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People get frustrated with 4e for a lot of reasons. Sometimes it’s combat. Often, peopl get frustrated with one of the aspects I like most about 4e: powers. The way powers are presented it is very easy to feel that powers are a big black box and if the power is not expressed within something “official” it probably might not need to be used.
This “hands-off” approach to powers is understandable, but limiting: Some people get so into that mindset that they will say things like there are things the characters can’t do because there is no power for it. With this mindset, D&D becomes quickly limited in scope. Fortunately this is extreme (but I swear to you people have said this to me) and people lie on a spectrum. What I want to do is get you to join me on the coolest side of the spectrum: Powers aren’t limiting; powers are everywhere.
If you think of a power as a frame of action, how the system can be used to do what you want leaps right at you. You want to kick down that wall? Your fighter is using the ‘kick down the door’ power implicitly. Other rules regulate this action, so you don’t need to make a new power to express this, but just thinking of it in this way forms a pattern of thinking that makes it easy to create powers on the fly when you do need it. When you put a real world action into the frame of a power, you “freeze” and turn it into a token that can be used in the system to link your game’s fiction and the mechanics.
When exactly do you create a power on the fly? Two situations come to mind:
Roleplaying award. I use this most frequently. If someone has a moment of exciting roleplay, maybe I give him a boon or maybe I provide the player with something that gives a small bonus or situation on the spot to “freeze” that moment and manifest it in the game. Something your player does often can become a bit of a schtick. Say a player’s character pulls pranks often. After she pulls a particularly effective and funny prank, you give the player the power “Always the Jester”. Let’s say it is a daily power that you can use to gain a +1 bonus to an attack. Weak for a daily power, but let’s say that it recharges when you pull a successful prank. Now you have a power that rewards the player for roleplaying and working within her character’s personality.
Treasure Replacement. Here’s my secret: a few months ago, I stopped giving out magic items in my home games. I use inherent bonuses, and then I give out effects based on what the story dictates. Players might find a magical weapon, sure, but when they do it is more likely to use artifact rules or my tragic imprint rules than a standard magic item. Otherwise, I’m giving the players special powers that relate to what is happening in the story. Sometimes I give the players “narrative loot” –I’ll ask them to describe what they found within some parameters — and then let that narrative loot come into the story later. That crystal ball they found earlier can come into play when least expected or most needed. We can decide what it does then and give it a power on the fly.
Most people might not feel comfortable with this, and much of what I suggest requires trust between the players and the DM — I don’t recommend this at your local encounters — but in the end it’s worth the squeeze. Viewing powers as omnipresent frames for action waiting to be plucked out of the air whenever needed is much more interesting and useful for RPing than viewing powers as a limitation.
Ever try something like this? How did it work for you? Talk to me.
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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.
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Great article! Following your suggestion, I’m going to re-post and expand upon the comments I made on Twitter. (@GMSarli, for any of you who might be interested.)
While working on the e20 System project, I’ve come to the same conclusion independently regarding what powers actually represent. Our system uses talents (in many ways parallel to powers in D&D 4E), and one of our patrons had made the brilliant observation that our early talents, as written, were essentially exclusive applications of existing skills.
This helped us get a handle on how these basic mechanics relate to one another: Skills have common applications that anyone can do (e.g. using Athletics to climb or jump, or using a weapon skill to make an attack), applications that require you to be trained in the skill (e.g. hacking a computer security system), applications that are exclusive to a particular class and learned by taking a given talent (i.e. roughly equivalent to 4E powers), and — most importantly — improvised applications that cover anything else the players want to try.
Since all of these things are based on the same skill-check mechanic (pick a skill, apply the most appropriate ability modifier, and roll against the DC), the link between talents and completely improvised actions became much more obvious. Just as you point out for 4E powers, talents don’t limit your options — they open up more of them. In the same way that you can use a skill to try something new, you can try the same thing with talents. More importantly, this commonality became apparent even to first-time players, and it encouraged them to think of skills creatively and invent new things to try out.
A great example of this came during the Evolved Delve events I ran at last year’s Gen Con. The computer expert was using a talent that let him do some special tricks when hacking a computer system, and he came up with the idea of using the talent to activate a remote-controlled crane and use it for an improvised attack against a group of minions. This is something I hadn’t even remotely considered when I wrote the delve, but since everything (attacks, skill checks, etc.) all worked on the same scale, I was able to assign a difficulty and resolve the effect of his skill check really quickly. Best of all, that eureka moment by one player made everyone else — all first-time players at the game’s first public playtest — realize how much things go beyond what they see on their character sheets, and it opened a torrent of creativity.
