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It doesn't seem like a big problem to me; the fighter is forcing enemies to choose between "probably miss the fighter" and "attack fighter's friends and get bushwacked" which is the fighter's job. If you think the balance is too far to one side of the dynamic, you can always just offer the fighter player some advice regarding their next feat or power choice.
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May 25, 2018 21:31
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dont even fink about it posted:3) I can't imagine how loving lame it would be to tell a guy to rebuild because you're too lovely of a DM to handle "guy with high AC" The problem isn't that that a high-AC fighter is hard to deal with, the problem is that a "high AC and nothing else" fighter isn't going to do very well if the GM is doing his job.
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May 25, 2018 21:33
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Yeah, but we don't know that this is the case just yet? Maybe the Fighter is acceptable at other stuff but hasn't had to demonstrate it yet? I would make the combat changes first and offer a retraining if the player feels they are underperforming.
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May 25, 2018 22:11
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Not to mention he almost certainly has at least one, probably two good NADs.
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May 25, 2018 22:30
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If the Fighter lacks the ability to land mark punishment attacks and do damage, the Fighter is badly built and can't do its job properly. You don't need to throw everything out, just make sure the stat array is correct and they have Expertise feats and the right weapon. That's assuming the Fighter actually is built incorrectly, though. If it isn't, then there's nothing to rebuild. 
Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 23:26 on May 25, 2018 |
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May 25, 2018 23:09
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I'll bet the Fighter has a completely poo poo Will unless it's epic tier. But anyway, the correct answer is "eat the mark punishments and gently caress up the other party members."
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May 25, 2018 23:19
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:The problem isn't that that a high-AC fighter is hard to deal with, the problem is that a "high AC and nothing else" fighter isn't going to do very well if the GM is doing his job. He'll be getting his licks in on with one of the most accurate classes in the game, and there's plenty of nice building blocks for "sword and board" fighters to be good at enforcing marks. We're working with limited information here. People ITT complaining that the fighter isn't doing his job when he's either giving monsters an extremely poor shot at him or getting bonus attacks, smdh The fact remains that if a DM takes me aside and tells me my 4E fighter's AC is too high and I have to change it, I'm going to laugh in his face. The original post that started this basically asks if it's good to have things ignore the high AC fighter if it's too difficult to hit. Yes. That's part of the trade-off in the build and it's totally OK if you don't have best-in-class mark punishment. dwarf74 posted:I'll bet the Fighter has a completely poo poo Will unless it's epic tier. If it's a Dex-secondary fighter, certainly. If it's anything else, it actually won't have that high of an AC after a point.
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May 25, 2018 23:52
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Did you actually read the initial post? It explicitly says the fighter's damage is trash due to throwing everything into AC and ignoring everything else, meaning the choice isn't "probably miss the fighter, or hit something else and eat punishment", it's "probably miss the fighter, or hit something else and ignore the punishment". This isn't "the fighter's AC is too high" it's "the fighter's AC is too high and provides no reason for enemies to pay attention to him".
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May 26, 2018 00:33
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senrath posted:Did you actually read the initial post? It explicitly says the fighter's damage is trash due to throwing everything into AC and ignoring everything else, meaning the choice isn't "probably miss the fighter, or hit something else and eat punishment", it's "probably miss the fighter, or hit something else and ignore the punishment". Unless he's leading with Sure Strike (which he can't op attack with) or straight up did his arrays wrong, which would be the real problem, his damage is going to be fine Name Change fucked around with this message at 01:00 on May 26, 2018 |
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May 26, 2018 00:58
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The solution either way is just start ignoring the fighter. The GM is usually at fault here for not disrespecting marks more often. The GM and the fighter player are in a metagame. If the GM never disrespects marks, the fighter will not improve the mark punishment he never gets to use. Similarly if the fighter never has his mark respected, he's going to stop investing in defence, why would he improve something he never gets to use? So if the GM is worried that the fighter has overinvested in defences, he should just start routinely ignoring the mark. The fighter will respond by beefing up his mark punishment and ignore defensive options which will bring him back into line. If you see the fighter getting frustrated, then offer him a character rebuild, but remeber your obligation to be a participant in the fighters build decisions in the future by ruthlessly min/maxing the decision of if people respect or ignore the mark.
