|
Gort posted:Nah, in 4e you don't double damage on criticals for anyone. Players get the maximum damage you could've rolled (so 5d8+17 becomes 57 for example) plus some dice for having a magic weapon, monsters just get the maximum possible rolled damage. Yeah, I know, I was just trying to avoid having to do any additional arithmetic. I still had a lot to learn about how the maths actually plays out. quote:You didn't find that lead to all the monsters having similar initiatives and going one after another? Generally you want to avoid a situation where the monsters are clumped up together and alpha-strike someone without the party being able to do anything about it, which random initiative rolling usually avoids. Not any more than I'd already been seeing, honestly. D&D's initiative system is horrible however you slice it.
|
#
?
Dec 24, 2019 10:03
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 8, 2024 12:55 |
|
|
You could just adopt popcorn initiative I guess. Just let the players roll-off for first turn. Or slow / fast initiative from, I think, Blades In The Dark? Again, let the players go before monsters, not sure how badly that would break anything. starkebn fucked around with this message at 05:36 on Dec 25, 2019 |
|
#
?
Dec 25, 2019 05:34
|
|
|
Popcorn initiative has some strange balance issues in a game with a bunch of end of turn effects like 4e.
|
|
#
?
Dec 25, 2019 07:01
|
|
|
Yeah whatever you think about D&D's basic initiative system, it's an integral part of how effect timing works in 4E, and at least for my money it's nowhere near bad enough for me to work out a new timing system. Especially if the timing system is one of my favourite elements of it.
|
|
#
?
Dec 25, 2019 09:47
|
|
|
The Crotch posted:Until the party warlord gets to add +int to the whole party's initiative mods and then it's just team PC followed by team monster for the rest of the campaign. Of all the many 'how my heartbreaker would work' things, initiative ould be something like: 'Alternate players and monsters, ordering players at their discretion. Group the monsters into the right number of groups to have one group per player, if possible.' Then have the warlord power be 'your team gets the first two slots, rather than just the first one'.
|
|
#
?
Dec 25, 2019 10:43
|
|
|
Did anyone play any of the Lair assaults and were they any good?
|
|
#
?
Dec 26, 2019 23:29
|
|
|
Moriatti posted:Did anyone play any of the Lair assaults and were they any good? They're OK. Your first run will be getting butchered, and then people bring characters to exploit the scenarios.
|
|
#
?
Dec 27, 2019 02:09
|
|
|
I've been playing in a 4e campaign using Character Builder/CBLoader. I recently bought a new Windows 10 laptop, and I've been having trouble getting CBLoader to work on it. It's not merging the .part files in the "Custom" directory properly, and all I have access to is the stuff from the Oct '10 update and earlier. I've tried running as admin, I've tried running it in Win7 compatibility mode, I've tried deleting the AppData directory for the CBLoader and getting it to try to re-detect the .part files, I've tried it with the "-d" (don't download updates from the Internet) and "-e" (merge .part files every time you run CBLoader) options. I'm running out of ideas. I have a disc image of my old Windows install where the CBLoader still works, but the ideal would be to not have to lug around a separate hard drive and my docking bay just to run the Character Builder once a week. EDIT: Figured it out. I was using the wrong CBLoader stuff, including a Custom directory that was apparently empty somehow. Had a backup, so I just used the Custom directory from there. Commander Keene fucked around with this message at 11:05 on Dec 27, 2019 |
|
#
?
Dec 27, 2019 10:35
|
|
|
I've been thinking of getting into the groove of 4e DMing again, and I've been eyeing Monster Manual on a Business Card as a result. But looking at it gives me a few questions for custom monster design. A) I imagine if I shuffle around NADs proportionally, they should even out (ex, give a quick but frail monster 1 less Fort for 1 more Ref). But how would AC fall into this? Since attacks on AC are more common than ones on NADs, should it be "weighted" more? (1 less AC, 2 more Will, for example). Or should I keep it 1 to 1? B) Similarly, if I wanted to decrease AC but increase HP proportionally, or vice-versa, how would I best calculate that? 1 less AC = 1 more hit point per level, a la the Brute formula? Or should it be something different? C) Should attacks that inflict a condition inflict the listed average damage, or should they deal less, similarly to how multi-target attacks function? D) How many unique quirks should each monsters have? I know each monster should probably have a basic attack, an ability suited to their role, and a unique quirk to the "species" of monster they are (a la all goblins having Goblin Tactics), but how much more should be added from there? How many abilities should Elites and Solos get? Should Minor actions and Reactions/Interrupts be common or rare?
|
|
#
?
