Monday, November 22, 2010

Character Creating in 4th Edition, Paul Jaquays' Style

First things first, there is something I don't like about 4th Edition that makes creating characters extremely limited.  Apparently, the dearth listing of skills.  We ran into this when we created characters using Paul Jaquay's "Heroes of Legend" book to create some very detailed characters.  The players started rolling some really unusual skills in 4th Edition. 

One of these happened to be Gourmet Cooking.  How would gourmet cooking fit in 4th Edition D&D?  Well, it doesn't.  There's no skill for it.  So, we invented all sorts of skills to cover the unusual skill set.  Skills such as inventing.  D&D 4e is extremely limited, apparently when you create characters with "Heroes of Legend" for 4th Edition, you run into something that sucks.

  • Lack of skills
  • Class specific powers
  • Lack of customizability

Being limited by the books, one of my players complained about me not allowing the assassin.  I had a big beef with that.  Because in Rolemaster (Fantasy Roleplaying and the Standard System) an Assassin is represented by choosing skills -- usually for a Magent, Rogue, or Thief.  When you try to create interesting characters, 4th Edition creates some walls with its design philosophy.  As a GM, I had to make some house rules on the spot.  Right now, it's expanding the skill set to accommodate usual skill choices.  And this is the first time I'm getting ready to play 4th Edition as the DM.

The Game comes with some frustrations.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Not everything needs a skill roll, or even the mechanics for them. Some would call this freedom, not limitation... it's how we played before 3rd edition by the way.

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