Converting 4th Edition D&D Paragons

[Morgenstern]

Carry on!  One of the things I actually liked in 4th was the Sword Mage class... I hope to see it's rebirth here in FC.  

I have a rough cut of how to arrange the majority of their abilites in Mastercraft form~

Sword Mage Skeleton

Core: broken weapon recreation
1 Defensive force technique and general flavor establishment
2/11/19 various challenge effects related to choosing an aegis - choose one of 3 styles (eventually gain all 3).
3/7/11/15/19 choose 1 of 5 elemental damage focuses and able to convert melee attacks to that damage type (eventually gain all 5).
4/8/12/16/20 teleport/blink effects
5/9/13/17 floating melee feats
6/9/12/15/18 selectable utility effects: Option to gain traditional spellcasting for low circles. Small AoE attack. Energy traps. Defensive buffs.
10/20 large AoE attack. Damage type can be altered according to available elemental focuses.
14 Crit Range gamebreaker.

[Sletchman]

Interesting skeleton.  My quick google of what the class did pegged them for Expert class in my mind.  Still, looks like enough to fill out a base class, and potentially interesting.  If you're up for it, I'd like to see more.

[Morgenstern]

Well, they have a number of places where they can share concept with both the Rune Knight and the Force of Nature, so it seems like there might be some payoff in setting them up as a base class that you might go into those classes from. Neither of those classes has much of a tanking mentality, so playing that up in the Swordmage should secure new ground.

[magustoad]

Carry on!  One of the things I actually liked in 4th was the Sword Mage class... I hope to see it's rebirth here in FC. 

I have a rough cut of how to arrange the majority of their abilites in Mastercraft form~

Sword Mage Skeleton

Core: broken weapon recreation
1 Defensive force technique and general flavor establishment
2/11/19 various challenge effects related to choosing an aegis - choose one of 3 styles (eventually gain all 3).
3/7/11/15/19 choose 1 of 5 elemental damage focuses and able to convert melee attacks to that damage type (eventually gain all 5).
4/8/12/16/20 teleport/blink effects
5/9/13/17 floating melee feats
6/9/12/15/18 selectable utility effects: Option to gain traditional spellcasting for low circles. Small AoE attack. Energy traps. Defensive buffs.
10/20 large AoE attack. Damage type can be altered according to available elemental focuses.
14 Crit Range gamebreaker.

Woot! Verily I say; Woot!

I'll try to digest this tonight and offer feed-backings after wife-unit heads to bed.

[the331st]

Looks good. I always saw the class as a draw b/c it's a hardy gish from level 1. No prereq levels to get in your way. I like it Morg can't wait to see it.

[The_Grand_User]

  However, the power level of Paragon abilities (having been designed for the mid-range of their native environment) is slightly higher than may be appropriate for a first-second-third tier Mastercraft feat chain, and so these adapted chain are better balanced by including a single feat in the prerequisites of the “Basics” feat in the chain (a quite modest replacement of the 10 levels of game-play 4th Edition characters must undertake before accessing these tools).

When asked once at a pre-release if FC classes would have 30 levels like D&D 4e, The response from the Crafty guys was "We've got 30 levels... we just skip the first 10."

And quite an appropriate replacement too

Good, work, really liking these. Have you thought about what it'd take to convert other 4E parts to FC? The Epic Destinies would be interesting, I'd think. If a lot of 4E can be formaly converted into FC, that'd be really great, because I like a lot of thier flavor, just not the overall system mechanics for an RP game (as a glorified miniatures combat game, it's not too bad).

[Morgenstern]

When asked once at a pre-release if FC classes would have 30 levels like D&D 4e, The response from the Crafty guys was "We've got 30 levels... we just skip the first 10."

These days (having spent a lot more time tearing into 4th ed) I find that less true. MC probably skips about 2 levels and the its a 1.5:1 ratio for quite a while.

Good, work, really liking these. Have you thought about what it'd take to convert other 4E parts to FC? The Epic Destinies would be interesting, I'd think.

For the most part epic destinies line up very well with Master classes. "once per session when you die" is becoming one of my favorite triggers .

If a lot of 4E can be formaly converted into FC, that'd be really great, because I lie a lot of thier flavor, just not the overall system mechanics for an RP game (as a glorified miniatures combat game, it's not too bad).

I'm not quite to formal conversion practices yet, but there are an awful lot of consistent partterns emerging as I go over more and more 4e classes. 4e has vastly better templating than 3.x and that makes mapping to a similarly template-heavy game like Mastercraft go a lot smoother than you might expect.

[Sletchman]

For the most part epic destinies line up very well with Master classes. "once per session when you die" is becoming one of my favorite triggers .

Curious how that would interact with the contractual immortality you discussed in a previous thread?  I mostly ask because after having a pretty lengthy discussion with my group about the concept after my last game, we all dig it - the only sticking point we had was rules for the heroic last stand (and what happens if you live through a glorious death...).

[Morgenstern]

Curious how that would interact with the contractual immortality you discussed in a previous thread?  I mostly ask because after having a pretty lengthy discussion with my group about the concept after my last game, we all dig it...

