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P.d0t posted:The problem is that if, as a DM, you set up a combat with particular combatants/terrain in mind, and your players decide "nope, we're gonna haggle our way out of this instead" the DM's effort has been completely wasted, unless the DM can meaningfully recycle that fight concept later on. Sometimes you wanna be able to go "look, just fight the stupid kobolds/gnolls/orcs/whatever." I was always immensely happy when my players talked their way around a fight because I had gone in expecting pure murderhoboing. The stats are easy to reskin, and cool, dynamic fights are pretty easy to make too. I could repurpose a planned fight or (more commonly) slap together something totally new with the same stats. 4E was great for that.
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Mar 27, 2015 23:04
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Serf posted:I was always immensely happy when my players talked their way around a fight because I had gone in expecting pure murderhoboing. 
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Mar 27, 2015 23:15
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thespaceinvader posted:If you can't meaningfully recycle it later on, the campaign is properly over. I don't think I've come across a fight in 4e I couldn't think of a way to refluff. Yeah, this. It's also ridiculously simple to design good fights in 4e, so even if you couldn't reuse the exact same fight you could still reuse a concept like "three brutes and two artillery attack the party in an unstable ruin" with a different enemy group (EG: They're now drow instead of goblins or something) That's one of the awesome things about 4e - you don't just get, "Here are the drow racial traits, now go spend an hour making a drow sorcerer, some drow swordsmen and some drow snipers for the party to fight, all of which are pretty similar to the same archetype of any race", you get "Drow are generally around this level, here's a sorcerer, swordsman and sniper type drow all pre-made with interesting powers out of the box, chuck 'em in an encounter and go hog wild".
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Mar 27, 2015 23:51
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And perhaps more to the point, if what you want isn't around this level (i.e. you want an encounter with kobolds, but you're above the level that kobolds mostly are) the game supplies you with the tools to make the kobolds the right level and keep them balanced and interesting.
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Mar 28, 2015 00:07
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Leveled up Koboolds = Yoked-up meathead kobolds. Hulking critters with comically high voices and water bottles on their leather lifting belts. These dogmen have learned ONE WEIRD TRICK for trapping and killing intruders to their underground lair. ADVENTURERS HATE THEM.
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Mar 28, 2015 00:12
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:I'm sorry, let me clarify: skill challenges sucked, basically didn't work very well, and the published adventures and dragon magazine stuff were very railroady pieces of skill challenge into the next combat into the next combat into the next skill challenge affairs. So reading this it was pretty obvious that the designers were mostly focused on fighting 4e Skill Challenges were (to use one of the few times GNS is appropriate) a narrativist mechanic explained by a simulationist. I've had my own go at explaining them as a part of my retroclone Megaman's Jockstrap posted:Can anyone give me specific references on the D&D Insider in 2013 still making a lot of money thing, and the ICv2 stuff that ProfessorCirno mentioned? I mean, if you have direct links handy. Google is returning a lot of stuff. For ENWorld, Morrus at ENWorld has been collecting the ICv2 stuff. The specific references on D&D Insider take a bit of insider information and are analysis; there is a group on the WoTC boards that all people who subscribed to D&D Insider were memebers of, and we'd checked that people were removed in real time when their subscription lapsed. WIth the number of people in the group in November 2013 at the cheapest possible subscription, WotC was making $5.85 million/year.
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Mar 28, 2015 01:27
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For my retroclone I'll probably define skill challenges as, instead of "x failures and you're out", every failure creates a hindrance or negative effect. You can push forward and get the thing you want done but drag along some negative baggage later. You find out the location of the bad guy's lair but you attract attention from local toughs, you get the duke's signature on a treaty but you make some enemies at court, etc.
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Mar 28, 2015 02:00
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Someone give me some ideas on what to do for an Easter story for Gamma World. One of my players is out of town for a couple weeks so instead of continuing Zeitgeist (we just finished Adventure 1 last week), so I'm going to introduce them to an afternoon Gamma World. I was thinking of invading the fort of the Easter Bunny who has enslaved some Gallus Galluses and forced them to into a slave army to produce eggs. Of course I'll add some flair and flavor. Any other suggestions/ideas?
