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i started working on my d n d 4e rewrite again because i make poor life choices
i only have the tail end of the warlock to finish before a 1st pass is done on it but it's daunting to pick up where i left off
if i can finish that i'll finally have all the phb 1 classes done and i can work on monsters for a while which isn't as cumbersome
inevitable undercut: a phase we all go through, or a warlock attack power?
one of the things that i wasn't prepared for when i started this is just how bad m*arls mechanical design for this edition was. he had a peculiar fixation with "stop hitting yourself. stop hitting yourself." too, which in retrospect was telling on himself
i have around 130+ new powers for the warlock now and when i look at it that way i feel like i must have done something wrong. it's because i fleshed out all of the pacts, so there are 3~5 attack powers at each level for each pact plus a few that overlap etc
finally finished a first pass on all the warlock AEDU powers. epic tier was brutal to work through; only the wizard was as challenging. next up are the paragon paths and feats.
text file size for my class documents are around 100 KB, around 200 KB for druid and wizard because controller powers tend to be more complicated, and warlock is ... over 300 KB with just the class powers
incidentally this is what i do in my D&D hacks https://twitter.com/FreyjaErlings/status/1188100953351868417
my strat D&D hack just has sword, spear, and bow, and everything else just belongs to one of those categories, no fussin' with voulge-guisarme nonsense
my 4e hack just has the weapon categories: axe, bow, flail, hammer, heavy blade, light blade, spear (spear + polearm), glaive (axe + heavy blade + polearm), pollaxe (axe + hammer + spear + polearm)
a hh aha haha ha. finally finished the warlock class a year later from when i last worked on it. i put it off to be the last one from phb1 because it's so complicated and varied and has ties to a lot of lore and setting stuff. 4 times the size of most other classes
the sorcerer-king pact probably could have been split off into a templar class, and the vestige pact probably could have been its own binder class, but they fit okay in the warlock class framework
even if i took those out and made them their own classes, the warlock class would still be huge with dark + elemental + fey + infernal + star pacts all fully fleshed out
im a little worn out from agonizing over this mountain of details, rethinking every single thing, doing KPR calculations. there have been parts i've enjoyed, like writing a power named "Calamity of Glass and Salt" and the Merciless Bureaucrat paragon path
unlike the player character classes, the monster vault is mostly a thing i can leave intact. i just plug my formulae in for the numbers and it works fine as is. i'm using a different system for elites/solos but converting that is mostly just yanking out the unnecessary features.
the patterns the 4e devs came up with for mm3/mv elites + solos work ok in the vanilla game but they were never able to settle on a decent way to handle the myriad control effects and differences in situation like a reduction of triggers for warlock pact boons
my hack cuts elites and solos into multiple turns and treats each turn as something like a separate creature (with provisions) and that resolves the issues in a systematic way instead of the hodge-podge the vanilla game uses
i'm trying to be more culturally sensitive in my D&D hacks and i have no trouble with changing "barbarian" to "berserker." in my strat D&D hack i've made the classes broad enough that anything related to fighting can fit into the fighter class, so a lot of issues are solved there
i've been reading up again on how people approach the orientalist material in various D&D games and i don't have an easy solution for that with my 4e hack. while a lot of the flavor was redirected toward the psionic power source, the monk is still not quite what i want
so what i've been considering for a while is to replace the monk with a "world warrior" class that draws more inspiration from fighting games like street fighter. that lines up with the psionic flavor of having "plasma butter" for meters
and a "world warrior" is not situated solely in a pan-asian gloss; it's set up to incorporate any sort of influence that vaguely fits into martial arts. instead of being tied to an ascetic flavor, the class structure would be more about fighting game archetypes
i think there's potential for an interesting correspondence between fighting games and tactical grid games insofar as both are keenly aware of and about the importance of relative space, movement, and setting up attacks that exploit a situational error or weakness
4e is already set up structurally in a way that accommodates ideas from games like street fighter: it has an understanding of timing, attacks that connect or are blocked/whiff, taunting, meters or gauges as points, normal and special attacks, grappling
those elements are also already set up as subtypes or play styles like rushdown, grapplers, zoners, shotos (a balance of the others), and those suggest design paths within a class
