D&D 4E Homebrewing: A different class system

[Kalontas]

Well, it seems like you're pretty fixed on a certain idea right now, so there's not much discussion left. I still believe that playing your enemies and your characters correctly will involve everyone. While leader is not as squishy as a wizard may be, him going down will affect everyone negatively.

So in my eyes, that's how group roles work:
-The striker kills the enemies quickly, so they don't get to kill defender and screw everyone
-The defender protects everyone essentially, but mainly the often squishy controllers and very important leaders.
-The leader boosts everyone, but mainly keeps his eye on the defender, so he doesn't go down from all the fire he gets
-The controller shuffles around and wears down enemies, so the striker can kill them faster.
So as I'm seeing it, there is balance to group roles and their importance, as lacking any one of them can result in a serious handicap. No defender means the weaker party members get attacked, no leader means you will be severely injured at the end of the encounter, no striker means combat will take really long, no controller means that again, weaker members may get fired upon.

[Xathan]

Well, it seems like you're pretty fixed on a certain idea right now, so there's not much discussion left. I still believe that playing your enemies and your characters correctly will involve everyone. While leader is not as squishy as a wizard may be, him going down will affect everyone negatively.

Here's the thing we're trying to say and I think that's causing the confusion: we agree with you in that is how it was intended to work, but our point is that it does not work that way in actual fights. In an actual 4E fight, the combat will almost always be resolved most quickly and with least amount of HP damage done to everyone if the rest of the party functions as a support team for the Strikers, regardless of how you play the monsters,  because they do so much damage per hit.

however, if you want to discuss this further, we should do so elsewhere - at this point, I think Xeviat's thread has been derailed enough by us. :P

One thing to play with might be status effects in place of increased damage. Especially since their role is to take out the squishy wizard (who already has low hit points, so you don't need much of a damage boost to be effective here). Status effects could work the way breaking concentration historically has on that front.

I like that idea a lot, it makes them into better "anti-casters" - which is an ideal role for someone who's incredibly mobile, because the ability to wear plate doesn't do much when your opponent can throw around lightning bolts and summon wind storms, where as the ability to get the hell out of the way of those things is very helpful.

Another thing to do might be to limit the striker's defensive capacity, play up things like cover, and downplay defensive buffs or anything that might let more people be tank-ish (if the wizard can get a defensive buff he doesn't need defending; if the striker can get a defensive buff he doesn't need to pick a route carefully or avoid the enemy defender).

I'd allow for limited defensive buffs but do play them down - after all, if the tank goes down, you don't want the MMO problem of "oh crap, it's gonna be a wipe now." Just choose them carefully so a buffed Wizard or Rogue can't fully replace the tank for an entire fight or soak like one, or limit them to things that fit with their existing roles - a defensive buff has different effects depending on the targets role. A rogue getting the buff might gain a boost to their defense when behind cover or after making a 10 ft move, a wizard getting the buff would instead gain the boost to their defense if (again) behind cover or after casting an AOE and only against people in the AOE (because he forces them to duck down) - that sort of thing.


EDIT: Also, I'm not sure if I missed your response or if you missed my comment but was wondering what you thought of the "Ki" power source for Barbarians and Monks. It might have gotten lost in the shuffle. :P

[Kalontas]

Well, it seems like you're pretty fixed on a certain idea right now, so there's not much discussion left. I still believe that playing your enemies and your characters correctly will involve everyone. While leader is not as squishy as a wizard may be, him going down will affect everyone negatively.

Here's the thing we're trying to say and I think that's causing the confusion: we agree with you in that is how it was intended to work, but our point is that it does not work that way in actual fights. In an actual 4E fight, the combat will almost always be resolved most quickly and with least amount of HP damage done to everyone if the rest of the party functions as a support team for the Strikers, regardless of how you play the monsters,  because they do so much damage per hit.

And from my experience, this is false. If everybody concentrates too much on the striker, people do get hurt - because they weren't watching the other people. If it works the way you mention to you, I think just some numbers need tweaking to change it, but the actual roles are not guilty of it.

[Xeviat]

Kalontas, the only reason I wasn't dwelling upon the striker role part of my post, and partially why it was in a note, is because it isn't the crux of this thread, nor does my stance end discussion. No matter what the striker does, I think every class could be a striker, as evidenced by the recent Slayer and Blackguard builds.

Xathan, I actually like the idea of the ki power source, but I'd like an English word for it for my setting's thematics. Then one could say the monk is the "ki caster" and the barbarian is the "ki gish".

Another way I had looked at making the classes ended up looking like this:

Source	Martial	Arcane	Divine	Primal	Psionic
"Caster"	Warlord	Wizard	Cleric	Druid	Psion
"Expert"	Rogue	Bard	Monk	Ranger	Soulknife
"Warrior"	Fighter	???	Paladin	Barbarian	Psychic Warrior

My only complaint about this is it would require the barbarian and the monk to be tweaked to be more than they are. In a 4E style where I still use largely individual class powers, it could be done. I left the warrior arcanist off because I cannot think of an iconic warrior/wizard that isn't just a multiclass. Monk loosely fits into divine because they treat their regiment as a religion (and they're based on Buddhist monks for crying out loud), and Barbarian definitely fits into primal. Psychic Warriors are also bland, but at least they've been around for a while.

