With several dozen sessions under my belt, I feel like I’ve got a good understanding of what sorts of feat/power/item/class/ability combinations are “overpowered” in the sense that they make noticeably more powerful characters than already powerful and solidly built characters. These types of characters can really hurt the game, both trivializing the game experience for encounters and making other characters feel left out or almost useless in comparison.

With that in mind, I use several house rules in my game. Normally I shy away from house rules because they often cause unintended consequences in the game or are an attempt to fix an already hopelessly unbalanced game.

I made an exception for 4th edition for a few reasons, however:

1. It feels reasonably balanced!: With several exceptions, the game feels like the designers really put a lot of thought into balancing various classes, feats, and abilities, so house ruling should be able to help!

2. It’s modular: A lot of the problems in 4th edition aren’t problems with the basic system or HUGE inequalities between classes. They’re problems with SPECIFIC feats, items, and powers! It’s much easier to house rule by simply removing things than it is to come up with new rules to take their place.

My house rules are below. General principles are listed first, followed by specific changes:

Danger Areas: If your build takes advantage of one of these qualities then it might be overpowered! I’ll be adding to this section as new combinations occur to me.

Ongoing Damage Rolls: These “fire and forget” or “fire and maintain” abilities are so powerful because not only do represent an extra source of damage beyond what you would normally do every round, but they often end up doing even more damage, since no attack roll is needed.

Multiple Attacks: The simple fact is that as a player progresses in level, the majority of a player’s damage comes from bonuses to the damage roll, not the roll itself. Consider a fairly innocuous at will attack that does 1W worth of damage. By level 11, a typical character is probably adding at least 5 (for their ability) + 3 (for their weapon or implement) on top of that and could easily be adding an extra +2 for weapon focus, extra bonuses from other feats, item bonuses (if allowed), and numerous other bonuses from weapon powers (if allowed). Thus an attack that allows multiple attacks suddenly becomes noticeably more powerful than a similar ability that gives a 2W or 3W damage roll. The thing to keep in mind with ANY power that gives multiple attacks is that every single thing that gives a bonus to damage is applying two or more times to the multiple attack, and that includes increasing the critical hit chance of a weapon! House rule accordingly!
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I like to tinker with the 4th Edition rules, which means I’m always in danger of breaking them. Luckily Rory has an infallible ability to discover broken abilities, which means that I can always pass an idea to him and he can instantly tell me the massively game-breaking implications of my proposed new mechanic.

When Rory’s not around, I use a rubric called the “Is it more powerful than Weapon Expertise, Staff of Ruin or Iron Armbands of Power?”

This feat and these two items are so good that they make it hard for competing feats/items, no matter how cool they are, to get chosen.

Weapon Expertise

It’s pretty well agreed that the Weapon Expertise and similar feats were introduced as a math fix for runaway monster defenses, and that D&D R&D intends that everyone take the feat. Luckily, except at very early levels, everyone has lots of feat slots, so you can take other, more flavorful feats in addition without feeling like you are shooting yourself in the feat. Still, under normal (non-math-fix) circumstances, I’d say that any feat that was a must-have for all characters was clearly overpowered.

Staff of Ruin

Staff of Ruin is a different matter. Every staff-using character should probably use this item. That means that every other staff is obsolete, and can only be taken by perverse players who like to play intentionally suboptimal characters – the half-orc bards among us. Most implements have daily powers, but Staff of Ruin reliably does lots of extra damage on every hit. A +1 staff of ruin that does an extra 1 item damage isn’t so unbalanced, but a +5 staff of ruin, doing 5 enhancement and 5 item damage on every hit, competes well even with many +6 magic staffs.

Not convinced? A staff of ruin is level 23. How much damage is a level 23 wizard with a +5 staff doing with encounter powers? 4d6+Int+5, or around 25 damage to each opponent, possibly with some status effect. Let’s be generous and say that with the other hit effects, a wizard encounter power is worth double its straight damage, or 50 damage. A wizard probably hits each opponent about 60% of the time, so that’s a damage expectation of 30 HP per opponent.

A +6 magic staff adds 1 to damage – let’s call it 51 damage now – and increases the chance to hit to 65%, which translates to an expectation of another 3 or so damage per opponent. So for encounter powers, with generously assessed damage, a staff +6 is worth 4 points of damage more than a staff +5. A staff of ruin +5 beats that by a point.

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