im giving explicit instructions to use monsters that are no more than 2 levels higher than the PC level because vanilla 4e telling you to go wild with that was a mistake, like level 35 lolth is a laugh and a half, just don't do it (im deleveling her to 32 for testing)
i split feats between attack feats and utility feats, rewrote/am rewriting all the feats, moderately cut down on the overall number of them, and PCs get 2 attack feats and 2 utility feats per tier on an exlicitly staggered schedule
something i consistently didnt like about level 30 characters was how cumbersome the number and complication of feats could introduce complexity to the point where i saw people making cheat sheets and flowcharts to manage their character during play
cutting it down to 12 feats total at level 30 feels like ive reached the best balance i can between removing cruft, allowing enough room for customization, and not so much complexity that management becomes an issue
putting feats in separate silos of attack and utility mirrors the separation of power types and it means that not all feats are competing against the others for the same opportunity cost which i feel has helped a lot on the design/balance end of editing and rewriting
a central reason why i wanted to do a complete edit of 4e is that while i enjoy engineering games that favor play-before-play, i also enjoy piloting games that favor play-during-play https://twitter.com/ChromeOvum/status/1191957825028792322
if i wanted more play-during-play, that meant i had to make a fundamental assessment of how and why piloting felt lackluster compared to engineering
a big part of that turns out to be the central math of the game where it involves determining attack bonuses, defense scores, and modifiers to damage. late official development into 4e was starting to address this, but the developers were underinformed about the issue
a parallel or intertwined issue was managing the many sources of inputs into these bonuses and scores. the vanilla game is set up in an extremely crufty way where the math is obscured
that cruft, i think, is, or lead to, the overriding reason that people felt the need to use software to help manage character creation, and to some extent the need to use software for running the game itself
my initial and perhaps only radical goal was to tear out that cruft and replace it with an explicit and obvious math. the path was already set for me by the inherent bonuses introduced in the dark sun material, and the mm3 math that was summarized by Blog of Holding
the vanilla game in that stage of development had formulae built in, and that dark sun material + mm3 math had exposed those formulae. key questions relating to that involve how scaling works and how the game changes from level 1 to 30
overall, the gameplay tends to slow down as character level increases, both because of increasing complexity and also because of factors determined by the core math of attack bonuses, defense scores, and hit points
the intended flow of combat in raw numerical terms was even made explicit by the developers in the player's strategy guide
the blog DMG 42 also presents a careful analysis of this math in an article titled "A Boot on the Face of Level 1 Damage ... Forever!"
https://dmg42.blogspot.com/2012/02/boot-on-face-of-level-1-damage-forever.html
https://dmg42.blogspot.com/2012/02/boot-on-face-of-level-1-damage-forever.html
that article argues in favor of maintaining the mathematical relationship of the core numbers from level 1 through to the end of level 30 instead of permitting change, and over time i came to agree with it
so with all of those ideas in mind as my starting point, i worked out what the percentages and ratios ought to be to accomplish that, and it turned out to be fairly simple, and it handily tore out all the foundational cruft that i had decided to remove
so while doing that i wanted to consider very carefully how that math influences play at the table as well as the engineering play-before-play. because 4e uses trad D&D style attack rolls for everything, there's an enormous pressure on players to hunt for bonuses to that
the vanilla game rewards your piloting through the flanking rules by giving you a bonus to those attack rolls, but the +2 bonus from flanking is proportionally very small compared to all the other bonuses, such that it doesn't matter as much as bonuses accrued from engineering
this is compounded by vanilla 4e giving players a seemingly endless variety of ways to get that flanking bonus, or combat advantage, through engineering instead of piloting
and it goes on and on: many of the engineering bonuses come from untyped sources, so they can be combined freely. this posed a major editing task for me if i wanted to place more emphasis on piloting and less on engineering
i decided to remove or at least push back many of the engineering sources of combat advantage to the paragon tier, and i changed the attack vs defense formula to mildly increase the chance of failure and decrease the chance of success
those changes gave me room so that combat advantage from flanking was better emphasized in piloting play, and it gave enough room for bonuses derived from leader-role powers, and they can be combined without becoming excessive
