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I hated adventure design in 3rd Edition at any level. Early on it was because of limited hit points, reliance on certain class features (like trapfinding) and magical healing, and magic in general required me to pay particularly close attention to what I was using, how much I was using, what the players might have or try to do, and so on. At higher levels I not only had to worry more about what spells the characters had, but I also had to juggle spellcasting monsters, flight, save-or-die effects, and more.
What concerns me is how easy it will be to get what you want out of the rules, and how smoothly the game responds to your needs and wants. Personally I want something very much like 4th Edition, just without the needless scaling and number of immediately available powers; the number of things to choose from was great, but having to juggle like, six things at 1st-level is a bit much for most players I run with (I would also like a magic system that makes sense, but Dungeons & Dragons has yet to address that).
So how does this work? Are they going to be packaged into something like styles or genres, so if you want to match a previous edition it will tell you where you should set the dials, as it were? Will each rules module reference an edition, or have sidebars that tell you the pros and cons like the variants in 3rd Edition’s Unearthed Arcana? Will various setting require you to go back through everything else and modify it, like inflating/reducing monster hit points, changing save-or-die effects to less punishing effects, turning resistances into values, changing/removing spells, etc?
(Seriously though, it would be nice to have a rules module that better emphasizes a character’s personality. morals, and motivations.)
At least you can apparently completely ignore alignment, but what about classes? Will there be an option to make them “meatier”, or more flexible, or interesting? I have blogged a couple times already about how boring and needlessly rigid they are. It would be nice to give them the breadth of 4th Edition, just without the depth (at 1st-level anyway), or give us enough options to actually realize some key concepts. Like, you know, a wind monk that can do more wind-things than fly a short distance once per day.
Thinking about D&D alignments, couldn't you have a middle ground where you build packages of aspects or of virtues/intimacies which approximate the D&D alignments and have the player pick a package? Okay, I'm not sure what the point of this approach is, but it's a way of bridging the gap.I really wish I'd gotten to experience 4th Edition more. It really seemed like a good design approach. Alas, most of my players are convinced it's the work of the devil.
That sounds pretty cool, actually. You could bundle them in archetypes and concepts, so a player could pick \”greedy dwarf\”, \”elf with stick up his bum\”, \”suave half-elf\”, or \”gnome trickster\” and just roll with it. You could crib from FATE and give players bonuses when acting on these aspects/intimacies, and penalize them when you try to force one and they want to ignore it.Actually, if Alignments could determine this sort of thing that would go a long way to making them more interesting. As it stands they are basically qualifiers for spell effects, because of COURSE more things need to center around magic. -.-