How easy a time are you having with fitting the mood of birthright (pretty close to medieval europe) together with D&D 4th? Looking at it, I thought the differences were too big to reconcile.
The style of combat (slightly manga/anime inspired), the ease of recovery, the broad access to powerful magic (rituals), etc., seems to mesh poorly with Birthright.
I really don't see it as much of a problem. It's still just D&D, the game flavor is provided by me, not the rules structure.
Anime/Manga is just a text fluff thing in the book really. It can be played down fairly easily while still keeping the mechanics of the system, which are quite good imo. Rituals I mistakenly didn't look too heavily into before we started, but am now working to reduce their effects. A lot of that can be restricted just by limiting access. And really, there's not much in rituals wizards couldn't do before anyway -- and there's always one player playing one, even if he's only one of a dozen on the continent.
And ease of recovery, well, that is a bit different. But the world (from a human perspective at least) has always been so heavily weighted towards the clergy that having adequate healing around was never much of an issue. I like that 4th ed makes explicit that Hit Points are conceptual and abstract representations - and not your character truly getting hit by dozens of sword blows and dozens of arrows before worrying. This to me seems more BR than your average 2 or 3.x ed representation would.
I dunno. Other than keeping the races true to BR and banning warlocks, there's nothing in 4th ed I find truly anti-birthright about the rules themselves. Mechanically it's fine, and it's a nice change. I love how truly dominate the martial classes can be, and that's very BR.
It's still the GM's responsibility to provide the setting... so, yeah: it's a low,low magic world... 4th works *vastly* better for playing in a low magic environment than 3.5 which desperately needed magic equipment for non-casters to even remotely compete with their supposedly rarer caster friends. It's a world without a lot of typical D&D monster manual madness, but there's still plenty of foes in the world. It's a world heavily influenced by a distinct mix of mundane and divine, and highly political... it's a world of Men. All just raw flavor, doesn't even need to be adapted, just spun right.
We're enjoying it. And I picked the Giantdowns for the 4th ed setting because in a lot of ways that place is natural for raw adventuring, which lets us really try out 4th ed in a way that sitting in the courts of Anuire all day never would let us.
On the other hand, the new 4th Ed game I started playing in just the other week looks to be a more normal approach to 4th. I suspect we'll soon be weighed down in thousands of pieces of uber kit and calling out our attach powers in game with graphical tracers dancing from our blades. And hell, that's fun too.
It's all about how you pitch the game really. What I really like about 4th is so much of the mechanics is so simple and streamlined your players just don't fret that much about the rules once they learn them. Really frees the DM up to concentrate on story and setting - and frees the players up to concentrate on their characters and roleplaying, not the math. Pretty sure it's one of my favorite RP systems yet from my DM's throne perspective - and since BR is the best RP setting of all time, I can absolutely make those two things come together somehow. It hasn't been hard, just a bit of common sense here and there.
You just have to be stern and put the foot down about Dragonborne.