Trivially easy to set up . You can already see some of it in the example feats - the language of "defeated" and "undefeated". So the trigger would be "once per session when you are defeated..." which actually works quite well since most epic destinies have some fashion of overturning/reversing death ONCE in any given adventure. Which is sort of fascinating, since it implies you maybe ought to be getting mauled that badly from time to time. It encourages players to stick it out longer that is rationally safe, which I think has some potential for promoting heroic play.

...the only sticking point we had was rules for the heroic last stand (and what happens if you live through a glorious death...).

The intent with the heroic last stand was you might survive it, but you shouldn't expect to survive it. We can pick this up over in that thread if you have specific concerns .

[magustoad]

Carry on!  One of the things I actually liked in 4th was the Sword Mage class... I hope to see it's rebirth here in FC. 

I have a rough cut of how to arrange the majority of their abilities in Mastercraft form~

Sword Mage Skeleton

Core: broken weapon recreation
1 Defensive force technique and general flavor establishment
2/11/19 various challenge effects related to choosing an aegis - choose one of 3 styles (eventually gain all 3).
3/7/11/15/19 choose 1 of 5 elemental damage focuses and able to convert melee attacks to that damage type (eventually gain all 5).
4/8/12/16/20 teleport/blink effects
5/9/13/17 floating melee feats
6/9/12/15/18 selectable utility effects: Option to gain traditional spellcasting for low circles. Small AoE attack. Energy traps. Defensive buffs.
10/20 large AoE attack. Damage type can be altered according to available elemental focuses.
14 Crit Range gamebreaker.

I just realized I still owed you some feedback.    A lot of this is just top-of-mind stuff and not much thought to balancing and such.  I just don't have the 'feel' down yet to be confident in that arena.

Core: Are you thinking along lines of spending AD for reforming a broken weapon?  Any plans on the 'call weapon to hand' ability?  I thought it was kinda cool flavor.  I was thinking as a part of the bond the weapon might gain favored status.  It just seems to flow nicely.

Defensive force:  Int mod bonus swap with Dex?  Some kind of scaling DR possibly?  Do we want to recreate the Assault/Shielding dichotomy here with 1H 2H differences on the bonus?

Aegis:  I think the two written ones work nicely pretty well as read. 

• Assault is spot on. One half-action attack, no tricks?  Then can add SM tricks later on like they let you do various powers later on.
• Shielding needs a tweak.  I thought DR was the way to go, but the more I think of it DResistance is more in-line with written since AP doesn't effect DRes.  I'm not sure where to lay the increase points for the shield...  1, 3(L8), 5(L14) + CON mod?
• Third Aegis? Did I miss it or do you have something in mind?

 

3/7/11/15/19 Elementals:  Acid, Fire, Electrical, Heat?, Cold?  Would they suffer -4 conversion penalty?  Would there be some rate limiter on it?  Might we instead convert some of those 'spells' to tricks or straight-up powers instead?

4/8/12/16/20 teleport/blink effects and 6/9/12/15/18 selectable utility effects: What did you have in mind, conversion, creation or re-use from RAW?

5/9/13/17 floating melee feats:  Looks good. 

10/20 large AoE attack: What is the diff between the two?  PBAoE first then targeted?  Just damage?  Maybe the 20 version tosses some nasty teleport-based effects in?

14 Crit Range gamebreaker: The source material version of this just grants a threat of 19-20.  In 4e that's pretty hardcore if memory serves.  In FC the Soldier can Autocrit once a session.  Pretty wide gap there.   

Anywho that's the brain-dump so far.

[Morgenstern]

The third Swordmage Aegis was offered in the Arcane Power book - which I have .

My expectation is the elemental focues would allow unlimited/unpenalized conversion of your melee attacks to the chosen type, and probably a limited number of times per scene bonus on top of that like slowing foes with cold. Debuffing (rather than damaging) secondary effects are probably the way to go to support tanking behavior. Final balancing won't happen until I've scriptted it more concisely.

10/20 is likely a 15 ft. PBAoE of a type chosen in the moment from you list of focuses w/ the extra effect thrown in too, so say a 15 ft. cold snap slowing everyting in the area. 20th level will probably expand the radius to 20 or 25 ft. + by then you'll have all your focuses to play with.

Looking at their 4e 29th level attacks, there were 2 AoE damage abilities (amply represented by the 10/20 class ability) and an increased threat range effect. As a Mastercraft gamebreaker, "increased threat range" probably looks like +4 threat range against standard characters and the last target of your challenge, +2 against everything else... aka nasty.

[The_Grand_User]

So if you challenged a standard, would that be a +8?

[Morgenstern]

So if you challenged a standard, would that be a +8?

There are PLENTY of other ways out there to auto-slay standard characters . +4 threat range will be more than adequate. Its the teleporting to them/teleporting them to you that'll be where this particular chipper-shredder will shine.

[Morgenstern]

I've added a block of text explaining pushing and pulling which should make quite a few more paragons easily adapted.

Also wanted to include a link to the Grand User's draconic paragon feats for easier reference:

http://www.crafty-games.com/forum/index.php?topic=6018.0

[The_Grand_User]

Thanks for the link. I never got any feedback on them, though, could I please have that next?