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The 4E Dark Sun Campaign Setting book is like the best 4E book. I love the themes in there, especially Escaped Slave (for my favorite power ever: Who is Master Now). Too bad it's out-of-print and goes for $50+ on ebay because everyone who has a copy doesn't want to sell it.
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Sep 6, 2013 19:19
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I got my copy (with map) for like twelve bucks through Craigslist. A guy was selling a bunch of 4e books, and I got an armful for super cheap. You can still find deals out there.
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Sep 6, 2013 19:26
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kingcom posted:I think the party makeup stuff is probably some of the dumbest parts of DnD in general. I mean 2 people playing the exact same class/build not working fine but the game requiring the group spread from 4e or the 'must have healer' for other editions is so nonsensical and just seems to create scenarios where someone is playing something they dont enjoy because they were last to the table. This is one of those things that makes it extremely clear that DnD would be best played by a single player against a computer. Having to make the tough choice between a few players taking levels in a healer class or dropping a damage dealer completely in lieu of a Cleric is a lot different than "Sorry Ted, you can play a Bard next campaign"
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Sep 6, 2013 20:03
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So it looks like they'll be streaming another session at 2. Have these been worth watching after the first one or is it just more "Half the party is stunned" broken up with "Let's sit in the loving market until someone rolls an 18."?
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Sep 6, 2013 21:18
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kingcom posted:I think the party makeup stuff is probably some of the dumbest parts of DnD in general. I mean 2 people playing the exact same class/build not working fine but the game requiring the group spread from 4e or the 'must have healer' for other editions is so nonsensical and just seems to create scenarios where someone is playing something they dont enjoy because they were last to the table. 4e generally worked fine with random makeups. You could easily have two leaders or three strikers or whatever. The notion that you had to have exactly one of each with no duplications was basically a product of optimizer nerds sperging out about playing "correctly". You could even play leaderless but I can't imagine anyone wanting to, since leaders in 4e are basically the most fun classes. C'mon cleric, artificer, bard, ardent, runepriest, shaman, goddamn motherfuckin warlord... they're all really really good. Well, ardent is a weird design space and runepriest needed some support, but it's a great set of classes. And parties with two of them were ridiculously good. Edit: Already had that same argument in this thread. Not a productive area of discussion. theironjef fucked around with this message at 21:35 on Sep 6, 2013 |
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Sep 6, 2013 21:29
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Razorwired posted:So it looks like they'll be streaming another session at 2. Have these been worth watching after the first one or is it just more "Half the party is stunned" broken up with "Let's sit in the loving market until someone rolls an 18."? They're boring and tedious. They barely engage with the system or use the mechanics, everyone seems kind of lethargic and it's just bad all around.
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Sep 6, 2013 21:40
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One guy was apparently literally falling asleep during all of the first three sessions. I'm up for some more snarking about it.
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Sep 6, 2013 21:52
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2PM PST? That's pretty much right now, isn't it? Here's the chatroom from last time if anyone doesn't have it. e: Or is daylight savings time playing me for the fool once again? Splicer fucked around with this message at 22:08 on Sep 6, 2013 |
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Sep 6, 2013 22:06
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Mikan posted:They're boring and tedious. They barely engage with the system or use the mechanics, everyone seems kind of lethargic and it's just bad all around. Basically this. It's only good for the snark you can wrangle out of it. (Also good to see you rockin the Kanji again, mikan.)
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Sep 6, 2013 22:21
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While it sounds tempting I think I am too behind on work to watch Mearls be a bad GM. Sorry. 
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Sep 6, 2013 22:22
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ritorix posted:That's one hell of a Dark Sun awesomeness overdose AlphaDog posted:Yeah, that's some drat nice respeccing, and I really need to run 4e Dark Sun. I liked the 2e setting a lot, but the books were bogged right the gently caress down with record-keeping rules for dying of thirst and other stupid poo poo. I also added crashed space ships with cyber-grell and undead githyanki.
