D&D 4E House Rule Patches to 4e

[Majoru Oakheart]

I love 4e, but over time, I've noticed that there are certain things that break the system. This is shown by the things people come up with on the Char Op boards and the things people bring to my games. It seems the combining of feats from various classes and multiple attacks appear to be the cause of most of these issues. I am thinking of implementing the following house rules to fix it and wanted some feedback:

1. All Temporary damage bonuses from Magic Items and Powers, and class features apply only once per turn.

2. All feats, powers, and class features that trigger on a hit and mention a specific weapon are errataed to say "weapon attacks" all of them that mention a specific implement are erratad to say "implement attack" unless specified otherwise.

3. All rules items that allow you to recover a power are errataed to say "Attack or Utility Power with a level number" unless specified otherwise.

4. All temporary feats, powers, and class features that add or subtract from attack rolls or saves that are based on a stat(e.g. add your Int modifier) are capped at +3/+4/+5(Heroic/Paragon/Epic). Likewise all abilities that add or subtract from damage that are based on a stat are capped at +6/+8/+10(this does not apply to the normal addition of your stat modifier to damage in powers).

 

[OnlineDM]

My approach is to veto things in my game that I feel are overpowered. My players know that this is my approach. We really haven't had problems. I think I've used the veto power twice in 15 levels of play.

If a player is doing something overpowered, talk to the player outside the game and explain that you're going to exercise DM veto power. The game is more fun if the player characters have a similar power level to one another, and if there's one mega-powerful character outshining the others, that's a problem that needs to be reined in.

If they're all uber-powerful to a similar degree, I'd be inclined to just run with it and ramp up the difficulty to match, but I know that's not everyone's style.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Yeah, that was my philosophy for a while. Until over 50% of the group came to the table with some form of overpowered build. My problem tends to be with damage so far off the scale that it hurts the game.

For instance, it became normal to have everyone save up their action points and then for 2 different Warlords to use all their buffs in one round and then everyone to use multiattack powers and then action point and use another one.

It got to the point that a +5 to hit, +30 damage wasn't out of the ordinary for one round every combat. And for everyone to take 5 or 6 attack rolls during their turn with this bonus. This is with characters in mid heroic tier.

Those buffs in and of themselves wouldn't be a big problem except when they are combined with so many attacks in one router. So a buff that should have done about 100 damage in one round was instead doing 600. Enough to kill solos of their level without much of a problem.

Part of the impetus for this change came from the fact that my players were sitting around discussing the fact that they were annoyed at WOTC for publishing so many bad powers when it was clearly better to take any power that allowed multiple attacks instead of them. When it was agreed upon that nearly every power at a level was clearly inferior to the one power that gave 4 attacks in a round, I realized something needed to be done.

 

[Stalker0]

I like your last houserule, and it has some precedence with WOTC recent errata (such as righteous brand)

 

[FireLance]

Likewise all abilities that add or subtract from damage that are based on a stat are capped at +6/+8/+10(this does not apply to the normal addition of your stat modifier to damage in powers).

I don't think you need this, unless you intend for the cap to apply to the combined effect of all damage modifiers, since the natural limits to ability score modifiers would be at or below those numbers, anyway.

 

[Zero Cochrane]

I have three different ideas that can house-rule multiple attacks into something reasonable.

1) When multiple attacks allow you to make multiple attack rolls, take the lowest die roll and apply it to all of the multiple attacks.

2) When multiple attacks allow you to make multiple attack rolls, take the highest die roll and apply it to one of the multiple attacks. The other attacks do not occur.

3) Instate iterative attack rolls like in 3rd edition D&D: 1st attack roll is normal, 2nd attack roll has a -5 penalty, 3rd attack roll has a -10 penalty, and so on.

 

[C4]

I love 4e, but over time, I've noticed that there are certain things that break the system. This is shown by the things people come up with on the Char Op boards and the things people bring to my games. It seems the combining of feats from various classes and multiple attacks appear to be the cause of most of these issues. I am thinking of implementing the following house rules to fix it and wanted some feedback:

I like #1 and #2. #2 is simple and intuitive.

#1 is part of an house rule fix I came up with a while back to fix multiattacks in my 4e clone. Unfortunately, I couldn't work out a fix that was both simple and effective; maybe you can do better. If your players are complaining, maybe they'd be okay with a little added complexity.

I'm not sure about #3, because I'm not sure what it's changing.

I don't like #4 because a) it kinda defeats the purpose of having high stats, and b) it looks like the 'benefit : complexity' ratio is too low to be worth the trouble.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

I don't think you need this, unless you intend for the cap to apply to the combined effect of all damage modifiers, since the natural limits to ability score modifiers would be at or below those numbers, anyway.

Yeah, I thought about not even including it. However, there are a couple of ways to exceed these numbers through a lot of power gaming. Mainly starting at a 20 in the stat and then using some sort of item to add to your effective stat. At 8th level, you'd exceed the limit by 1 or 2. It probably isn't needed for such a small number, however. Probably best to leave it out.

I'm just concerned that as long as my players know they can get one or two more points to something, they will continually beg me to let them buy or find the magic items that give them to them. Either that or they will search every book for the one feat that gives them that extra point. At this point, I've lost track of whether there actually IS a feat that does this, however.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

I like your last houserule, and it has some precedence with WOTC recent errata (such as righteous brand)

Exactly. The math actually works out such that anything higher than -5 to a save or attack roll pretty much guarantees a miss. This fix is here mostly for builds that create impossible save situations and stun an enemy permanently. And for Psions and Wardens to avoid them making an enemy unable to hit for a round.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

I have three different ideas that can house-rule multiple attacks into something reasonable.

1) When multiple attacks allow you to make multiple attack rolls, take the lowest die roll and apply it to all of the multiple attacks.

2) When multiple attacks allow you to make multiple attack rolls, take the highest die roll and apply it to one of the multiple attacks. The other attacks do not occur.

3) Instate iterative attack rolls like in 3rd edition D&D: 1st attack roll is normal, 2nd attack roll has a -5 penalty, 3rd attack roll has a -10 penalty, and so on.

I think 1 makes multi attacks completely useless. 2 and 3 make them nearly useless. The problem is, most of the multi attack powers are things like "Make 3 attacks at 1[w]" without adding a stat modifier. Which is good if your leader is currently adding +20 to all your damage rolls or if you have some magic item that adds 6 damage to all your attacks. It's not so good if most of your attacks auto miss. And the math in 4e is such that the third attack applying iterative penalties is guaranteed to miss.

My problem with multi-attacks is that WOTC said in one of their preview articles that the issue they saw from 3.5e was that multi-attacks were the root of many of that editions problems. So they said both in a preview article and in the preview book that they'd learned from their mistakes and were going to limit making multiple attacks in one turn to a number small enough to avoid this issue.

But then they published powers that attack 5 times, powers that attack using a minor action and powers that attack as a free action, plus action points. Thus allowing people to get up to 11 attacks in a round(a 5 attack power, a 4 attack power, a minor action attack, and a free action attack). At high level, all you need is Iron Armbands of Power +6 to make this overpowered.