As I write this entry, I just got back from the Essentials/Red Box Game Day. I would have recorded a segment, but honestly, I don’t think there’s much to say about it that hasn’t been said. I played the Rogue, it felt like a Rogue. As I sat there spamming melee basic attacks, I drfited back in my mind to earlier editions. I’ve played 4E enough now that I’m to the point where I miss a lot of the old tropes; spell lists, multiclass dips, not needing an 18 in a stat to be on the to-hit or damage curve, even THAC0. Maybe it’s time for me to go play Pathfinder, but I don’t think so just yet. I bet I could replicate more older edition feel in 4E without needing to change editions. Essentials does this to some extent with all the melee basic attacks, but that’s not the fun stuff really. In the next few episodes of Aberrant Rules, I’m going to begin disassembling some of the less fundamental assumptions of 4E to try to bring back more of that old-school flavor.

This week, I’m starting something easy, but kinda long, class, so start taking notes. Let’s talk spellcasting. When was the last time your wizard actually used his or her Spellbook feature, hunh? Your feats and powers are probably set up to complement each other so you don’t change them out often. The feature is just too small to be really flexible, so it tends to be forgotten. Rituals are supposed to step in and fill this gap for the Wizard (see also Cleric, Psion, Artificer, Bard and Druid), but again, how often do they get used? They’re too expensive and take up too much time. I never see my players use Rituals for anything and when I try to use them as a player, I get little to no support from the table. It’s really frustrating and needs to be changed – so here’s my fix.

If you get Ritual Casting as a bonus feat, you can spend 1 hour each morning to also prepare rituals for free to be used throughout the day as a standard action each. The total number of rituals prepared is equal to 4 + 1/2 of your level. Because rituals don’t inherently deal damage, there is no level spacing requirement. The only caveat is that if the ritual states that the subject must be present, willing and/or helpless for the duration of the casting, such as Imprisonment or Anthem of Unity, that must be true for the hour you spend preparing them. Furthermore, you can take a power twice in two different slots if you like. That is, if you have Shield as your level 2 Utility and you want to also have it as your level 6, so be it. Same goes for Encounter and Daily attack powers.

That takes care of your prepared casters, but how about spontaneous casters? I would place the Sorcerer, Swordmage, Invoker (minus Ritual Casting, of course) as a Favored Soul analog and maybe the Shaman here. For this group, I would allow a lower-level power to be recharged on the fly by sacrificing a higher-level power as a free action. Normally Encounters recharge Encounters, Dailies recharge Dailies, etc, though I might allow a Daily to recharge a Encounter if you really want.

What about metamagic? Take a look at Mongoose Publishing’s Quintessential Wizard and Svalin Games’ Power Alteration Feats; they’re pretty well balanced and absolutely useful. Thing is, my concept of arcane magic specifically is that it’s very malleable so metamagic shouldn’t be such a problem. I like how WotC dealt with this in the Enlarged Spell feat; -2 damage to each die to increase the size. Let’s mimic that with Arcana checks. How about a DC 35 Arcana check to extend a timed spell for another turn, but if you do, you’re dazed? Maybe a DC 25 to change the energy type on a spell, but you gain vulnerable 5 all until the end of your next turn? I miss the Spellcraft skill… a lot.. and this feels like stuff casters ought to be able to do.

Now this of course opens up a whole different can of worms for me which is the rigid power system in the first place. That’s a far more difficult nut to crack, though, and we’ll hold off on it… for now. I have plans. Give that a run, see if it adds a little bit more complexity and old-school fun to your casters. Next time, we’ll talk about how you don’t need to be 18 to be legal. An 18 hit stat, that is. And not like hitting that.. ya know, this metaphor’s REALLY going south fast. Alright people, I’m out.

So I know I said last week I was going to review Necromancer-type material but stuff came up as if often does and it occurred to me that I had at least two more houserule segments lying around I’d never talked about. This week, I’d like to talk about money and currency in 4E.

