|
Asking for a friend: Are there any really good Eberron articles that were published in Dragon or Dungeon that are worth tracking down? Looking specifically for stuff that was published in 4th edition, and from a DM standpoint (read: Not 101 Warforged Feats).
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2015 03:37
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 9, 2024 15:52 |
|
|
RPZip posted:Asking for a friend: Are there any really good Eberron articles that were published in Dragon or Dungeon that are worth tracking down? Looking specifically for stuff that was published in 4th edition, and from a DM standpoint (read: Not 101 Warforged Feats). I really enjoyed the spotlight on Graywall article, but then I think Graywall is one of the best places in Eberron. It was in Dragon #368.
|
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2015 03:42
|
|
|
RPZip posted:Asking for a friend: Are there any really good Eberron articles that were published in Dragon or Dungeon that are worth tracking down? Looking specifically for stuff that was published in 4th edition, and from a DM standpoint (read: Not 101 Warforged Feats). While not exactly 4e, there's a decently fun bank heist adventure that could be pretty easily converted with access to the compendium and/or MM3 Monster Math
|
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2015 14:02
|
|
|
Moriatti posted:While not exactly 4e, there's a decently fun bank heist adventure that could be pretty easily converted with access to the compendium and/or MM3 Monster Math ohhhhhhhhh I'm interested in this, whats the name of it?
|
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2015 16:41
|
|
|
The Aundairian Job in Dungeon 147, back when the magazine was published by Paizo. I know that a psd of it is obtainable via quick google search because this is how I got it.
Moriatti fucked around with this message at 22:24 on Apr 18, 2015 |
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2015 16:51
|
|
|
RPZip posted:Asking for a friend: Are there any really good Eberron articles that were published in Dragon or Dungeon that are worth tracking down? Looking specifically for stuff that was published in 4th edition, and from a DM standpoint (read: Not 101 Warforged Feats). The previously-mentioned Graywall one is the only one that stands out in my memory, but the Eberron wiki has a list of the Eberron-specific content in Dragon/Dungeon: http://eberron.wikia.com/wiki/Dragon_magazine http://eberron.wikia.com/wiki/Dungeon_magazine Also, the Eberron board on the WotC boards has this post: http://community.wizards.com/forum/eberron/threads/1597336
|
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2015 22:16
|
|
|
The Graywall article is the best of the lot, but the Eye on Eberron and Expeditionary articles in general are pretty solid for fleshing out smaller, more focused pieces of Eberron. They are of somewhat uneven quality though. If there's a particular place or concept that one of them covers that your friend wants to explore, it would be worth checking that one out. All of the print magazine material is 3.5, but I do remember The Umbragen: Shadow Elves of Xen'drik, Touched by Madness: Eberron's Cults of the Dragon Below, and The Giants of Xen'drik articles gave me inspiration for some adventures when I was running the game. The Dragon Below cults is probably the most broadly useful, since they can pop up anywhere, but the Giants information can serve as a backdrop for adventures away from Xen'drik - someone brings an ancient artifact into Sharn and it causes trouble, for example.
|
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2015 22:56
|
|
|
Right, also, I find print adventures aren't too hard to convert to 4e, the hardest part is changing the combat from 3 Zombies to 3 distinct enemies reflagged into zombies but serving distinct roles, and occasionally adding in some interactive terrain. The compendium is great for this if you have access to it. Edit: and skill check names and DCs, I guess too.
|
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2015 23:40
|
|
|
What's the best way to make a combat more challenging without making it longer?
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2015 03:36
|
|
|
Upping monster damage and decreasing monster health will both make fights more tense and make them shorter.
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2015 03:48
|
|
|
aegof posted:Upping monster damage and decreasing monster health will both make fights more tense and make them shorter. It's the Gamma World method. 
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2015 06:19
|
|
|
Create monsters that have about the same or even less health than normal that require specific setups or conditions to defeat efficiently, and make those tactics interesting or obvious. A monster that can freely teleport except when hit by a Cold attack, or one that is quickly defeated (Vulnerability maybe) when actions are taken in the environment. Monsters that do increasingly nasty things to characters suffering under various conditions can be fun at higher levels when your Leader probably has a way to throw out free saves, or failing that, provide an environmental way to get free of the Condition. I once did a fight that was just three minions and a unique Elite. The three minions were crows made out of ice than would explode when killed, causing vulnerability to cold for one round; if the character was adjacent to a fire or other heat source at the end of any turn, I made it go away. The Elite could slow and then stun characters who were vulnerable/slowed respectively (and with increasingly larger bonuses to hit and damage) which made for a fiddly but manageable fight centered around quickly removing conditions and positioning near fires or characters that could create fires.
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2015 07:35
|
|
|
Really Pants posted:What's the best way to make a combat more challenging without making it longer? Build fights with win conditions that aren't "kill everything". Grabbing and holding on to an item, controlling territory, protecting a hostage, etc, etc. Coming up with interesting mechanics to help or hinder those goals helps.