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Sep 6, 2013 23:19
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dwarf74 posted:There's some of that, but on hitting Paragon, they got an abstract "food cart" (if the cart is there, you have food) and got rituals to help cross-desert travel. That poo poo is only fun for so long. And the setting is metal enough without constant poverty and misery. I've read the 4e DS rules, they look pretty good. 2e was all "you consume X water per day based on <stuff> but if you're encumbered or fighting you consume more, here are the penalties associated with it, etc" stuck onto an awesome setting about desert elves riding giant beetles and cannibal gladiator halflings fighting pit-bred half-giants.
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Sep 7, 2013 01:10
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theironjef posted:4e generally worked fine with random makeups. You could easily have two leaders or three strikers or whatever. The notion that you had to have exactly one of each with no duplications was basically a product of optimizer nerds sperging out about playing "correctly". You could even play leaderless but I can't imagine anyone wanting to, since leaders in 4e are basically the most fun classes. For the record one of the most fun parties I've DM'd for consisted of: 1 Thief (Dex primary striker) 1 Scout (Dex primary striker) 1 Vampire (Dex primary striker) 1 Hunter (Dex primary controller who's a borderline striker) No leaders or defenders among them and the only one who wasn't officially a striker was only marginally not. And for the record they all had stealth trained (and both rangers had obscene perception skills). Either the enemies died fast or they ran like buggery, hid, and regrouped for another ambush. (Bug out techniques involved the thief hiding where it was normally impossible to hide, the hunter being so far back that there wasn't an issue, the vampire turning into a bat, and on one occasion the scout leaping into a fast-flowing river and grabbing the catch-rope they had set up). Edit: Was Mearls any better this time than he had been before?
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Sep 7, 2013 01:11
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You could just as easily ignore that stuff as you can ignore survival days, and it's not like the 2E books were overrun with survival rules. It's one small part of the rule book alongside the sweet stuff about being a half giant gladiator.
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Sep 7, 2013 01:15
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neonchameleon posted:Edit: Was Mearls any better this time than he had been before?
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Sep 7, 2013 01:18
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ImpactVector posted:Mearls wasn't playing today. I had the volume muted, but from the snarkchat it sounded like they spent 40+ minutes interrogating the prisoner and then fought a beholder. Is this post really quoting from the game itself? Or is that from elsewhere?
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Sep 7, 2013 01:22
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At least some of that is from the livestream, I wasn't listening closely enough to know whether all of it was.
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Sep 7, 2013 01:37
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neonchameleon posted:Is this post really quoting from the game itself? Or is that from elsewhere? Man I would love to just post that all into here so we could talk about it without getting probated for not constantly paying grog tax. Anyway, that stuff was mostly from the livestream chat where the guy running the tech for the session was.
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Sep 7, 2013 01:48
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Yeah, I was just copying and pasting stuff I read and heard but I think the only thing from the actual game was:quote:I'm not thrilled that we gave monsters just lists of spells, which was a lesson we learned in 2005 and forgot in 2012 for some reason. Everything else was stuff the Twitch chat said.
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Sep 7, 2013 02:08
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Actually that quote is circa me. I said that in the mibbit or whatever. The actual guy in the playtest just said he wanted to add more information to the monster spell blocks and was unhappy with the current practice of listing spells.
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Sep 7, 2013 02:33
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theironjef posted:Actually that quote is circa me. I said that in the mibbit or whatever. The actual guy in the playtest just said he wanted to add more information to the monster spell blocks and was unhappy with the current practice of listing spells. EDIT: No they don't. gently caress. dwarf74 fucked around with this message at 03:50 on Sep 7, 2013 |
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Sep 7, 2013 03:39
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They really went with the "monster abilities are magic, wizards learn magic, therefore wizards can learn every monster special ability" thing in the end?
