I position myself as something of an expert in 4th edition D&D, but that’s obviously a trick. I don’t remember everything in all books at all times; even if I did remember it, it doesn’t mean I can correlate the contents of my memory at all times. What I offer on this blog is regular writing about the topic of a closed game system where, largely, no new material is being produced. I may have homebrew material for the game (and do, you should check out the Square Fireballs compendium for a bunch of material Fox and I have made) but broadly speaking I don’t speak about 4th edition in terms of what you can add to the game and rather what you can do with the pieces that are already in place.

I do this because I want you, random stranger, to think that you have the same frame of reference to me, and that you don’t need to go do other research to find out what I mean. Even if that means looking up the sourcebooks you, statistically, don’t have any more, or maybe some online compendium or pdf elsewhere, the idea is that you should be able to treat 4th edition as a toybox with a limited range of pieces in it.

This is not the way I think we should engage with 4th edition. I think that there’s a lot of stuff in 4th edition that, through experience, we can refine in the name of giving players better experiences and to erode some of the biases the original game had in its design. I’m not saying there’s a conspiracy to make it so people thought of defenders as ‘big tough characters,’ but there’s an obvious bias and the only way to address the bias is to add things to the game that change that trend.

Particularly, a place where I feel there’s a problem is the shallowness of themes.

How To Be has been a great series to work on through its life on this blog, but its focus on heroic underscores the ways that the early stage of the game has some problems. Not the base game; I think the 4th edition Heroic experience is one of the best low-level Dungeons & Dragons experiences available; your character is tough enough to be able to make some mistakes and Dungeon Masters can make encounters meaningfully different, but you also very crucially feel the limitations of a character lacking for the depth of options in the higher levels.

In the most basic form a level 1 character has a heritage option, which dictates stats and usually some power choices. Then there’s your class option, which gives you power choices which are dedicated to a specific purpose. If you strike, you get powers that are good for attacking. This is your rudimentary sort of A-B building, but you don’t get a lot of choice about how to express anything of your character beyond that basic structure. Two given Rangers who fight in melee are probably going to play a heritage with a good Strength score, and they’re probably both going to take Twin Strike.

(And so is the Bard.)

What the Heroic stage of the game can use to make this first level just a little more interesting is themes. Themes add a whole different layer of character packages to your design, and they don’t all necessarily pull in the same direction. Most of them offer something interesting, but what they offer is something for every different character. Themes are the layer where you’re most likely to do something that sets your Melee Ranger apart from anyone else’s Melee Ranger.

Or they should, at least.

The problem for Themes is that they were a ‘late’ development for 4th edition. Not literally – they first appear in the Dark Sun Campaign Setting, in 2010, 3 years after the edition started, and 5th edition came out 4 years later. Almost squarely the middle, really. But that middle position meant that they weren’t being put through the same paces as the Players Handbook options were, which meant there were less of them, and they weren’t all being made by the same people who made the core rulebooks. A total of 116 themes were put into the Compendium, and of those, fully 64 are from Dragon Magazine. No shame on Dragon Magazine, but the material in the magazine is a bit looser, a bit less refined than the stuff they put in the books.

And this is where the other problem crops up: Most themes aren’t very good.

With 116 themes to look through, it would be hypothetically a problem every time you make a new character to consider the best option for them. The problem is that there are two themes that stand head and shoulders above the others just for being reliable and useful, with everything they offer more or less working easily:

• The Guardian, if you exist in melee at all. Ostensibly a Defender theme, the Guardian can also be great for melee damage dealers, since you can interrupt an attack on anyone to make a free basic melee attack, and if you are dealing with another person who has Guardian, they can stack it on top of yours.
• The Fey Beast Tamer, for anyone where the Guardian isn’t better. The Fey Beast Tamer gives you a second body on the battlefield that can make opportunity attacks, it’s tough enough to block hits and squares, and when you stand next to it you can both use defensive powers to protect it, and you get a bonus based on which one you pick.

There are a few other outsiders. The Sohei for example has value to people who want a big explosive attack. I’ve spoken about the use of the Werebear and the Werewolf, which aren’t great overall, but do offer something unique to a build that can benefit from them, and, importantly, give you a really distinct feel that makes the character feel like they’re not just the same kind of Ranger as anyone else. This is one of the reasons why a variety of Themes is important to me; it needs to be able to make things feel different and reward players for making choices that fulfill their specific thematic vibe.

But I am not by any means an expert in all themes, and this past week I have had a new-to-me-but-still-fifteen-years-or-so-old theme brought to my attention, the Order Adept. The Order Adept is a Theme for people who attended some kind of wizard school, but its most exciting element is that it’s not necessarily for wizards. The level 5 feature is a cool skill bonus, and also, if you’re not a Wizard, you can take Wizard utility powers when you retrain utility powers. Retraining does require you to be a level higher than the level you got the power, of course, so it’s not as free as just having the Wizard Utilities as your, say, Ranger Utilities as well, but it does mean that a level after you get any utility power, you can use your theme power to pick up a Wizard power to replace one of your Ranger powers.

This is not necessarily a very powerful thing. That’s fine. What’s exciting about it is not what this lets you do, but rather the design space it opens up. Multiclassing is a big burden for a character that requires feats; but if you want someone who can be a bit of a Wizard, then this theme lets you use your Utility powers to pick up some Wizard effects. And this is an idea that seems reasonably portable. With one exception (the Paladin), there isn’t really a class that stands out as having remarkably gonzo Utility powers.

It makes me want to start designing more themes; a simple attack power, some small bonuses, and then that little extra feature expanding the opportunities for character building.