STILL Not Dead (Terrors & Tactics Updade)

Okay, unexpected couple of pages added today, but I woke up inspired.

The short version is, just like I added a section in the GM's Guide on how to incorporate player motivations into play, I decided I needed a section in the GM's Guide on incorporating the heroic virtues into play (beyond just having players think about which are important to the PC heroes).

So the new section includes the virtues and headings for Draw, Support, Test and Reward.

Draws are hooks to offer PCs in quests that align with a given virtue. Support is examples of the virtue in the world. Tests are example situations where it will cost the PC something to follow the virtue. Rewards are ways that the virtue can rebound in beneficial ways for the PCs who adhere to it.

These wouldn't need to come up every session, but are mostly ideas on how to incorporate the virtues into the campaign world.

So, for example, here's Compassion...

Compassion
Draw: people in need of assistance.

Support: describe how people nearby are helping each other; someone needs minor assistance (holding a door, gathering up something dropped); a respectable figure is asking for trivial donations to a good cause.

Test: you come across a beaten wretch who is near death; news of desperate need arrives and going to render aid would greatly disrupt the PC’s current plans; a foe throws down their arms and begs the PC for mercy.

Reward: someone, possibly someone they previously helped, helps the PC when they’re in most need (ex. the PCs party is defeated and should be dead, but instead are found, their wounds tended and live to fight another day).

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I think that this section will add another superversive layer to game by getting the GM and not just the players thinking about virtuous behavior.

As to Technomancer... I'm still weighing it. It is more broad, but at the same time if I make it too broad it eats wizardry in most of my portrayals of it being "sufficiently advanced technology." Gadgeteer is also something that doesn't actually require "magic" so its in some ways easier to justify in a low/no magic setting along with the Fighter and Mastermind while Technomancer doesn't quite draw the same easy association.

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And complete sidebar; there's an Honorbound1980 hanging out on John C. Wright's blog and I was curious if that was also you.

If not that is one WILD coincidence.

Yeah, it's me. I was lurking for a while, then I remembered how to log into Disqus so I could actually comment on a few things.

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The GM side of the virtues looks interesting. I'd put in a sidebar telling GMs not to abuse the tests to get one over on the players. For example, having the defeated, surrendering foe come back later as a threat because they were shown mercy, an insincere surrender, if you will, is a great way to make sure that every future foe is summarily executed, regardless of whether or not they might have a chance to repent.

It's honestly the same problem i have with modern superhero comics and why they've unintentionally made the Punisher's way the only one that works - they keep bringing the villains back and using the hero's mercy to do so, thereby ensuring that said mercy is a fool's errand. If they want villains to be spared, they need to write villains that are 1) worthy of being spared (i.e., aren't looking to plant a knife in the hero's back or scheming to kill more people), and 2) don't come back via a revolving door at say Arkham Asylum.

Cool beans, good to see you out in the wider digital world.

Yeah, I probably do need to add that; I forget how cynical some people can be sometimes. Perhaps, I should more outright state that the rewards come most often sometime after a successful test and maybe add an example of a foe you spared coming back to your aid to the compassion entry.

With luck, the Ruins section will be done today, leaving only Events on my official list.

My unofficial list though has added a couple of thoughts; first, a page-ish discussing guidelines for creating your own boons, talents and rituals. The second is an option for going for a more primitive setting by swapping out the permanent teleportation portals for Ley Lines.

I don’t know if you’re familiar with Rifts at all, but the gist would be that in a more primitive world ley lines/dragon lines/etc. crisscross the world and where they intersect is a nexus of power. The safe version of Teleportation in the setting involves opening a temporary portal at a nexus to another nexus on the same line. Thus, you’d still have your limited long range teleportation (nexus to nexus) but it would be using a natural phenomenon (akin to the gnome network) instead of pre-built portals.

The main reason they’re not in my main setting is arcane magic as “sufficiently advanced technology” doesn’t feel quite right with a “technology that uses this clearly supernatural network of magic power” rider attached. It could put more of a barrier between wizardry (ley line energy) and gadgeteering (technology).

