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I mean, if you're not setting entire storylines up for a pun payoff like an episode of Aesop and Son, what's the point, really.
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Dec 13, 2017 17:05
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I know monster math has been pretty thoroughly solved for 4E. Where can I find good trap math in a similar vein?
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Dec 18, 2017 05:07
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The Bee posted:I know monster math has been pretty thoroughly solved for 4E. Where can I find good trap math in a similar vein? It's literally the same math, as far as I know.
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Dec 18, 2017 06:18
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The Bee posted:I know monster math has been pretty thoroughly solved for 4E. Where can I find good trap math in a similar vein? make a monster that doesn't move call it a trap
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Dec 18, 2017 09:42
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Huh, literally that easy? Sounds good to me!
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Dec 18, 2017 14:34
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Well, also have possible countermeasures based on skills rather than HP you need to reduce, identify triggers for the trap's attacks, determine whether it's friendly to enemies or something the PCs can make clever use of, use different math for defenses and HP, and actually do quite a few things different from just "monster that doesn't move" but yeah sure as far as attack maths are concerned that works.
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Dec 18, 2017 14:44
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The how-to-use and why of traps is an entirely different (and long) discussion, but mechanically speaking ... use the skill check DCs from the Rules Compendium to set the detection and deactivation DC, and use the monster math to set the damage dealt by the trap. You'll want to err on the high-side of monster damage, especially in a situation where it might only be hitting people once.
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Dec 18, 2017 15:04
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Also minion-level one shot traps are fun to just pepper around areas, especially if you flavor them as some other kind of effect. Magic storms or rockslides or whatever.
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Dec 19, 2017 23:13
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The Bee posted:I know monster math has been pretty thoroughly solved for 4E. Where can I find good trap math in a similar vein? Is that just "use post MM3 monsters", or that along with "half HP and 1.5 times damage" or something?
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Dec 20, 2017 01:27
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Otherkinsey Scale posted:Is that just "use post MM3 monsters", or that along with "half HP and 1.5 times damage" or something? Further halving HP and upping damage seems a little extreme personally, but I've heard people favor both. With how much high level 4E drags, though, I might start at post MM3 and switch around late Paragon.
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Dec 20, 2017 02:02
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PMush Perfect posted:Also minion-level one shot traps are fun to just pepper around areas, especially if you flavor them as some other kind of effect. Magic storms or rockslides or whatever. My favorite trap is the one that's a screaming head on a stick. It screams at you and it hurts.
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Dec 20, 2017 08:27
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Do enhancement bonuses apply to fixed damage or just if there's a roll? Like, the druid power Vine Serpents creates a zone that deals 5 + Wisdom mod to creatures that leave it. Would I add the enhancement bonus of my implement to that damage?
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Dec 21, 2017 10:32
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It almost always says "damage rolls". This could be 1d4, or 3[W]+Str mod, but damage dice have to be rolling. This is also true of enhancement modifiers, iirc.
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Dec 21, 2017 10:40
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Hello all. I have read a lot of this thread (~150 pages), but I have only recently managed to get enough people together to play our collective first game of D&D. I will be DMing, and I've managed to get most of my players (4 out of 6 PCs) to create characters using the offline character builder. I've got dice and a big gently caress off grid mat, and I now need to sort out the actual content that we'll be playing through, so I've decided on the Slaying Stone. Now my question is, with 6 players, will I need to adjust much of the combat stuff, either using the mathematics adjustments in the OP, or as a result of me having 6 players (the book states it is for 4-5 players)? And if so, what's the best way to do this? Also, I only have digital copies of the books so I have no tokens for monsters. Is there somewhere you can order tokens from that ship to the UK for a reasonable price? Or is it a matter of printing stuff out and making the tokens myself? Thanks and god bless.
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Dec 27, 2017 22:23
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I'd pront off tokens, but also army men or heroclix or anynother littke minis usually suffice. As for yoir adjustments, I'd wait and see, you don't really want to overadjust and if everyone is new, that is a potential issue.
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Dec 27, 2017 22:33
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The world is your oyster as far as token choices go. You can use anything from colored glass beads, to printed monster pics glued to washers, to actual minis. If you're the crafty type and have some money to spend these guys are my current go-to. But since this is your first time running it's probably not worth investing in something like that until you know it'll pan out. Otherwise, if you have any Lego minifigs, I've always been partial to those for PCs. The ability to customize them has always gone over well, though it's too much work for monsters IMO. For adventure related stuff, you might want to recheck the math to make sure it's MM3 compliant. I can't remember if Slaying Stone actually is. If it's not, that's at least one place to start. MM3 monsters are built to be more dangerous and less of a slog. If they are MM3 compliant, I'd agree that you should probably just see how the first fight or two goes and adjust from there. You have to do that anyway to account for the optimization level/tactical savvy of your group, but if they're all new it's not a bad idea to throw them a softball or two. Then just add an extra standard or two to taste if they're crushing things.
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Dec 27, 2017 23:05
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I think if you are adding add more minions if the fight is mostly standards and add standards of the fight is mostly minions.
