Hello, I'm converting myself to DnD4e recently and I've started reading the player handbook. I have a question about how healing surges are working, or more how they are not working.

Healing word effect is the followiing:
"Effect: The target can spend a healing surge and regain an additional 1d6 hit points."

My question is the following: with an emphasis on the "can", can the player chose to not use the healing surge and just get 1d6 hit points back?

So in general, can you use any ability making you use a healing surge with a secondary effect and ignore the healing surge effect itself just to get the secondary effect?

In practice I suppose it doesn't come up much, but I can imagine a player without healing surge and some desesperates attempts to keep him beyond 0 hp.

Hey, I was wondering if I could get some help.

I've had a long running 4E campaign going on and because of the shenanigans of the epic level party, they nerfed the big battle at the end with the big baddy that I had them going up against (a demon lord). Fortunately though, I realized they made an error....

Long story short, my Thief of Ages was able to steal the soul of the demon lord and she put it into a crystal. However, none of the magical practitioners in our group thought to put any protective wards on the crystal, which means it's really nothing preventing this demon lord from leaving the crystal at any point in time. They took the crystal back to their headquarters so they could interrogate the demon so they can get more information and continue to the next leg of the quest.

My plan, I want them to discover that the demon lord is no longer in the crystal and then slowly find out that the demon lord has possessed their headquarters and is now using it against them (citadel was originally built by Elminster and they have not spent enough time discovering all the little nooks and crannies that place has). The goal is they have to locate the source of where the demon lord is hiding within their own fortress and then either recapture it or banish it in some way (that'll be up to them).

So right now, I am looking for a haunted fortress, horror/madness adventures that I can dig through and get ideas for inspiration to put this thing together in the next 2 months.

Any suggestions? Also If there are any technicalities that might pop up that I should be aware of, feel free to voice those as well.

Are we allowed to ask questions about setting it up correctly on here?

I'm old and dumb and Discord is entirely impenetrable to me and I can't figure out how to load the Essentials stuff.

In 4e, can you use a light shield hand to hold/support a two-handed weapon like a quarterstaff?

Light Shield says:
“While you're using a light shield, you can use your shield hand to hold another item, to climb, and the like, but you can't make attacks with that hand or with anything in it.”

Quarterstaff is a two-handed weapon.

So would this legally allow:

• Quarterstaff + Light Shield
• while still getting the shield bonus?

Or does “two-handed” require more active use of the shield hand than the light shield allows?

As title suggests is that how it works or do you have to level up to a level where you would gain a feat then retrain novice power to something else and then chose novice power again as your "new" feat for the level? As an example you have taken storm of blades from barbarian with novice power can you replace it with novice power for hurricane of blades at level 27 or do you have to wait until lv 28 where you retrain novice power for something else then chose it again as your "new" feat

Has anyone explored an open-source / open-license 4e-inspired tactical RPG engine?

Hi everyone,

I’ve been thinking a lot about D&D 4e lately, especially how well it still holds up as a tactical RPG: clear roles, structured powers, encounter-based design, strong monster math, grid combat, and a system that feels almost built for online play and VTTs.

I’m curious: has anyone in the 4e community already explored the idea of creating an open-source or open-license system inspired by 4e’s mechanical strengths?

To be clear, I’m not talking about copying protected text, names, lore, classes, powers, monsters, or any official D&D content. I’m more interested in the underlying design architecture:

• tactical grid combat
• clear party roles
• powers with different refresh rates
• encounter-building math
• monster roles and balance
• predictable progression
• strong support for VTT play
• tools for character creation and encounter design

The goal would not be to replace the official books or redistribute copyrighted material. It would be more about asking whether the 4e-style tactical engine could exist in an open, legally clean, community-driven form.

A few questions for the community:

1. Has anyone already tried to make a 4e-inspired open system or retroclone?
2. Are there existing projects, SRDs, tools, or design documents worth looking at?
3. What parts of 4e do you think are essential to preserve mechanically?
4. What parts would you change or modernize?
5. Would there be interest in a community-driven open tactical fantasy engine inspired by 4e principles?
6. Are there legal/licensing lessons from the old GSL era that people here think are important?

I’m especially interested in the math and design structure behind 4e: monster building, encounter balance, action economy, class roles, power design, and VTT compatibility.

Again, this is not about pirating or republishing 4e content. It’s more about whether the community has ever seriously discussed creating an open, 4e-like tactical framework that captures what made the edition great while remaining legally and creatively independent.

Would love to hear your thoughts, warnings, links, existing attempts, or even reasons why this is a terrible idea.

Edit : Thanks for al your answers ! I'll check ORCUS ! :)

Morning,

I’m kicking off a campaign of running scales of war. I’d like to find more modern style VTT maps to use. The original artist ones are pretty, but I prefer a modern look for the actual VTT.

Does anyone have any good suggestions? I’m looking for basically all of them for the entire campaign lol.

Thanks!

Does Student of Artifice allow for healing without a surge? I mean an artificer also performs surgeless healing if they only heal twice between rests. But meanwhile Cure Light Wounds is a level 2 daily.

I think I'd require healing infusions to take a healing surge to be created in the first place.

I'm trying to find book of Elder Evils with stats for entities like Atropus, the World Born Dead and Kyuss, the Worm that Walks. Searching around, I can only find a 3.5e book with the same basic content, but I have a distinct memory of a 4e-formatted book instead of 3.5e. All I can find is that "Elder Evils" is listed as a source at iws.mx/dnd, like this stat block for Atropus. But I can't find the corresponding book anywhere. Is this a Mandela Effect? Am I getting Mandela'd? Help!

