You’ll need to change the XP curve for advancement once characters stop leveling. Their ability to fight higher level monsters (and thus gain more XP) won’t progress at the same rate at all. In E6 for 3rd edition, characters gained a feat for every additional 5000 XP. If you follow the normal XP curve, character advancement will grind to a crawl. Picking a static amount of XP will help things out a lot.

You should consider stopping the level progression at level 6, as E6 does. That will help keep characters from gaining too many hit points and losing their keen sense of mortality. In 4E, levels 21 through 30 simply incorporates an alternative to 3E’s infinite epic level progression into the core rules. E6 doesn’t bat an eye at the Epic Level Handbook. If character’s never reach paragon levels, you don’t have to account for diverse paragon paths or players sniping paths for potent level 11 features. You’ll save yourself a lot of time in the long run. If you don’t like making level 6 the cut off, you could just make it level 10.

Allowing characters to gain powers above their level is viable, but may be tricky. If characters’ upper level is static, but the level of their powers keeps climbing, their damage will spiral upward beyond their defensive capabilities. Also some high level utility powers that effect hit points aren’t balanced for reduced hit point pools. You could create a feat series that allows them gain powers that exceed their level within predefined limits.

A few more circumstantial tweaks may prove necessary. For example, 4E Toughness could go back to it’s 3E roots and allow characters to take the feat multiple times. If characters never gain the benefits of becoming paragon, it will be a sensible change. Characters who want to be really tough should have to work hard to get there. You may also want to take a close look at the effect this system will have on 4E rituals.

My gut feeling is, the closer this adaptation stays to the original E6, the better it will work.

1. Players recover from damage too quickly: It takes days to fully recover from even a minor wound, and weeks or months to recover from a truly grievous wound. In 4E, just take five minutes, pick your lung up off the floor, slap on a band-aid, and burn three or four healing surges. Ooo-ra!!

2. Players are not in any immediate danger from a weapon hit: you’ve got to grind through lots and lots of hit points, even with this system. It’s nearly impossible to assassinate a target of any level with a crossbow unless you crit with a daily. There has to be some possibility for any hit to drop any target if you want “gritty”.

I’m sure that these have een hashed over many times, so I apologize if that’s the case. Just getting back into the game after a several year hiatus. Lots to love and hate about 4E…

-Fletch!

But with 4e a few seconds on the monster builder can turn a 9th level standard monster into a 17th level standard monster, if you want a tougher version, or a 17th level minion if you want to keep its XPV. So this isn’t the big issue it was in 3e, where levelling up monsters was quite a pain.

My thinking: Say you normally level about every 3 sessions, and want to run a Heroic Tier Dark Sun campaign of approximately 60 sessions. The best thing to do then is to halve XP awards, so PCs level up about every 6 sessions so they reach 10th around the end of the campaign. If they level up faster than you expect and reach 10th in say 50 sessions, well then they simply stay 10th for the rest of the campaign.

I suppose it could be fun. I like the idea I think I saw on this site earlier: getting bloodied has lasting effects (scar, limited ability, loss of healing surges forever).

Maxwell

I think it’s a really interesting idea though, and 4E seems like it could be adopted to this style of gritty play. I agree with Copperfield’s assessment of PP’s however, and DMs using E11 might need to “tweak” them to balance them out. Good post!

What about magic items? I’d say, cut the numeric bonus in half. Round down, so level 1-5 items are +0 (granted, makes the level 1 “magic” enchantment useless). This prevents magic item quality from overshadowing character abilities.

What about the damage of higher-level powers? You might want to reduce power damage, otherwise you get an unusual curve where damage starts out-pacing hit points. My gut says, reduce damage of level 16+ powers by 1[W] or 1dX, and powers of level 26+ by 2[W] or 2dX. Many of those powers are still going to be super awesome even with the reduced damage.

Alternatively, if you want to avoid the more over-the-top epic powers, just impose a level cap on powers. Say, level 20. So at level 23 when you get to replace an encounter power, you get rid of your 3rd level encounter power, but then must choose a level 17 power or lower, since level 23 powers are off limits.

-The Gneech