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Dec 28, 2017 01:25
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Firos posted:Hello all. I have read a lot of this thread (~150 pages), but I have only recently managed to get enough people together to play our collective first game of D&D. I will be DMing, and I've managed to get most of my players (4 out of 6 PCs) to create characters using the offline character builder. I've got dice and a big gently caress off grid mat, and I now need to sort out the actual content that we'll be playing through, so I've decided on the Slaying Stone. Do what I did and go on aliexpress and order 5USD worth (about 200) of wooden 1inch tokens and write "A1-10" "B1-10" etc and use coloring pens/felts to shade them red/green/yellow or whatever I needed and then cover them both sides with 1inch epoxy dome stickers (3bucks for 100 same site). They're durable, look really nice, and are nicer to pickup than cardboard or coins and don't look as meh as dice or lego bricks or whatever.
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Dec 28, 2017 02:12
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Alternatively to adding monsters to a fight, which adds another HP pool to beat down, add a trap or hazard, which gives players something to do with their skill checks and hopefully some tough choices.
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Dec 28, 2017 08:54
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I went with some 22mm plastic counters I found for relatively cheap. That should do the job for now in terms of tokens  I think I'll see how the first encounter goes as provided before I make any changes.
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Dec 28, 2017 13:05
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I find that soda rings are the best counters and markers. Tons of colors, 'free', and you can hang them off minis. I use them more than the alea tools magnets I have.
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Dec 28, 2017 15:08
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4e encounters are quite easy to scale for party numbers -- each enemy has an XP cost based on its level, and you have an XP budget for each encounter based on the number of players and their level, so it's not hard at all to add additional enemies on the night. I've run games quite comfortably with six players before. The main challenge with a bigger party is that it will take longer between each player's turn, and if you have a couple of players who are bad at making decisions then that can mean people get bored waiting to act. It's worth encouraging new players to buddy up with someone more experienced who can explain the rules to them and discuss strategy, if that's possible. The other thing to bear in mind is party composition. Success in D&D4e relies a lot more on the party all working together, so if the party are missing any of the four roles (striker, leader, defender, controller) they will have a much more difficult time.
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Dec 28, 2017 15:21
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To speed things up it can help to have the initiative order on a whiteboard or even written down on the map mat where everyone can see it. Give a player an extra floating action point or 5e's inspiration (spend to roll 2 d20s and take the highest) to track it for you. Then when you start someone's turn, you also want to remind whoever's next that they're "on deck". Also try to encourage players to roll attack and damage at the same time. If they crit or miss, they just ignore the damage dice. You wouldn't think this would save time, but it really adds up.
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Dec 28, 2017 16:55
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My players have a fairly even spread I think: 1 defender, 1 controller, 2 strikers and 2 leaders. These are all useful tips and I'm taking note.
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Dec 28, 2017 17:03
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That's solid but I'd try to get one of the leaders to make sure they run a defender-y build. It's going to be difficult for a single defender and a single controller to do their jobs well against six PCs' worth of XP budget.
Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 17:35 on Dec 28, 2017 |
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Dec 28, 2017 17:09
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It'd be a nice to have but it's by no means essential -- it's more than you want to make sure you don't have six defenders or something like that.
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Dec 28, 2017 17:16
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Warlords can go kinda defender-y can't they?
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Dec 28, 2017 17:23
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Firos posted:Warlords can go kinda defender-y can't they? In broad terms, for secondaries/leans the general trend is: Martial - stiker Divine - leader Primal - defender Arcane - controller Shadow - lol There are obviously some deviations, between classes and even builds, but that's the general trend.
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Dec 28, 2017 17:34
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Does the Psionic power source have a similar tendency? I am much less familiar with the PHB3 classes.
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Dec 28, 2017 17:59
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Lemniscate Blue posted:Does the Psionic power source have a similar tendency? I am much less familiar with the PHB3 classes.  My gut says controller, but I'm in the same boat really. I'm not sure I've actually seen a Psionic class at the table before (granted, I also tend to mildly discourage them since they seem pretty boring and wonky unless you know what you're doing).
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Dec 28, 2017 18:08
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Monk is sorta controllery in the way a beast-form-druid is. But yeah the other classes use power points and depend heavily on which 3 at wills you pick.
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Dec 28, 2017 18:23
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The Warlock kind of stole an entire power source's cookies, and is now hoarding them as an at-will.
girl dick energy fucked around with this message at 19:28 on Dec 28, 2017 |
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Dec 28, 2017 19:26
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ImpactVector posted:I knew I was forgetting one. Both the Battlemind and Psion are mostly based around powering up their at-wills, and what generally happens in practice is that players take the class' obviously best at-will(s) (level 1 for psions, Dishearten, levels 7-13 for battleminds (Forceful Reversal, Lightning Rush, or Brutal Barrage) and spam that almost every round until the end of time. Battleminds are also unnecessarily tricky to play as effective defenders, and until you've paid off your feat taxes there to achieve base competence as a defender, they are really just self-sufficient whatever characters who don't contribute well to typical group cohesion. You can definitely play them against type; one of my favorite things with battlemind is to combine their speed class trait with Samurai and then Sonic the Hedgehog my way across the map to whatever enemy I want during initiative, which can consistently solve the DM trying to gently caress over the party's positioning, or gently caress over the positioning for everyone else free of charge (leaders hate this one trick). Bring the shield that gives soak against all ranged attacks. Wisdom-secondary battleminds meanwhile have approximately eight million ways to soak damage. And so it goes. It's possible to have fun with them but at early levels they can be pretty lame.
