# 4 Elements at the Core of 4e



## RangerWickett (Jul 18, 2013)

Aside from the '5 encounters per day' thing, I keyed into this basic trend when I worked up a home-brew RPG based on 4e. You certainly cannot use all of 4e's options, since they're too granular. But for a quick-play game, it worked pretty well, and there were still enough levers to make it narratively interesting. 

The main thing I did was give everyone a default of 10 HP, which might go up to 20 for tough guys. So kind of like your '5 hits,' except each hit could be broken up. It allowed for daggers to be different from greatswords, and for spells to do half damage on a miss, and the like.

I think for a functional game that lets you wrap your head around different elements of fantasy adventures, you need at least:

AC, Fort, Ref, Will
Hits and damage to kill you vs. saving throws and conditions to weaken or take you out
Energy types and resistances
Big & small weapons
Some mechanic to allow limited powerful attacks vs. regular normal attacks
And of course a cavalcade of magic.


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## amerigoV (Jul 18, 2013)

This is all IMO since everybody likes different things out of a game. Savage Worlds is my go-to system both as player and GM these days. It has a much higher "swing" factor and good tools for players to deal with that swing. That (among other things) reminded me of the bad old days of 1e (except I like the SW system much better - I get the best of both worlds - nostalgia and a good system and I am loving it).

With that in mind, your observations just confirm how much the numbers drove 4e. 4e seemed to remove the variance and drove much tighter to the mean. Quite frankly, its not to my taste. I enjoy the wildness so long as players (and the GM) have some way to influence it. Its more fun to ride the roller coaster than the kiddie-cars at the amusement part, even though both get you to the same spot.

When the GM puts down a Dragon fig, I "want" to have the feeling "oh crap, this could hurt" and not "ok guys, if we roll 9+ six times before it can get five hits on us, the loot is ours!" That may sound I am being condescending, but if that is how the game really runs there are players that will pick up on this, guaranteed*


* I'll given an example from 3e. Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil. In the obelisk room there is an arch that Gates in a Grell if you touch it. Sadly, the first thing said was *not* "crap, don't touch that again!" First thing out of one of my player's mouth was "cool, an XP generator!" And he was exactly right. The system awarded XP based on killing stuff. And here was a way to provide endless XP, in theory. Of course I then showed a picture of the elder grell wizard from the Aberrations book just to remind them that it might not just be a plain old Grell that pops out :evil


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## Highland Raider (Jul 18, 2013)

I haven't run 4e (aside from a Gamma World game that lasted all of 3 sessions), but I might implement some of this if I do run the system. The 9+ success reminds me of Barbarians of Lemuria (which is my current favorite system) and the other adjustments are intriguing. Not for everyone, definitely, and I'd probably adjust things a bit so that the players can't, as AmerigoV puts it, think in terms of number of hits, etc. I do like the combat-as-skill-check variant but think it might need to be tweaked for various monsters, increased and decreased accordingly. I'd have to think it over a bit before making further comments, but I do like the direction you're heading with this.


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## I'm A Banana (Jul 18, 2013)

amerigoV said:
			
		

> When the GM puts down a Dragon fig, I "want" to have the feeling "oh crap, this could hurt" and not "ok guys, if we roll 9+ six times before it can get five hits on us, the loot is ours!" That may sound I am being condescending, but if that is how the game really runs there are players that will pick up on this, guaranteed




I think of these numbers as a baseline that you can use to deviate from. In the example of plunking down a monster that is truly menacing, you might play with the "thou shalt have 5 encounters" rule and include ALL FIVE ENCOUNTERS in one big set-piece fight designed to rip away nearly all of the party's resources. In the example of the grells this works, too: if you know how many monsters the party can take on, you can toy with those assumptions to make sure they can't take on infinite waves of grell, or to make sure they get XP only for the broader goals.

You can even weave in something like bounded accuracy: start off hitting on a 14, end up hitting on a 6 (or whatever). 

4e never really did much with those itself, but the chassis certainly allows an individual DM to do all those things.


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## Storminator (Jul 18, 2013)

The "Roll 9+" really only applies to things you're good at. Trying an untrained skill with your dump stat means you might need to roll an 18. I've seen encounters were I, as the DM, was able to force the players to work without their strengths - FREX continuously hitting the strikers, while only allowing the leaders to hit back - that made the encounter extremely dangerous to the PCs. Winning those encounters means controlling the situation and getting it back into the "Roll 9+" paradigm. 

PS


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## Janx (Jul 18, 2013)

Some quibbles first:

In the Water section, second paragraph, the last sentence is uncompleted.  It simply starts "You can also "

Can you confirm (or revise the text to include) that the GM also needs 9+ to-hit players?

I raise that, because it seems fishy that declared facts state the players need 9+ and kill monsters on 6 hits, and monsters kill players in 5 hits.

It's not explicitly stated what the monsters need to hit, though later text assumes it is also 9+.  This would imply the monsters kill the players more often than the players kill monsters, since they both have the same odds of success but the monsters need fewer hits to win.

I suspect the monsters actually have a higher to-hit requirement (shooting more like storm troopers). I don't do 4e, so I couldn't say for sure, merely that the article's assessment seemed off.

Other than that, it's an interesting article.  I see some useful simplified gaming concepts for anybody designing a game.  Namely, how hard to make things.

Making success be "slightly better" than 50/50 keeps players happy.  It also supports James Ernest's design point of making games be mostly luck, with a slight advantage going to somebody who plays smart.  Keeping the odds of success near the 50/50 line helps enable that.