Let me start out by saying I don’t like 4E’s economy at all. Do YOU go around carrying thousands of dollars in cash in your wallet? Does it make sense to have a less technologically advanced society than us minting vast quantities of standardized coinage? And seriously, what’s up with this 20% return rate? I buy and sell used clothes, books and whatever on eBay or craigslist. I held garage sales at my mom’s house and back when my wife and I were first married, we seriously considered pawning off some of her mother’s jewelry due to employment issues so I think I have a reasonable idea of how this sort of stuff generally works. It just doesn’t add up for me. I can see in the math how it works out, but it’s just so… contrived in a lot of ways.

This is one of the big worldbuilding issues I considered when preparing for the Power Source campaign and one day at the lab working on a nanosphere formulation for a well-known antidepressant, an idea struck me. It was so simple, elegant and complete (at least to me, y’all can judge it for yourself of course) that I can’t imagine running 4E without it ever again. I cut the PCs actual gold earnings to about 20% normal and then put the balance in a sort of virtual “bank” in two separate “accounts” – one called Fame and the other called Karma or Luck. PCs can call upon this bank to obtain needed goods and services. For example, rather than actually shilling out 100 gp for a Raise Dead ritual, 100 gp is subtracted from the character’s “bank” and the priest performs the ceremony because the characters “have done such good around here.” The “bank” also represents resources funneled to the characters through their various sponsors, benefactors or investments. In practice, there is little mechanical difference between this system and the default economy – it is simply flavor to further illuminate the game world and allows the PCs to throw around their status as famous adventurers in a measured, regimented way.

Karma or Luck is earned for performing actions that help restore the natural “correctness” of the world. Noble deeds, delivering justice, killing undead, pretty much anything stereotypically “Good” earns Karma. It can be spent like normal GP in stores representing the odds that the location actually has what the characters want. It can also be spent while adventuring to have certain events occur. For instance, spending 50 Luck in a dungeon can give you a Healing Potion as treasure in the next encounter or chest. Spending 20 Luck can ensure that a water source you find is pure (as the Clearwater Solution). As a general expectation, the cost of an event is equal to an item that causes the event.

Fame is earned for performing deeds that will be talked about by others. It can be spent like normal GP in stores representing the shopkeeper’s willingness to sell the characters rare or dangerous items. It can also be spent while adventuring to have certain events occur. For instance, you can use Fame to “bribe” someone into letting you into an area they shouldn’t. It can purchase room and board in foreign towns when you lack the on-hand gold. (“Hey, we’ve heard about you guys? Tell us about your travels! A place to stay? Sure, it’s on the house.”) PCs might also spend Fame to receive gifts and favors from NPCs that they meet. As a general expectation, the cost of an event is equal to an item that causes the event, though this isn’t quite as sturdy an expectation for Fame as it is Luck.

When a PC goes to buy something, he or she is only required to have 20-40% of the cost in currency. The rest is paid in Luck or Fame. Thus when he or she tries to resell it, only the currency is returned and the 20% number makes more sense in-game. It also eliminates the problem of a single +2 weapon costing as much gold as a small army. The army only needs gold. The weapon requires Fame and Luck, which most NPCs do not have. I’ve found, as a side effect, that the system additionally tends to (though not completely) keep the party moving on the straight and narrow since they know the sorts of things that will earn them full wealth – big, heroic deeds. It would be just as simple to change Fame to Infamy if I was running an Evil campaign or Karma to Honor if the players were of a culture where that sort of thing is important. Having intangible wealth in a quantified, measurable way can really set the tone for the game. You could even use this system as a sort of compromise between the ‘wish list’ and ‘whatever the DM puts there’ methods of treasure placement. I like mechanics that facilitate bargaining between the DM and players on the meta level in an agreed-upon manner that also have a believable in-game expression; Fame and Luck banks totally do this for me in a way that nothing else does.

