Very interesting 4E post by Mike Mearls on EN World

[Ceres]

Mike Mearls has recently posted a post which, for me at least, has given me bigger hopes for 4E than all the Design & Development articles combined:

Original post found here (http://www.enworld.org/showpost.php?p=4047202&postcount=6).

One of the nice things about the roles is that they let you play around with power sources without messing up the basic structure of the game. You can totally do a no magic game with the PH by sticking to the fighter, rogue, warlord, and ranger. You wouldn't have a controller, but it is possible to create a martial one.

You can also roll things back another step and do some crazy stuff with the structure of the classes. Since many of the elements of character progression are unified, you could run classless D&D by allowing players to select maneuvers and spells from any class they want, mingling the two together, or start everyone with access to all heroic abilities and grant access to divine and arcane via feats.

The really nice thing is that this structure allows you to better depict many classic D&D settings and fantasy worlds. You can run pre-War of the Lance adventures in Dragonlance without clerics. You could run Conan with just the heroic classes for PCs and NPC spellcasters as villains and allies.

The one stumbling block is that the game expects fighters to wear heavy armor, but you could get around that by building a simple house rule (a fighter in light armor gets a flat bonus to AC to make up the gap).
Some things to be learned from this post are:
- No Magic and Low Magic campaigns possible!
- Rangers are no longer spellcasters! :smallsmile:
- 4e will be highly customizable. It will even be possible to run it as a classless system! (Edit: With a bit of work, of course)
- Greater ease of emulating settings dissimilar to typical D&D settings!

So what do you think? Urge to buy 4e rising? Still not convinced?

[Edit]: Here (http://www.enworld.org/showpost.php?p=4047456&postcount=24) is another post by Mearls, clarifying the "customizable 4e" bit.

The classless thing is pure noodling/theorizing/game tinkering on my part. It isn't something that the core game comes out and tells you how to do.

[Ryuuk]

It looks nice, but I can't help but feel that this idea will at most be sidebar-ed in core and expanded on when the 4e Unearthed Arcane comes out. It would be nice if they gave it some good support in core.

[Ceres]

It looks nice, but I can't help but feel that this idea will at most be sidebar-ed in core and expanded on when the 4e Unearthed Arcane comes out. It would be nice if they gave it some good support in core.

Ah, well. I'm sure we'll be able to figure something out here on the boards.

By the way, just noticed another thing I didn't really notice before. Martial controller? How will that work?

[Azerian Kelimon]

A BFS version of the spiked chain of 200' and the feat Stand Still?

[Tren]

Yeah, some sort of reach weapon class with focus on maybe AoE or making threatened squares difficult terrain kind of like the 3.5 knight. Thought as I understand lots of Knight features are getting rolled into the fighter, so who knows?

[FinalJustice]

Originally Posted by Mike Mearls
One of the nice things about the roles is that they let you play around with power sources without messing up the basic structure of the game. You can totally do a no magic game with the PH by sticking to the fighter, rogue, warlord, and ranger. You wouldn't have a controller, but it is possible to create a martial one.

You can also roll things back another step and do some crazy stuff with the structure of the classes. Since many of the elements of character progression are unified, you could run classless D&D by allowing players to select maneuvers and spells from any class they want, mingling the two together, or start everyone with access to all heroic abilities and grant access to divine and arcane via feats.

The really nice thing is that this structure allows you to better depict many classic D&D settings and fantasy worlds. You can run pre-War of the Lance adventures in Dragonlance without clerics. You could run Conan with just the heroic classes for PCs and NPC spellcasters as villains and allies.

The one stumbling block is that the game expects fighters to wear heavy armor, but you could get around that by building a simple house rule (a fighter in light armor gets a flat bonus to AC to make up the gap).

Man, is this STILL a stumbling block, seriously? If, in this edition, naked fighters are still as hard to hit as heavily armored commoners or even easier, I'll seriously cry.

[Crow]

Man, is this STILL a stumbling block, seriously? If, in this edition, naked fighters are still as hard to hit as heavily armored commoners or even easier, I'll seriously cry.Maybe fighters will have abilities that let them get more "bang for your buck" while wearing armor. D20 Modern had two AC's for each armor, proficient and non-proficient. Maybe it will be some form of that.

[Artanis]

Man, is this STILL a stumbling block, seriously? If, in this edition, naked fighters are still as hard to hit as heavily armored commoners or even easier, I'll seriously cry.
What?

I read that as him saying that that would be one way to avoid screwing Fighters if you do a no-heavy-armor setting, and NOT that that would be the default or anything.

[Draz74]

Man, is this STILL a stumbling block, seriously? If, in this edition, naked fighters are still as hard to hit as heavily armored commoners or even easier, I'll seriously cry.

I think AC rises with 1/2 character level, just like Fort/Ref/Will and other values. So yes, a Fighter without armor will be harder to hit than a commoner (unless the commoner is the same level as the Fighter, and I don't think 4e is even letting commoners be high-level).

The issue that they're worried about is that a Fighter without armor is no harder to hit than the buff-less Wizard. And that can cause a game balance issue too.

[FinalJustice]

That makes things better. They dropped the 'good base \ poor base' thing? Because it could be done to base AC the way it's done to saves, melees get the better and casters the worse. This seems a reasonable way to deal with this issue.

[osyluth]

YES! No more spellcasting rangers!

