I assume that someone is going to launch a "4e Pathfinder" because there will be some people interested in continuing their 4e experience.

If you were to continue 4e, what would you do in creating 4.5e? How would you make a "4e Pathfinder" that convinced 4e fans to stick with your creation instead of just buying old 4e books?

AKA, how do you make a 4e Paizo?

QuoteI assume that someone is going to launch a "4e Pathfinder" because there will be some people interested in continuing their 4e experience.

(Side remark: I assume nothing of the sort. Outside of WotC, no 3PP could produce a 4.x, I think. To incline people to switch, they'd need to get an equally viable char builder software up and running. That's costly, and would require massive investment up front.)

My own sole 4.5 idea is to forego individual stat blocks for monsters and traps and terrain features, and roll them all into a single encounter stat block which optionally contains fragments of skill challenges. To get an idea, look at the 4E stat block for a trap rather than a monster.



Observe the 'hp' entry in the last line. Now imagine this'd be an encounter stat block. Team Hero has to beat Team DM, and team DM runs on a single pool of hp (<- very abstract), which has repercussions on the encounter (when team DM gets bloodied etc). Less book keeping - goodbye individual hp accounting! - and you bring back a 4E'ism which later MMs discarded, sc. of pre-written encounter groups. (My own 4E random encounter tables run on these scripted groups, not monster entries.)

4E doesn't really work in terms of single monsters or single traps or single terrain features, they are all meant to complement each other. If so, that's a design feature you want to bring to greater prominence.

And no, you can't possibly do this in 5E, because what I suggest is take My Precious Encounter design (phrase (c) Justin Alexander), which is pretty anathema to pre-3E, and turn it to 11. The 4.5 MMs would then be a series of readymade encounters, sorted by theme and EL.

And no, that isn't more complicated to run than a current 2-page delve spread, because the latter requires you to jump forth and back between individual stat blocks already (so the skeleton rogues get extra damage in darkness, and the bats can cast auras of darkness ---> have the skellies delay until the bats have cast darkness). All that the 'encounter stat block' would alter is greater convenience - it'd cross reference these entries right away.

Two downsides:
- first, lack of customization. If DMs get sold entire encounter packages, it will be harder to customize them than under the the XP parcel system (where you got an XP budget and put in any monsters/traps/terrain features you like). From a DIY perspective, I like 4E's way better than my proposed 4.5, so I'm not even sure myself it'd be a great idea.

- second, 4E would now run on scripts even more so than it already does. Or would it? Delves already have these scripts in them, it's just that they are not presented very efficiently. Still, for people who prefer to run non-scripted encounters, encounter stat blocks could be unwelcome.

That's quite cool, Windjammer.

I like your idea, Windjammer

Quote from: Windjammer;507253Two downsides:
- first, lack of customization. If DMs get sold entire encounter packages, it will be harder to customize them than under the the XP parcel system (where you got an XP budget and put in any monsters/traps/terrain features you like). From a DIY perspective, I like 4E's way better than my proposed 4.5, so I'm not even sure myself it'd be a great idea.

I don't know; I don't think a design system would be terribly complicated, it's just how to explain it to DM's. You'd just need to devote enough space to examples with a wide range of complexity (And notes on what that encounter is intended to do and why it was built that way).

You don't even need to go down to "single pools of HP" - even that example encounter has two skulls, which can be disabled individually.