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May 26, 2018 01:14
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Actually looking at his stats his damage isn't completely woeful at 1d10+15 versus marked enemies at level 14, so I'm not sure why he doesn't feel like something the enemies should be worrying about. Perhaps it is that the warden in the party has much more effective feeling marks and encounter / daily powers that actually do damage rather than just raise his defences to crazy levels.
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May 26, 2018 01:18
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I dunno man if he wants to be The Guy With Crazy High AC, ignore him sometimes and also occasionally attack him and have attacks bounce off him, clearly he thinks it's cool
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May 26, 2018 01:30
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dont even fink about it posted:This is bullshit. The problem is that a fighter's job is to be a less unattractive target than their allies. They want to be hard to hurt, but still seem better than taking a free attack (and an attack penalty). If they can't be hurt at all but hit back with the force of a feather, there's not much disincentive to attacking the allies (who are actually doing damage) instead. Edit: Oops, missed this page.
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May 26, 2018 03:28
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Gharbad the Weak posted:I dunno man if he wants to be The Guy With Crazy High AC, ignore him sometimes and also occasionally attack him and have attacks bounce off him, clearly he thinks it's cool He is getting a lot of satisfaction out of never being hit and having more healing surges left than everyone else, so it's not like he's not enjoying the game.
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May 26, 2018 04:58
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zedar posted:Actually looking at his stats his damage isn't completely woeful at 1d10+15 versus marked enemies at level 14, so I'm not sure why he doesn't feel like something the enemies should be worrying about. Perhaps it is that the warden in the party has much more effective feeling marks and encounter / daily powers that actually do damage rather than just raise his defences to crazy levels. That damage is acceptable but anemic unless it comes with a status effect. A skirmisher at that level has 136 HP? That guy does an average of 20 damage a hit - so a bit less than that as a practical matter, probably closer to 16. If he's a being ignores he needs to do striker damage: which means 35-45 damage a turn. He's probably on the low end of that range, so optimal to just ignore him and pound on someone else. I've got a knight in my game who hits not.much harder than that, but his attacks inflict slows and knock prone and he can punish shifts with an OA not an interrupt and that mark punishment is way, way nastier. Cthulhu Dreams fucked around with this message at 06:07 on May 26, 2018 |
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May 26, 2018 06:04
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A tad late to the party, but, speaking of pixie fighters, does the heavy armour speed penalty apply to their flight speed? I don't seem to see anything definitive anywhere.
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May 26, 2018 13:43
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bio347 posted:A tad late to the party, but, speaking of pixie fighters, does the heavy armour speed penalty apply to their flight speed? I don't seem to see anything definitive anywhere. It applies to flight speed. The speed penalty rule (Rules Compendium 66, 202, 266-267) just says "speed", which means "the distance (in squares) a creature can move using the walk action" (316). Flying uses the walk, run, or charge action (210). Jesus, why did I cite it like that?