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Sep 7, 2013 07:13
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neonchameleon posted:1 Thief (Dex primary striker) Stealth is OP'd as gently caress, especially if everyone goes for it. Right now I'm in a party with: Elf Fighter (middling Dex, trained in stealth) Gnome Psion (for some reason gets like 31 stealth every enounter) Elf Rogue [sniper] (high Dex, trained+skill focus in stealth) Elf Scout [me] (20 Dex, trained+skill focus+background bonus in stealth, also +2 power bonus from Aspect, and grants +2 to allies with Knack) Wilden Ranger [archer] (20 Dex, trained+skill focus+racial bonus in stealth) And then some other scrubs who are basically there to aggro the enemies into our ambush. Dragonborn Paladin Kalashtar Avenger Hengeyokai Seeker|Shaman
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Sep 7, 2013 07:16
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My group likes to fulfill all the 4e roles, but we've had a successful game with 3 strikers and a defender, too. I always wanted to try an all-warlord party or an all-warlord party with one striker who did all the work while everyone else encouraged him.
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Sep 7, 2013 11:04
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I find at high levels in D&D 4e, everyone is either a striker, or wielding strikers. There can be a case for hard control/buffing/debuffing, but that is just to make the strikers strike better. Monsters go away when you deplete them of their precious Hemogoblin Points after all. I still vastly prefer this to "I magic them away." but I wish Social stuff existed more as a Thing to Do in combat.
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Sep 7, 2013 15:52
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Laphroaig posted:I find at high levels in D&D 4e, everyone is either a striker, or wielding strikers. There can be a case for hard control/buffing/debuffing, but that is just to make the strikers strike better. Monsters go away when you deplete them of their precious Hemogoblin Points after all.
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Sep 7, 2013 17:32
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Laphroaig posted:I find at high levels in D&D 4e, everyone is either a striker, or wielding strikers. There can be a case for hard control/buffing/debuffing, but that is just to make the strikers strike better. Monsters go away when you deplete them of their precious Hemogoblin Points after all. A high level controller can make fights vastly more easy; I ran a campaign 1-30 and there was actually a huge difference between not having a controller and a psion joining in late paragon. It actually sped fights up a lot, too; I don't know that there were any fewer rounds, but when half the monsters can't do anything (or can't do anything useful), it speeds up the DM's turns a lot. By the time he's run out of things that would keep half the fight locked down, at least half the monsters were dead anyway. You certainly want strikers to get rid of the monsters while they're reeling, but hard control is amazing in 4e if you focus on it.
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Sep 7, 2013 18:06
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AlphaDog posted:My group likes to fulfill all the 4e roles, but we've had a successful game with 3 strikers and a defender, too. I had a large group at the start of my campaign, so there were lots of split sessions; I was almost able to run barfight mode with 2 warlords and a barbarian  it would have been glorious.As it is, my party has been without a healer for a long time, and unreliable defender support. Two-hit monsters are a DM's godsend for this situation; I'm often running with a Psion, a tactically inept archer Ranger and an Avenger, and I can actually have a fun fight and not TPK everyone using two-hit dudes. e: Laphroaig posted:I find at high levels in D&D 4e, everyone is either a striker, or wielding strikers. There can be a case for hard control/buffing/debuffing, but that is just to make the strikers strike better. Monsters go away when you deplete them of their precious Hemogoblin Points after all. Laphroaig posted:I still vastly prefer this to "I magic them away." but I wish Social stuff existed more as a Thing to Do in combat. P.d0t fucked around with this message at 18:36 on Sep 7, 2013 |
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Sep 7, 2013 18:32
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Damage is king at low levels but hard control is optimal in epic tier 4e - when the monsters are all stunned and/or dominated for the first 3 rounds, what chance do they have? HOWEVER, you don't have to sacrifice damage for hard control. Just pick a rogue and you'll get stunning powers as well as tons of off-turn attacks to pump up your damage. An invoker can do tons of multi-target damage while also getting to pick great hard-control powers (I haven't tried, but I bet you can do similarly with a wizard). Two-hander Fighters can do damage not quite at striker levels while utterly locking down anyone who comes close using pinning challenge (and making them come close with Come and Get It). Add in a leader (all the leaders are awesome, but bards are great at accuracy-debuffing any enemies that are immune to your stunning/dominating) and you've got a party that will utterly lay waste to epic tier. Entire (level + 4) encounters will go down with the monsters having had a collective two or three attacks. Edit: drat, I thought I was in the 4e thread since all the talk seemed to be about 4e. Sorry for the 4e-post.
