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?

See, first and foremost 4e is a game about movement and engaging the board. Every class has some movement capabilities and has reasons to engage the board, but rogues have a very synergistic setup with their backstabs. This ability gives a strong incentive to move and a clear lens through which to view the board that provides an array of meaningful choices as the rogue looks for opportunities to seize combat advantage. That combination is important since some classes may excel at one point or another – rangers and some warlocks are more mobile, fighters have a clearer lens and so on – but for those other classes it takes time and experience to find the sweet spot for play. Running around the edges of a fight or standing toe to toe with the big bad can be cool, but they don’t necessarily offer the same clear set of meaningful choices a rogue gets every turn.

Still, if that was all then it would really just be a difference of learning curve – other classes get rewarding too and the rogue is just the fastest route. But the rogue has another advantage – his advancement is just that much cooler than everyone else.

Now, I’m not asserting his powers are cooler. Everyone has cool powers, so I consider those to be a wash. Where the rogue gets more interesting is in the domain of feat selection. I have made a lot of characters, and there’s a pattern you start seeing with feats that is perhaps most obvious when your wizard hits 2nd or 4th level and loudly declares “These feats all suck.” And the thing is, he’s kind of right, at least for a wizard. There aren’t a lot of feats that help him do the things he does better or more interestingly (and even the ones he might want, the keyword ones, tend to have crappy reqs) so he’s stuck taking generic feats for a lack of anything more interesting (at least until he changes tiers – higher level feats are a wizards saving grace). In contrast, I have never made a rogue and not wanted more feats. So many feats interact well with how a rogue is played that you can never get enough of them.

This is a really big deal, and it exists as a sort of spectrum from the rogue at the top to the wizard at the bottom, and if there’s one reason the game needs more feats, it is to get to the point where the wizards and clerics and others of the world have more options than the same handful of feats, then nothing until they change tiers.

Lastly, and this is a point I’ve touched upon before, rogues probably have the best model for how to handle the interplay between stats and character effectiveness, allowing for one clear primary stat, and branching off from there based on substats. Building a rogue that mechanically satisfies your vision is just easier than doing so with, say, a Paladin.

Anyway, all this is important because it means when I’m faced with a general question about how something should be done, I tend to look at the rogue first as an example. That is not to say I want other classes to have powers and effects like the rogue, but rather that I want rules to introduce options that make things as clearly engaging for other classes as they are for the rogue. My hope is that eventually there will be enough support that other classes have equally clear paths to engagement (and some come close already – Martial Power was a nice bump for the martial classes in general) but doing so is going to take some work. There are a few roadblocks built into the core rules that need to be knocked down or worked around, but I think that’s doable.

With Fourth Edition, the designers have done a great job of applying a unified design theory to just about everything. This makes the reverse engineering job that much easier, natch. Still, there’s always some fly in the ointment. This time around, it was the discrepancy between the costing of poisons in the DMG and the Adventurer’s Vault. We have poisons of similar level and effect with pretty drastic price differences. For the longest time, I couldn’t crack the code. Until yesterday….

I identified an extremely subtle yet crucial and ultimately satisfying discrepancy between the poisons themselves. The poisons in AV are one-shot consumables; they are effective for a single target and a single attack. The poisons in the DMG are effective for an entire encounter (more on this in a bit). Though it is not expressly identified in either text, this distinction gives us two classes of poisons. Part of the confusion comes from the fact that they are both simply referred to as “poison”. To avoid this confusion I’ve tentatively titled them transient poisons and persistent poisons. Once we make this distinction, it is a relatively simple matter to develop creation systems for both.

As a bonus, these two classes of poison bring with them a larger design space as well. Now I can have poison families with rules for one class of poison, utility powers that only affect one class of poison, etc. How about a metapoison feat that allows a transient poison to last for two attacks? In play, these two classes of poison are susceptible to different strategies. A transient poison would do the trick for an assassination attempt; a persistent poison would be the better choice against the big battle with the BBEG.

Now, as promised, a note about the persistent quality of DMG poisons. The text is a little obtuse, and I’ve seen more than a few people misread it. However, I’m certain that the rule is as I read it. The text indicates:

The poison takes effect the next time the weapon hits and deals damage. The poison’s effect is a secondary attack against the same target. If a poisoned weapon hits multiple targets, the poison attacks only the first target hit. Apply a Poison: Apply poison to a weapon. This is a standard action. Poison applied to a weapon loses its potency at the end of the encounter or after 5 minutes have passed.

Some people have read the phrase “the poison attacks only the first target hit” to mean that the poison affects that first target and then stops being effective altogether. However, that interpretation improperly discounts the introductory clause “If a poisoned weapon hits multiple targets”. The term “target” has a specific meaning, i.e., the subject of a specific single attack. It should not be confused with its general use as a synonym of enemy or opponent. It is evident that the limitation is there to avoid giving a disparate advantage for using poison to classes with a greater number of multiple-target weapon attacks. Compare the impact a persistent poison that affected all targets would have on a dual-wielding ranger as opposed to a warlock.