Matt shrugged his shoulders and moved his miniature.
“I have to do it.” And indeed, he did. Looking at the battlefield, the paladin fighting a foe at one end of the battlefield, his divine challenged foe at the other end, it was clear that our proposed change was too good. Sure the player could have used it as intended, but it was our new rule, and you have to play it as it can be played to see if that’s what you meant it to be. One of our proposed changes was to make it so the paladin didn’t need to be near the target to keep it marked. With that change, you would be dumb not to get as far away from your target as possible, and engage another target. Combine this with our increased damage, and although the challenged target didn’t always take the damage, it was not what we were intending by a long shot.
After a few turns of this bloody abuse, Matt and I looked at each other.
“This is changing, as in next encounter.”
“Yeah.”
Maybe I think too much of myself, but I pictured someone from WotC R&D cruising by the site, chuckling softly.
“Good luck with that, kid,” he’d say before moving on.
The changes we made seemed great when first created, and they survived about one session with the “new car smell” intact before reality set in. Looking at it in play, our “fix” looked like something WotC’s team had originally tried –and discarded. It was a little disheartening, but what can you do? Not every idea is good. Sometimes, even a good idea needs extensive tweaking and testing.
I got a lot of great feedback on the Divinely Challenged post, and believe you me, you were heard. I’m strictly amateur at the game design biz –no one yet pays me anything at all for it — but I am an avid hobbyist nonetheless. I’m also a technologist. A RPG nerd that’s into tech? Shocking. I know. The prime lesson extracted from both game design and technology is this: feedback early, feedback often. There’s different forms of feedback. One form is to get a lot of eyes on the game rule, and borrow from several points of view. I think the most important though, is to see your design change in action. Get something playable as early as possible. Poke it, prod it, see if it jiggles like a Gelatinous Cube. Run if it starts dissolving your flesh. If you’re changing something, change it in small increments. I know this, and yet still committed the sin of wholesale changes. We tweaked damage and basic functions of the power (need to be near the target, and having to roll to attack) all in one revision. It’s no surprise we were surprised by the end-product.
For the next encounter I ruled that we’re going to start back at the base Divine Challenge setting, but with a subtle tweak. We’ve added the holy symbol implement bonus to the damage. This is working much better. We’ll give another couple of sessions and see where it is and judge from there.
I would love to see the original design notes for divine challenge. I still want to tweak it for my own nefarious purposes, but I have a great appreciation for the work that has already been done on the power. I’ll certainly post major revisions on the site, because I greatly appreciate the feedback from readers thus far.
I’ve been wondering when I’d see feedback on this house rule you created. Ameron plays a paladin in our regular game and we were both interested in seeing the results. When I read your first post I thought it looked a little too powerfull and it seems that you’ve reached that conclusion through some good playtesting.
I like the idea of adding the implement enhancement as a bonus to damage. This doesn’t seem too overpowering at all. Let us know how it goes, as I’m always interested in hearing how different house rules effect the gaming experience.
The rules are meant to be tinkered with. Nobody is laughing at you, for if they were, the lordly title of “King Prick of the Ballsackians” would be rightly earned.
We tweaked most magical items to have encounter powers instead of dailies, and it has made a big dfference – fun wise.
You’re doing it right
If you want a character which can ‘mark’ a target and then move away, try a Swordmage from Forgotten Realms Players Guide. It is specifically intended to allow the PC to move around and one of my players does this to great effect.
I can’t wait until they are high enough level for the monsters to just ignore the effect (in his case, the first 10 points of damage the marked monster does to a target other than the marker are ignored by the target).
It was worth a shot! House rules are great. For my new 4e campaign I’m trying the half the monsters HP and double their damage dice thing. I call it brutality!!!
I’m away from my books ATM, but doesn’t the Avenger have a power that damages a marked target when it either moves away or attacks the Avenger that marked it?
@wimwick thus far, thumbs up on the implement. It gives the Holy Symbol something to do while not cranking the damage through the roof. I’ll post more updates as it goes.
@Donny_The_DM encounter? that’s really interesting. I may try that myself one day soon. I’ll be sure to post results when I do.
@Tman thanks for visiting! Yeah, the swordmage mechanic was what we didn’t want, so we had to get it into play to see that we made that exact thing in different form.
@kaeosdad -brutality, eh? We were playing this way pretty much (we halved PC HP instead of upping damage) –it is indeed brutal, especially for me, who enjoys playing glass cannon types. The last game I played my drow tempest fighter and got hammered. It’s exciting, for sure. I feel that it would be an interesting way to do something like a Dark Sun campaign, simulating it’s lethality.
@kingworks the Censure of Pursuit is what your thinking of, and yeah, that’s essentially it. your oath of enmity target runs away, and you get extra bonuses against it for running.
[...] up is an interesting discussion on the 4e D&D paladin’s divine challenge at the At Will site. I am not sure why they feel the mark needs a tweek, I think it is the best mark in the game [...]