Can’t believe I missed a show. Ah well. Let’s see some hands – how many of you all have played FASERIP Marvel? Hunh? Put up ‘em up! ten… twenty… thirty…. so less than a third, but still enough. Cool. Hands down. For those of you who haven’t, it’s an older TSR superheroes game set in the Marvel universe – so old in fact that the licensing has expired on it and you can legally pick up pdfs of the game for free. I’ll post the link in the forums when this show hits, so you can look it up. I really enjoyed Marvel in all its table-y glory, particularly for its use of Karma points and power stunts. I’m not going to cover karma points here, so go read about them in the books if you’re interested, but I do want to discuss power stunts here for a couple minutes.

Power Stunts are exactly what they sound like – unorthodox uses of a superpower in order to do something the power didn’t necessarily intend. Superman flying around the world backward to reverse time for instance, is a power stunt. The Flash phasing himself through solid objects by altering the vibrations of his molecules is another. Classic Silver Age stuff right there. Earlier editions of D&D had their own form of power stunts – metamagic feats but even moreso, the creative interpretations of spell effects based on their flavor text. Can you look like a small treant if someone casts Barkskin on you? How about shooting an arrow out of the sky with your own Magic Missile? And can you get a paladin out of his armor by polymorphing him into a snake and then using Animal Control to force him to shed his skin? These are the sort of creative solutions that players love to come up with and DMs either ignore completely or tremble in fear of. It’s important to notice though, that classic power stunts rarely deal damage and if they do, the point of the stunt is not actually the damage but some kind of utility effect – terrain modification, movement, etc.

4E has a weird way of discouraging this sort of thing. I don’t believe it was any intention of the design staff, but something about the way powers are written keeps a lot of people well within a precision-tuned box. But you know what? I’m an Instigator dangit; I like to see crazy stuff happen in my games and the best way I know to promote that sort of thing is to give it its own economy, in this case the FATE point.

I need to dip briefly into system design here for a second. The other uses of a FATE point were pretty tame. A +2 to a d20 roll is the standard “DM’s best friend” circumstance bonus. A reroll with a +3 bonus to skill checks sounds awesome – and can be! – but think for a minute. You’re only supposed to make right around half of your attack rolls according to proper game balance but you need to make two-thirds or better of your skill checks (4 successes out of 6 rolls for a complexity 1 skill challenge) so even a hefty reroll bonus isn’t too “out there”. Player narration, though it may mess with the plot in unexpected ways, has no mechanical effect on the game and so is safe as well. Using an attack power as a utility power – which is what we’re going to do here – does have mechanical impact on the game, and so we have to keep some kind of limit on it. Also, applying an artifical, arbitrary limitation on doing something triggers the natural human rebellion instinct, so in limiting usage, you’re also encouraging usage.

All that talk leads up to this idea. By spending a FATE point, the player may use an attack power in a predetermined utility way until the end of the encounter. Example – let’s say you have an underage kawaii pyromaniac tiefling assassin who does incredibly well with her relatively modest 20 AC at level 5. She wants to use her Executioner’s Noose to go all Spiderman and stuff. It’s an at-will power, so you want to limit the movement to standard speed or less but you think that a standard action to fly 5 is probably fair. She hands over the FATE point and until her next short rest, she can swing on branches, stalactites, clotheslines, whatever happens to be handy. What about using Dire Radiance to light up a room? It’s radiance, right? Another at-will power, so let’s use it like the Wizard cantrip Light except again as a standard action to not step on the Wizard’s toes too much. If you can find an already written utility power for what you want to do of the same usage and approximate level, that’s your best bet. I’d love to see some of your ideas, so please! Post them on the forums.

As a parting note, this will up your characters’ overall power levels a little bit, so to compensate I as a DM would raise all encounter levels by 1 and award Action Points only after milestones to keep roughly the same challenge. Depending on the way your PCs play, your mileage may vary.

Except for my Wave Dogs in the Vineyard game, I don’t get to play enough RPGs that aren’t D&D. Wait, Ryven, this is a 4E podcast. Yeah, yeah, I know, just run with me on this for a second. There are some mechanics I really want to play from other systems that I’m probably just not going to be able to play, so I’ll just have to port them into 4E, conveniently enough in the next few segments! Power Source folks be warned – some things will be changed after the end of the first arc here in about 6 weeks so pay attention! This week, the FATE point.

