I have fallen head over heels in love with 4th edition. I hope you and your gaming crews are having the same amount of fun that our crew is having. The shock value with what each monster or creature subgroup can do has been amazing. I highly recommend to DMs the Young Black Dragon, Goblin Hexer & Chokers to anyone looking for fun low-level monsters that will create moments that everyone will remember. I have had animated statues recommended to me and I cannot wait to use them. I can list more monsters for everyone but that just becomes an un-fun laundry list. What are some things you have seen, in terms of monsters/traps/hazards, that have created those wonderful moments for your PCs?

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auronn actually blew the hexer's head off with a critical eldritch blast magnified by a curse (while blind). marinn was busy taking down the last goblin warrior.

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One distinction I'm trying to make in my work on this project is to avoid overlapping it with house rules. I'm working on a system conversion, rather than a house rules type thing. For example, when I post my skills conversion, it's without thought to fixing things like the Diplomacy problem. That's a house rule, not a system thing...yet.

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I've been asked to give some Design Notes for my conversions, so here goes.

Skills
The first thing I mention in the text is simplification. The sheer number of skills present in 3.x means that it's not possible to cover them all with an average party, or really to even cover a broad enough range to be able to meet all the challenges an adventure might throw at them. I'm not saying a party should necessarily be good at everything, but adventure writers used skills that only 1 party in 5 might have access to, like Knowledge (the planes).

The problem is that most classes didn't get a lot of skill points, and they generally had to spend them on "class-mandatory" skills or risk falling behind the DC-curve adventures took into account. After all, why have 4-6 ranks in a skill when you're trying to hit DC 30? Rogues were even worse even though they had more skill points than everyone else, because they were *expected* to be the Open Lock/Disable Device/Spot/Listen/Hide/Move Silently/Appraise/etc. etc. experts.

Skill System as a Group Resource
Lots of people have house-ruled things like Notice (Listen, Spot) and Stealth (Hide, Move Silently), but that didn't go far enough in my opinion. The D&D skill system is not attempting to model the real world, it needs to model fantasy adventuring, research/knowledge, and NPC interactions. A D&D party should have a reasonable chance to be skilled at almost anything involved in one of those three pursuits. Sure, some parties will be too heavy in some areas and light in others, but a skill system needs to provide enough flexibility that the party has a chance to do the highest amount of cool things possible in each adventure.

Therefore, even though skills are selected individually and help define a character, the system should actually be worried about the entire group's efficacy rather than a single character.

More in the next post...

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