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Mar 28, 2015 06:36
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I think any Easter story is required by law to include horrible Cadbury Bunny mutants/golems/engineered abominations of science.
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Mar 28, 2015 08:23
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Bruceski posted:I think any Easter story is required by law to include horrible Cadbury Bunny mutants/golems/engineered abominations of science. That's the plan. The name of their adventure will be "The Terrible Secret of the Doctor E.B. Egg Emporium"
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Mar 28, 2015 13:32
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Any pro-tips for making a decent Hexblade? (I know the answer is that you don't), but I think it'd have the right mix of stuff to do a Soulknife. I'd try out the one from embertiger, but gently caress entering all that poo poo into CBLoader without the wiki being up.
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Mar 28, 2015 19:41
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Generally? Don't, hexblades suck. If you're set on making one, hybrid it with Executioner, Charge. Charge a lot. If you want to retain the theme, but play something effective, Swordmage, Sorcerer, o-Warlock, Bard, some flavours of Wizard, various other classes depending on how much you're willing to refluff.
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Mar 28, 2015 19:51
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The Unseelie Agent theme or a Spellsoul Blade would cover all your "I have a magic lightsaber" needs.
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Mar 28, 2015 20:01
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The baseline hexblade pacts are pretty terrible. White well and star are better, and Elemental's good if you're in a weakness exploiting party. They aren't the best striker though, sadly.
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Mar 28, 2015 20:05
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Strictly speaking for an MBA based warlock-y striker, Warlock|Executioner will always be better. However, neither of those will cover the whole "summon weapon out of my hands" deal. There used to be a feat where warlocks could gain the hexblade weapon and associated at-will, but then WotC realized that was literally all hexblades had, and instead of buffing hexblades, just erased the power. Essentials!
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Mar 28, 2015 22:02
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Really Pants posted:The Unseelie Agent theme or a Spellsoul Blade would cover all your "I have a magic lightsaber" needs. There are a couple of other weapons which accomplish the same thing (in particular, Lesser Hidden Weapon and Hidden Weapon IIRC), not to mention MC Swordmage/Swordbond/Farbond Spellbalde.
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Mar 29, 2015 00:23
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My preferred lightsaber character was a shadar kai with two rods and vestige pact. (Eldritch Blast as a melee basic + dual implement expertise.). My swords are made out of ghosts.
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Mar 29, 2015 02:26
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I think I may just ask my DM if I can use Pact Blade Manifestation (the playtest feat). I was convinced by a friend in the interim that an MBA class would bore me to death. I mean, I got bored playing an Gnome Illusionist Mage. I need melee and action, apparently. Though, it occurs to me, if I'm already re-fluffing everything to be various 3.5-style psionic disciplines, do I REALLY need the Blade of the White Well and it's busted-rear end MBA? Probably? Just tinkering with a skirmisher feylock makes it seem like a blast. Just teleport around debuffing the living hell out of everything. Echophonic fucked around with this message at 05:12 on Mar 29, 2015 |
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Mar 29, 2015 05:06
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Echophonic posted:I think I may just ask my DM if I can use Pact Blade Manifestation (the playtest feat). I was convinced by a friend in the interim that an MBA class would bore me to death. I mean, I got bored playing an Gnome Illusionist Mage. I need melee and action, apparently. Though, it occurs to me, if I'm already re-fluffing everything to be various 3.5-style psionic disciplines, do I REALLY need the Blade of the White Well and it's busted-rear end MBA? Friends don't let friends play Essentials  Between that and my assault swordmage, I feel like our DM may learn to despise teleports.
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Mar 29, 2015 05:13
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If you like warlocks and melee, just take Eldritch Strike in place of Eldritch Blast. You could pick Eladrin for free staff proficiency, and Staff Expertise to cast in melee without provoking.
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Mar 29, 2015 05:18
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It might be easiest for you to tell us what you want to do fluff-wise and we can pair that up with a class or class idea, since you've gone to like three different places here, hahaha. The good thing about warlocks is that they hybrid really well, and if you want complicated, boy howdy welcome to hybrids.