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Jun 1, 2018 03:22
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So last week I wrapped up a complete War of the Burning Sky campaign and wanted to post some thoughts on how it went, for those who are interested in either running WotBS, or doing a complete 1-30 campaign, or both. The adventure path itself is, on the whole, pretty good. It's roughly on par with Scales of War (at least from reading through SoW), but almost certainly inferior to Zeitgeist. I wouldn't recommend using it unless your players don't like the steampunk aesthetic of Zeitgeist. The 4E conversation is middle of the road - a few encounters are standouts (including the last one, which was a pleasant surprise) but most don't really embody the 4E design ethos. Skill challenges are terrible, but that's a 4E issue and not anything in particular with the adventure path. Minions aren't used nearly to the degree they should be, traps are ported from (I assume) the 3.5E version without really understanding how traps in 4E are supposed to work, and the battlemaps/terrain aren't what they need to be to really challenge a party. Oh, and the epic tier of the adventure path is sorely lacking in maps, which really hurt given that's a large part of what I wanted out of prepublished adventures. The setting is OK, pretty standard fantasy fare. I liked the myth of the Eagle and the Dragon, and leaned into that pretty heavily as the metaphysical knot the party had to find a way to untie. The relationship between the Taranesti and the Shahalesti wasn't handled as well as it should have been (fantasy genocides are tricky that way) but it really made Shaalhadel seem like a strong contender for Worst Person In The World, Leska's villainy notwithstanding. My players really glommed onto Haddin, a fairly minor NPC from the first adventure, as someone they absolutely loving hated, so I rolled with that and turned him into the mentalist duke of the criminal underworld (essentially Killgrave) and kept him from having a direct confrontation with the party until they were prepared to grind him into a fine paste. I never hit the degree of challenge I wanted out of most encounters, especially once epic bullshit came into play. The party was collectively about medium optimized, with two hybrids (warlock/paladin and swordmage/avenger) and three pure classes (rogue, invoker, warlord). The most effective tactics that put pressure on the party were artillery minions focusing their fire on the invoker or rogue, who were by far the most squishy heroes on the field. Both the hybrids could dish out damage iike a striker and take hits like a defender, so anything in their direction was essentially useless. The shining star was the warlord though - everything in his arsenal was amazing and seemed like a lot of fun to put into action. I've said it once and I'll say it again - hybrids are at least one design pass short of being playable. I would not allow them again in any game I ran - 4E already has enough trouble keeping up with optimized single-class characters. Aside from massed artillery, the biggest challenge seemed to come when the terrain offered limited line of sight. By epic tier teleportation and flight are commonplace, so if you can see it you can usually get to it within a single move action. High walls and darkness zones did the best job of making the party respond to circumstance as opposed to just running through their standard Damage Blender routine. Marking wasn't generally enough of an deterrent to lock down mobile threats - enemies intended to behave like defenders need some way of physically restraining PCs, including teleport jamming. I had to really put the pedal to the floor on the action economy - anything less than a 50% advantage of actions was completely evened out by the end of the first turn. Elites and solos didn't have enough survivability for this really to matter. I was giving all the solos an action advantage (plus some version of Superior Will) since middle-paragon, but being a single vessel for all those actions just made solos more of a target. I didn't want to make every solo immune to daze/stun/dominate because that takes fun toys away from the characters who use those abilities, but I never found something equivalent to give the opposition to even the playing field. Encounters with larger numbers of normals/minions seemed to offer better challenges than elites/solos. Luckily we were playing in Fantasy Grounds so there wasn't much of a bookkeeping overhead to having extremely crowded battlefields. All told I (and I think we) had a huge amount of fun over the last four years going 1-30. 4E is such a well put together game, and it's a real shame that it never got the design iteration needed to polish its flaws. I'm not sure I would ever try such an undertaking again, but I had a blast and certainly don't regret the fun I had or the friends I made.
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Jun 18, 2018 17:48
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Thanks, kaynorr ! I looked into it way back when and I thought the 4e conversion looked rather bad - mostly it was stat blocks with numbers, and poorly-designed abilities. Did you need to do a lot of edits?
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Jun 18, 2018 18:03
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dwarf74 posted:Thanks, kaynorr ! Yes, fairly extensive ones. MM3 math doesn't kick until about midway through the adventure path, so everything has to be revised at least that much. Most traps need to be rewritten, and there is a lot of room for improvement with encounter composition and terrain features. All told I'm still glad I bought a prepublished campaign instead of rolling my own (I hate Hate HATE doing maps) and I think I got my money's worth, but I wouldn't call myself blown away by the value.
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Jun 18, 2018 18:21
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kaynorr posted:All told I'm still glad I bought a prepublished campaign instead of rolling my own (I hate Hate HATE doing maps) and I think I got my money's worth, but I wouldn't call myself blown away by the value. You don't need maps when running a campaign. Logistics are dumb as poo poo and don't add anything important. If you and the players are telling a good story no one will stop and say "wait, how does this fit on the map?".