Actually, think of this more like Bonus Tokens Part II – Beyond Thunderdome. My original Bonus Token concept was specifically for skill challenges and while I like that option there, I want to expand it. A couple shows back, Jared and I briefly tossed around the idea of a roleplay build for 4E characters and FATE points and so this is really just the result of that discussion. Imagine – after you create your character at level 1, you have 5 Aspects – words or phrases that you use to describe your character. The first two are your race and class. The next three, you create on your own. You get more as you increase in level, but don’t worry about that right now.

At the end of each extended rest, you gain 2 FATE points + 1 per tier. You gain another after each milestone. A Bonus Token is then just sort of a temporary FATE point. You can use a FATE point to do one of four things. First, you can play it to gain a +2 to any d20 roll you’ve already made. Not a bad use, but as we’ll see, there are better. Second, if you spend it on a non-attack roll that goes along with one of your Aspects, you may reroll the d20 with a +3 bonus. Finally, you may spend a FATE point to declare a fact about the game world, again in accordance with one of your Aspects. The declaration can’t directly contradict something the DM has already said, but you can twist it. The DM may also Compel your Aspects, making an event occur because of your character’s habits and such. You may pay a FATE point to deny that event, but if you can’t the event happens and you get another FATE point for your trouble. Need some examples to sort this all out? No problem.

Mircolis is a half-elf star pact warlock. (this guy should be familiar to some of you). He’s level 8 and has 6 Aspects: Half-Elf, Star Pact, Evil-Looking Goatee, Ritual Master, Street Hustler and Love of Comfort. In this situation, he’s trying to pry some information about a cave from a hunter in town. The DM has already specified that the hunter doesn’t trust Mircolis enough to give him the information. Mircolis could try to roll Diplomacy to improve his mood and get a +2 bonus by spending a FATE point. However Street Hustler is one of his Aspects, so instead if he tries to Bluff to gain that trust, he can reroll with a +3 bonus if he doesn’t like the first roll by spending that same FATE point. Even better, though, I can plop down that FATE point and say “Mircolis reads the man’s fortune using his connections to the Far Realms and finds a mistress. Will he tell me if I threaten to expose him to his wife?” The twist opens up all kinds of fun options – maybe the hunter now gives Mircolis false information out of spite, or feels compelled to redeem himself by leading Mircolis to the cave personally. On the other hand, the DM could Compel the Evil-Looking Goatee Aspect to outright deny the information and force Mircolis to go some other route, but I still at least get another FATE point out of it. It’s a quick but robust system and after a couple playtests, I hope to implement it permanently.

Now astute listeners may have noticed that earlier I said four things to do with a FATE point, but I only gave the player three – the Compel is a DM option. That’s because next week we’ll talk about the fourth option for your FATE point purchases – the power stunt.

This one’s going to run a little long ’cause I have a lot to say. Just warning you. Also, I’m selling my PHB3, $25 (which includes shipping) anywhere in the States. International listeners, eh, we’ll talk. Shoot me an email if you’re interested.

But now let’s take a peek at cursed items. Back in earlier editions, a cursed item was basically a “gotcha;” the big middle finger from behind the DM screen. It looked like something cool until you found out it actually sucked – and then you couldn’t get rid of it or it killed you. Great for gritty “realism”, not so good for heroic storytelling. For the purposes of 4E, I think of three basic types of curses.
First, minor curses – downfalls or oddities that are fairly situational – are ok to spring on your PCs without warning most of the time. The 3rd edition version of the Backbiter Spear (though I would avoid the 1st or 2nd edition versions), an Elven Cloak that fails to work for dwarves, armor that makes you vulnerable to radiant damage while in direct sunlight and a healing potion that also turns you Smurf blue for the rest of the day aren’t going to be game-breaking and perfectly legitimate as surprise curses. If your curse is mildly annoying, easy to circumvent or simply played for laughs, you can put it on any magic item that seems feasible and have the curse only identified when it actually occurs for the first time.