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Sep 7, 2013 19:42
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Mm, init-opped large-scale battlefield control is win in 4e, unless (as a lot of Epic LFR mods have demonstrated) the creatures have ways out,, like a LOT of more recent solos do.
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Sep 7, 2013 19:43
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OneThousandMonkeys posted:That mainly sounds like a case of Terrible DM but I feel you. That's correct. Because, as we know, killing PCs is doing it wrong.  In this case it does sound like you are right though; that is unless the OP was a being a bigger jerk than he realized or the OP has a different definition of what a high DC is than I do. I am guessing neither of those are the case and the OP just had a terrible GM. This is one of the reasons I am resistant to getting involved in organized play. It happens often enough that the idea of sitting in a game run by a stranger means, to me, that I've got a 1 in 4 chance of not having any fun. The only other thing I can add is that having each PC off doing their own thing is a problem in almost every game, and almost always fucks with people's enjoyment. So that need not be a problem with the game system per se. And since this was an encounter, I'm guessing it is more likely to be a problem with the scenario design. It could also be a GM thing again. In most non-premade situations this really falls on the GM. If you are going to have players running off doing their own thing, which you sometimes cannot avoid, you need to manage it in such a way that you are constantly keeping the rest of the table engaged. Otherwise the player attention scores start to fall to zero pretty quickly. ZombieLenin fucked around with this message at 00:57 on Sep 8, 2013 |
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Sep 8, 2013 00:46
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MiBG is explicitly designed to be more freeform than previous seasons of Encounters, and so naturally requires a DM who can roll with the punches and keep the party on track. My LGS is lucky enough to have a DM with a lot of experience, but I can see the module quickly turning into a trainwreck with a novice running the show - I was ready to set a house on fire (and probably the rest of BG, coincidentally this was the same side quest Rosalind died on) and that would have almost certainly derailed things a bit. And yeah, a DC 18 check is definitely a high DC in Next, because there's only a handful of ways to get bonuses outside of your base ability modifier. It doesn't sound like much coming from previous editions where you could stack enough bonuses to blow any check out of the water, but in Next you rely a lot on having good rolls to succeed.
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Sep 8, 2013 04:50
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The weird thing about my FLGS is that the "veteran" DM is struggling with it. It sounds like he runs mostly published modules so when given a freeform campaign book he's floundering. Our store's other issues(Magic Draft literally three seats down) doesn't help but his seems to be the table with the most trouble picking a track. Then again his party opted to spend the entire second week on a pub crawl. Our new(ish) DMs are doing awesome. One runs the private game I play at and with her older players helping her write a setting she's gotten really good at the pick up and go stuff. She's used the "I go to the first bar I see" thing to illustrate that the rich areas of Baldur's Gate don't really have those and got the table figuring out the social scenes and who to ask about going on adventures. The other table has me subbing in and I'm doing okay. But that's because I told the party "For this season the question isn't, 'Can I do this?' it's 'Who will this piss off?'" Plus I genuinely love it when the literal children figure out something cool and start running with "Well my guy is brave, so he wouldn't leave you." Also yeah. A DC 18 in Next is pretty rough. Your party's like level 1-2 right? To give some context, the dragon the parties fought in Confrontation at Candlekeep at level 2 had an AC of 16 and could be expected to fail a DC 14 Saving Throw from a PC's spell.