That could be fine for some people’s settings, but I really like my “wizardry is really advanced programming and engineering” because of the flavor it grants to the setting. But it does seem like a valid option to include.

Anyway, for now, breakfast, engraving and writing await. Make it a good day.

Okay... revised Reward Language;

"Rewards are ways that those who pass a test of virtue can be rewarded for their virtue in a way that reinforces that virtue."

And the Compassion Reward entry;

Reward: someone, possibly someone they previously helped, helps the PC when they’re in most need (ex. the PCs are defeated and should be dead, but the foe they previously spared returns, binds their wounds and saves them).

That should make it a little clearer that the point of the tests are to give the player opportunities to demonstrate their PC's virtues and in turn be rewarded for their virtue (vs. being a sucker).

And the foe you spare turning around and saving you at a critical time is exactly the sort of Superversive theme I'd like the setting to reinforce.

I got quite a shock when I saw you posting there - I knew you'd posted at rpg.net for a while and read some of your posts, but that was it. (I got myself banned for questioning their little speech codes.)

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Your revised version looks good. The foe in question doesn't even have to be a previous Big Bad Evil Guy, just some minion who got a second chance and is making good on it.

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I'm familiar with the concept of ley lines, albeit from the Dresden Files and other sources. I think that they, and the idea of magic in general being a natural phenomenon could work and keep the "arcane magic as a science" angle, since that phenomenon would be studied and measured like heat, pressure, gravity, or electricity.

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It's a shame that WotC already snagged artificer. Given your concerns about technomancer eating wizard, I think that gadgeteer might be the way to go.

So, couple of updates;

First, pushing through on laying out the Ruin design section (which is ending up larger than I was first thinking since designing a good ruin and the encounters within is pretty core to the overall experience so needs more details than I was first planning).

As a side-effect of that though I had to go back to the Afflictions section and bring them up from three examples to an even dozen so that first-time GMs will have enough options to stock a ruin with; much like how I ended up expanding the traps and hazards a while back.

That's because one of the details in ruin layout is going to be distributing challenge point budget between problem-solving (skill use for puzzles, secret doors, etc.), hazards/traps (also skills mostly, but with more direct danger), afflictions (curses and diseases mostly) and creatures so its not just endless combats.

On top of that, I've added in a layer for the "locations" where you're asked to choose (or roll for) the purpose of the location... is the location interesting because;

- its related to the ruin's original purpose (ex. a library in a ruined academy, a rich vein of ore in an abandoned mine, etc.)

- its condition (ex. a half or fully flooded chamber in a submerged ruin)

- of the ruin's present importance (ex. a room full of prisoners when the importance is because of valuable hostages)

- of the threats in the ruin (ex. the lab of a malicious wizard whose occupied the ruin)

- of a combination of those (a half-flooded library or the wizard's lab also has cages full of prisoners/test subjects).

The original purpose also determines a bit of how you should look to lay out the ruin with maps. For example, an academy suggests many rooms located off of hallways that allow you to go from place to place in the academy without entering all the side rooms. By contrast, a prison suggests choke-points to enable it to hold prisoners with minimum manpower and natural caves suggest irregular chambers and tunnels connected almost randomly.

From the layout and location purposes you can decide where you want to place traps, hazards, puzzles and creatures into the ruins.

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The other update is semi-unrelated, but also kinda completely related. A friend of mine has started to run a 4E game on their discord server, which, since I only rarely get to play vs. run anything I signed up for. We're playing on Saturday afternoons and I give anyone details if they want in.

That's the unrelated part. The related part is this. I had to make a new 1st level PC for myself and then for two of my other real-life friends who wanted in, but my CBLoader program has stopped working and nothing I've tried has worked to fix it.

I'm actually NOT asking for assistance on that. Its more an observation.

Without the easy sorting and compilation of the builder program I have actually realized that I can now build PCs more easily in Ruins & Realms than I can in 4E. More accurately, the limits of time mean that in building these 4E PCs, something I could have done in an hour using the old builder program, to only use readily available options from core books because I can't pour through a hundred issues of dragon magazine just to find the perfect feat or power in a reasonable length of time.