I prefer the second class of curses, ones that a player can put aside if they want, but are tempted to endure for the sake of power. Think about cursed items in literature. Everyone in LotR knew what the One Ring was and exactly how it worked. Elric could put Stormbringer down any time he wanted to, but he didn’t. These are the kinds of cursed items you want to mimic for the bulk of your game. A necromancer’s wand that drains a healing surge the first time it is used each day but adds an extra d6 of damage to critical hits is going to entice players to keep using it so that the loss of the healing surge doesn’t go to waste. The dagger of a famous traitor that adds another die of Sneak Attack once per day, but only after it is has struck one of it’s wielder’s allies (for base d6 damage dice, of course) is another good option. When creating an item like this, you’re asking your players to make a sort of bet. They ante with an upfront cost and then hope their bet pays off. This keeps the curse in play and the item in the character’s hand without forcing it with a “this item can not be discarded without a Remove Curse” entry. Also consider a mechanic like the one in the Summoning Wizard’s class article from Dragon 385 where if you don’t use the item or do what it wants you to do, it “misbehaves.” Imagine a set of boots that give +2 speed but if the character doesn’t move at least half their speed on a turn, the boots will move them their full speed at the end of their turn – and never somewhere helpful! Characters who try to identify these types of items should probably at least know vaguely that something is wrong ahead of time if not the full nature of the curse.

If, however you are the sort of sadistic DM that needs to inflict horrible punishments and crippling infirmities on your PCs just because you can (and for whatever reason you’re still playing 4E), then let your players be heroic in their suckiness. That is, let them choose to be cursed, take up the weapon that can’t be sheathed or wear the ring that can’t be removed. But who’s going to choose being cursed? I bet the paladin in your party would rather be unable to put down the immensely powerful but soul-draining cursed sword rather than let it fall into the hands of the villain. I bet the party psion already hears enough voices in her head that she could deal with a supernatural possession better than that 10-year old orphan over there. And I bet the party rogue is willing to be mute or take a -4 to all saving throws if it will help him get through the dungeon to the hoard of gold at the end. You can hand your PCs the 2nd edition Backbiter Spear in 4th edition so long as they know how it works in advance and it will be an interesting, compelling item when used. A good DM will know the characters’ (and players’) motivations and can use them to convince said characters to willingly take on horrifying curses.

Since first writing this, Quinn Murphy of the At-Will Blog has put up a list of his own cursed items and I strongly encourage you to go read it. He and I had a lengthy discussion on the topic and turns out we have vastly different design philosophies. Namely, his items are far more complex and harder to get rid of, but you get the fun stuff before the curse hits. Mine are simpler and not so permanent but I make you deal with the curse first before you get the fun stuff. It’s all a matter of taste really. I have posted my versions of his two cursed items – Gamble and Valor – below.

Before I end, I should probably address the save-or-die curses. Some are fairly simple to import, like the Necklace of Strangulation. In 2nd edition this item dealt 6 points of damage per round to its wearer until their corpse fully decomposes, removable only with a wish or miracle! For 4E, you would probably want to give three saves, assisted by Heal checks, to prevent death so that it works more like a petrifying gaze attack. Don’t put these in every treaure chest, but once or twice per Tier, something similar could be quite a fun surprise! The scarab of death which after being worn for at least 10 minutes suddenly insta-kills … not so much. It’s just not the right fit for the heroic genre. Leave it be.

Feels good to be behind the microphone again. It’s been like 6 weeks since I actually recorded something, so I’m hyped to get back into it. For the next couple weeks, we’re going to talk about putting the magic back into your magic items.