Dec 30, 2019 06:53
|
|
|
The Bee posted:I've been thinking of getting into the groove of 4e DMing again, and I've been eyeing Monster Manual on a Business Card as a result. But looking at it gives me a few questions for custom monster design. In general it's a good idea to look at monsters in the latter material, especially the Monster Vaults, for a reference for a lot of these things. For A, you're right that you can easily shuffle around NADs. I wouldn't mess with AC too much (it's sort of a role thing to have higher or lower AC), but you probably can trade it 1 for 1 or 1 for 2 as long as you don't increase it or decrease it by too much. You can easily have big gaps between different NADs, but you want to stay relatively close to the AC target. For B, I would definitely not trade AC for HP like that straight up, though I haven't thought that much about how I would do it. C really depends on the condition applied and how readily the monster can apply it. D is something where you can really choose however you want to do it as long as you give it a little thought. Giving monsters more options will rarely make them too strong because they're still fundamentally restricted by the action economy. If you give them way too many encounter abilities or whatever, then yeah, that's not good because you basically have just powered up all their at wills, but you have a ton of leeway. Minor action attacks are something that aren't super common for regular enemies, but are relatively common for elites and solos. There are certainly regular monsters with them as well. Again, looking at stuff in the Monster Vaults should give you a general sense of where to start.
|
|
#
?
Dec 30, 2019 09:02
|
|
|
I kinda felt like the last Monster Vault went a little overboard with how many features and abilities they gave some of their creatures. I can't remember to use all that poo poo!
|
|
#
?
Dec 30, 2019 18:02
|
|
|
I never made an actual system out of it but I always fared well with an approach that went something like: - mooks get a basic attack, maybe a group ability or death ability if it's their specific gimmick - normal enemies get a basic attack and one additional ability that supports their role or, more often, identifies them as a particular creature (like Goblin Tactics); this can be an attack or a passive thing but never anything triggered - elite enemies get a basic attack with two attack rolls (or equivalent) and as many as three extra abilities, one of which may be triggered - solo enemies, anything goes, definitely will have a triggered ability and a ton of other gimmicks
|
|
#
?
Dec 30, 2019 18:54
|
|
|
That sounds about right. Sort of like how the MM Goblin skirmisher gets Goblin Tactics for its goblin-ness and Great Position for being a skirmisher. As for the other questions, those all make sense. I can definitely get the value of not futzing with HP and armor too much. e: Do the skill rolls feel a little skewed to everyone else? Looking at level 1 atm, but DC 8 feels so trivial it doesn't even feel worth rolling, and DC 12 feels pretty easy (especially if you're specialized in a skill through race, class, and stat.) Then DC 19 just feels brutal by comparison for anything but the specialized character. I added a DC 16 as an in between difficulty and nudged the hard DC up to 20 to compensate, but I keep waffling as to whether it's a good idea or not. Does skill use end up more balanced in practice than in theory? The Bee fucked around with this message at 01:10 on Dec 31, 2019 |
|
#
?
Dec 30, 2019 19:11
|
|
|
With the online builder finally over, I rushed to back up all the character builds I had and get cbloader working. I’d forgotten just how ugly the power cards look. Did anyone ever make an alternate print layout?
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2020 22:07
|
|
|
The Bee posted:e: Do the skill rolls feel a little skewed to everyone else? Looking at level 1 atm, but DC 8 feels so trivial it doesn't even feel worth rolling, and DC 12 feels pretty easy (especially if you're specialized in a skill through race, class, and stat.) Then DC 19 just feels brutal by comparison for anything but the specialized character. I added a DC 16 as an in between difficulty and nudged the hard DC up to 20 to compensate, but I keep waffling as to whether it's a good idea or not. Does skill use end up more balanced in practice than in theory? The higher DCs assume a specialized character who's put resources into the skill. In practice, I never used the Easy DCs for individual rolls except to represent an advantage; I just gave an auto-pass for it most of the time.
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2020 22:15
|
|
|
Part of the issue is that often DC tables look reasonable or "Too easy", but then modules and GMs will just do whatever the gently caress they want. Like "It's an extra tile of movement to climb onto a table in the bar. It's DC 30 athletics to climb on top of the bar itself. Yes, this is the literal first fight in the level 1 start of this campaign (Don't worry, it's only 15 with a running start!)" being one particular example my friends joke about. Or examples of trap disarm vs locate gaps, when it's as hard or harder to manage the perception check to know there is a trap than it is to disarm it. Hardly unique to 4th ed, or DnD in general. So you can end up with a lot of well meaning people trying to ensure there is some consistent challenge who won't back down on "Actually these DCs are getting kind of wild." because if chart is too easy, therefore these must be GOOD DCs to challenge the party  One friend in particular had OPINIONS about 4th ed Even Level skill gains (Wizards getting better at athletics broke their brain), so I can imagine that particular mechanic doesn't help people trying tweak DCs when they are used to systems without such scaling.
