Working on 4e stuff is an ongoing process of discovery. The game has a lot of moving parts, many of which are not immediately evident. For purposes of play, this is a fantastic thing, and it contributes a lot to the sense that the game “just works.” Unfortunately, it also means that if you sit down and start writing your own material, there are a lot of potential pitfalls. Worse, if you’ve got a lot of third edition in your brain, there are a lot of assumptions that are going make trouble for you.
Here are a few tidbits that I’ve come across (or stumbled over) as I’ve been working on the Witch Doctor. It’s far from comprehensive, but it’s a good start.
- It is critically important to remember that “Effect” in a power always goes off. A lot of daily powers which do not have a “Miss” entry still have an effect, so it’s not wasted on a miss. In short, if you want something to happen whether you hit or miss, make it an effect.
- Stance and Reliable are intensely powerful and useful keywords, and they create a number of rules for a power so it’s important to get comfortable with them.
- It is easy to confuse attack types and keywords because they’re used similarly, but so long as you remember that melee, ranged, close, area and personal are attack types, then you’re probably ok.
-
Some bonuses stack. Specifically, feat, racial and untyped bonuses stack. The feat ones are the ones that really matter because there are a few existing feats (like Improved Initiative and Quick Draw or Dwarven Weapon Training and Weapon Focus) that already do this. Obviously, too many stacked bonuses can be a problem, so these are the categories you need to look for.
Nope. That was me reading certain sidebars wrong.
- As a curious addendum, I originally missed that the bonus you get from magic items is not an item bonus but rather an enhancement bonus. Yes, obvious once you realize it, but it left my totally scratching my head the first time I saw a magical suit of armor that had an item bonus among its properties. It’s all laid out explicitly in a sidebar in chapter 9, but I think I just glazed over it.
- Anytime you see an effect with ongoing damage, remember that it will almost always fire off at least once, and adjust your impression of its damage appropriately. This is why cloud of daggers uses a relatively low die value.
- There is no such thing as a to hit bonus. That is now a bonus to an attack. This is a small thing, but man, the to hit bonus is a hard habit to break.
- ‘Wall’ just describes a shape, it does not suggest duration. Notably, a solid wall is an explicit type of wall.
- I still have no idea why there’s no ‘Bolt’ or ‘Ray’ area type. You can fake it by saying a wall which can’t change direction, but that’s kind of a pain.
- Races that have stat pairs within the same defense category (Strength & Constitution, Dexterity & Intelligence or Charisma & Wisdom) can often seem very potent (Warforged and Eladrin being great examples) but the hit they take to their defenses can be a real problem.
- Some feats are just better than others. Dwarven Weapon Training is just better than weapon focus, and that’s ok. This is partly because it’s a more specialized sort of feat, but more because it supports the fiction. Dwarves should be using axes and hammers, so the rules reinforce that by making it a better choice.
There’s more, of course, but a lot of it is even more fiddly – matters of layout, style and much more, but I’ll be here all night if we start getting into that. We’re already on version 4 of our internal style guide, and it’s GROWING.
Subscribe to RSS