[Morty]

Not bad, but I honestly don't see much merit in allowing getting rid of classes. If I wanted classless system, I wouldn't play D&D. So while it's nice, it doesn't mean much. All in all, it doesn't change the fact that "all classes using the same mechanics" is a very bad idea, but it does make it somewhat less awful. Though rangers not being spellcasters is good. Also, it seems that this "roles" nonsense is preety firmly built into the game.

[Kurald Galain]

Why would you want to play classless D&D to begin with? A central design point of D&D is to have classes; if you don't like classes, there's plenty of RPGs that don't have them.

[warmachine]

Does this mean it'll be possible to multiclass in and out of spellcaster classes without ending up being sucktastic? I hope so as it'll expand the range of viable character concepts. Cleric/Fighter for a start.

[Falrin]

How do we have to interpretate the 'no/low magic' part. As I'm correct he is saying:

-Drop all caster-classes and you have a low magic campaign. You will not encounter any difficulties doing so.

When this is the case we can assume that it might fail horribly.

We can brake the idea down to: a CR 4 is still a CR 4, even without any form of casters in the party. In other words: All classes are balanced, so you can do without some of them.
Sound familiar.

And what about magic items? Does low magic mean low magic equipment? If so, will the players be less gear dependent (a good thing) or will they need a bunch of items to ‘replace’ the caster, screwing over the ‘low magic’ part

[Zincorium]

How do we have to interpretate the 'no/low magic' part. As I'm correct he is saying:

-Drop all caster-classes and you have a low magic campaign. You will not encounter any difficulties doing so.

When this is the case we can assume that it might fail horribly.

I'm missing your logic here. Are you saying that if they make it possible to run low magic, low magic will fail horribly? That's a bit too cynical for me to wrap my head completely around.



We can brake the idea down to: a CR 4 is still a CR 4, even without any form of casters in the party. In other words: All classes are balanced, so you can do without some of them.
Sound familiar.

The idea, from what I've read, is that you have 'types', controller, skirmisher, and so on, and to run an adventure well you need a mix of those types.

If all of the types you need have non-magical versions, then there isn't a gap you'd have to worry about. Sounds simple enough to me.


And what about magic items? Does low magic mean low magic equipment? If so, will the players be less gear dependent (a good thing) or will they need a bunch of items to ‘replace’ the caster, screwing over the ‘low magic’ part

Their stated goal with magic items is to allow people to do cool things but no class will need magic items to function. Fighters won't need magical swords, wizards won't need scrolls, etc.


While it's a perfectly reasonable goal to identify problems before they come up, if you can't be bothered to come up with possible solutions and assume that no one else will either, you're not going to have a reasonable view of what's going on.

[MammonAzrael]

Interesting. As for a martial controller, I was thinking something like a grenades and explosives expert, with ranged area attacks with splash damage, perhaps some precision stuff like poisoned darts that can be hurled rapidly, and maybe a bit of trap making.

[Fax Celestis]

Interesting. As for a martial controller, I was thinking something like a grenades and explosives expert, with ranged area attacks with splash damage, perhaps some precision stuff like poisoned darts that can be hurled rapidly, and maybe a bit of trap making.

Chances are something like that will happen. I can see the Combat Trapsmith (from CScn) turning into a rogue talent tree in 4e.

[Somebloke]

Interesting. As for a martial controller, I was thinking something like a grenades and explosives expert, with ranged area attacks with splash damage, perhaps some precision stuff like poisoned darts that can be hurled rapidly, and maybe a bit of trap making.You do realise that I'm going to damn well invent one all of five minutes after receiving my PHB...

...low magic campaigns- yay!!!!

As for the armor rules, I can think of half a dozen ways around this already.

[Fax Celestis]

As for the armor rules, I can think of half a dozen ways around this already.

Like maybe porting over the class defense system from 3.5e UA?

[Indon]

Why would you want to play classless D&D to begin with? A central design point of D&D is to have classes; if you don't like classes, there's plenty of RPGs that don't have them.

Because options are good.

An easily moddable class system, aside from the benefit of being moddable into classlessness, also provides easier-to-modify classes. I envision Fax's big list of class feature equivalencies and I'm hoping for something vaguely like that.

[Kurald Galain]

An easily moddable class system, aside from the benefit of being moddable into classlessness, also provides easier-to-modify classes.

Unfortunately, Mike Mearls already said that it "is pure noodling/theorizing/game tinkering on [his] part. It isn't something that the core game comes out and tells you how to do."

It all depends on how well balanced the abilities are. Since the present design D&D team appears to have been drawn in part from Magic: the Gathering designers, arguably they'd have better balancing skills than the 3.0 design team did.

[Jack Zander]

Unfortunately, Mike Mearls already said that it "is pure noodling/theorizing/game tinkering on [his] part. It isn't something that the core game comes out and tells you how to do."

It all depends on how well balanced the abilities are. Since the present design D&D team appears to have been drawn in part from Magic: the Gathering designers, arguably they'd have better balancing skills than the 3.0 design team did.

So because the team designed a game which it's very purpose is to break overwrite the rules and unleash terrible combos, this one will be balanced?

[Reinboom]

I personally don't like a large number of options flooding my core books, though I am fond that they are tinkering with them.

Let the game get published, then let the thousands of playtesters (the general public) crack, stress, and mend the system first.



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I will think of this article as another good hope for 4E. It shows one of the more promising designers is still thinking and making in a promising way.