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Mar 29, 2015 05:44
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I'm really just trying to do something in the vein of an old 3.5 soulknife. Maybe mix the psionic discipline fluff that the psion got. I'm also banking on Zeitgeist being a more urban game and doing Secrets of the City (skill power) and Connected (feat) to have some fun with Streetwise, the skill nobody uses and for good reason. This is also the same character that had me looking at a debuffer rogue in the CharOp thread a while back. Burned spy based on John from Person of Interest, but this take would trade CQC and kneecapping people with psychometabolism and telekinesis. I really dig all of the control options feylocks get, there's some really silly powers in that set that would be great to refluff as thrown mind blades, telepathic distractions, psionic simulcrums, and the like. Fits the sort of powers and mobility I want to do better than the other classes I've considered, like the Monk and Rogue. So yes, I AM all over the place with what I want to do. It'll ideally coalesce at some point or I'll reject it and start over.
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Mar 29, 2015 06:48
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If you want interesting RP powers and lots of mobility, Feylock|Executioner is pretty solid.
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Mar 29, 2015 08:28
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Can you explain what that hybrid needs to look like? I don't see how any of the features I'd get mesh with a control Warlock, combining that with the cost of having to buy back the good Warlock features with feats.
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Mar 29, 2015 17:11
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Not very effectively, no, I suck at Warlocks. The core of it is Eldritch Strike with Curse and assassing buffs doing +damage, with interesting utility powers, so if the control effects are the important part, you're better off sticking with a straight Feylock. Or... well, an actual controller. Really though, you're better off actually picking a concept and working out how to make it from what you're playing.
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Mar 29, 2015 17:18
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4E is weird in that it is very easy to reskin the fluff of your crunch, but said crunch is extremely rigid in what it does. You will have two or three things you are good at but you really have to cherrypick Hybrid and Multiclass options in order to choose what those things will be, otherwise you'll be stuck to class restrictions or underpowered. Like thespaceinvader said, you should decide what you want to do gameplaywise and adapt your concept to it.
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Mar 29, 2015 17:36
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Kurieg posted:The baseline hexblade pacts are pretty terrible. White well and star are better, and Elemental's good if you're in a weakness exploiting party. The Winter Fey pact is pretty good by hexblade standards, since it's at the intersection of light blade, dexterity, frost, arcane and teleport support, but you're pretty much looking at White Lotus Riposte and using teleportation to set up Surprising Charge, with good accuracy thanks to Deft Blade. The major problem with the hexblade is that they have no real damage spikes outside of APs and Quicken Spell at epic. Unlike vampires, hexblades can be built to reliably churn out an acceptable amount of damage but if you need something dead immediately you're going to want a second or different striker in your party.
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Mar 29, 2015 17:52
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So I'm looking to do a Skype game with a few friends, and 3/5 of them picked hengeyokai. I was going to have them start in Eberron, then almost immediately move to the Infinite Staircase and Sigil. (I'm going to adapt Tales from the Infinite Staircase, The Great Modron March and Dead Gods into 4Runner as an ongoing campaign.) The question is, what is the deal with hengeyokai in Eberron? Is there any deal? It's not huge, but I was going to try and be somewhat representative of each setting in case they head back there.
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Mar 29, 2015 20:55
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Hengeyokai are from one of the very last 4e books, so they won't have any special write-ups in the big settings.