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Jun 18, 2018 18:25
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KPC_Mammon posted:You don't need maps when running a campaign. Logistics are dumb as poo poo and don't add anything important. Not geographical maps (although those are included in the adventure path and are quite nice), but battle maps which are pretty much mandatory for 4E.
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Jun 18, 2018 18:27
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I'm a player in Kaynorr's game. I'm glad I got to do a stupid gimmick hybrid, but in the unlikely event that happens again (I would like to try the Whole Zeitgeist. Really Pants did an amazing job, so I have no idea how much came from the books and what Pants made up), no way am I getting close to a hybrid. I think I'd really like to play a leader, because I'm pretty good at making good characters, so if I go overboard I'm making other people cooler (cmonnnn double leader no controller game) I do think the party as a whole was balanced, although individuals were not, until we hit a certain point where the hybrids were doing too much. After that, balance was basically impossible. I would have changed classes, except I wanted to do at least one scary hybrid to 30 in my life. I'm not sure if that's when I asked kaynorr to look at level One Damage Forever, but I do know that there were a couple "there goes 75% of our hp" moments, which were really fun. Gharbad the Weak fucked around with this message at 20:37 on Jun 18, 2018 |
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Jun 18, 2018 18:52
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kaynorr posted:Yes, fairly extensive ones. MM3 math doesn't kick until about midway through the adventure path, so everything has to be revised at least that much. Most traps need to be rewritten, and there is a lot of room for improvement with encounter composition and terrain features.
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Jun 18, 2018 18:57
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One thing I felt War of the Burning Sky did well was escalating the setting from level 1 through level 30. Kaynorr of course did a lot of the work, but it definitely felt like things were getting more mythical as we progressed. And the final battles, not just the ultimate battle but the penultimate and the army fight before that, worked really well. IDK how much of that was our GM and how much was the adventure though. Encounter balance did seem tricky, but how much of that was the unique party composition, how much of that was the sheer explosion of ability that all 4e characters gain through paragon and at epic, and how much of that was the published adventure seemed difficult to tell. Action economy, improving solo fights, and late paragon / epic damage seemed the biggest issues, as Kaynorr said. If anyone here is building 4e encounters, remember that the more things that the characters need to interact with in an encounter, the more taxed they'll have to be and the better your bosses and solos will be. Whether those things are respawning minions, traps, things they have to disable, conditionals they have to fill to do damage, places they have to move or avoid, battlefields they have to search, and so on. It doesn't matter how many actions you give a solo, they'll still get focused when the party can actually give them attention, so in many ways you're trying to sap attention rather than pure damage / actions. Giving the characters things to do in an encounter especially applies in epic, applies mostly in paragon, and can be ignored in heroic. I like the note about line-of-sight. I've played a line-of-sight denial + damage zone character before and it was a blast, but very annoying to track, especially for the GM I thought. But yeah, I suppose this is particularly relevant to WotBS, as your party picks up a plot object that gives at-will teleport to its holder and an encounter party-teleport. As for the Swordmage/Avenger I played, I, uh, didn't have anything near defender defenses. Like, at level 30 I had 43 AC, which is on the low end of where a character that doesn't neglect his armor stat should be (42-47 AC for level 26+, ~49 for a swordmage). I mean, yeah, add +4 conditional to that for always-on abilities, but that's just the high end of what no-bonus AC should be at level 26. I also specced out of all my retaliatory abilities at around the start of epic, pretty sure I mentioned I was speccing into striker actually. What kept me alive against enemies of that level was 218+ effective hitpoints, NADs that were truly great (41/43/45) so I couldn't get locked down easily, and the fact that we had a second defender who could force mono-focus. Two-defender parties are pretty super in 4e, if the rest can do damage, and we had a warlord for that. As an aside, the one time you did take me out, Kaynorr, was because you did decide to focus fire me for once.