I was just stopping by the internet to see if my etsy sales sold, so I'll be back tomorrow with a more in depth post about some of my thoughts I had while doing nothing at work.

[Xeviat]

Something that won't take me long to question is this: In a game where Wizards and Psions walk side by side, what differentiates them? They have always had considerable overlap in their spell selection, even though the names were changed to protect those innocent spells. My own setting uses four "spheres" of magic: Elemental, Physical, Mental, and Aether (Aether contains healing/harming, radiant/darkness, warding/binding, and summoning of aligned things, fyi). I was trying to figure out different ways to dole them out, such as having each power source lack one, or having each power source only have access to two, but both the Wizard and Psion throw things off for me. I can easily leave Elemental out of the psion, but I'd also want to leave Aether out of the psion as well. I can't see leaving anything off the Wizard, though; taking anything away would make a wizard of a very different color indeed.

[Xathan]

Kalontas, the only reason I wasn't dwelling upon the striker role part of my post, and partially why it was in a note, is because it isn't the crux of this thread, nor does my stance end discussion. No matter what the striker does, I think every class could be a striker, as evidenced by the recent Slayer and Blackguard builds.

Xathan, I actually like the idea of the ki power source, but I'd like an English word for it for my setting's thematics. Then one could say the monk is the "ki caster" and the barbarian is the "ki gish".

Yeah, I've been trying to think of a western name for it. Spirit? Drive? Will? Anima?

Another way I had looked at making the classes ended up looking like this:

Source	Martial	Arcane	Divine	Primal	Psionic
"Caster"	Warlord	Wizard	Cleric	Druid	Psion
"Expert"	Rogue	Bard	Monk	Ranger	Soulknife
"Warrior"	Fighter	???	Paladin	Barbarian	Psychic Warrior

My only complaint about this is it would require the barbarian and the monk to be tweaked to be more than they are. In a 4E style where I still use largely individual class powers, it could be done. I left the warrior arcanist off because I cannot think of an iconic warrior/wizard that isn't just a multiclass. Monk loosely fits into divine because they treat their regiment as a religion (and they're based on Buddhist monks for crying out loud), and Barbarian definitely fits into primal. Psychic Warriors are also bland, but at least they've been around for a while.

I love this part of the post, first of all because I can now see the table code without having to make a post in the dragons den going "Uh...how do you make a table again?" AND because it's a nice, unique way of looking at things. I do think the breakdown of "Caster" "Expert" "Warrior" poses a problem when it comes to arcane - while spellswords/warmages/etc are common, they're all multiclass without a doubt. Heck, the term "gish" originally was used to refer to a spellsword, if I recall correctly. That being said, the spellsword is iconic enough and has been around for long enough that I think no one would blink twice at it being made a core class - especially because most of 4e and most derivative systems makes multiclassing very disadvantageous or unable to really fill the archetype, and having a class that just IS a spellsword would be very fitting.

Also, something that I became confused on - you mentioned at first your love of the Essential's route of expanding classes beyond their typical role, but the focus on each class being a caster, expert, or warrior seems to go against that and go more towards the 4e route of each class having it's role and sticking within it. It's possible I just misunderstood, but wanted to clarify I understood what you were going for.

Something that won't take me long to question is this: In a game where Wizards and Psions walk side by side, what differentiates them? They have always had considerable overlap in their spell selection, even though the names were changed to protect those innocent spells. My own setting uses four "spheres" of magic: Elemental, Physical, Mental, and Aether (Aether contains healing/harming, radiant/darkness, warding/binding, and summoning of aligned things, fyi). I was trying to figure out different ways to dole them out, such as having each power source lack one, or having each power source only have access to two, but both the Wizard and Psion throw things off for me. I can easily leave Elemental out of the psion, but I'd also want to leave Aether out of the psion as well. I can't see leaving anything off the Wizard, though; taking anything away would make a wizard of a very different color indeed.

I think the answer is very simple - take out the Aether from the psion and the Mental from the wizards. Charm, Dominate, and other spells that wizards do to control people are crudely using the warding/binding element of the Aether to bind their will - a psion controlling someone, since they can actually use Mental, makes them able to do it much more subtly - a wizard controlling someone completely will always get a obedient thrall that lacks initiative or free will or creative/higher reasoning, while a psion can do it so well that people who knew that person well might not even know the change was anything other than natural. As for wizard spells that induce emotions, they're not literally inducing them, they're summoning a spirit of that emotion to haunt the person - something that would feel much different than a psion just changing how you feel, and the reactions would likely be very different.

[Xeviat]

Hmmm ... an interesting thought. The mental spheres are Illusion, Charm, Artifice, and Divination, so I'm not entirely sure I want to give that up. Then again, for my setting, I don't have the same caster distinctions, as this thread is really thinking of D&D baseline and not my setting.