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Mar 29, 2015 21:50
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If you're going for controller then you're probably better off not hybriding warlock. Warlock in general doesn't want to use it's at-wills unless it's hybriding to take advantage of them, really, and that goes double for controllerlock. Hybriding will likely not increase your control capabilities (or rather, it wouldn't increase it any more then going straight Wizard would) If you hit paragon your level 11 feat is twofold pact; star for Student of Caiphon PP and/or a lot of great riders, or SK for mindscorn to add psychic damage to your attacks and to carry into the feat psychic lock (you'd probably want to go Long Night Scion with your fey pact if you do that). Depending on your PP, in paragon, you'll want to focus on either getting radiant damage or cold damage and building to that. Student of Caiphon is half-leader and has some great controller powers; SK has more leader-y powers and LNS can really pump up both damage and control. Or go Star+Fey for LNS and star powers. There's plenty of options here. Student of Caiphon is built around higher crits with a Radiant Staff and pumping constant basic attacks to your allies. It has less control then LNS but can end up working even better depending HEAVILY on your group. If you go SoC, you want a group that has a lot of strong MBAs. The initial crit addition should give you a strong damage spike, and the level 16 feature will make you the group's best friend (again, depending on group layout; if nobody has a good MBA, it goes to waste completely). If you don't have that or want to double down on control, LNS is a frost-based paragon path for fey pacts. Depending on GM interpretation the action point feature could let you make two attacks on spending an AP, but that's not what you specifically are after (I mean, still get it if you can, that's super awesome for your nova). For you, the big one is the level 16 teleport effect; by level 16 you should absolutely have a teleport at will as a warlock, and 1/turn when you teleport, you an deal intelligence frost damage to all enemies around you and slow them. If you do this, make sure you take the feat World Serpent's Grasp - whenever you attack slow enemies (which, again, should be literally every round), you knock them prone. If you aren't an eladrin who went Sun Elf to gain wizard implements, consider taking wizard as your multiclass; staves and orbs work great for controller locks. If you are a Sun Elf...still consider it; Wizard also has some fantastic power swaps. You'll probably want to go staff expertise and implement so you can smack dudes with ranged powers at melee range. It fits the sorta soulknife flavor you're going for, and is real good to boot. Beyond that, staves are also weapons, so you can get a radiant or frost weapon, depending on paragon choices, and stick a dragonshard in there. Remember again that you are still a high controlling striker. As far as powers go, here are my top Heroic picks, starting with encounters. At level 1 you start off strong with Witchfire; as a feylock, whoever you hit isn't going to be making their next attack roll period. However, Iron Grasp is also strong in a different sort of control (personally I'd go Witchfire). At level 3 you have a rather hard choice. Delban's Deadly Attention is known far and wide as an amazing power for good reason - interrupts are always strong, and this is a really strong interrupt! But it also competes with Otherwind Stride, which immobilizes enemies, and at level 3, immobilizing most enemies means they can't do anything for their next turn (so long as your party doesn't run up and let them attack). For a bonus, both of these are up-close attacks to fit the soulknife shindig. Level 7 is another hard choice; Touch of Command is an interrupt dominate at level 7, and interrupt dominates are unheard of period, much less at level 7. Plus hey, dominating is a psionic thing. The downside? It's single target control. On the other hand, for much wider control, All the Sand, All the Stars is a huge dazing burst, and daze in lower levels is incredible as few enemies will have minor attacks. Consider also how it stacks with LNS; with LNS at level 16, you can teleport away from enemies to slow them, hit them with All the Sand to prone them, and then the power dazes them. Those enemies have ALL just lost their next turn. For dailies, at level 1 I've always liked Decree of Kihrad; it's a fairly big burst to catch enough enemies and make them ALL slice each other, and if you can catch marked enemies next to your defender then your defender ALSO gets to slice them. It does have some stark competition though; Web of Shadows will immobilize (remember how good that is?) and stick a zone that keeps itself going without any output from you for further control. Star Shackles on the other hand can be potentially hilarious depending on how people roll, allowing you to Force Choke the poo poo out of enemies across the encounter. Level 5 is a hard choice; Deathly Conduit and Roaring Storm of Cania are both really strong. At level 9 there's Command Insanity. It's a dominate save, so it could potentially last far longer then Touch of Command (or could potentially end immediately), but is a daily and not an interrupt. Otherwise level 9 is kinda weak; you can and should consider grabbing whichever level 5 you gave up initially. For utilities I favor Ethereal Slide at 2 to get my teleport game going strong right from the start, and u6's Mirror Darkly can do some hilarious and awesome stuff. At u10, congrats! You now have Ethereal Sidestep and your easy at-will teleport! Not much to say for competing here - I seriously always take these three in a row like that.
