Kudos in Order

To balance out my complaining, I just thought I'd mention some of the things I really like about 4e.

Races. Much more fun, and the racial feats are pretty sweet too.

Uniform attack progression. The 1/2 level system is great. That way wizards finally have a chance to hit things with a high AC.

Powers. I have no idea how these are going to shake out, but they look like a hell of a lot of fun.

Healing surges. Dear god, why didn't they do this before!? This will take all the onus off the cleric as a healing bitch and make it unnecessary to stop to rest in the middle of dungeons all the time. Hooray for that.

Grappling rules that I might actually use. : )

I was reading about Combat myself tonight and I have to say that of course since I know 3e combat this is more complicated and what not but thats only because it is different. I think once the new rules are adapted to things will be a lot easier, for example uniform bonuses and minuses. Basically if it's good you get +2 if it's bad -2 pretty easy to remember, haha.

Also matthew, with at will powers my wizard will never stab anythinbg with this dagger that he will carry anyway for some unknown reason. By the way, i'll throw this out there... I'm going to play a wizard... and I'm not going to get magic missle.

To me the only thing I haven't loved about 4e has been the skills section seems lackluster to me but oh well not a huge deal. I agree though overall I fucking love all the races, they actually made the other races cool enough that i DON"T play a human for the extra feat. Also, I love the powers, it is going to be so confusing to do to start but it will be a lot of fun.

One thing while talking about powers I am predicting that combat will really rely on everyone working together. What I mean is that with all these powers there are so many saving throws, and continuing damage, and after-effects that pretty much the PC"s are going to have to work just as hard as the DM during combat just to remind the DM of what's happening to all the monsters. No more do your thing on your turn and space out for 2 minutes.

One thing I found surprising is that in combat you can only use one healing surge per encounter and they call it "Second WInd" which also confers a +2 to all defenses until the next round. I thought that was limiting at first but then i realized it stopped monsters and pc's from standing toe to toe healing in front of each other for 3 rounds straight making the battles really long. The good thing is you can heal unlimited outside of combat. It's funny but a lot of these combat maneuvers and abilities and stuff remind me of games like WoW so I find myself fighting the urge to slip into WoW terminology so forgive me if I call Ongoing Damage DoT's instead of something I gaurantee it will slip out.

Quote :

One thing while talking about powers I am predicting that combat will really rely on everyone working together. What I mean is that with all these powers there are so many saving throws, and continuing damage, and after-effects that pretty much the PC"s are going to have to work just as hard as the DM during combat just to remind the DM of what's happening to all the monsters. No more do your thing on your turn and space out for 2 minutes.

On that note, wouldn't it be nuts if the new, but too-expensive, 4th Ed. D&D Table Top thing had tools that would make this much easier? I'm betting that it will.

Actually, this got me thinking. Lately, I've been trying to figure out something I could do in the way of a personal C# ASP.NET project, and I think this might be what I needed. Basically, I'm thinking about seeing if it would be practical to create a program that would track all of the modifiers on PCs, NPC, and Monsters. I was also thinking about having this program automate initiative, such that you would click an initative button for your character or for NPCs and Monsters and the application would automatically generate an initiative line-up.

Obviously, there are lots of details to work out here, but I've got a bunch of ideas already. Something I need to know though is how practical doing this would be, based on how the new rules are setup. In all honesty, I haven't read the combat section of the PHB yet, and I have pretty much been focusing on Clerics. So, I'm not sure how much overlap there is between effect types, damage categories, timeframes in which effects can last, etc. It would be best if there were a lot of overlap so that creating the app wouldn't require having to handle a bunch of one-off circumstances all over the place.

Anyway, I'm not sure if all of that made sense, or if you guys would even be interested in this, but it something I'd really like to explore.

From Patrick:

Patrick wrote:

First of all I have to say I’m impressed that you could even create something like that, that is awesome. The intiative generator would be really handy and save someone a good amount of time. I’m not computer savvy at all when it comes to programming so would this be a separate program that we would have to run that you would create or would you basically write your own Table top program? Or is it like an add-on that would be your own program but would work within the confines of maptools or whatever.

I don’t really think it is a bad thing at all that players will have to pay attention in battle more I actually think it is a good thing instead of the DM freaking out and the players off doing whatever they do. It will probably be more fun working together. As for combat I know the gist of how everything works and it is very very similar to 3e, things like cover and concealment are the same. They added in this “minor action” which you can do basically it is taking the place of the move equivalent action. For example like taking out a potion. So in 4e you get minor, standard, and move actions. Anyway we can get to all that later since it doesn’t affect this email. I myself have also been focusing mostly on Wizard powers so I don’t know how much our class powers will overlap. One example though is there is a wizard spell that hits the first round and then has ongoing damage of 5 damage every turn and each turn the monster has a chance to make a save to remove the effect. I’m assuming that cleric or fighters might have something like this too. The way they seem to do it is not that each class has its own unique power just its own unique way of incorporating the game rules. What I mean by that is I’m sure the wizard has the ongoing 5 damage from a spell, and maybe a fighter has ongoing damage 2 from a bleed effect from hitting or something. So a program that could incorporate all the ongoing damage and stuff could work, was that the answer you were looking for? This is what I meant by players paying attention because when it does come to the monsters turn it is that fighter and that wizards responsibility to remind the DM “hey I have on going damage, go ahead take 5 hp’s and make your save” basically spreading the work throughout everyone.

I think the best coarse of action would be to keep this idea in mind but maybe bring it back up after a week or two of battles when we all really get the hang of how these new powers work, the new saves, and all that kind of stuff

Yeah, I wasn't exactly planning to start working on this tonight or anything. In fact, I'd probably want to spend a couple weeks just laying out the project plans and talking to you guys about what would be needed and/or useful. In any case though, while I have been looking for something that I could take on as a project, and that would be fun, i am not by any means committed to this idea. If it wouldn't be practical or useful then it shouldn't be done. Then again, if it would be practical and useful, then I would enjoy making it.