since i changed the attack vs defense formula, i also had to be very careful to work out how that determined what the damage vs hit point ratio needed to be, and all of those things combined also determine (to a surprising degree) the length of combats
vanilla 4e combats generally run a little too long. the original developers seriously overestimated how long combats needed to be and i think that's a possible reason why the math for monsters when the game was first published didn't work well
at this point where i was performing major surgery on the foundation of the game, i knew i could also arbitrarily choose the length of combats, and that was also tied to some degree to how swingy combat outcomes could be, so i took a moderate approach to reducing combat length
despite (or because of) all these changes, the modified form of the game that i'm working on still operates about as predictably as the vanilla game, but without the heavy layers of cruft and obfuscation, and it better emphasizes choices made during play instead of before play
i rewrote my take on elites/solos for the Nth time https://pastebin.com/LHJ7N2nW
im working through sample conversions of one monster per level for my 4e hack and it's reminding me that they made everything immune to poison for no real reason, like at some point everyone started reflexively writing "Immune disease, poison;"
practically every time i've written a necrotic power for player characters i've included an alternate function for when the target has necrotic resistance because it's so common and without it those powers can become useless at the whim of the DM
i don't mind the majority of monsters having damage type resistances/vulnerabilities but they were unevenly distributed and too strong in the original game, so that's something i'm working on
uploaded all updated documents, continuing work on converting monsters for next couple of days so there're some playable encounters
uploaded example document of 1 standard monster for each level (1-30) and example monsters for encounters at level 1, 10, 20, 30 (including minions and boss monsters). i've had the first 10 levels of the sorcerer class sitting around for a long time and i might pick that up next.
4e encodes the process of drawing a ray at a fundamental level for determining lines and cover and whatnot, then just acts like that isn't a thing you're doing all the time when it comes to designing powers
so i defined the ray as an area of effect and it feels like i discovered a missing puzzle piece. it's a middle ground between ranged & AOE that rewards positioning + forced moves, but harder to use because it requires lining up instead of clustering
this is something that most tactics video games have as a basic shape and the fact that it was missing from 4e felt weird, especially when the game already instructs you to perform the needed process for it all the time
my understanding of why it was excluded is that the devs chose the "ranged X, target 1 2 or 3 creatures" formula as a substitute for that because it was faster to resolve and easier to use, but that ended up diminishing the need for piloting skill + the game still makes you do it
a lot of iconic effects from video games rely on being able to draw a path and then apply an effect along that, like shoot 'em up lasers (marisa's lasers) or the FFT monk's earth slash, and i felt dissatisfied not being able to articulate that within the existing areas
i feel like another underused area is the wall, which provides a method for drawing a non-overlapping path with a given length. it doesn't need to create a literal wall. i used that for a few new warlock powers (Twisting Chaos Serpent) and i think they came out well
there's an anime trope where a character will strike the ground and magical energy erupts out of it in a path away from them, and the wall area turns out to be perfect for modeling that when it's curvy, or a ray for when it's straight away from the user
i think the overall move away from exact shapes like cones and spheres was good for the kind of tactics game that 4e is, and that diagonal = orthogonal was the right move even if it produces unrealistic shapes. this corresponds with a broader move away from supporting sim
i doubt i can salvage anything about the o-assassin (written by king turd of shit mountain, published in what was clearly a first pass, by someone that didn't know anything about the game) and i've been folding the e-classes back into the o-classes
and i'm not excited about the assassin as a character class in general, like the only reason it's a thing was that it ended up as a not-thief in 1e and it got carried forward uncritically
but i am interested in designing classes that have shadow as the power source, like i think there's enough extant material in various games and myth+legend to support something like a vampire class and a werewolf class, even if those are framed as para-classes
something that the left for dead games and one-vs-many horror games have highlighted is that there's interesting design space for monsters-as-PCs that aren't usually given that treatment, like slashers.