The result? Most of the feats came out of the two Essentials player books and the PCs are a human skald (me), a tiefling executioner and a half-orc slayer. All the stuff being mostly in 1-2 books is just so much easier to use.

And I think it really does justify my decision to make the Player's Guide a "one-and-done" for building PCs and NOT trying to spread a bunch of options out to various later splats. Because, Lord knows, halfway through the second PC I was really wishing all the options could just be in a single book like when I was building PCs for Ruins & Realms.

Adding Regions, Realms, Settlements, Ruins, new monsters, traps, afflictions and vehicles built from the core book guidelines? Definitely for supplements. But having now really having to experience it from the other side... only needing one book to build your PC is just so much easier and you never have to second-guess that you've overlooked some obscure thing that would have made your concept perfect, but was hidden away in the back third of a Dragon Magazine.

Sounds like the Essentials design crew were on to something by keeping feats class-neutral and relatively centralized in certain books.

By the way, have TSR and WotC ever published an edition that didn't rely on excessive splatbooks to shell out new material?

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Having the CP budget be tied into problem-solving events is a good idea. I think that 4e's skill challenges were going for the same thing, creating a codified way of allowing players to gain XP outside of combat.

To be fair to TSR and WotC, 1e AD&D started in 1977 and didn't get a second player facing book (Unearthed Arcana) until 1985.

Likewise, while there's been a lot of free articles and third party options for 5e, official player facing material has been almost entirely the PHB and Xanathar's Guide to everything which was several years later (one reason is they put in an organized play rule that legal PCs could only use the PHB and one other book and XGtE just has so many good options and spells that few are willing to give it up. They've had a much smaller/slower release schedule than anything except 1e.

As to the Essentials crew being onto something; hindsight is 20/20, but I do sometimes wonder what would have happened if the Essentials line had come before main 4E if it could have avoided a bunch of the backlash. Simple fighter, no warlord, etc. Then ease the base into full 4e later on.

There's a lot of things that have nothing to do with game's quality that shot 4E in the foot. Things that I'm hoping to avoid with Ruins & Realms.

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Yeah, the idea is to give guidelines for non-combat Challenges largely because too many of any one thing will get tedious. By mixing it up, you can prevent that.

So it was mainly 3.x and 4e that had the splat bloat. I knew that 5e saw a massive reduction in splats, but I was unfamiliar with how 2e and earlier editions did things.

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Given hindsight, there are a lot of ways that 4e and Essentials could have done things differently, but even my hindsight is 20/20.

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4e gets a lot of grief about being nothing but combat, but at least the 4e developers tried to develop non-combat challenges, even if skill challenges went over like a lead balloon for a lot of people.

Actually, 2e got pretty heavy on the splats too so it wasn't just a WotC thing. 2e was notorious for its number of splats and particularly player facing options like "kits" in their "Complete X's Handbook" line.

For a comparison, by edition... I will leave out adventure modules, boxed starter sets and the like, but will include campaign guides;

OD&D (1974-1976): 1 box set (core rules) and 4 books.
1e AD&D (1977-1988): 13 books (second player book wasn't released until the end of 1985).
2e AD&D (1989-1999): 91+ books (most lists I've leave off campaign settings like Birthright).
3e D&D (2000-2003): 23 books
3.5e D&D (2003-2007): 49 books
4E D&D (2008-2012): 49 books
5e D&D (2014-present): 13 books (+15 if you include hardbound adventures).

Basically, 2e - 4e had a release schedule of about a book a month throughout their lives.

This doesn't count adventure mods and 2e's many campaign settings and in-house production of Dungeon & Dragon magazines which made it even more prolific.

Similarly, it doesn't account for the sheer deluge of 3e-related products from third parties via the OGL, nor the in-house 4E Dungeon and Dragon magazines and adventure modules of 4E.

1e was about a book a year, though it was backloaded with a book about every year and half initially and then about two a year towards the end, but they also had a ton of adventure modules and Dragon and then Dungeon magazines as well (though early Dragon included articles for non-TSR systems as well... it wasn't until it got outsourced to Paizo that non-D&D content disappeared entirely).