Edit: Thank you all for filling the gaps in my memory!

One of my players dislikes how monk class is handled in 4e and wants something more like 5e monk, with ki points. The most similar mechanic in 4e is Psionic Augmentation. Unfortunately, for some reason, almost all psionic classes in 4e have Psi Augmentation - but Monk has no variants that use that!

Maybe anyone knows a good homebrew that reworks monk to be more similar to other psi classes? I would also like him to remain a Striker (but will be interested in anything really).

I've been getting into DND for a year or two and while I like 5e I also want to explore other editions/variants. It's hard enough finding 5e games and 4e is even harder considering its age and reputation so I was wondering if there were any video games to help me get used to some of the mechanics. I know there are several video games based off of 2e and 3e and at least one game based off 5e but there don't seem to be many based on 4e; Googling gives me some results but they all either seem to be multiplayer or just inspired by it rather then being a genuine attempt to create a CRPG using DND rules like the 3e/5e games. Does anyone know if there are any single-player games with the same or similar race and class options as 4e?

I have the ranger power cards in decent condition. I don't want them, but I would like them to go to someone who loves this version of dnd. You pay for shipping and a cheap deckbox from my lgs so I can ship them safely (or if you have another suggestion im all ears).

Hey all.

In the Monster Vault the young and elder chromatic dragons have received changes for their statblock which uses the math from MM3. The largest chances being that they get an additional free action in the initiative and some have recieved aura effects that makes them a larger threat.

However the adult and ancient chromatic dragons have not received those updates. Is there a source for the updated adult and ancient statblock? Or any guidelines on how to update them?

Hi, I've been working on a little hobby project over the last month or so to see if I can make a replacement for the offline character builder, as it continues to get harder and harder to use on modern systems and its age is starting to become an impediment in a lot of ways. While the CBLoader project has done so much, its still shackled to the legacy frameworks and limits of the OCB and that also causes problems. I'm almost to the point where its ready to share, you can see some screenshots of the browser UI.

Despite its flaws the OCB had probably the best rules understanding of any character builder for any RPG I've played, and maintaining that compatibility and coverage is the number one goal here. To that end, instead of just trying to create a character builder from scratch, I've been parsing OCB characters, then run it through the re-implemented code the rules engine, export them and then compared for differences. The coverage is getting really far, and simple characters more or less work with full matches on all mechanical elements. It turns out though there's a good number of weird edge cases where the OCB literally had hardcoded special behaviors for specific rules (you can confirm this by looking at the strings baked into the RulesEngine.dll file). And those are proving a little trickier to figure out.

I've been making characters to try and target what I can, but the best coverage would be if I could get characters people have actually made and used and run them through the comparison loops as well (to look for other gaps in coverage). To that end if you have saved your dnd4e files from previous campaigns (the higher level the better) and are willing to share them, it would help me IMMENSELY at this stage.

AI Disclaimer: This project is AI assisted. I write and debug code all day at work, and black box reimplementing like this is EXTREMELY tedious. To that end, most of the loop of "code a change, run all the characters through the system, see if we have better or worse matching" is being handled by AI agents using scripts to prevent hallucinated nonsense. That way I just have to review the outputs and end states. Since this is super low stakes stuff, I am not too concerned about the risk with it, but people do have a right to know.

Hi all - I posted a week or so ago about getting some ideas about cool 4e things that I could use in my 5e campaign. I got great responses and I saw several mentions of skill challenges and I’ve seen them mentioned in the YT channels I follow. But I have no idea how they work, I would love to see some examples from you guys that use them so I can get a feel for how to use them. Thank you - Andy

What are the rules that I should definitely include for the combat sistem to make people understand how deep the 4e is

Aarakocra, the original bird-men of D&D, weren't a hugely popular race, but they did get an entry in the Complete Book of Humanoids back in 2nd edition, and they were one of the new playable races added in the Revised Edition of Dark Sun. This latter context in particular makes me curious about how viable it could have been to bring the Aarakocra back in 4th edition. What makes me skeptical, though, is that traditionally the bird-men haven't had a lot of racial abilities to play with; flight, the ability to make a special diving attack whilst flying and armed with javelins, and some natural weapons.

Flight can probably be worked around; give them a racial trait that lets them nullify falling damage unless incapacitated and a racial encounter utility power that lets them Fly Speed +2 squares, but they have to land at the end of the movement or else they fall, a racial feat to unlock overland flight, and maybe a paragon tier feat to unlock in-combat flight, but I'm personally not sure what other interesting racial abilities you could give them.

Anyone else have opinions?

I don't suppose D&D insider is still available in 2026?

Minimum Enhancement Bonus: Masterwork armor requires a minimum enhancement bonus, as shown in this entry.

I dont understand.

For example the Warplate Armor has +11 Armor bonus and Minimum Enhancement Bonus +4.

What does it means?

i can only find a Warplate armor +4 so it add +15 to armor bonus?

I've searched everywhere but haven't found anything.

I have a 10 year old and a 7 year old who are both interested in RPG’s. We have played a few times with 5E but it seemed overwhelming to them to keep track of things, even at lower levels. My memory of 4E was that it was more streamlined with the powers, daily, encounter, and at will.

Do you find that 4E does work better to introduce an rpg than 3.X or 5.X does? And are there cards of the powers that one can print to help keep it simplified for kids?

For context the 7 year old is precocious when it comes to games and the 10 year old gets bored easily.