Like I said, I may have realized this while doing development on a completely separate game, but that mindset quickly found its way into the way I think about Star Wars Saga Edition, Pathfinder, D&D 4E, and pretty much any d20 game I can think of.
Character sheets, powers, talents, feats, and so forth don’t define the end of your character’s capabilities; they define the beginning.
Nice article. I especially like the idea of “roleplay rechargeable” powers.
I’ve used various programs (MSE) to make power cards before, but I mainly used them to define interactive terrain, like the classic “bend the branch and smack it into someone.” Your article gives me some great ideas for adding story based powers.
I too have done away with magic items and adopted inherent bonuses. I could see these story based powers fitting well into future adventures.
Again, thanks for the article, it gets the juices flowing.
So here’s something I do think is a genuine failing of 4e along these lines: there exists a secret formula that WotC R&D and key freelancers use to make powers, both PC and Monster. Certain conditions are worth a certain amount of damage dice. As far as I know, this has never been fully revealed: some reverse engineering can be done (and the monster creation rules cover a little bit of this), but as a solid piece, it’s never been out there.
I would love to see these rules published as a companion to page 42. If that existed, it would be a lot easier to come up with on-the-fly powers based on the situation: the math can even reflect that this is an improvised (non-practiced) move unlike the powers these characters normally possess. That would go a long way to REALLY having powers everywhere and encouraging the kind of out-of-the character sheet thinking that some really want.
@GMSarli I totally dig your breakdown and analysis. When I realized this myself I wanted to go back and replay all the other D20 games I owned with this in mind (with all that abundant free time, right?).
@Johnny glad you liked! I think people just need to feel inspired to do this stuff, so I’m glad this does it for you.
@Dave that is a tremendously good point. Who can we speak to get that done? Opening up the game to that degree would go so far into making the game more free form.
Let’s make that happen.
Thanks guys!
Great post, and I agree with Dave about DMG page 42 – we could use a lot more examples upon which we, as DMs, can use as a guide for handling powers on-the-fly. Not to open any “edition wars” old wounds, but it somehow felt easier to wing situational “powers” in the older editions…
Then again, maybe we’re all still too newbie to the intricacies of 4E mechanics to feel as comfortable winging 4E, as we were after years of mastering our d20 maneuvers?
More info on the secret sauce of the math would be pretty awesome. Speaking from my own inexperience, I’m not quite as comfortable flat-out winging it as I was in d20… I do it anyway, but I’m at least aware I’m likely breaking something.
Seeing powers everywhere plays well with another DM habit I try hard to cultivate, which is saying yes as much as possible. And it works very well with the alternate victory conditions mentioned elsewhere on the blog. Should the barbarian that can lift the poor dominated target one handed need a special power to turn his axe sideways or hold back with the maul to stun, rather than injure? (No hyperbole, serious curiosity.)
Coming up with an improvised power to represent the mechanics of the rogue kicking a really annoying caster square in the, er, unmentionables was hilarious and fun at the same time. I settled on strength v. fortitude* to daze, with possible stun or prone if she nailed it. I put it on her to describe what happened when she vaulted over a table and critted on the attack, though. (We agreed that with a critical kick to the bits that they’d be prone and dazed).
I’m still curious if the math bears this one out, though. I liked it just because they worked out the real threat very quickly (Glass cannon caster with massive burst damage and controller abilities, and brutes and minions screening.) and reacted accordingly, with a solid plan to stop the pain until he could be dealt with more permanently. (Which, for this group, that kind of tactical acumen was new.) The player in question thought it was a good use of her turn, and it definitely saved at least one PC from dropping.
*(High dex rogue with CA? I figured it was a foregone conclusion she’d place the kick well, more if it’d impact enough to have any real effect. And yes, there was a table discussion to this effect over pizza later. Who says D&D can’t be funny?)
Dave does make a great point; it’s the thing that has caused me to produce so much less unique 4e player-side content, relative to the reams of PrCs, core classes, and feats I’d churn out in 3.X. That reluctance is interesting to me in and of itself, actually; something in the nature of 4e’s polish feels much more sacrosanct to me than earlier editions, meaning I’m more cautious about upsetting the balance with a “broken” at-will power for a new class build.
That said, I have had the good fortune of playing in several games where the DMs award treasure bonuses along the lines suggested in this article. They’re usually thematic to some plot-based achievment–especially in the Deadwood-inspired Pathfinder game where the party has a tendency to eat the hearts of every giant beast they slay. We’ve had our stealth skills boosted by shadow-wolves, and my character’s virility just had a bump from taking down a house-sized boar.
I very much like the idea of narrative loot, though; that’s something I haven’t seen before which seems extremely well-suited to a sandbox campaign. Jack, do you set any guidelines on the power of such narrative items, or is that entirely in your hands?