Section Z fucked around with this message at 23:07 on Jan 2, 2020 |
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2020 22:53
|
|
|
It definitely bugs my players to increase all their skill levels by 1 every couple of levels. It might've been better to just have static skill DCs all along.
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2020 23:23
|
|
|
I feel really weird playing games with a lot of numbers when those numbers don't all get bigger, even though I'm fully aware "everything goes up by 1" doesn't do anything.
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2020 23:51
|
|
|
dwarf74 posted:DC8 is pretty trivial; that's what makes it Easy. It's supposed to be doable even by people without the skill and trivial for skilled characters. That was my take. If the PCs were rolling against Easy DC it meant they'd done something really smart and outwitted my poor bad guys - or it meant that everyone was teaming up to e.g. let the tank sneak despite the plate armour.
|
|
#
?
Jan 3, 2020 02:03
|
|
|
Gort posted:It definitely bugs my players to increase all their skill levels by 1 every couple of levels. It might've been better to just have static skill DCs all along. This is another sign pointing to 4E benefitting from the virtual tabletop that never was, tbh. This kinda thing sounds agonizing on paper but way more convenient and useful if digitized. I ended up leaving the DCs mostly identical, just adding in a middle of the road between Medium and Hard. No sense messing with things too much, after all.
|
|
#
?
Jan 3, 2020 16:55
|
|
|
So I've got a campaign going with like 18 players (yes I know) many of them are new so I handle printing their sheet etc. I really like the character builder but printing new cards/sheets everytime they level up is a pain. There's slight editing tools in the character builder but I don't see a way of forcing to leave fields blank, any way I could use the character builder to make the character then print it out in a way we have to write in AC/To-hit etc so we can just write it in/level up easier.
|
|
#
?
Jan 5, 2020 23:06
|
|
|
I have a feeling everyone's going to ignore your question and focus on how on earth you're handling 18 players. Myself included. Personally, and this kind of ties in with the group size, I'd do a lateral move: print everything to PDF, distribute the PDFs, leave it up to everyone individually to get stuff printed or bring a tablet. I don't think there's any easy way to do what you want to do at the character builder or printing stages; I think you could just leave the relevant bits blank in the builder, but it would defeat the purpose of using it (if it doesn't just output N/A).
|
|
#
?
Jan 6, 2020 07:07
|
|
|
Yeah, print to PDF sounds like the solution to your problem, one way or the other. You could see about finding a PDF editor and blanking out the text you don't want, then distributing the sheets.
|
|
#
?
Jan 6, 2020 07:19
|
|
|
Consider how much fiddly work that would be for each individual instance of AC or attack bonus on even half the number of character sheets, though. Honestly you're kind of already defeating the purpose of the builder if you leave out the final number values only to manually transfer them from the builder to character sheets later, to the point where you probably about break even if you instead make your own non-fancy sheets in Word with relevant spaces left blank.
|
|
#
?
Jan 6, 2020 07:25
|
|
|
I was told on the discord to ask this here, so since DDi is dead, is there somewhere to like... get a working D&D4e character builder? Does it still work on Win10?
|
|
#
?
Jan 6, 2020 20:49
|
|
|
socialsecurity posted:So I've got a campaign going with like 18 players (yes I know) many of them are new so I handle printing their sheet etc. I sincerely hope this is a West Marches style game or at least 3 of you are gms
|
|
#
?
Jan 6, 2020 22:21
|
|
|
I think we all want to hear what's happening here
|
|
#
?
Jan 7, 2020 00:21
|
|
|
So we had a bunch of people at work who wanted to DnD for the first time. I came up with the idea of a loose drop in/out campaign figuring most people who are interested usually don't last past a few sessions. Turns out everyone loves it and invites their loved ones. I have 2 other people who help dm and we've been splitting th party (except for one fight because everyone kept asking why we did that so they got to experience a like 14 pc battle). Some of them have started doing their own character stuff so that helps I setup an azure vm with the character builder for them. It's been fun I've been trying to utilize the high player count in neat ways, early on I had them take over a Merc compound for their own uses, half the party went frontal assault for a diversion while the other half snuck in to fight from the inside. I had some ballistas inside the building shooting out at the other party giving them a way to help the other party, instead they looted the building and kept it all for themselves almost feels like a mmo guild.
|
|
#
?