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Mar 29, 2015 23:06
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Moriatti posted:So I'm looking to do a Skype game with a few friends, and 3/5 of them picked hengeyokai. I was going to have them start in Eberron, then almost immediately move to the Infinite Staircase and Sigil. (I'm going to adapt Tales from the Infinite Staircase, The Great Modron March and Dead Gods into 4Runner as an ongoing campaign.) Heads up- hengeyokai have no support officially. As in literally there is not a single thing. You can make up your own or just ignore it, but if you have 3 it might be worth coming up with your own stuff.
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Mar 29, 2015 23:38
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Eberron IS set up so that anything could potentially fit though, so it's basically "you tell US what the deal is!"
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Mar 29, 2015 23:40
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Those are basically the power picks I had in mind, Cirno. Thanks for the input.
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Mar 30, 2015 00:53
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Moriatti posted:So I'm looking to do a Skype game with a few friends, and 3/5 of them picked hengeyokai. I was going to have them start in Eberron, then almost immediately move to the Infinite Staircase and Sigil. (I'm going to adapt Tales from the Infinite Staircase, The Great Modron March and Dead Gods into 4Runner as an ongoing campaign.) I'd probably put them in the Eldeen Reaches. Druids, small communities, in touch with nature, all that.
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Mar 30, 2015 03:37
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bonus plot: since the Eldeen Reaches are literally just a rebel separatist province of Aundair, it's crawling with nasty terrorist druids, basically al-Qaeda Forest Annex. Bringing the place back to Aundair's rightful dominion is a solid Heroic plotline.
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Mar 30, 2015 06:51
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I was just about to write my nontraditional paladin player (what are STR and CHA, I'll have 18 CON/WIS, GOTTA HAVE 4 LAY ON HANDS A DAY) an email with some pointers on how to keep doing the healing/support thing he does while also becoming better at actually hitting things when I got a twinge of deja vu, checked my mail archives and sure enough, I wrote him an email last May giving the same advice I would have given now, and so far he hasn't done any of it. So I'm not doing that. (I actually ran the math and a well supported Righteous Smite gives the party a larger HP buffer than 4 Lay on Hands ever could but hell, if that's the hill he wants to not die on...) e: hell even just the Lay on Hands thing he's like "I need that 18 CON, I burn through surges like a motherfucker" and I'm like "because your Lay on Hands is unnecessarily bad, it's not worth it to take Devoted Paladin and that other feat with only a +1 CHA mod but you could have a Lay on Hands that's 1.5 times as effective so you'd need to spend less surges overall, and you could even still do it four times a day and actually kill things while you're at it" and he's like "hey, if I keep pumping WIS, at level 8 I can do it five times a day." My Lovely Horse fucked around with this message at 20:18 on Mar 30, 2015 |
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Mar 30, 2015 20:12
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Why isn't he playing a Cleric?
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Mar 30, 2015 21:31
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"Fluff reasons." Told him fluff is what you make it but it's worlds clashing. In his defense, he's pretty good at distributing party-wide THP. It's just he could be better!
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Mar 30, 2015 21:36
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It turns out you can actually be bad at RPGs and 4E seems to bring this out in some people extra hard. My last face-to-face GM was running a 4E game for another group and told me about this player of his who had rolled a PHB1 Fighter and spent all his time focusing on trying to do big hits and damage instead of acting like a Defender, running way out from the rest of the party and getting cut off from the others and inevitably winding up spiked into the ground without any support. I told my friend "y'know, it sounds like what he really wants to play is some sort of Striker" and he just shook his head. No, the dude insisted he wanted to play a FIGHTER, it had to say "Fighter" on the tin. The GM had suggested all sorts of different approaches but the guy was just straight-up set in his ways. This was before Essentials so the Slayer wasn't there, but even if it had been the fact that the guy couldn't wrap his head around "maybe I shouldn't move so far away from the rest of the party that I get surrounded and killed all the time" suggests that it wouldn't have really helped much.
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Mar 30, 2015 21:46
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It's not like you can't make a very good striker out of a basic o-Fighter anyway. Rain of Blows, Trip Up, Bash and Pummel, Dreadnought or Shock Trooper... done, basically. The 'I have to be a Paladin not a Cleric because fluff' thing is loving LUDICROUS. Paladins and Clerics have the same loving fluff.
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Mar 30, 2015 21:55
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