Some part of me knows this is wrong, but I can’t stop putting the four musketeers into a 4e filter to see what comes out. Take roles, for example:
D’artagnan is clearly the striker, and Porthos is obviously the defender. I can’t make up my mind about Athos and Aramis, though, since I can make a good case for either one being a leader or controller. I think I settle on Athos as Leader and Aramis as controller, but I could probably be convinced otherwise.
All of which is to say, swashbuckling is on my mind. Thinking about urban play for my Gloomwrought game has bled a little bit into it, and what it would take to capture that flavor in 4e.
I consider swashbuckling to be an oddity in D&D history, particularly since I think it has never been as well supported as it was in second edition. With setting material like a Mighty Fortress and Red Steel combined with what was my favorite application of the kit system – making a swashbuckler kit available to all classes – it was a really good time to be swinging a rapier. In contrast, 3e fell short. Sure, there were swashbuckler classes, but I never saw the product that made me think “ah, yes, I can see doing a campaign of this.”
4e starts off on slightly better footing than 3e, if only because combat encourages a lot more movement and noise (things I consider essential for swashbuckling) and it strongly encourages stunts. Plus, the rogue is almost a swashbuckler in design; he makes an excellent pirate, but a poor musketeer. However, it’s definitely not entirely there yet. 4e’s flavor and style owes something to swashbuckling, but it is a horse of a different color, and that in turn leads to my thinking about what it would take to make the transition.
The biggest question for me is really about the map – for all that it has promoted a certain amount of dynamism in fight scenes, mapnosis and setup are both somewhat calcifying. Someday when I have the time, I really want to go through the various powers and think about which ones are still fun without the map.
Handling things like range, sneak attacks and proximity was never a problem pre-minis so a lot of powers can translate easily, but there are some real gotchas. I suspect that the warlord would really end up getting gutted.
If there’s enough to work with, it would be easier to work with the existing classes than to have ot make new ones from scratch. It’s a bit limited, since I’d probably want to stick to the martial power source, which is a a problem with controllers, but the martial controller is one of those ideas that is starting to bubble through to the surface in enough places that I suspect its addressable. Far easier to tweak the classes.
For example, consider the Duelist, a Rogue mod. It’s basically the rogue, but with two changes:
1) Sneak Attack is renamed “Fair Fight” and it grants a bonus to damage under the following circumstances:
* In melee
* The duelist has no allies adjacent to the target
* No one else has attacked the target sicne the end of the duellist’s last turn
* The duelist does not have combat advantage against the target
2) Gains the class ability “Gentleman’s deferral” which is an encounter ability, standard action. When you have combat advantage against an opponent, you can choose not to attack him, and take a second wind action (which does not count as your usual 1 second wind per turn).
Yes, there are some minor tweaks that such a change demands – some feats need tweaking or duplicating, some powers may not quite work. It’s not finely balanced – it’s possible it would be better off with ranger/warlock extra damage. But this sort of thing is easy to rapidly prototype and try out in your own game if you’re just looking to scratch an itch.
Now, I know that a lot of this is technically an arena where paragon paths are supposed to be the tool to use, but I just don’t buy it. I like paragon paths mechanically, and some of them even have nice color, but I really have not yet felt like they are interesting enough that anyone would use them if they weren’t mandatory. Hacking paragon paths is certainly cleaner, but while it’s full of dangers, Martial Power gave us some good illustrations of why there’s a lot more mileage to be gotten out of hacking the core class.
All of which comes back to the four musketeers. Excepting Aramis, it’s not hard to come up with a similar hack for each of them (and Aramis will hopefully be covered in time). Mix in a little hack to improve everyone’s light armor AC and you now have most of the makings of a game of game of rooftops and rapiers. There are still some rough bits (*cough*magicitems*cough*) but to me it feels like a lot of distance can be covered in only a few steps.
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