While not the most active here (mostly due to detesting straight DnD in 3.X), I was fortunate in getting my 4th ed DnD books early (up to now I had used AGoT with some modifcations for Birthright).
Here is some thoughts for BR 4e
Warlocks need to be replaced or removed, they don’t fit slightly.
Eladrin’s Fey Step actually reminds me a bit of the halfling abilities.
Human subraces could get a +2 to what they used to get a +1 to, but detracts minorly from the ‘good at everything specalist at nothing’ that they push for 4e Humans.
Blood Abilities
With the increase in feats gained in 4e, it Could be possible to use feats to simulate blood abilities, make extensive feat chains. In fact having 4 tier chain (like how Multiclassing works) is fairly reasonable. Each feat could replace an ability with blood power from the feat (or enhance an exsisting ability).
Another solution is to not worry about it and more or less bring back the method in 2e. Balance while its still there is less ‘everything must equate’ its more of a ‘everyone must be useful.’
Just In case you missed my first/introductory post: Hi, my name is Pablo! Nice to meet you all.
I would very much like to help in this effort, since I love Birthright and Im really liking the look of 4th Edition. Still, I have very little time to devote to this, so I will contribute with my 2 cents whenever I can.
Since I´m already at this, I have a first idea/thought to share: I believe it will be really hard to come up with powers/feats that run smoothly with 4E mechanics. They have playtested this system for months, and even before the books were on the streets, people started finding loopholes and exploits. And we are just looking at the core rule book, with tons of splatbooks coming.
I believe that it might be better to completely separate the blooded mechanics from the core mechanics: let´s make the blooded abilities matter only on realm level, or on army battles and such. It will save us a lot of headaches trying to figure balanced powers/feats, and we might even have them invalidated with further 4E development. In this a way we will “futureproof” this unique Birthright mechanics for when a 4.5th, 5th and 6th editions come out.
Personally, I was never much into 3x editions, so I will gladly wok from 2nd edition sources. Still, it would be a shame not to take advantage of the tons of work people made to do the 3x conversion.
Mhhh, you still would have Regents and scions, deciding the fate of their nations with their rulling and their blood abilities. It is stil quite unique. You just would not have blooded abilities on normal “party” gaming.
Birthright is different things for different people. My campaign is purely adventuring these days, but the Seeming/Blood abilities etc all play a significant part of the story and do influence the PC actions.
And we generally do not do regent things at all. As far as the party knows, there are no regents in the party, just agents of regents. And not all party members are blooded.
So blood abilities should still be able to used at the adventure/encounter level. But I like the idea of some abilities having different affects at different levels. For example, diplomacy may give the character alertness about the cultural tendencies of a community which they enter. This could help them 1) talk to a town official (per encounter) 2) be generally well received by people at a market/in a village (per day) 3) get a new treaty (domain level).
Or when you take feats to swap powers for blood abilities (a tree for each derivation) you get also some minor effect for domain play. Maybe not at heroic level, but it could be a possibility in paragon or epic levels.
Here we go again…brings back memories of various 3E conversions.
What I’d like to see is a ‘quick and dirty’ 4E conversion published fairly quickly - that tries to keep as close to 4E as possible, even if it means ‘changing’ BR.
But I’d also like to see a more fleshed-out 4E BIRTHRIGHT, where as much of the flavor of BR is preserved, even if it means introducing new concepts to 4E.
Not only do we need a 3-4 conversion, but a direct 2e to 4e conversion, since the core materials and source inspiration is 2nd edition. I don’t think I’ve written a stat block in six months, since it seems pointless to convert a character from 2 to 3, only as 4 dawns.
While acceptance of 3rd Edition over 2nd Edition was by far the great majority, I think that many people will stay with 3rd Edition, so it seem a little silly just to abandon everything 3E simply because of the genesis of 4th Edition.
When 3rd edition came out, people all talked of sticking with 2nd edition, which was the edition the setting was written in. I expect the same now. In fact I think the barrier from 2nd to 3rd was higher, because of the fact that BR is written in 2e. Plus, new people who happen on BR are far more likely to be playing the current edition than playing in some vestigial edition.
Agreed. And by the time any real fruit is available from the project it will be about the time many stalwart 3E players begin to dabble into/research 4E a little more heavily (18-24 mo).
I haven´t received my books yet (being in South America means I will have to wait some weeks to get them ), but from what I read in En World and other forums, the 4E DMG has pretty good and clear rules to build and customize almost everything. In this respect, it seems that the numbers-sytem in 4E is much more solid and balanced, having clear guidlines to correlate and compare things.
Also, from what I read, it is pretty pointless to build NPCs using PC´s building methods. As opposed to 3e, where everything is comparable rules wise to everything else, 4E is much more “pc oriented”, being the minions rules the most clear example of it. So translating important NPCs and monsters (like the everpresent Gorgon), should be quite easy.
By “conversion,” do you mean converting the classes, characters and monsters, monsters, equipment, skills and feats, spells, and bloodlines? In other words, the adventure-level stuff?
Or do you mean “converting” the realm-level play rules?
It seems to me that only the adventure-level stuff needs a hard-and-fast conversion, and that this should actually be pretty easy.
Any revision to realm-level play rules should be done carefully and given an appropriate amount of time to incorporate input and changes that will make game play better. In fact, no revision of these rules seems necessary for 4e, though we may now have played with BRCS long enough to identify and make some improvements on that basis.
I must say Im not familiar with 3x realm rules. As for your question, 4E has some really cool mechanics like skill challenges, which would be great to integrate into domain rules.
The skill challenges require multiple rolls and successes to determine if something is achieved and to what extent it is achieved–similar in some ways to the White Wolf system. Incorporating this aspect of skill challenges would be fine for small tabletop RPGs where the addition of many extra rolls isn’t a big deal. It would, however, be crippling for large games, particularly PBEMs. If realm rules revision goes this route, then we would definitely need to create a separate set of rules for the PBEM community and games with large numbers of players.
The other aspect of skill challenges that I’m aware of is just assigning them levels of difficulty and appropriate XP. This could indeed be derived into a formula for determining XP for succeeding at realm level actions. For instance, perhaps Ruling a level 3 holding to a level 4 holding is adjusted to be an adequate level 4 challenge, thereby earning the appropriate XP. Realm actions would act as either additional encounters, or have the multiplier effect akin to multiple monsters of the same level. Then again, it could be argued that regents should only gain XP for those actions they are personally involved in, which (depending on how you interpret Realm actions) would keep it limited to a single action for a single holding.
I’m pretty sure Wizards has stated 3e can’t be converted to 4e and that the conversion was something they didn’t even want to try. Things in 4e are the way they wanted to get an easier and more balanced system, no matter if on 2e or 3e they were that way or not (for example Dragons don’t have spells. And they killed several other “sacred crows” in the process).
So more than “Conversion” I would call it plainly Birthright 4e: how the concept X (domain actions, bloodline,…) from Birthright is expressed in 4e no matter how it was expressed in older editions.
Totally agree on this. We should use 2nd edition as source and inspiration and build things using 4E system and paradigm.
It just came to me that it will be perfectly reasonable to add a “power source” to the BR setting: Blood. Just as “Martial” fuels the cool fighter moves and “Arcane” fuels the wizard´s magic, “Blood” can fuel blooded abilities, being either adventuring or domain powers.
Or we could just work on feats, and ignore the above.
), but from what I read in En World and other forums, the 4E DMG has pretty good and clear rules to build and customize almost everything. In this respect, it seems that the numbers-sytem in 4E is much more solid and balanced, having clear guidlines to correlate and compare things.