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Dec 29, 2017 08:55
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dont even fink about it posted:Both the Battlemind and Psion are mostly based around powering up their at-wills, and what generally happens in practice is that players take the class' obviously best at-will(s) (level 1 for psions, Dishearten, levels 7-13 for battleminds (Forceful Reversal, Lightning Rush, or Brutal Barrage) and spam that almost every round until the end of time. For a paragon game here I made a half-elf Battlemind, poached Eldritch Strike with Versatile Master, and then picked up flail expertise, dragging flail, hindering shield, etc, making my opportunity attack brutal (with Lightning Rush to defend allies against people I don't stop). But yeah, it takes a while to get going.
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Dec 29, 2017 11:12
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Don't get too hung up on party composition specifics. You just need an answer to 'where is the damage coming from' With two leaders in 6 players one or both of them need to focus on enabling more damage to ensure their team does enough damage. If both go super defensive reduce monster HP and increase monster damage to suit. A team of 5 strikers and a leader would probably be playable because it has a clear cut answer to how do we crank out enough damage, but 3 leaders, 1 controller and 2 defenders would be unplayable because there is no obvious source of damage.
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Dec 29, 2017 11:41
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Cthulhu Dreams posted:Don't get too hung up on party composition specifics. You just need an answer to 'where is the damage coming from' Well, in the latter, if the three leaders were a melee cleric, lazylord, and conbard, and the defenders have basics, you're in the money. A leader and 5 dedicated strikers is a bunch of squishies that the leader can heal maybe one of. One non-optimal initiative result for the party at close range and you are going to get pushed off the battle map and suffer casualties. Or, someone will get caught out when they accidentally isolate themselves because they go first, and then the eight enemies that the DM threw in to deal with your large group get their turns before everyone else. So the player is unwittingly Leroy Jenkins'd. But I digress, the point is, everything is in the details. A battlemind without the appropriate building blocks is a really frustrating character to play who can't do his job.
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Dec 29, 2017 12:16
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About battleminds: if someone tries to add a damage roll to brutal barrage (or takes something that reliably adds a dice roll to damage), you should pay really close attention, because it's possible that the battlemind is about to start doing like 200 damage a round.
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Dec 29, 2017 16:24
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dont even fink about it posted:Well, in the latter, if the three leaders were a melee cleric, lazylord, and conbard, and the defenders have basics, you're in the money. Yeah look you can do anything as long as you know where the damage is coming from. The real problem with 4E combat is that you need to be able to burn through the bad guys HP pools in a timely way and that means 'do we have enough offense' If you have enough offence (the baseline maths seems to assume the party as a whole can kill 115% of a standard per round with 5 players, but I reckon you want to be closer to 130-150%) you're probably OK. Bigger groups will have more variance as both sides have more fire to focus with leads to more swingy combat. If you do 125% of a standards HP in a round, average combat will be four rounds. If you do 150%, average combat will be 3.6 rounds (which in practice becomes 3). If you do 100% combat will be 5 rounds. If your party has below par damage but 'bqlanced' increases in durability, the maths work but the game breaks as, combat takes forever and the game becomes a protracted nightmare. To counteract this the GM will end up reducing HP and increasing damage which makes things swingy again, which is diabolical with larger parties as now there are two possible sources of variance to go horribly wrong.
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Dec 29, 2017 16:54
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Gharbad the Weak posted:About battleminds: if someone tries to add a damage roll to brutal barrage (or takes something that reliably adds a dice roll to damage), you should pay really close attention, because it's possible that the battlemind is about to start doing like 200 damage a round. Werewolf/Werebear lvl 10 + Cat gloves being the preeminent example. Add in some vulnerability exploitation and a side of Hammer rhythym and just watch the At-Will damage rack up.
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Dec 29, 2017 17:10
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| # ? May 9, 2024 13:52 |
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Whybird posted:Success in D&D4e relies a lot more on the party all working together, so if the party are missing any of the four roles (striker, leader, defender, controller) they will have a much more difficult time. gently caress controllers. They're boring and their main effect on the game is trivializing fights that would otherwise be interesting and challenging by spraying AOE status effects everywhere. There's nothing I find more irritating in 4e than watching a potentially interesting fight get ruined by a controller daily. The ideal controller is either a defender or a warlock. Defenders actively control the fight by trying to force enemies into lose/lose situations. Warlocks are more along the classic "debilitating status effects" line of controller, but they've generally got a more single target focus and they also put out pretty good damage alongside it. Both of these are more interesting and fun and involved than watching an invoker spray AOE dazes everywhere.
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Dec 29, 2017 18:19
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