Likewise, as alluded to, 5e isn't quite as low turnout as it appears... it just shifted focus onto adventures and themed boxed sets (Stranger Things, Rick & Morty, etc.) with new mechanical options in book form dropping only once a year or so (the actual mechanical core is considered to be just seven books... the normal core, Volo's Guide to Monsters, Xanathar's Guide to Everything, Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes and Tasha's Cauldron of Everything).

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I was really tired when I posted last night, so to clarify my comment on Essentials. It was largely a reaction to move back closer to previous editions to reclaim audience from Pathfinder.

My notion was, hindsight being 20/20 that if Essentials had been what was released first in 2008 (make the Heroes of Fallen Lands/Forgotten Kingdom into the PHB, merge the Rules Compendium and DM Kit into a Dungeon Master's Guide and call the Monster Vault the Monster Manual) and not gone insane on the Game System License, there would have been much less initial backlash to 4E because the changes would not have been as extreme.

Then they'd have be able to introduce the AEDU standard classes over the course of the next few years without as many issues.

WotC frankly underestimated the appeal of nostalgia and thought it could force concessions out of the rest of the industry who'd relied on the OGL/SRD combo via its switch to the GSL for 4E, but failed to realize just HOW open Dancy's OGL had made 3.5e content (which was Dancy's plan all along... he created the OGL specifically so that D&D could never be threatened with extinction the way it had been in the TSR bankruptcy again) and that they basically couldn't force them into the 4E shaped box they wanted.

Basically, outside of the actual brilliant mechanics of 4E, the entire 4E period of D&D was pretty much a horror show of bad management with bad ideas and worse marketing.

One nice thing for me is that I can get away with fairly big changes from 4E/D&D precisely because I'm NOT D&D... "Ruins & Realms" is free to be its own thing without the baggage.

I also have the opportunity to make sure I get my system license set up properly from the start. Given the state of the world and feeling the Superversive call, I'm actually far less concerned with a license that maximizes profit, but I am very concerned with ensuring that 3rd party products present Superversive values.

I want Ruins & Realms to be a system that others can build their ideas onto and be rewarded with much more liberal use of my logos and trade dress if they're producing family-friendly superversive material, but be unable to do more than put "uses the game engine created by Siege Engine Games" in Comic Sans on their back cover when referencing its connection to my system if they're aiming at non-family friendly and or subversive content.

Now I'm wondering how in the hell 2e managed to inflate their book count that high, unless you're counting campaign guides and I'm misreading your post.

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If I recall correctly, isn't Tasha's basically a compendium of the various post-PHB player-facing content in one place?

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If Essentials had gone first, then the AEDU martial classes wouldn't have gotten the traction they had - the Fighter and its "Come and Get It" power especially would have been dismissed like the Warblade in 3.5.

I feel like it could have gone over better had the martial classes worked like the Essentials versions with the Hunter's at-wills and magical classes had all taken the psionics classes' power points, and given both groups the option of choosing daily powers or additional class features.

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To mix metaphors, the GSD was them trying to put the genie back in the bottle and instead creating their own worst enemy.

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A big part of me feels like 4e wasn't a good fit for D&D, or more accurately, D&D wasn't a good fit for 4e. As you said, D&D's baggage was a hefty load, one that I think held back 4e's potential, keeping it from being the game that it could have been.

Well, it 2e isn't all THAT inflated once you remember that it lasted for 11 years. 11x12 = 132 months.

In terms of content, they had a "complete" book for every sub-class and race plus other themes like psionics, barbarians, ninjas, humanoids (i.e. all the monster ones), etc. They also had LOTS of monster books and campaign guides for playing in Celtic, Roman, Crusades, etc. eras.

The problem with every edition that focuses on new player-side content though is the bloat eventually makes the whole thing unplayable. Along with cutting Gygax out completely, 2e was instituted largely to clean up what they felt was the bloat of 1e... then the gal in charge proceeded to run the IP into the ground with all sort of releases that diluted the brand.

