This is an idea I've had but never gave it much thought. I wanted to introduce friends to 4th Edition in a way they could handle. So I thought of just freeforming Fourth Edition. Fourth Edition is not at all difficult to learn, but I want the powers to not always be at their maximum potential. IE: Make it more M.A.D, and the PCs actually feel threatened.
I know so far I want to make the PCs choose a monster, obviously I'll limit how high of a level monster they can be. They'll be rewarded for picking weaker monsters by starting off with free tokens. I thought of making tokens to replace XP. They'll need them.
Equipment tokens. (For weapons and other items that will undoutedly break)
Vigor tokens. (Powers. Could be daily, encounter, or at-will)
Industrial tokens. (Improve their stats in some permanent way like +1 cha or HP or something)
Level tokens. (Can "upgrade" powers that would otherwise only be capable of powering up via character level increase or powerpoints)
Yes, I coded "EVIL" on purpose. Because this'll be an evil campaign, but in the completely ridiculous way. The world is in balance, full of rotten little twurps of both the lawful, neutral, and good kind. What drives of an evil man to go neutral? A lust for gold? Power? Or were their hearts just born full of neutrality? So the party members are encouraged to be one of the three evil alignments of 3rd edition D&D. And to it extravently. Theatrics is most important. I don't want people to just be like "huurduur, I kill my team-mates in their sleep". I want them to be like...
Orc: I poisond my team-mates food because they spoke bad about my momma!
Kobold: No we didn't...
Orc: Yes you did! You totally did! The voices in my head told me so!
Devil looking face that vaguely looks like Orc's momma: Well done Orc! Now go poison that innocent little boy's candy too and make momma proud!!!
Tokens could be earned just by them going on encounters and stuff. I'd keep a quota for them to levelup so they can standup to the threats presented to them. (As obviously the more [in]famous they get, the more they'll have to be crazy prepared...) But I'd also introduce tokens for pleasing the DM and have them earn "achievements" like a videogame. Achievements probably named after metal songs or lyrics.
Ie: I want this to be everything Brutal Legend should've been. A bioware type rpg where you get a speech wheel of varying evil alignments, and can have fun leveling your character in abstract ways and earn achievements to showoff to your friends. You know... before you kill them...
Not that killing them is a good idea. As whats the fun in evil if there's noone there to laugh about it with? Or get the enjoyment of disgusting them. Test eachother's resolve! How black is your heart anyway?!
The only trouble is coming up with quests to put them on. I have some old Dungeon magizines that have quests, and I could just tell them to do what they think is best from their evil perspective... For example, one involves a ranger whos gone coocoo and kills people and eats them or whatever. It's about some strange plant that once exposed to, drives the person bonkers and apparently makes them a cannibal. Further investigation proves there are ways to cure the ranger. Just killing the ranger and expecting payment for dealing with the threat is more lazy alignment then good or evil, (again, what drives a man to be neutral?!) obviously they don't want to cure him. Infecting everyone with cannibalism and making everybody crazy is more evil stupid as then you have cannibals chasing after you yelling "yumyum!" and thinking you're a cheeseburger with fries... Lawful evil and maybe neutral evil might interrogate the goblins for answers. And by intterogate I mean break some arms and testicles. So it'll probably take something a bit less heroic in theme for quests...
But then again, thats the thing. The campaign world is generally good where nothing bad ever happens and everyone is either hunkey dorey goodygoods or zero tolerant lawful stupids... So these bad situations are isolated incidents that should encourage them to make things worse...
For starting stats, they'll basically choose a monster and be a carbon copy. But be given a few tokens as reperations to make themselves unique. If a monster is lower level or a minion, he will be given additional tokens at my apparel... Some rules are different...
No. 1: HP does not recover. Instead, you gain HP from different sources. Healing surges, rest, potions, what have you. But you don't recover HP, just gain it.
No. 2: Healing surges do not recover. However, healing surges are not set numbers, but rather dice based boosts to your HP. Healing surges may be different in amount and type of dice rolled.
No. 3: Death does not come right away. Rather then dying when you reach 0HP. You gain a soul scar. The number of soul scars you can possess before actually dying for real is ussually equal to con modifier but can be raised obviously. After you take a soul scar, you return to an amount of HP equal to str+con.
No. 4: All stats contribute equally to the game and therefore enhance M.A.D as you can't predict what stats you'll need and there is no "dump stat".
Strength=Fortitude Defense and Starting HP.
Dexterity=AC Defense+Reflex Defense
Constitution=Starting HP+Soul Scar Threshold
Intelligence=Will Defense+No. of Trained Skills
Wisdom=Reflex Defense+AC Defense
Charisma=Will Defense+Fortitude Defense
You can take the same trained skill more then once, (+5 each time) and obviously modifier bonus for defense stats. Stats will be something like 3d10 take the two best results.
Base Attack Bonus=1d4. Healing Surges=1d4. (Each will start off at 1d4 for simplicity's sake)
Do people see any flaw in this freeform methodlogical mess? Would it be better off being third edition where the rules were broken anyway and monsters can roll their hit die for HP? I was thinking about third edition based abilities too. The metagame would be alot different. For example in 3rd, encounter/daily/at-will would be much less balanced as the levels between spells is so vastly different in scope. As well, 3rd would make the equipment gained much more important then what they could use it with. Tokens become more autonomanous where as in fourth they'll need some of every...
Third could be more versatile with skillpoints too. Something like five per +1. And when everything's treated as a class skill... But I'd limit how many ranks they could have in a skill to something like int score divided by two.