Delays and Progress

The weekend was a busy one, between a party and a D&D game to run.  The past couple days have been a small Hell of fatigue and poor health.  The game went fairly well, all things considered.  I'm considering a table "lose one turn" penalty for when a player causes serious problems.  During an encounter, the player's character would effectively be considered stunned until the end of their next turn.  Something like that.  Hopefully I won't need to implement it, but it was necessary this last session.

I completely forgot to test implementing the Swift Action Points rule, but I think things ran pretty well over all.  I didn't have thing planned as well as I might like and really need to place extra effort on considering things like, perhaps, creating a disease tract for spending a certain amount of time in raw sewage.  (The encounters took place in a sewer.)

In the meantime, I had the thought to attempt porting some Diablo material to 4th Edition, now that I'm more familiar with the game than I was when I last ran a session of this campaign.  First things first: aura powers for the paladin.  Here's a first draft attempt at establishing the aura keyword:

Auras
     Auras are tied to utility powers which have the aura keyword. Every aura power is a burst power which creates a zone. That zone is centered on a creature or an object and moves with the creature or object. Any one creature or object can only have one aura active on it at a time, and can only benefit from one aura power at a time.
     For example, should a creature be standing in a square that is covered by two overlapping zones, that creature must choose which benefit to gain, rather than gaining the benefits of both. In addition, any player who uses an aura power cannot use another aura power until after the original power’s effects have ended.

I've put more work into creating the aura powers themselves.  It's an interesting thing to try and downgrade the overpowered skills from Diablo II into something that can fit into a D&D game (or at least, a 4th Edition game).  I think I have the powers' concepts laid out fairly well, though I haven't done any rigorous balancing work yet.  It's a tricky thing.  Of course, none of this will be publishable, but it could be useful for the campaign I'm running and for practice.  Who knows: if I start creating material that's really satisfying and writing some decent flavor for it, I might consider pitching an article or two for D&D Insider.