You're confused about my use of the terms expert and warrior in this. That's more of a descriptive term here. I want classes to be able to be multiple roles, so expert doesn't mean "striker" and warrior doesn't mean "defender". Warrior means generally beefy guy who generally fights straight forwardly, while Expert means skillsy guy who generally fights with a bit of trickery/talent/penache/whatever that makes them less straight forward. When a striker fighter charges you, he does so in the open, slashes at you with a big sword, and hacks away. When a rogue striker charges you, he does so from the shadows and with a few flips thrown in for good measure. It's also more of a line between "light" and "heavy" armors, but even that line is blurred from time to time.

I also agree that the "spellsword" in whatever form is rather iconic, but it's flatly iconic (just like the psychic warrior). It would really need something unique to make me want to have it be a class. I am also wholly aware of how sticky 4E multiclassing can be in tone, so that is something I am heavily looking into fixing (in fact, I think generally rolling the power-swap feats in with the initial multiclass feat would do that; paying a feat to swap a power isn't balanced if powers are supposed to be balanced against each other).

[Pair o' Dice Lost]

Random thoughts:

1) Regarding power lists by theme vs. power lists by class, one thing you might want to look at is doing at-wills and utilities by power source, encounters by role, and dailies and class features by class.  That way, the bread-and-butter powers for in and out of combat are determined by your schtick (martials swing swords, arcanists shoot fire, etc.), you can do things every encounter that definitively say "I'm a defender!" or "I'm a controller!", and your big guns are class-defining to really set them apart, kind of like how barbarians have their rages as dailies, wizards can swap out daily spells, etc.

This means that (A) people have less need for system mastery/memorization, as knowledge of at-wills, utilities, and encounters will transfer between roles as well as between power sources and (B) this increased overlap means you don't need to worry about repeating role-specific powers too much between power sources and will have lots more room to get creative with dailies.

2)

Another way I had looked at making the classes ended up looking like this:

[table snipped]

I left the warrior arcanist off because I cannot think of an iconic warrior/wizard that isn't just a multiclass.

How about the Sorcerer?  They have the basic fluff of "innate, uncontrolled magic," which lends them well to a very direct in-your-face style of magic while bards might be more tricky and wizards might be more...caster-y with theirs, and sorcerers got several melee-friendly variants towards the end of 3.5 and gishes are well-served by reusing a signature set of buffs and debuffs rather than being Swiss army knives, so the playstyle would be familiar to many people.  Also, sorcerers had plenty of special options like making good use of reserve feats, having those draconic-themed "sacrifice a spell to do X" feats, and similar that would allow a sorcerer to blur the lines of "casting spells" vs. "channeling magic" in order to differentiate it from other casters (for instance, while a fighter/wizard in 2e/3e might pre-buff before combat and toss a few blasting spells before charging in, sorcerers with Draconic Heritage and other dragon-y feats and features might have dragon scales for armor and could breathe fire in peoples' faces instead of blasting from afar).

3) Psions and wizards are fairly similar mechanically, but there are a few points where they have differed.  In 4e, of course, psions have the augmentation mechanic for greater on-the-fly flexibility.  In 3e, they had blasting powers where you could choose energy types on the fly and different energy types did different things.  In 2e, they had a psionic combat system that let them directly attack opponents' minds and do so faster than most other caster-types.  Putting these together, I would say the major difference between the wizard and the psion is that the psion is more tactical while the wizard is more strategic, if you know what I mean.
--The psion targets individuals well (messing with individual minds, quickly crushing single targets with overwhelming force, etc.) while the wizard targets groups well (creating free-standing illusions that can fool many people, filling the battlefield with spell effects, etc.).
--The psion improvises tactics on the fly (tailoring energy types, astral construct forms, and such to the situation) while wizards plan out strategies in advance (predicting the situations he'll face, preparing certain spells to be combined in certain orders, and such).
--Psions can be more subtle and sneaky in the thick of things (having no components or issues with armor mean they don't have to be obvious casters, many of their powers are invisible, etc.) while wizards benefit from having a bird's-eye view, sometimes literally (they are safer when separated from immediate combat, good range and vision help with targeting their wide-area powers, etc.).
--Psionic abilities are more ephemeral (many requiring concentration, not affecting the physical world, or similar) while magical abilities can be more grounded (lasting permanently, creating real or quasi-real things, and such).

So the difference, then, is not a matter of mental vs. physical, it's a matter of style, just like divine and arcane casters pre-4e shared many of the same spells but had differences in components, tools, synergies, and the like.

[Xeviat]

I left the sorcerer out because it can easily just be a wizard variant. But good points otherwise.

I think gishes like the bard, paladin, and ranger throw a wrench in the works. Their at-wills are going to want to be weapon attacks. That's why I was looking at encounters being more defined by source, as these classes used to have a smaller subsection of spells. But I can see roles support going into encounters; perhaps there could be common riders that are triggered by role, though that would be odd for multiclasses.