I would use the following:

- Bloodied is not a condition status for being intimidated;
- Bonuses against fear applies;
- An intimidated subject becomes Weakened (save ends);
.
All the rest remaining the same.

This turns the skill check still useful, and eliminates the save or die problem.

If / when I run a 4th ed game, I’ll be houseruling Intimidate to make it useful, but not overpowered. Also, adding more Feats. The list I saw available made me a little disappointed in the lack of options.

In my experience, power optimization and role-playing are orthogonal. The one doesn’t have much impact on the other, certainly less that the drift the GM brings to the game. If the GM is running the game in a very fiddly, technical way, the optimization elements will be in the foreground; if he’s not, they don’t, but they can still be there.

Amber… is a thing. I’m very hesitant to draw conclusions or project trends based on Amber. It’s a weird duck.

You can flop on your rear as often as you like. You can only get your powers recharged ‘every now and then’, which is just as much a hack as the ‘wizards get their spells back every night’ rule.

Since characters live in a self consistent world, you do need some flavor text, and to accept up front that hit points, integral stats, action points, initiative dice, encounter powers, and so on, are all things that need a flavor text wrapper. Create those, and the rest is just how you track the die rolls.

On another note, power optimization does not seem positively correlated with role playing in any of the groups I have sat in on or run. Of course, our group has found Amber diceless to work out well. Part of the flow of that game is explicit buy-in on balance, and a requirement that players create flavor text themselves.

Scott

I’m onboard with a number of your other comments, especially the flight issue. They state this stuff about how the various tiers of play should feel, keep to those ideas with the powers, then violate them with the equipment (in this case, the hippogriff). Seems kinda dumb to me.

Yeah, I expect to have a notebook full of house rules if I run this one. Then again, I usually do, no matter what game I play.

About the suspension of disbelief thing, in a later comment I think you have it right when you said “this is D&D”. Whatever crazy thing you want to throw in you damn well should be able to, and with all the easy acceptance and enthusiasm as an obsessive “Buffy” fan when the show was fresh. Suspend disbelief. Do it now. Do it with mind boggling idiocity. Do it like you’ve just spent $40 a book to be able to play a game about being a hero in a supernatural world. Otherwise, maybe you should just start reading biographies.

In short, my disbelief only applies to the real world.

It’s also fairly easy to get a Cold Descriptor weapon, and this feat would apply to those attacks as well.

However the real win here is going to be attacks with the Radiant descriptor for Paladins. Big, big damage and a lot of late game foes with vulnerabilities.

I think the real issue with the system is that it is now almost impossible to consider a character in a vacuum. My Dragonborn Warlord went Tactical because our party has no Defenders, so I need to be able to get the Strikers in and out of melee quickly, and control where the enemy is. On paper the Inspiring Warlord looks more attractive, but without a Fighter or Paladin and the party has another Leader (cleric) to add more healing, so it’s a matter of overlapping and stacking abilities and boni.

Anything I can do to grant the Rogue Combat Advantage means that much more damage in a round.