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2015 10:23
|
|
|
Quick rules questions. 1) Can you charge with a standard granted by an action point? 2) Can you augment at-wills usable with charge?
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2015 16:48
|
|
|
Moriatti posted:Quick rules questions. 1. Yes. Any standard can be made as a charge as long as you meet the conditions for the charge. It just ends your turn. 2. No. Whenever something lets you use a basic attack power, that power is unaugmented. There might be a specific power that says otherwise, but that'd be the exception.
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2015 16:52
|
|
|
Cool, thank you!
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2015 16:55
|
|
|
djw175 posted:1. Yes. Any standard can be made as a charge as long as you meet the conditions for the charge. It just ends your turn. Not quite - you can't take actions after a charge except free actions - but if those free actions grant you additional actions, you can take those just fine. So charge > ap > charge is totally legit if you can get the distance back or provoke and OA to charge another target. Or, if you kill it, something like Spur the Cycle is also legit.
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2015 17:50
|
|
|
So what do you guys use to make creature/player tokens to put in the maps for PbP games?
|
|
#
?
Apr 20, 2015 06:14
|
|
|
Chrono Trigger sprites. Looks super dope.
|
|
#
?
Apr 20, 2015 06:19
|
|
|
Token Tool. http://www.rptools.net/tools/token-tool/
|
|
#
?
Apr 20, 2015 06:26
|
|
|
But the SNES sprites look so good!
Moriatti fucked around with this message at 07:42 on Apr 20, 2015 |
|
#
?
Apr 20, 2015 06:33
|
|
|
Bloody hell, that's impressive. Might give that a shot.
|
|
#
?
Apr 20, 2015 06:40
|
|
|
I find Chrono Trigger, Terranigma and Secret of Evermore all have pretty similar styles, so enemies and NPCs from those games all fit together, and since they're relatively small, the sprites are easy to edit (The Tiefling Paladin in that shot was once Magus, for instance.) EDIT: I imagine that GBA Fire Emblem battle sprites would look really good this way too. You could probably even go as simple as Gameboy Zelda sprites in a pinch, since that's what I started with. Moriatti fucked around with this message at 07:48 on Apr 20, 2015 |
|
#
?
Apr 20, 2015 07:42
|
|
|
I used to do sprite comics, I'm all about that  I'm mostly hoping to get recognizability out of it - we play with Masterplan using a second monitor, and some folks end up sitting quite far away. I need enemies that can be identified at a glance at distance. It worked for us in the 90s! wallawallawingwang posted:I mention this specifically as an alternative to trying to replace or supplement the skills, backgrounds, and non-combat feats rules. There is basically a lot of, at least mildly, playtested material out there which covers the same ground but ends up competing for build resources. Maybe let players writeup these backgrounds as pseudo-themes that give them access to a set of noncombat feats and utility powers. Prison Warden posted:This happens even in 13th Age itself is the thing, I have one player in particular whose background of "Former Lieutenant in the Lich King's Army" is used for almost everything. There really isn't anything actually wrong with this though, I don't think. Maybe I could just let everyone have a theme-appropriate utility power. Or something entirely outside the scope of the usual mechanics after all, like a "once per game session" resource. "Invoke your background to flat out succeed at a skill check." Then again I already don't call for skill checks if they give me a good description. "Invoke your background to roll 2d20 on a skill check and use the higher roll." Would have the advantage that background application would be less "hey DM, does Exotic Dancer apply here" and more "hey DM, I can do this better than anyone because I'm an Exotic Dancer!" e: hell, as a once-per-session thing, that might even be any d20 roll. In fact, now that I think about it, that's straight up a rule from my group's homebrew system. And thus the circle closes. e2: one of my players likes to make bland characters and hasn't picked a background; for fairness' sake though, "mysterious past" seems like a totally valid one
My Lovely Horse fucked around with this message at 13:07 on Apr 20, 2015 |
|
#
?
Apr 20, 2015 08:36
|
|
|
I'm getting back into the swing of the Dark Sun campaign I've been half-hiatusing for a while now and starting to take things a little more seriously. The main problem - as such - is that most encounters are days apart, so the party basically always goes into a fight with all their dailies available to turn fights into stompfests. I've heard a lot that having fights work as waves of enemies rather than everything being on the board at the start works well, but what's the best way to systematically track that? Just have X amount of easier encounters bundled together to make up the total XP budget of the combat?
|
|
#
?
Apr 20, 2015 23:04
|
|
|
NETH 4-2 from LFR has a good example in its final fight http://livingforgottenrealms.com/adventures/NETH0402LFR.zip Alternatively, this is DARK SUN. If there's ever a world where a night's sleep =/= an extended rest, it's this one. Just say they can only sleep in town. But, to be fair, if they're enjoying it and not finding it too easy... why is it a problem?
|
|
#
?