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Jun 18, 2018 20:36
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Well, we were two off tanks, which works really well. One guy marks, the other punishes when defending that mark. I think big issues were sheer damage output (and your avenger swordmage sage of ages was Rollin, my guy doing off turn damage, with a warlord, and a rogue that could ping off radiant vulnerability), and, yeah, the number of options we had at our disposal. Once we had decent arrays of items, then we had more daily abilities than we knew what to do with. It was overwhelming. Although, none of us used as many dailies as we "should" have, there were just plain too many options. Edit: on a good note, it did give some flexibility for people to play characters they wanted, rather than Be Mechanically Optimized Gharbad the Weak fucked around with this message at 20:49 on Jun 18, 2018 |
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Jun 18, 2018 20:47
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TheDemon posted:One thing I felt War of the Burning Sky did well was escalating the setting from level 1 through level 30. Kaynorr of course did a lot of the work, but it definitely felt like things were getting more mythical as we progressed. And the final battles, not just the ultimate battle but the penultimate and the army fight before that, worked really well. IDK how much of that was our GM and how much was the adventure though. Funny you should mention the army fight, that was completely made up on my own. In the published text, there are a long-ish (4-5 I think?) series of encounters representing different skirmishes of the overall battle, including an assassination attempt at the command tent. I decided to cut it for a couple of reasons - one being it felt like there was a certain amount of narrative momentum coming off the confrontations in the Imperial Palace, and I didn't want things to feel bogged down in a long string of smaller fights. Two is that ALL of these smaller fights were missing maps, which I've already gone on the record as hating with a passion. Three is just plain fatigue. The best part of all those individual fights is that each one highlights a returning NPC, which is where the idea to have each of you command a squad of old friends came from. I actually think it doesn't go far enough in the escalation from heroic to epic (although having the great spirits and gods chat with you frequently helped with that). Scales of War is really great on this front - you start out as standard level 1 chumps in a tavern and at level 30 you're saving Bahamut's rear end at least twice, singlehandly clearing out the City of Brass in the Elemental Plane of Fire, and killing/ressurecting gods at every opportunity. Part of that was the constant wealth issue (which I think bothered me more than any of my players) - heroes with epic level wealth can't even interact with the heroic tier world without completely reshaping it. In Scales of War you're exchanging sacks of astral diamonds in the bazaars of Sigil, but in WotBS it's still the same merchants you met at level 7 who are supplying the army at level 27. I think somewhere in upper paragon I said "gently caress it" and just had all wealth represent the narrative ability to have the Rings of Free Time every wants "just happen" to be found in the Lyceum's storerooms. TheDemon posted:If anyone here is building 4e encounters, remember that the more things that the characters need to interact with in an encounter, the more taxed they'll have to be and the better your bosses and solos will be. Whether those things are respawning minions, traps, things they have to disable, conditionals they have to fill to do damage, places they have to move or avoid, battlefields they have to search, and so on. It doesn't matter how many actions you give a solo, they'll still get focused when the party can actually give them attention, so in many ways you're trying to sap attention rather than pure damage / actions. Giving the characters things to do in an encounter especially applies in epic, applies mostly in paragon, and can be ignored in heroic. This is what made the final fight work a lot better in practice than it did on paper. There were a bunch of objectives that had to be destroyed before you could even harm the final enemy, and she could summon in a new unit every turn which you didn't have the actions to clear. Those kinds of things were a lot of fun to design - the Blasphemies against Avandara/Melora/etc. were not in the original book, and I think they did a lot to keep that fight lively. When in doubt, I just copied from World of Warcraft, which is good advice when you need mechanical inspiration for 4E encounters.
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Jun 18, 2018 21:33
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As for gear, I basically destroyed the entire magic item economy and switched whole-hog to inherent bonuses for Zeitgeist. There's a number of really flavorful stuff through the adventure path which the PCs mostly got to keep, but several ended up without magic armor or magic weapon/implements at the end of the game. As for escalation... I don't want to spoil anything, but Zeitgeist does a really good job of this. The epic-tier adventures are suitably epic - especially Adventure 12 - and their goals likewise escalate from mundane to - basically - interplanetary. It felt at every step like the sorts of things Epic-tier characters should be bothering themselves with.