the variety of antagonist classes we see in something like IllF*nic's F13 game is a good example of what a shadow class could look like, and i think that implementation suggests a lot of cool ideas that would cover similar ground to the assassin but offer something more distinct
i woke up thinking about flanking (what is my life) and i realized the language i used for it was sloppy because it allows an unintended interpretation, so i'm rewriting that while attempting an aggressive reading of it
i was imagining making kirby a 4e class & considered a flow that's "kill an enemy to get a bonus" like a warlock pact boon but it's based on the enemy's role (artillery, brute, et al). might fit that shadow class (because kirby and jas*n vo*rhees obviously go together)
copying/stealing enemy at-wills could be viable because those are scaled to be closer to PC encounter powers. it'd need some provision about ignoring resistance/immunity so they aren't useless
going over my first pass on heroic tier sorcerer that's mostly from 2 years ago and,,, oh my god no
it's from before i did further editing passes on wizard and others and it shows, but reassuring that i have an improved grasp on what's appropriate at which level
it's from before i did further editing passes on wizard and others and it shows, but reassuring that i have an improved grasp on what's appropriate at which level
when i'm done editing heroic tier for sorcerer again i'll decide whether i want to include the elementalist or not. writing riders for 5 subclasses can be a pain but there are already a lot of generic elemental powers so it might not be that bad
ive been watching someone stream mega man battle network in the background while working on this and it's making me think i could make a PC class out of that, with a rockman subclass that emphasizes ranged powers and a zero subclass that emphasizes melee powers
something like that might also absorb the hexblade because i left that out of the already-bloated warlock. it'd be a striker class that could have powers with weapon riders like the fighter, and mega man boss weapons as stance + attack powers
got through level 1 at-will and encounter attacks for sorcerer and it has cosmic, dragon, elemental (!), storm, and wild subclasses. level 1 is honestly difficult because it sets the tone and mechanical idiom for the rest of the class and at the same time is limited in scope
i don't have the brain worms that make people hate video games so of course i'm looking at the dark souls and diablo series while working on the sorcerer. lore nerds will recall that pyromancy was originally flame sorcery 
this is what i did in my dnd 4e hack. got rid of ability scores, cut out the other mechanical parts of race and reinterpreted them as personality types https://twitter.com/DragonCobolt/status/1195768539942019075
using personality in place of race also gives a clear reason how your character can have that mechanical feature change later without it being weird, or even just suggesting that it's possible at all
if people want to play only as humans, or an all furry setting, or the trad mix of race-coded entities (with its attendant host of problems), i'd rather the system be agnostic about that rather than (subtly) force you to play one way or the other
games like diablo 3 and gloomhaven use a structure for powers where you can add a thing to them (skill runes in d3 and stickers in gh). 4e has style feats but typically you could only have one apply to a power and they weren't improved as your level increased
im working on powers that sometimes have 3 or 4 subclass riders on them and thinking about what itd look like if instead of those being assigned to a subclass they were each keyed to your character level so that the power continues to improve over time, or had d3 skill runes etc
essentials tried doing something like that where it overloaded the at-will or basic powers but that turned out to be an ugly mess that both wasn't easier for new people to understand and also interacted with the rest of the system in an unpredicted way where "basic" lost meaning
i need to come up with a name for that not-hexblade class that encompasses the various "magic sword hero" bits and pieces (bladesinger, hexblade, zero from rockman, link from zelda, stray melee powers). can't call it hexblade because it's not a warlock and it'd confuse people
there are other magic sword hero ideas in the prev ed too like duskblade, soulknife, a bunch of stuff from book of 9 swords, shadowblade from ToM. there's enough material to flesh out a complete class that has subclasses and paragon paths and so on
magic sword hero class is the most anime class. there can be no class that is more anime than this. inconceivable.
mystic blade. eldritch knight. blademaster.
