Inspired 4e Design

Why WotC is laughing at me: Divine Challenge and the importance of feedback.

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.

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About gamefiend

A Jack of All Trades ,or if you prefer, an extreme example of multi-classing, Gamefiend, a.k.a Quinn Murphy has been discussing, playing and designing games straight out of the womb. He is the owner and Editor-in-Chief of this site in addition to being an aspiring game designer. As you would assume, he is a huge fan of 4e. By day he is a technologist.