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Jun 18, 2018 21:46
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And now I really want to play in a 4e campaign.
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Jun 18, 2018 21:54
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What are the best 4e rewrites? I love Strike and want to see more things like it. (I'd probably run more 4e but I don't love the magic items, healing surge and daily power economy so if anything does that better I'd like to know about it)
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Jun 20, 2018 21:58
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Gort posted:What are the best 4e rewrites? I love Strike and want to see more things like it. Gamma World 7e. It's literally 4e without magic items/surges/dailies. Instead you have decks of cards you draw from during play that yield different powers (you can ignore these if you want, they're the game's substitute for magic items), and everyone gets all their health back after an encounter (effectively killing the "adventuring day" and letting you just move from encounter to encounter). Second Wind is also a minor action for everybody and heals for your bloodied value. e: oh, and the game has a level range of 1-10 instead of 1-30, if that's important to you. Generic Octopus fucked around with this message at 22:23 on Jun 20, 2018 |
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Jun 20, 2018 22:18
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I just recently got my kickstarter copy of Unity. I hope it's available for public release soon; it borrows a whole ton of 4e's design ethos.
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Jun 20, 2018 22:59
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dwarf74 posted:I just recently got my kickstarter copy of Unity. I hope it's available for public release soon; it borrows a whole ton of 4e's design ethos. Do you have a link? I can only find Unity software for making rpg games on a cursory look
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Jun 20, 2018 23:13
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Spiteski posted:Do you have a link? I can only find Unity software for making rpg games on a cursory look Yup! I just wish this was a dtrpg link. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/215931791/unity-tabletop-rpg
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Jun 21, 2018 00:16
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http://www.unity-rpg.com/#store reading the page, they've done some of the things I thought I would do to improve 4e, ie - use a 2-dice curve instead of 1d20 & no GM dice rolling. I'm interested in reading this when it gets released. starkebn fucked around with this message at 00:44 on Jun 21, 2018 |
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Jun 21, 2018 00:40
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After playing Shadow of the Demon Lord (which has both good and bad points compared to 4E) the biggest things I want from a theoretical 4E clone are, in no particular order: - Better multiclassing - No "adventuring day" -- no dailies, no Vancian casting, no healing surges, either make encounters completely discrete or have resources that refresh based on player-facing triggers ("when you kill an enemy, regain 2 uses of this power" or whatever) instead of an 8-hour rest - No initiative (fast turns / slow turns is loving genius and I wish I'd thought of it) - Enough dice to make a nice bell curve re: resolution mechanics - Encounter budgeting rules that are 100% airtight and playtested to death Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 00:52 on Jun 21, 2018 |
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Jun 21, 2018 00:50
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"No GM rolling" sounds awful though, the only way I want that is if your game just doesn't use random resolution models period (at which point you're not really talking about D&D any more)
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Jun 21, 2018 00:54
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:"No GM rolling" sounds awful though, the only way I want that is if your game just doesn't use random resolution models period (at which point you're not really talking about D&D any more) when something is attacking the player, the player rolls their defence to beat the attack - when you're attacking something you roll to beat their defence
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Jun 21, 2018 01:03
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starkebn posted:when something is attacking the player, the player rolls their defence to beat their attack - when you're attacking something you roll to beat their defence Huh. If it works out to the same math I guess I'll adjust my position from "negative" to just "confused why this matters." I was imagining something where the GM has a deterministic model and the players had a random one, which just sounds like a recipe for frustration and unfairness.
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Jun 21, 2018 01:05
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:After playing Shadow of the Demon Lord (which has both good and bad points compared to 4E) the biggest things I want from a theoretical 4E clone are, in no particular order: I can get behind these. Honestly the only improvements 5e got even close to making was proficiency being baked into the class (which allows/helps for bounded accuracy) and Advantage/Disadvantage. I think you could do a Daiiy style system based on milestones instead of days.
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Jun 21, 2018 01:18
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