Poisoncraft: Codex Venenorum is done and waiting for a trip through the Fred Hicks Prettification Machine. So I thought I would unwind with another 3e conversion. This is one of my favorites from the last edition:

Feeblemind power

I like this conversion for a few reasons. It gives the wizard another long-distance power, which is quickly becoming the last defining feature of the class. It has a pretty novel suite of damage effects. (I particularly like the penalty to Reflex defense, which seems odd at first blush but, in fact, makes perfect sense.) Finally, I like the conditional penalty to the saving throw, which is a fruitful area for further design exploration.

Just one problem….

Did you figure it out….

I didn’t notice until I started typing this post….

That’s right. Monsters don’t have the arcane keyword. So that last sentence is essentially useless. Sigh.

This points out an interesting design phenomenon for me. When I’m designing for 4e, I don’t have much trouble getting into the 4e mindset. For some reason, when I’m designing conversions from 3e to 4e, I seem to have these kind of niggling issues pop up. In fact, I had some similar issues crop up while I was working on the Poisoncraft conversion. I would find myself doing a straight conversion of something and catch myself in time to realize that it might be something that doesn’t belong in 4e at all. For Poisoncraft, I think this ended up making it a much better product because I found myself really focusing on the design issues, giving them greater scrutiny. Anyone else have similar experiences?

On the upside, there are a couple of easy fixes. You could just swap psychic for arcane. In some ways, this is a better fit than arcane anyway (though it lacks the traditional tie to its 3e progenitor). You could repurpose it to a monster power easily enough, perhaps for an evil mage NPC. What would you do?