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Devorum posted:What adventures are good for showing the system? Madness at Gardmore Abbey is an excellent campaign but is fairly involved, has some special mechanics and starts at level 6. You can jump into it but something more basic might be better to ease into it. Cairn of the Winter King is a perfectly good dungeon crawl with potential for diplomatic solutions. Still starts at level 4 but that's probably fine. quote:Should I keep it to PHB1 to start, or open up PHB2 for Bards and Druids? General advice: it's a system geared towards involved tactical combat and mechanics before descriptions. Disabuse your worldbuilder wizard players of the notion of "creative spell application" as soon as you can. Circumventing encounters or solving them peacefully is literally avoiding playing the game. The more a 4E game feels like Final Fantasy Tactics, the more it shines. This isn't to say you should play a pure mindless hack and slash campaign. Far from it - it's just that in 4E combat is the way to interact with the plot.
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Nov 13, 2020 18:33
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I don't entirely agree with the idea that you shouldn't come up with clever solutions to avoid combat. That's why some of the more interesting rituals and utility powers exist. But yeah, there's not a lot of room to come up with your usual "wizard casts a spell and solves everything" stuff and that's a good thing actually.
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Nov 13, 2020 19:04
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Try to include interesting terrain or other features in your encounter design, too. Push/Pull powers can be more interesting when the party is fighting on something that isn’t a standard flat square dungeon floor. (USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST)
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Nov 13, 2020 19:04
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My Lovely Horse posted:General advice: it's a system geared towards involved tactical combat and mechanics before descriptions. Disabuse your worldbuilder wizard players of the notion of "creative spell application" as soon as you can. Circumventing encounters or solving them peacefully is literally avoiding playing the game. The more a 4E game feels like Final Fantasy Tactics, the more it shines. I disagree with basically all of this. Just because 4e has good encounters doesn't make it a videogame, or make combat the only way to interact with the plot. Likewise 4e has tons of ways to get creative with spells, they're just called rituals, and aren't restricted to magic classes only.
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Nov 13, 2020 19:06
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In my current game I realized that Create Campsite, in addition to, well, creating a campsite, specifies that it is a) magically hidden b) possible to have it set up your regular camping gear, but it uses natural materials if said gear is not available. The party used it as a blind and our actual campsite as a decoy.
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Nov 13, 2020 19:21
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if you bypass combat entirely in 4E then you hosed up, there's no reason to be playing 4E in that situation the flip side of this is that what combat you end up fighting can be very flexible. prep generic encounters that can be reskinned a bunch of ways and you can still have a ton of narrative flexibility with roughly the same mechanical structure
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Nov 13, 2020 19:55
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You are all forgetting the single most important tip. - RESKIN EVERYTHING. If your player wants to play something that’s not an exact fit for one of the classes you have, don’t try to bodge it, find the one that best fits what they want to do mechanically, and then reskin it. The design is focused much more on the numbers, and messing around with them can have unintended effects. This also carries over to monsters, and can even save you from needing to redesign encounters if players do something you didn’t expect. Those ogres in the cave they decided to ignore in favor of pissing off a wizard? They’re earth elementals now. - Similarly, the to-hit math strongly encourages players to have at least a 16 in their primary stat, ideally an 18 or 20. It’s not minimaxing, it’s how the math works best. If they want to play a class with a different best stat... reskin! - Also, early modules and books made monsters way too beefy and not nearly threatening enough. This was fixed in Monster Manual 3 and the Monster Vault. If you want to use older books and modules, look for the MM3 monster math on a business card in the OP. girl dick energy fucked around with this message at 20:40 on Nov 13, 2020 |
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Nov 13, 2020 20:36
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I actually have a bunch of tips for new 4e DMs in my post history, I can aggregate them together later if you’d like (I’m on mobile right now.)
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Nov 13, 2020 20:51
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:if you bypass combat entirely in 4E then you hosed up, there's no reason to be playing 4E in that situation If players feel pigeonholed into always needing to do a combat when they would prefer an alternative, imo they should be able to make an attempt at a different solution with the possibility of bypassing combat. Although yeah if you're forgoing combat entirely you should probably just pick a different system. PMush Perfect posted:You are all forgetting the single most important tip. This is all very solid advice, and you can always adjust monster defenses down by 1 or 2 points if your players still have difficulty hitting things.
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Nov 13, 2020 22:52
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Devorum posted:What adventures are good for showing the system? None of the first party ones are any good. If you can find Zeitgeist, it's pretty solid, but you're better off just writing your own - 4E gives you actual tools for building encounters as a GM so writing your own adventures is pretty easy. Devorum posted:Should I keep it to PHB1 to start, or open up PHB2 for Bards and Druids? There is no reason to disallow any of the supplements in 4E. The game is actually competently designed and well balanced (though remember to use the errata). The Essentials supplements are significantly worse-designed than the pre-Essentials ones but even then, they're not really a balance problem. Devorum posted:Any advice on running it is greatly appreciated. Reskin everything, use inherent bonuses and fixed maths, convert all pre-MM3 monsters to MM3 monster maths (just Google "MM3 on a business card").