The main thing about 3e historically that is worth remembering is that while it was an attempt at cleaning up the bloat from 2e... another part was just that it had been years since much of anything had been released for 2e. Adventures, compilations and such were still coming out, but the last new supplement-style release came out in 1997.

That's a big part of why 3e got such a pass despite extreme changes from 2e (which was still close enough to 1e that you could use monsters, spells, magic items, etc. from one in the other)... it had saved D&D from oblivion.

4E's greatest sin was probably being released about a year too soon. There's a whole theory about new releases where you can break down the market into early, normal and late adopters. Early adopters are the ones who always need the latest greatest version and pay a premium for it. Normal adopters are a year or so behind that once the features are seen as good enough for the money and late adopters won't join until their current option stops working.

c. 2008 3.5e was definitely in the end stages of its life span; early adopters were already looking elsewhere, BUT the problem was that the normal adopters weren't QUITE done with 3.5e yet and, with its jarring changes and Paizo offering an alternative that was billed as 3.75e... that's where 4E lost out. The normal adopters needed another year or so to get tired of all the system bloat and play out the last of the options they were interested in before they were ready to move on.

Likewise, the devs have admitted that 4E was rushed out the door before it was entirely ready. The reason many of the classic classes weren't in the PHB1 was because they still hadn't figured out mechanics for them yet. They were still trying to figure out the controller role at the point the PHB1 was released (which is one reason the wizard ended up just so OP compared to other controller classes) and hadn't realized the problem of V-shaped vs. A-shaped or I-shaped classes yet.

They really could have used that year between the PHB1 and PHB2 to clean up the PHB1 classes. Image how 4E would have been received if the first PHB actually had ALL the 3e classes (plus warlock, warlord, shaman and warden) and races (plus dragonborn, tieflings, eladrin, devas and shifters) present.

So I'm actually really glad that I took the time to get Ruins & Realms right instead of just releasing what I had in, say, 2015. Taking that extra time resulted in a MUCH better system.

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That's a pretty apt description of the GSL. The MOST ironic thing about it was that Pathfinder's setting was actually intended to be the default 4E campaign setting for a Paizo released Dragon and Dungeon magazine.

It was bringing those back in house and killing the OGL for 4E that turned Paizo into their biggest competitor. If they had played ball with Paizo, 3.5e would have died off (to the degree any P&P game can) without any new book/adventure releases to support the system and 4E would have won by default.

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Honestly, if 4E had been released as "Terrors & Tactics" by anyone other than WotC and done a quarter as well as it ultimately did, it would have been heralded as a major success in the RPG market.

It was really the D&D brand, the expectations for said brand and the sales levels demanded by Hasbro (even in the massive global economic downturn of 2008) that turned 4E into a "failure."

Well, that and Mearls never really grokking 4E (but absolutely grokking how to play corporate politics to end up in charge of the brand) so needing to change it to match how he thought it was supposed to work and breaking things in the process.

Basically, 4E had everything stacked against it, still managed nearly 50 hardcovers and a bunch of digital and softbound content atop that in a 4 year run.

In sheer word count I was never going to match it with Ruins & Realms. In fact that's always been the biggest hang up in writing a retro-clone like you could for 3e or earlier editions. Thousands upon thousands of powers and thousands upon thousands of feats.

That's why I had to go a bit more "Essentials-ish" in my design with more generic options used by multiple classes and splitting what in prior editions would be a class into a Class and a Background half so that the "how you fight" and "non-combat abilities" could be assembled into more combinations (i.e. a 4E Barbarian, Ranger and Warden would all have the Barbarian Background in Ruins & Realms, but have the classes of Daring Berserker Ravager Fighter, Wary Swift Striker Fighter and Potent Abjurer Mystic).

So, in effect, 2e ended up creating far more bloat than the edition it purported to replace, which combined with the head shed's mismanagement (I've heard about her, Lorraine Williams, I think her name was) basically ran it into the ground. Sounds like a government program, except they actually had to face reality when the money ran out.