Think back to your 1st, 2nd or maybe 3rd edition days. You just found some crazy magic item in a dungeon and you had no idea what to do with it. So now you’ve got two options: either stow it somewhere until you can get someone to explain it to you or screw around with it until it does something. You’ll end up paying out the wazoo for the chance (and I do mean CHANCE) to have an NPC identify the item so you can use it. If you do experiment, good luck because you’re probably going to get yourself or another party member killed, polymorphed or otherwise hosed. At best, you use the item at the wrong time and lose it. Before anyone gets on my case, yes, there is something fun about having to figure out how to use an item and the magic items of the time were commonly CRAZY awesome; it’s one of the charms of that genre of gaming.

However, 4E is a game of fantastic heroes managing resources. It assumes you are always going to be able to get maximum potential from your items and rarely if ever suffer penalties from unknowingly putting on the wrong hat or something. Can you imagine if Fafhrd or the Grey Mouser just suddenly keeled over dead from drinking from the wrong pool of water? Even Indiana Jones, who did in fact face that very situation, had a bunch of chalices to choose from and some foreknowledge, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
I admittedly don’t really like the 4E magic item system in some ways. It’s too.. predictable. I want my players to pick something up from time to time and go “what the heck is THIS?” The uncertainty makes it more interesting. An item with multiple functions under different circumstances also feels magical. But how do you balance the wonder of something unknown against the pointlessness of the thing never being used? Your PCs have to know how and when to use something, but not what it is. This is obviously tricky.
I came upon one solution to this problem several weeks back, something I call Compound Items. Here’s something one Power Source Campaign party found in the belongings of what amounted to a flesh golem – it’s called Patchwork Synthetic.

See what I did there? I combined a slightly better Healing Potion, a suit of Delver’s Armor and a ritual scroll of Make Whole into one item. The players have a meaningful decision to make about the item and if I describe it correctly, they’ll know when to use it even if they’re not entirely sure what it is. I didn’t describe it well, though, since the group seems to have forgotten about it. An unused item is a pointless item. On the other hand, the Eifa tree I gave the other group that combined a healing potion with a stonemeal biscuit and a suit of Darkleaf Armor with a Tethercord seemed to draw their attention more. It may be because I gave the party’s artificer all of the options right upfront, so Casey, make sure Kaitlynn gets to hear this because I think Tullie is still carting it around*. Despite bad presentation so far I think the idea is sound so I will continue to toy with it and let you know how it works.
Once again I’m dangerously over time, but I have more examples for you, so watch the forum as I will post them when this show hits. Next week – curses and cursed items.

*Casey and Kaitlynn are players in my home campaign; Tullie is Kaitlynn’s character.

 
I originally started writing this entry talking about manipulatives, which are any tokens, objects or bits of something that is handled and moved around to signify meaning. But as I wrote it, it really coalesced around skill challenges and one manipulative specifically – the Bonus Token. Don’t go looking in your core rulebooks for this because you’re not going to find it. It’s something I’ve cribbed from other games and ported into 4th Edition D&D.

How often have you been adjudicating a skill challenge and one of your players makes a check that goes beyond a simple secondary skill, in a way that is both creative and reasonable but doesn’t directly contribute to winning the challenge? Many times, you dole out a +2 to the next check and go on with it, but as a DM, I found that got really lame really fast. It increases the odds of the next check succeeding by 10% but if it doesn’t help (or isn’t necessary), the player may not feel particularly inclined to come up with another unique idea later and I definitely want to encourage that sort of thinking. So here’s what I started doing. When one of my players goes in a direction with a skill check that I didn’t expect and passes a level-appropriate DC, I throw them a little chip with the word “Bonus!” on it. (I play mostly on MapTools VTT, by the way, so I can make all sorts of weird virtual stuff). Anyway – it tells the player that I officially recognize the successful skill check and feel that it was somehow appropriate but have no idea how to incorporate that check at this exact moment. I also take particular care to NOT describe that check in the game story when it’s made. In this way, I don’t feel like I ever have to say “no” to anything, but the pressure to come up with the result immediately is lifted. Later on in the challenge, players can ‘cash in’ their tokens for other effects related to the skill check.