EDGELORD
mystic blade. eldritch knight. blademaster.
EDGELORD
i forgot how excessive some of the sorcerer U6 powers are, like "reroll your AP attack when you miss" and "just tell the DM you didn't get hit"
just another stray thought but 4e has all the tech for jjba built into it and needs a striker class built on the shaman model
reading talen's take on fire emblem's hilda in 4e as a test case to see how compatible it is with my hack https://twitter.com/Talen_Lee/status/1197885191500550150
first up is weapons: i reduced all the weapons to a limited list of categories, so superior implements and superior weapons are out. there's no execution axe
damage is determined by powers, and all damage expressions are rendered as Xd6 and/or with a scaling bonus keyed to character level. damage to HP ratio is modeled on level 1 + charop damage, so there's absolutely no need to hunt for extra sources of damage
defense scores including armor are taken purely from level and class. because weapons and armor are not factors in determining damage or defense scores, i removed all proficiency feats, so there's no reason to have things like superior weapon proficiency
two-handed weapon expertise was part of the expertise family of feats that were a way to patch the game's math. i worked on the fundamental math and removed all cruft and feat taxes, so there's no two-handed weapon expertise feat
the other element of that feat is a damage bonus to charge attacks. charge attacks are generally not great in my hack and since i removed magic items there's no "charge kit" like there is in the vanilla game
i reduced & scheduled the # of feats and typed them as either attack feats or utility feats. "expertise" feats are retained but they don't change bonus to attack rolls, and are combos of other weapon-specific feats
a Hilda in 4e Remix could take the Spear Expertise feat as her level 1 attack feat if she really wanted to combine that with some other class power that allows its use as part of a charge. the pollaxe weapon category is an amalgam of axe, hammer, spear, polearm that is 2 handed
Spear Expertise (Remix)
Benefit:
* When charging, you gain a Perk feat bonus to the damage rolls of weapon attacks that you make with a spear.
* You shift 1 square as a free action after you make a weapon attack with a spear. You must end the shift farther from the target.
Benefit:
* When charging, you gain a Perk feat bonus to the damage rolls of weapon attacks that you make with a spear.
* You shift 1 square as a free action after you make a weapon attack with a spear. You must end the shift farther from the target.
Talen suggests Mul or Goliath for race. i've glossed race as personality. a variety of personalities have bonuses or powers related to saving throws, and Goliaths i've glossed as the Steadfast personality that has a power that protects an ally
Severe (Dragonborn), Sturdy (Dwarf/Warforged), and Resilient (Human) are all fine for tanky choices too
ive finished a pass on the Paladin class and that also involves changes to how the marked condition works and the Paladin's Divine Challenge and Divine Sanction. Challenge is the feature that marks, Sanction is a feature that punishes, and you choose radiant or necrotic for that
Blood of the Mighty is still a high damage power that rewards you for attacking with a weapon wielded with two hands
that power now has, if you fulfill some conditionals, and a small part of it spread over ongoing damage, a KPR of about 0.78 (assumes 2handed weapon, you're bloodied, and the target is granting combat advantage)
so with all of the changes i've made, it's still accurate to say it "can result in one shot killing the hardest enemies at your level and above" if you roll well and fulfill all the requirements
here's a direct comparison of the original version vs my take on it. ive systematically removed the Reliable keyword and either rewritten the power or translated it to half damage on a miss https://pastebin.com/8eSE3RnA
i changed "you deal damage to yourself" to "you deal extra damage when bloodied" to encourage using it as a dramatic comeback power, exchanged Reliable keyword for half damage on a miss, and added a weapon rider with a small benefit for using it with a weapon in 2 hands