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4e really needed that polish, so that they could catch math issues like the famous feat taxes and monster stat issues. It really makes me wonder what the PHB1 classes and the Swordmage and Artificer might have looked like with PHB2-era design. And having something like the Monster Vault-era design from the get-go would have been awesome.

The funny thing about A vs V classes (I think only a few classes like the Thief were truly I-shaped, like the Thief) is that they later came out with powers that used "primary ability modifier/highest ability modifer" language, so the problem would have been moot had they implemented that earlier.

The feat bloat and the Essentials-era correction was a shift in design philosophy that I'm not sure would have come about with that extra year to bake, though again, it would have been nice.

Combine that with the lack of a GSL and Paizo working with them instead of against them, and I think we would have had a juggernaut on our hands.

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What you said, "4e had everything stacked against it and still managed nearly 50 hardcovers and a bunch of digital and softbound content atop that in a 4 year run," says a lot, both about how well 4e did, and about how even that wasn't enough for Hasbro.

I remember hearing about Hasbro's crazy expectations and how they would have had to not only corner the entire RPG market, but expand said market, in order to meet the suits' numbers. Makes me think that the suits had no idea what they were talking about.

I think with proper support instead of people fighting it, 4e would have been unstoppable.

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Frankly, going "Essentials-ish" has made Ruins and Realms more efficient - it does so much more with its pieces in a way that D&D never could, because the grognards would be shrieking to high heaven about the lack of, say, a cleric.

By the say, Potent Abjurer Mystic works better for the Warden concept than the Warden itself did, since the R&R version doesn't use man-made weapons. It doesn't need to: it can grow its own weapons, like icy claws for a winter-themed Warden or vines and tree-trunk bludgeons for a tree Warden.

Just want to confirm something with Shift Form's Form Weapon: is your choice of weapon group and fine weapon qualities locked in when you take the boon, or do you select new weapon groups and fine weapon qualities each time you shift? I was under the impression that it was the former, but your example of Jane picking Kalla and the Exotic Tutor (Shapeshifter) boon tells me that it's the latter.

Your summary of 2e is pretty on the money. One of the big killers of TSR was Ms. Williams trying to push out games based on IPs she owned (so she could get further profits from each sale), but not realizing that just because you own it, doesn't make the property marketable. In this case it was Buck Rogers and the RPG, as you might expect, flopped hard after she used a whole bunch of company assets to produce it.

But overall it was just that they atomized their market too much with their campaign settings. When a supplement is only any good to one setting, then anyone who doesn't play that setting won't be buying. Its why the vast majority of 3e supplements were intended for generic worlds with the exception of Forgotten Realms because its Forgotten Realms and by dint of novel sales alone COULD be its own line.

Similarly, for 4E, each annual setting focus got exactly two books and everything else was generic. Also, the player's book for each annual setting had options that could be used in other settings; The Swordmage, Drow and Genasi in FR, The Artificer, changelings and warforged in Eberron, lots of options in Dark Sun too so they would appeal to generic players as well as those who liked the setting.

It was also by Dark Sun that they'd figured out the perfect formula too by adding most of the setting material into first book along with player options and turning the second book entirely into a monster book because you can drop the Dark Sun monsters into ANY setting if you wanted to; maximizing the utility of the product even to those who had no interest in Dark Sun as Dark Sun.

One thing you have to give 5e props on is, as much as I loathe the Forgotten Realms setting, by making it their core setting and then making sure that all their adventures and supplements work for it, they've ensured the maximum audience for each release... basically the opposite of the mistake 2e made.

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As for Hasbro and 4E, it was less that they didn't know what they were talking about as their jobs being to maximize the profits of Hasbro as a whole. If your division could get to $50 million a year in sales (which is why the virtual table top/subscription model was critical to the plan) Hasbro would consider you a major brand and increase your funding budget to continue to grow the brand. Without that level of sales, your budget was limited to a percentage of what the line actually earned (with the rest going into Hasbro's general coffers).

WotC thought it could boost D&D into that $50 million bracket with a new edition and digital cross-support. Hasbro though needed results before everything was good to go and then the lead developer of the software half deleted/encrypted every bit of work, including all the backups, and then committed suicide a month before launch.