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Sep 8, 2013 09:14
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isndl posted:MiBG is explicitly designed to be more freeform than previous seasons of Encounters, and so naturally requires a DM who can roll with the punches and keep the party on track. My LGS is lucky enough to have a DM with a lot of experience, but I can see the module quickly turning into a trainwreck with a novice running the show - I was ready to set a house on fire (and probably the rest of BG, coincidentally this was the same side quest Rosalind died on) and that would have almost certainly derailed things a bit. I think I'm doing a good job with this adventure, though. The way I see it, the players should always feel like the grass is always greener somewhere else, no matter which side they're on. They've been working for the Duke but are flirting with working for the Fist. And a few are really starting to sympathize with the Guild. What's great is that all three factions have understandable goals and concerns, and that none of them are actually the "good guys." That makes it really fun. The party is 3/5 Law & Order types, or else utterly mercenary, so they're sticking with the Duke for now...
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Sep 8, 2013 22:41
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thespaceinvader posted:Mm, init-opped large-scale battlefield control is win in 4e, unless (as a lot of Epic LFR mods have demonstrated) the creatures have ways out,, like a LOT of more recent solos do. Yeah, we are playing the epic level LFR campaign. There are a large number of creatures with ways out of being stunned, dazed, dominated etc, but only a few are immune to being beaten to death with damage (I'm looking at you, Manshoon).
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Sep 10, 2013 20:46
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Laphroaig posted:There are a large number of creatures with ways out of being stunned, dazed, dominated etc. In a more broad/general game design sense, I'm at a point in my 4e "career" where I'm questioning the necessity for solos. If their biggest weakness is status effects, and you patch the weakness by saying "LoL not" that fails my "is this bullshit?" test, personally. I mean, if my options for cramming a fight under the XP budget are:
or a handful of monsters with slightly more attack bonus/HP/damage/AC but no special resistance to status effects
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Sep 10, 2013 21:01
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Laphroaig posted:Yeah, we are playing the epic level LFR campaign. There are a large number of creatures with ways out of being stunned, dazed, dominated etc, but only a few are immune to being beaten to death with damage (I'm looking at you, Manshoon). I noticed from the MM3 and Monster Vault that most monsters with ways out of control effects have to give up something to do so. So for instance, a black dragon gets a free bite attack each round, unless it needs to escape from a control effect, in which case it escapes but doesn't get the free bite. So in good monster design they shouldn't just be flat-out-immune. Maybe the LFRs monsters suck, I dunno.
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Sep 10, 2013 21:45
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Gort posted:I noticed from the MM3 and Monster Vault that most monsters with ways out of control effects have to give up something to do so. So for instance, a black dragon gets a free bite attack each round, unless it needs to escape from a control effect, in which case it escapes but doesn't get the free bite. So in good monster design they shouldn't just be flat-out-immune.
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Sep 10, 2013 23:43
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P.d0t posted:In a more broad/general game design sense, I'm at a point in my 4e "career" where I'm questioning the necessity for solos. If their biggest weakness is status effects, and you patch the weakness by saying "LoL not" that fails my "is this bullshit?" test, personally. Here's a question - what if solo monsters had 2-3 actions, and a given status effect blocked only a single type of action? Immobilize might block a melee type action, stunning might block a single target ranged action, etc? That way status effects are still strong, as you're cutting down on enemy offense and having a significant impact on the fight, but the enemy isn't completely screwed either. Alternately, what if the monster takes significant penalties to hit and/or damage when crowd controlled rather than being disabled outright? Additionally, you could add in a weakness that's only able to be hit when the monster is "disabled" in some way.
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Sep 11, 2013 00:04
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To answer your questions with questions, how would the players figure those out? Would it be guess-and-test, or would you allow monster knowledge checks that tell you about the weaknesses? Or both? Might that cause a death spiral? It also begs metagame considerations; does the party have the abilities needed to disable the boss effectively? Did they use them earlier in the day? Did they prepare them today? Basically you're either giving the monster a possible disability to throw the PCs a bone, or playing to their weakness/gap in party composition as a (intentional or not) gently caress-you to the party.
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Sep 11, 2013 00:11
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