the next suggestion is Righteous Rage of Tempus, a channel divinity feat power from FRPG. that book gets a lot of charop ratings in red/purple (bad) or gold (extremely good, must have), which is a sign that it needed more development work
Righteous Rage of Tempus was originally so good that it drew enough attention to be nerfed iirc, and even after that it was still rated sky blue (exceptionally good)
Paladins have a channel divinity power unique to their class called Divine Strength, which is also a "more damage" power, so i wrote and scaled that to ensure that it's worthwhile, and that makes it unnecessary to look elsewhere for a replacement
Righteous Rage of Tempus also specifically keyed off of critical damage, but i've reduced that to almost always just be +Xd6 where X is your tier (heroic 1, paragon 2, epic 3) and severely restricted or eliminated game elements that change or improve that
Talen mentions armor next, and i want to point out that by removing magic items and assigning the Armor defense score through level and class, that reduces the silent compulsion to equate a character's appearance to the player's mechanical choices
ive also removed the reduction in speed because the armor distinctions (heavy vs light) are removed, so you're totally free to imagine your character wearing ordinary clothes while keeping the equivalent protection of heavy armor and none of the sim demands get in the way
4e was already an edition that encouraged the player to overwrite the flavor as they would, so i only took a step farther in that direction wrt reducing sim elements that i felt didnt belong
Talen mentions the lazylord which is something that the vanilla version of the game never formally recognizes, like there's no Warlord subclass that supports it, and it's difficult to construct, often requiring the optional class hybrid rules to function
here's the thing: i think the lazylord is almost entirely an artifact of engineering play. because it sticks out awkwardly to engineers, they pick up on it and it gives them a dopamine spike. it appeals to the Johnny player archetype that likes to look for weird combos
i could be persuaded to write up formalized support for the lazylord, but it's going to be something that i leave as a thing to do after i'm done editing all of the other o-classes that i can directly include in my hack
the Brave Warriors Warlord daily power comes up. that didn't make the cut on my last pass on the Warlord. it's a vanilla vs AC, 3[W], miss half power with a small bonus to charges, and it can be used as part of a charge
that kind of power is ok in vanilla 4e because the charge ecosystem went wild and unchecked. it's not interesting in my hack because i don't have a dozen things that everyone can take that key off of it. charging is more of a thing you do when you're far away and want to attack
in general, charging, just like basic attacks, had a ton of other game elements written to modify them, and that was exacerbated during the Essentials era to the point where "basic" lost its meaning
charging was no longer a tradeoff for extra movement, but instead became a strat that players hunted for bonuses and powers to apply to. what started out as a kind of reduced effectiveness for attacking after crossing a long distance became a preferred method of attacking
from the outside looking in, this is a weird quirk of 4e that doesn't make sense. i don't feel like that was a good direction for the game to develop in. it rewards engineering play to the detriment of piloting play, directly contrary to my goals
my version of Lamb to the Slaughter works the same way that Talen suggests, so that advice holds. the rest of the article covers things i haven't worked on yet, like the Bard and Avenger. the essentials classes (Knight, Cavalier, Skald) are folded into their o-classes or removed
something Talen doesn't mention here is the idea of classing Hilda as a Rogue with the Brutal Scoundrel subclass. that works out well with using an axe in two hands, has good feat support, emphasizes damage, and can draw some attention to dish out punishment
i folded the Ruthless Ruffian subclass into Brutal Scoundrel, so it now reads as:
Brutal Scoundrel: You gain a Perk bonus to Sly Attack damage. You can use hammers as if they were light blades.
Brutal Scoundrel: You gain a Perk bonus to Sly Attack damage. You can use hammers as if they were light blades.