If you ever wondered why the digital tools were so half-assed... its because they literally scraped them together in a month's time on a shoestring budget.

And that pretty much doomed the big push to failure... whereas 500k subscribers at $7.99 a month for the complete digital package of dungeon and dragon magazines, the character builder, character visualizer, monster builder, encounter builder, and virtual tabletop would have reached $50 million per year all by itself.

Basically, Hasbro behaved like any corporation would. They felt their money could be better spent on more profitable ventures and so left D&D to a skeleton crew and skeleton budget.

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As for what more polished classes would have looked like, we saw at least one in the form of the Essentials Mage... which everyone agreed was basically the 4E wizard only better in every way.

But a bit overlooked in that, because everyone still planned to use all their usual powers, was to look at the changes made to the powers presented in the Essentials books themselves. It was one of the big complaints from the CharOps fans that the new Wizard powers from Essentials were pretty worthless because they lacked the hard control of earlier books.

The Hunter in HotFK was similarly lambasted for having mostly soft control rather than hard control (stuns and such).

But if you also look at another 4E controller who immediately preceded Essentials, the Seeker in the PHB3, it too also lacked the harder control and, combined with finally getting the math right for monsters in the MM3 from about that time you can see it wasn't accidental but a deliberate design choice to move the options away from hard control to softer control that limited but didn't eliminate target options.

I think if it had another year to really bake, the 4E wizard never would have gotten all the early stuns it did from the early books because it took the designers a while to realize that completely locking down the monsters so they can't do anything just isn't all that fun. It takes a tactical fight and turns it into beating on helpless sacks of hit points.

Similarly, the Swordmage (the Artificer didn't drop in its final form until a while after the PHB2; which is why it didn't get any options in Arcane Power; and was actually pretty good) probably would have benefited from getting a little more in the way of basic ranged options (like the Hexblade's eldritch blast) and possibly making their marks work more like my defensive wards did (i.e. they flip the mechanics by dropping them on a specific ally or two instead of a specific enemy).

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I would have been just as annoyed as the grognards if I hadn't managed a cleric in Ruins & Realms. Much as I personally disliked them because of the enforced polytheism thing D&D has going, my first and foremost goal for Ruins & Realms was that every 4E race and class would have a place in the game. Its since grown way beyond that, but that was always the baseline goal... its why I had three classes (each with 2-4 subclasses) for each of the martial, divine, arcane and primal power sources in my earliest drafts.

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Regarding Form Weapons... No, its supposed to be locked in. I just failed to list a weapon group for Kalla's pick because it was so irrelevant to her build (she has melee range for her unarmed implement attacks) I didn't even stop to actually pick a weapon group for it. She was literally using the form weapon as a free large shield rather than something she'd smack people with (that's what her Dr. Strange-ish kinetic, storm or fire whip... which is how I envision her Melee 3 implement attack... is for).

Looking at the wording I do need to make that a bit clearer though (and add alternate weapon groups to the list of options you can pick for the Augmented Attack trait). Thanks for the catch.

So, unrelated to the above; a recent discussion on another board has me questioning whether I should be using species to describe that set of options since some of them (ex. Golems) aren’t even definable as such.

Similarly, using race is entirely ridiculous... not to mention anachronistic if doing medieval fantasy as the term didn’t acquire its modern useage until the 1700’s... in medieval times it referred to people of common occupation (so miner and cobbler would be races in medieval parlance) or generation (so Millennial, Gen-X and Baby Boomer would be races). Species is actually the correct medieval term, having been used since the time of Aristotle (c. 350 BC).

So I’m actually thinking I should change Species to perhaps Origin or Type or something similar... though I’d have to change the current use of Origin slightly if I used the first (perhaps to Affinity as it’s mainly used as a keyword for things like Magic Circles).

It’s a niggly unimportant thing, but I want my terminology to be as clear as possible... and even though it IS ancient, I do have to admit that species does feel like a modern term (in addition to not really defining something like a golem or embodied spirit or mutant human properly either).

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https://4enclave.forumotion.com/viewtopic.php?t=369