Jan 7, 2020 01:51
|
|
|
So like... Is everyone there every session or how does that work?
|
|
#
?
Jan 7, 2020 04:41
|
|
|
Moriatti posted:So like... Is everyone there every session or how does that work? Yes, we play at work so we usually meet in a large conference room layout general rp/story stuff then the groups split into the smaller conference rooms. I text with the other DMs if one party does something that affects the others or if they end up in a situation where they meet.
|
|
#
?
Jan 7, 2020 05:11
|
|
|
Ok, tell group A that either group B or group C are traitors, tell group B that at least some (but maybe not all) members of group C are traitors, and tell group C that group A and B are secretly pretending to cause conflict to draw out an enemy so they should encourage drama to make it believable. I mean, don't do that, this isn't paranoia. UNLESS IT IS see D&D really is a universal system.
|
|
#
?
Jan 7, 2020 06:04
|
|
|
Gharbad the Weak posted:UNLESS IT IS see D&D really is a universal system. This hurt me. socialsecurity posted:Yes, we play at work so we usually meet in a large conference room layout general rp/story stuff then the groups split into the smaller conference rooms. I text with the other DMs if one party does something that affects the others or if they end up in a situation where they meet. That's pretty cool and solved pretty much all of the real hazards I foresaw. It'd be cool to have a large enough crowd to do that, and I've often thought about doing something similar with my groups, but the time zone differences have made me cowardly.
|
|
#
?
Jan 7, 2020 22:17
|
|
|
Moriatti posted:This hurt me Let me tell you this great hack for turning D&D into a murder investigation by Gundams. Not the pilots, the machines themselves. Inevitable romances are rolled into the feat system.
|
|
#
?
Jan 8, 2020 00:07
|
|
|
Gharbad the Weak posted:Let me tell you this great hack for turning D&D into a murder investigation by Gundams. Not the pilots, the machines themselves. Using feats from the Book of Erotic Fantasy, I presume?
|
|
#
?
Jan 8, 2020 00:22
|
|
|
Dick Burglar posted:Using feats from the Book of Erotic Fantasy, I presume? I'm surprised there haven't been updates to that book. I mean, good, but still surprised. I imagine designing custom paths/destinies is a bit too much for 3rd party.
|
|
#
?
Jan 8, 2020 00:55
|
|
|
... Anyone done a hexcrawl in 4e yet? I've been wanting to run one and figured it'd be nice to do with a system I'm familiar with.
|
|
#
?
Jan 8, 2020 01:35
|
|
|
Moriatti posted:... Given that there is basically no support in 4E for hexcrawl-type activities (but it does work off on attrition model, which is nicely complementar to hexcrawl), just find another game which does hexcrawl well and drop into the 4E stuff whenever an encounter occurs. Hand out loot along 4E guidelines (of your choice, either classic or inherent bonuses), figure out how to properly incentivize doing the 5th, 6th, 7th encounter that day, and you're off to the races.
|
|
#
?
Jan 10, 2020 18:07
|
|
|
kaynorr posted:Given that there is basically no support in 4E for hexcrawl-type activities (but it does work off on attrition model, which is nicely complementar to hexcrawl), just find another game which does hexcrawl well and drop into the 4E stuff whenever an encounter occurs. Hand out loot along 4E guidelines (of your choice, either classic or inherent bonuses), figure out how to properly incentivize doing the 5th, 6th, 7th encounter that day, and you're off to the races. This was my assumption, I was hoping for any practical experience but I think reading this is also good. I figured this would be where I'd use random encounters during camping so a full rest outside of a settlement would run the risk of potentially very dangerous ambushes. Generally such encounters would have an optional skill challenge or alt retreat condition.
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2020 02:00
|
|
|
Moriatti posted:... Yes. It doesn't give much less than any other D&D. Standard rule I used - long rests in base camp, short rests took an overnight sleep. That made wandering monster fights meaningful as endurance actually mattered. Oh, XP for exploring or quests rather than killing stuff.
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2020 02:59
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 8, 2024 12:55 |
|
|
neonchameleon posted:short rests took an overnight sleep This seems incredibly punishing to anyone who didn't build around optimizing at will attacks, and it feels like it could fundamentally break a lot of how the game is supposed to run.
|
|
#
?
Jan 12, 2020 10:20
|
|