that means Hilda could take a pollaxe, which also counts as a hammer, and then use it with Rogue powers that call out requirements or benefits for using a light blade, so the pollaxe + rogue combo works out well that way
Hilda's Advocate ability boosts the damage of her allies, and that might be translated as the Rogue's Sneak in the Attack utility power at level 2, which lets an ally deal the extra damage that she deals as a Rogue
discussion last night about ritual got me thinking about their relation to procedural plots and that reminded me of sailor moon, and i woke up thinking about how that would translate to 4e classes
the larger category of transforming heroes doesnt conform to a single dnd class all that well. sometimes there's martial arts, sometimes not, sometimes there are weapons, sometimes not. the notion of class roles often isnt reflected in super sentai as much as another set of roles
sailor moon as a more specific example does generally conform to the following ideas: theyre using magic, that is (mainly) some kind of energy attack, at a distance, themed around a celestial body with some associated elemental type, using a magical implement (wand)
the procedure of the fights involves weakening the monster through supporting attacks or exposing it through trickery or some strategy, which makes it vulnerable to a finishing strike
while 5e has a bard subclass for the transforming hero, the more specific example of sailor moon seems to match the sorcerer class in 4e in all the respects i listed, moreso than other classes
so while im working on the sorcerer right now im looking at how well that lines up with sailor moon (sailor senshi) specifically; i'd like to support that in a direct way if it feels like it fits naturally
the pattern of needing to lock down an enemy before you can successfully use a finishing strike is distantly related to how the final fantasy tactics black mage is implemented, where their attack spells have a casting time that extends past their turn
so the black mage is a kind of artillery piece that the player aims at a space, and then either has to immobilize the target to ensure a hit, or check that the spell goes off before the intended target has a chance to exit the attack zone
this kind of setup of aiming and waiting isnt much of a thing in 4e. the vast majority of your attacks either go off on your turn or they go off when they're triggered outside of your turn
to bring that back to the sailor moon idea, usagi's finishing attack might be something like that, where she has to wait for the monster to be locked down or else it'll dodge out of the way. 4e has all the tools i need for this built in, with conditions that prevent movement frex
something that im considering that's possible but not really a done thing in vanilla 4e is writing a power so that you use it on your turn (standard action), it's an area burst so you choose an origin square, but then it doesnt go off until the start of your next turn
introducing that delay would give it an artillery feeling that's shared across sailor moon and FFT black mage (and other similar video game tropes)
tbf there is a lot of punching, kicking, throws, and fisticuff mayhem in the sailor moon video games. the beat 'em up is really funny in the contrast between the chill 90s azuba-juuban bgm and the sailor senshi just beating the absolute living shit out of youma in the streets
in the beat 'em up AU all the senshi attend sailor jupiter's sukeban ass-kicking cram school
because SM has been remade/adapted so many times there is a lot more to look at wrt magic attacks than i expected but fortunately there is a fan wiki. so far they seem to be fitting nicely as sorcerer heroic tier milestone powers
the 2 encounters / milestone setup maps well to procedural super sentai/transforming hero episodes where the first encounter is like a skill challenge or other make believe activity & the second encounter is the monster-of-the-week set piece fight
team attacks like those in super sentai and chrono trigger are underrepresented in vanilla 4e. off the top of my head i can only recall a few monsters that do that?
maybe another paraclass via feat that would let you use its powers through you + ally expending a power with the right keyword + each spending a standard action on it? not a combinatoric space i want to explore though. it feels clunky and against the idiom of the game too
interesting because my take on the sailors was that they have in-born powers as cosmic sorcerers, but this is also really cool. maybe a better fit for 5e too? i chose sorcerer for 4e in part because i felt their rules lined up better/more elegant fit https://twitter.com/larpanalysis/status/1201943670087462915
the elemental sorcerer was one of those things that got sorta left as half an idea because it was an essentials mess so im looking at an avatar: the last airbender fan wiki to help me fill out elemental powers. i should probably watch that at some point ha
im doing my best to retain the naming conventions for powers because im adding a lot of new ones and i want to keep a consistent tone but god help me sometimes i am sorely tempted
wrote down an idea for the world warrior class. i just thought of this in bed while i was waking up; idk if i'll use it. it feels a little complicated but it has enough hooks to hang an entire class on. https://pastebin.com/pJAaumhr
watched a recent interview with a musician i liked a long time ago, discussing a new album. they mentioned making a ton of new tracks, only a small number of which made it onto the new album. i listened to the new album and didnt like any of it
whenever i write something new for this project i now think of that interview and album and im drained of all confidence 