Apr 20, 2015 23:08
|
|
|
To be fair, I'm not opposed to the occasional stompfest, they definitely have their place - I just worry that if every fight is transparently one-sided after the first round it would get kind of tedious, especially since like 80% of combat in the campaign has occurred outside of the traditional dungeon crawling paradigm. Thanks for that link, that does give me a bit of insight! I think I just need to work on more wave-based fights and maybe have the spaced-out encounters higher level. I normally aim for PC Level +2 but might experiment with +3/4 if they're getting the opportunity to go full bore.
|
|
#
?
Apr 20, 2015 23:20
|
|
|
Moriatti posted:But the SNES sprites look so good! I can't not see Flea, Slash, Flea again, Heckran, and Magus there.
|
|
#
?
Apr 21, 2015 00:02
|
|
|
theironjef posted:I can't not see Flea, Slash, Flea again, Heckran, and Magus there. I actually avoided Flea, there is Magus, Chrono, Marle, The Chancellor and Dalton edits among the party, then the dog's prehistoric transformation from Secret of Evermore for the Wolves. EDIT: I'm glad that I'm not the only one who's group decided that the Saurial's language is at least partially farts. Moriatti fucked around with this message at 01:14 on Apr 21, 2015 |
|
#
?
Apr 21, 2015 00:33
|
|
|
thespaceinvader posted:If there's ever a world where a night's sleep =/= an extended rest, it's this one. Just say they can only sleep in town. This. I personally think that extended rests are better defined as something along the lines of "a rest that you take with a reasonable expectation of complete safety" or something along those lines instead of just "take six hour rest." Basically, if you're in any kind of situation where you'd reasonably want to set guards or take turns at watch or even just sleep lightly, I don't think you should get an extended rest just because you decide to stop for six hours.
|
|
#
?
Apr 21, 2015 01:04
|
|
|
Moriatti posted:But the SNES sprites look so good! Is that done on roll20?
|
|
#
?
Apr 21, 2015 01:41
|
|
|
That particular photo was a GIMP edit, I was running it concurrent with a Gdocs Drawing. I find it's a little easier to use Gdocs Drawings sometimes for quick skirmishes and random encounters.
|
|
#
?
Apr 21, 2015 01:45
|
|
|
Frankosity posted:To be fair, I'm not opposed to the occasional stompfest, they definitely have their place - I just worry that if every fight is transparently one-sided after the first round it would get kind of tedious, especially since like 80% of combat in the campaign has occurred outside of the traditional dungeon crawling paradigm. Thanks for that link, that does give me a bit of insight! I think I just need to work on more wave-based fights and maybe have the spaced-out encounters higher level. I normally aim for PC Level +2 but might experiment with +3/4 if they're getting the opportunity to go full bore. For a reasonably optimised party, level +4 should be challenging but manageable. Depending on the party and level it may even wind up being easy - the chief difficulty with increasing level is that hit rate goes down, if you have a leader granting big hit bonuses, that's less of an issue..
|
|
#
?
Apr 21, 2015 17:45
|
|
|
Khizan posted:This. I personally think that extended rests are better defined as something along the lines of "a rest that you take with a reasonable expectation of complete safety" or something along those lines instead of just "take six hour rest." This was the approach I used when I was running a campaign where fights happened pretty infrequently. I think my definition of 'an extended rest' ended up being 'long enough that you miss out on something important'.
|
|
#
?
Apr 22, 2015 08:13
|
|
|
Whybird posted:I think my definition of 'an extended rest' ended up being 'long enough that you miss out on something important'.
|
|
#
?
Apr 22, 2015 08:19
|
|
|
My Lovely Horse posted:In my game I'm doing "you get extended rests at the DM's call" for simplicity's sake, but I'm thinking of changing it to something like that. Take an extended rest whenever you want (as long as it's in a safe place), but every time you do, things happen. It's in the party's best interests to get as much done between rests as possible. What I find works best for my group is letting them take an automatic extended rest every four combats, with an in-game advantage if they stretch it to five and an in-game disadvantage if they need it at three.
|
|
#
?
Apr 22, 2015 18:24
|
|
|
I feel like extended rests were meant to have some element of danger anyway. It's why Drow and Warforged have those 'you don't have to sleep and are still aware while resting' traits and you can take feats that remove the perception penalty for allies and stuff.
|
|
#
?
Apr 22, 2015 20:01
|
|
|
AXE COP posted:I feel like extended rests were meant to have some element of danger anyway. It's why Drow and Warforged have those 'you don't have to sleep and are still aware while resting' traits and you can take feats that remove the perception penalty for allies and stuff. I think that stuff is all legacy mechanics from earlier editions.
|
|
#
?
Apr 22, 2015 20:03
|
|
|
True, but it is fun to have things creep up on them while they are camping out in the wilderness. As far as Dark Sun goes with this, I think a more dangerous night time encounter table would fit in just fine.
|
|
#
?
Apr 23, 2015 00:51
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 9, 2024 15:52 |
|
|
So how do you guys create humanoid enemies in campaigns? Like not the goblins/kobolds but humans/half-elves/dwarfs based on classes like paladins/rangers? Do you just take a look at the classes powers and simply them a bit?
|
|
#
?
Apr 23, 2015 03:30
|
|