Here’s an example – the players are chasing a thief through a busy town. The primary skills are Athletics, Acrobatics, Perception, Endurance and Streetwise. Your player’s Cleric is not trained in any of these things, so she decides to use Religion; she prays to Erathis, the goddess of law and civilization for help. That seems both creative and reasonable, so upon making her check, you throw her a Bonus Token. When the thief is caught, the cleric asks “is the thief part of the evil cult we’re looking for?” and waves her token. If the thief wasn’t already a cultist, but you’re prepared to play it that way you have her return the token and you say “yes, in fact he is and he has the entry password tattooed on his left hand.” Perhaps you don’t want to go just hand your players quite so much information. You could trade that token for “no, he isn’t, but one of the guards that comes to arrest the thief comments that the last couple burglars they’ve caught were dead and marked with a strange sigil in blood.” Now if the PCs were about to botch the challenge and had only one or two failures left, maybe the cleric player could decide to use the token more mechanically, say to add 2 to a check an ally has already failed in the hopes that it would then succeed or grant a new reroll altogether (much like the way the LFR card system works). However you do it, the purpose of the Bonus Token is to teach your players that a unique, creative idea will pay out somehow in a meaningful way. A simple +2 bonus may be the DM’s best friend, but after a few sightings, that Bonus Token will become your players’ best friend.

 

Along with writing for At-Will, I do some small podcast snippets for the Power Source Podcast on d20Radio. A couple weeks ago, we had a listener named Sam write in about including mechanics for character flaws in 4th Edition D&D. If you want to listen to the whole thing, check out Episode 8, but I’ll give you the short version here. His “mechanic” at the time was that his character has a short temper and throws away his weapon on any attack roll resulting in a natural 1. As you can guess, this didn’t go over entirely well with the rest of his group and he wanted advice on how to make it work. The hosts of the podcast – Jared and Scott – took the long way around telling him not to do it and just roleplay the temper in non-mechanical ways that wouldn’t affect the overall efficiency of the group. For the next episode, I turned in this piece, which I now offer to you all as an option to mechanically deal with character flaws in a way that is both compelling and appropriate for the game.

Dear Sam,

Don’t listen to Scott and Jared. You can absolutely have a mechanic for character flaws in 4th Edition D&D – your only problem is that you’re trying to lead with the stick, not the carrot. Let’s hop off the WotC train for just a moment – yeah, I know: sacrilege – anyway, and go peek at the Dresden Files RPG for a second. There’s a mechanic in that game called a Compel. A Compel is a weak spot in your character. It doesn’t necessarily need to be a character trait, it just need to be some handle your DM can tempt you with or jerk you around by. A short temper, rampant curiosity or even an easily kidnapped family member all make good Compels. If you follow a Compel, thus getting you and your group into a little more trouble, you get a Fate point which is used to modify die rolls and stuff. Without getting into specifics, the game is written such that you may need a couple more Fate points than what you’re normally allotted for the main story. The Compels, then, provide a personal risk/reward option for you to get that extra help, though possibly at a cost.

This is the concept I think you want to model for D&D. Your character’s flaw should be something you turn to when the chips are down in a sort of Faustian bargain, not a mechanic that does nothing but get in your way. So you seem to want to play a character with anger issues and you like the idea of throwing away your weapon mid-combat. Alright. Sit down with your DM and propose this idea: if you throw away your weapon as part of taking your second wind, you can spend two healing surges. You’re lowering your damage output and burning through your surges faster, so it’s a risk, but you are getting the immediate healing you need and so your party has some time to mechanically to deal with your decision – it’s not just a hosing. Your character flaw is not only a resource management option now, but it’s also probably not going to tick off your fellow players. Heck, they may even encourage you to do it! Your flaw contributes to both your character and the game rather than detracting from it. If you don’t like that option, then maybe throwing your main weapon away on a roll of 1 causes your secondary weapon to gain the high crit property. I don’t like that one as much, but it’s a thought. Hope this gives you and everyone else listening some ideas.