Keeping a combat (or any other challenge) constrained to 6 rounds on average, helps with pacing. Fights on TV don't last a whole episode either.  if your game mechanics don't bog down within the round, then fights will feel fast paced.

For my own game designs, I have another rule of thumb.  A player doesn't want to wait for more than 4 actions by other players before his own turn.  This is why, in even relatively simple games, they feel like they are too slow when there are 6 or more players at that table (that's N-1 actions I have to wait for before I get to act).  Complex games with multiple actions, are eating away at this budget of "waiting for my turn."

So, taking the lessons from 4elemental here, we could make a very fast-play RPG where each player gets one action per turn, needs 9+ to succeed, and 6 successes to overcome the current encounter challenge.


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## I'm A Banana (Jul 18, 2013)

Janx said:
			
		

> In the Water section, second paragraph, the last sentence is uncompleted. It simply starts "You can also "




Aw, man.  Thanks!



			
				Storminator said:
			
		

> The "Roll 9+" really only applies to things you're good at.




That's pretty true! All 4e characters are just "good at" attacks. Changing that target number is a great way to account for things you aren't so good at (I point out adding ability modifiers as the only modifiers hits that zone...though admittedly, not with the 18+-to-pass requirement!)


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## Storminator (Jul 18, 2013)

Kamikaze Midget said:


> That's pretty true! All 4e characters are just "good at" attacks. Changing that target number is a great way to account for things you aren't so good at (I point out adding ability modifiers as the only modifiers hits that zone...though admittedly, not with the 18+-to-pass requirement!)




Right - everyone's good at combat so it holds true there. But that doesn't apply to skill challenges, where players can frequently try their crazy idea, even with a -1 CHA mod and no training in Bluff.

PS


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## Balesir (Jul 19, 2013)

Janx said:


> I suspect the monsters actually have a higher to-hit requirement (shooting more like storm troopers). I don't do 4e, so I couldn't say for sure, merely that the article's assessment seemed off.



This is perhaps slightly true, but not by a huge margin. You might think of it in terms of PCs tending towards hitting on an 8, monsters hitting on a 10, but it's not as extreme as that (and modifiers, especially good positioning, make it much more fluid).

To give the PCs the edge they have other tools available. Spending healing surges during the battle is one - this extends the hits needed to drop a PC by one or two. Another is that they have more ability to "stick" monsters to the characters better able to take the punishment (defenders tend to have more hit points and higher defences, although just what mix of them varies with the specific class).

If the players leverage their advantages they can win an equal level battle quite easily, but they can't just take it for granted.



Janx said:


> Keeping a combat (or any other challenge) constrained to 6 rounds on average, helps with pacing. Fights on TV don't last a whole episode either.  if your game mechanics don't bog down within the round, then fights will feel fast paced.



Fight duration is a critical control point, and more guidance on rules variants to modify it would have been very useful from day 1. Too long a duration and the session gets eaten up with just one big battle; too short a duration and no interesting decisions are really possible in the fight, and these moments of high tension are often the best moments to see some really deep roleplaying. Your character is perhaps best defined by what they do when the chips are down - and if they don't get time to blink at those times then there will be little chance for their character to be revealed.

Plus, on a simpler level, tactics only get interesting if the fight lasts more than 10 seconds...



Janx said:


> For my own game designs, I have another rule of thumb.  A player doesn't want to wait for more than 4 actions by other players before his own turn.  This is why, in even relatively simple games, they feel like they are too slow when there are 6 or more players at that table (that's N-1 actions I have to wait for before I get to act).  Complex games with multiple actions, are eating away at this budget of "waiting for my turn."



Interesting rule of thumb; probably not a bad one.

I would note, though, that giving players between-turn actions, _as long as they all get them_, is another way to address this (and will allow more than 5 players - including the GM, who might even arguably count as more than one player/action - in the game).


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## Klaus (Jul 19, 2013)

The "9+" rule is (like everything else here) the Average target. If you include "6+" (Easy), "9+" (Average), "12+" (Hard), "15+" (Very Hard) and "18+" (Extremely Hard), you can better cover for skill checks, hard-to-hit monsters, etc.


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## S'mon (Jul 20, 2013)

Re 9+ - another way of saying 60% success chance, which is definitely a good game design rule of thumb. One reason d20-roll-under-stat attribute checks work so well in pre-3e D&D; in practice the tested attribute averages around 12, so 60% success. Games that deviate too far from that - Call of Cthulu with 90% skills, OD&D with 1 in 6 or 2 in 6 success chance as the default - feel less satisfying IMO.


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## I'm A Banana (Jul 21, 2013)

S'mon said:
			
		

> Re 9+ - another way of saying 60% success chance, which is definitely a good game design rule of thumb. One reason d20-roll-under-stat attribute checks work so well in pre-3e D&D; in practice the tested attribute averages around 12, so 60% success. Games that deviate too far from that - Call of Cthulu with 90% skills, OD&D with 1 in 6 or 2 in 6 success chance as the default - feel less satisfying IMO.




It's true: it gives you enough chance to encourage you to try (because you'll probably succeed), while still allowing a pretty significant chance for failure. 



			
				Klaus said:
			
		

> The "9+" rule is (like everything else here) the Average target. If you include "6+" (Easy), "9+" (Average), "12+" (Hard), "15+" (Very Hard) and "18+" (Extremely Hard), you can better cover for skill checks, hard-to-hit monsters, etc.




I think this is part of what makes the chassis extremely customizable. You have an easy way to account for gradients in ability and difficulty, without really getting into the accounting of what bonuses apply where and stack to what caps or whatever.


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