" anyway. So I'd add two stats to the sheet: Primary Competency and Secondary Competency. The values of each would be +5 and +3, or +4 and +4, player's choice. Primary Competency would be subbed in for one attribute of your choice for purposes of attack rolls, class features, etc. Secondary Competency would be subbed in for all others. This does have the tendency to boost things that are clearly meant to be a tertiary attribute (as the Fighter's Wisdom-based abilities, or the Wizard's implement-dependent class features), but I'm not sure that giving a couple points' boost to a once-per-encounter thing like Wand of Accuracy would be a devastating change.
The progression for Primary Competency and Secondary Competency would both be based on the normal attribute progression with the assumption that you're raising the same two attributes every time you get to choose. You would also separately raise your actual attributes as normal.
As for the intriguing yet not necessarily "worth it" skill powers... the designers clearly understood the basic problem they presented because they added a feat that gives you a skill power, which suggests they understood that trading a utility power slot for a skill power would not seem like a good deal to most players. The problem is that 1) that doesn't go far enough and 2) most players wouldn't trade a feat for one, either. Especially since most skill powers, like a lot of the interesting utility powers, are totally situational... if the situation doesn't come up, you might as well not have it.
I think what they needed to do was just make skill powers an optional part of the progression... if you use them, you get them automatically in a second set of power slots. Obviously this makes characters more power, but they didn't care much about power creep when they added character themes to the game, or when they gave bards a set of "social cantrips" in Heroes of the Feywild. And no skill power is really game breaking.
So I would just make skill powers an automatic part of progression... I'm not sure exactly what rate I'd use, but I'd like to see something where the number of skill powers you have relates to the total number of skills you have, so that "skill monkey" characters get a little more razzle-dazzle out of that aspect of their character. The skill power slots could also be filled with utility powers taken from a theme or racial power set.
Obviously the upshot of these changes is that characters would be more effective/powerful (hit more often, have more efficient abilities, have more powers), but I don't think it would quite be enough to turn the game into God Mode, it would just do a bit more to emphasize that 4th Edition is already in Potential Demigod Mode.
I don't know that I'd go all-out and include the Competencies and extra skill powers for a group that's heavy on beginners or people who just don't care that much about customizing a character past the off-the-shelf versions, but I'm definitely using the d10+10 attack formula.
Also note that while skill powers are entirely an artifact of 4th edition, the d10+10 thing is portable to any d20-based game (and for that reason, I'm probably not the first person to propose it), and a version of Primary Competency/Secondary Competency could be used to solve multiple attribute dependency in earlier editions... though this might make multiclassing even cheesier in 3.X.
There's a good chance that any or all of these changes might open up holes that a dedicated char-op'er could drive a tank through, but these rule changes are meant to appeal to players who want the heroic stature experience without having to perfectly tailor their character choices for it.