BlakeK's page

4e is reasonably balanced (in terms of both classes & encounters), which makes it easy to run under a variety of styles without much modification. It'd probably be easier to go into the styles it doesn't work so well with, but I'm afraid that might be taken the wrong way... ;)

If you play 4e more or less as it's presented, without giving any thought to what you're trying to get out of it, you'll probably end up falling into one of two styles, depending on what you pay attention to:

1) Tactical: If you focus on combat, mechanics, and not on character much at all, you can approach the game as a series of tactical challenges. Works great if you like that sort of thing. The rules are easy to learn, yet there's a good deal of depth to it.

2) Heroic Fantasy: Really, almost 'Action Movie' type heroic fantasy. If you start to pay even a teeny bit of attention to what the characters, monsters, powers, etc are representing, you can't help but starting to notice how many 'bits' or 'tropes' from the genre you're hitting. The characters feel an heroic sort of tough right out the gate, everything from basics, like second wind, to higher level powers like Bolt of Genius, will make you flash to a scene from a movie.

Rather than go into all the directions you could go, from there, I think it'd help to look at aspects of the game and how using them different ways can get you to different styles & genres. (Oh, and I'm largely ignoring Essentials to focus on what was unique about 4e, Essentials muddies things a bit.)

Pacing: Some styles, you want to have the party fighting desperately, all night long, others, you want them to have maybe one encounter a week on a long journey. Unmodified, 4e handles both extremes with a little consideration from the DM in encounter building. 4e's AEDU classes are quite powerful in 1-combat days, but have enough encounters, at-wills, and healing to handle quite a large number of less deadly encounters 8-16, perhaps. Thing is, they're all like that, so there's no instant class imbalance if you tend heavily one way or the other. With just one conceptual modification, you can have even more control over pacing: consider an 'encounter' a 'scene' and a 'day' a 'story,' and you can have standard-issue 4-6 encounter 'days' (whether they're 6 hours or 7 days long, in game) all campaign long. Same trick works with a lot of resource-attrition games.

Magic level: D&D defaults to a wildly high level of magic, of course, and 4e is no exception. 4e, without any homebrewing, however, lets you eschew it if you like. You flip a switch on one optional rule: inherent bonuses. The players choose non-magical classes - Fighter, Ranger, Rogue, Warlord. You give out few or no magic items. And your campaign sails along with few noticeable issues. (One thing you might notice is that minions are a little nastier in large numbers in the absence of a controller.) If you want 'low' rather than 'no' magic, you can allow magical classes in as multiclasses - including Paragon Multi-classing. Even the 'low-magic' world with high-magic PCs - that is, few magic items, but no restrictions on PC casters - works, with the removal of a few rituals - it's not even that imbalanced, since martial characters aren't all that dependent on items to make up their shorfall relative to casters.

Tone: This is where it gets harder. 4e has a fairly light or action-hero hero tone to it. You can take it downright comedic or anime pretty easily. But, while you can ratchet things up, challenge-wise, the PCs will still feel very heroic, just desperation heroics. Dragging 4e down to a grittier feel takes some re-jiggering. Reducing surges is an obvious first step - both the number of them, and the amount they heal are possibilities. A more extreme option is doing away with them, entirely: any power that says 'spend a surge to recover hps' instead grants a small number of temp hps (like level+CON mod + whatever the power says), only non-surge and very long rests actually restore hps. Trimming powers may also be appropriate - or giving them consequences or limitations. Things like: only 1 daily/encounter, or using a daily consumes a surge, or rolling at the start of combat to re-charge encounter powers used in the previous combat. Extending the length of 'rests' could have a similar effect. If a 'short' rest is a full night's sleep, for instance, and a long rest a whole week or month off, for instance, then wounds linger. You can also make wounds linger - or even fester or debilitate - by adapting the mechanics of the Disease Track to nasty, debilitating, or literally diseased wounds. Fun stuff. Again, by modifying the game at the base level (surges, rests, rules regarding power recharges), you avoid introducing any class imbalances, as all classes get impacted to a similar degree.

Combat Emphasis: While D&D has always been a very combat-oriented game, 4e does give you a few tools that can be leveraged to make it less so. They're really just jumping off points, though. The first, and most significant is the Skill Challenge - finally revised, updated & errata'd into something useable two years before the game went out of print in the 'Rules Compendium' softbound. Skill Challenges are better than nothing - they give the DM a structure to judge how difficult a non-combat challenge is, how much exp it's worth, and a straightforward mechanical way to keep everyone involved (everyone rolls). Unfortunately, while having everyone roll several times is a little more engaging and less story-blocking than having one person make one roll with everything hinging on it, it's still about as exciting as a combat where no one gets to do anything but roll to hit. To shift the emphasis away from combat, you need to embellish on that. A well-done skill challenge can be like a game-within-a-game, and quite entertaining, but it takes some real effort by the DM to frame it. The other area D&D has always done non-combat is spells - in 4e, they're Rituals that don't use up your combat spells (but do use up gp-equivalent resources), so you can run combat vs non-combat in whatever proportion you want, without badly imbalancing either as a result. Rituals also take long enough to cast and are expensive enough that they can't easily obviate other ways of approaching a non-combat challenge. Finally, there are resources you can use to track success/failure/consequences outside the combat timeframe: losing surges in place of taking damage, action points, milestones, gp and gp-equivalents like components/residuum (and Dark Sun's survival-days worth of supplies), and the aforementioned Disease track.

Optimization/Customization: 4e doesn't give intentional 'rewards for system mastery' but it is pretty choice-rich and player-empowering as presented. Because perfect balance is impossible, and players do have a lot of choice & agency, system masters can squeeze a noticeable, but not usually game-breaking advantage out of it. Because the mechanics are fairly transparent and consistent, it's also amenable to 're-skinning' for customization purposes. The DM who wants to de-emphasize these styles has to take more of the game under his control. The easiest and most obvious step is just not allowing make/but of magic items, so they're DM-placed only (the players can give you a 'wish list' if they want, you're under no obligation to use it). Then there's some technically optional areas you can ban or restrict: Themes and Backgrounds. Hybrids. Paragon Paths & Epic Destiny (yeah, they're optional - players aren't even technically obliged to take them). Races are simple enough to ban (or have a short list of allowed races). Banning classes is also pretty safe, as long as you leave at least one of each role (and even Controller can be dispensed with if you're careful with encounter design) - for instance, you can focus a campaign by allowing only classes of a specific Source or sources. Conversely, feats can be a PiTA to trim, because there's so many of them, and a few classes /really/ need certain 'stealth-errata' feats or 'feat taxes.'