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Nov 13, 2020 23:09
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I'd say, if you have to use a prewritten low-level module, The Slaying Stone is perfectly serviceable, as long as you're willing to play a little fast and loose with the encounters.
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Nov 13, 2020 23:24
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I can confirm the 4e zeitgeist campaign is loving awesome - I ran it 1-30 and am now running a homebrew sequel campaign in the same setting.
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Nov 13, 2020 23:29
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Thirding Zeitgeist as a longer campaign. I have converted the first of the three books into fantasy grounds if thats what you're using. Otherwise the first adventure is freely available on ENpublishing website and serves as a pretty great standalone as is.
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Nov 14, 2020 02:12
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Devorum posted:Should I keep it to PHB1 to start, or open up PHB2 for Bards and Druids? Just in case one of your players brings up the 3rd player's handbook, don't work with hybrid characters until you've got a firm grasp of the system. Most hybrid characters are just kinda trash. Also, the Monk works decently, but I'd stay away from the psionic classes that use power points because... well, the power point system incentivizes really boring gameplay. Edit: Because power points basically let you spam "encounter" level attacks. It's entirely possible to go through multiple battles using exactly one attack, over and over and over and over.
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Nov 14, 2020 03:24
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Also I have a ".part" file for Zeitgeist on character builder. It doesn't have the paragon paths or added theme features but it works for placeholders at the very least.
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Nov 14, 2020 03:28
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Gharbad the Weak posted:Just in case one of your players brings up the 3rd player's handbook, don't work with hybrid characters until you've got a firm grasp of the system. Most hybrid characters are just kinda trash. This is very true, for Ardents and Psions both grab really powerful level 1 at-wills and sort of just carry them on through level 21.
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Nov 14, 2020 04:19
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Devorum posted:My current group has only ever payed 5E, and the current DM saw a bunch of YouTube videos about 4E and asked if I would run it for them since I've actually played it before. To agree with everyone else HS1: The Slaying Stone is the best of the bad bunch WotC produced, and ENWorld's Zeitgeist: The Gears of Revolution is probably the best adventure/adventure path published for 4e. As long as you don't mind starting out as the cops. Open up PHB2 - for that matter the main reason not to open up everything (with the arguable exception of the Dungeon Explorer's Handbook, the last published sourcebook for 4e and literally half full of adverts for other products) is to avoid burying people in options. The PHB2 is a definite include - although the PHB2 druid class is slightly disappointing (unlike bards, barbarians, invokers, and sorcerers). 4e IME very much uses narrative pacing, with everyone having at will abilities in combat (at will attacks - 5e would call the spell version cantrips), signature moves they can use 1/scene ("encounter powers") and major abilities they can use 1/long rest ("daily" powers). Out of combat run 4e almost as if it were 5e. Ignore skill challenges (they are good but really badly explained) and you won't get Wizards Solving Everything. The biggest differences are that being proficient in a skill is a flat +5 - and because people get better all round the PCs get a + 1/2 level bonus to all skills. This means that instead of picking a DC that divides by 5 you pick an expected level to be doing [thing] and then easy/medium/hard and look up the number on a table. Or pull one out of thin air. The only other real things worth mentioning about the out of combat experience are that short rests are only about five minutes - and healing surges are much more integrated with the rest of the mechanics as a measure of stamina than hit dice are in 5e; you get more recovery from them and there are more abilities that let you spend them in combat. Notably spending a turn to take a breather ("Second wind") and inspirational abilities - if the recipient is spending healing surges it's not magic, it's inspiration that's letting them fight harder and longer. The first thing to mention about 4e combat is that it's a showstopper. Fights are slightly longer than they are in 5e, but a whole lot more engaging with rather fewer bullet sponge enemies (especially if you stick to the Monster Manual 3, Monster Vault, and Threats to the Nentir Vale for your monster-books; they reworked the math and got better at monster design as the edition went on). An hour for an engaging and cinematic fight makes for an excellent climax to a session (or when you're really uninspired) - but 4e does small fights against two goblins very badly and fight after fight gets monotonous and dull. The second thing to mention about 4e combat is that it's kinaesthetic. Never have a fight without something to push people into/onto/off/over and make sure most of the PCs have forced movement abilities that push or pull. Having a fight by a latrine pit can be fun and pushing BBEGs back through their own summoning portal is really entertaining. Because you're pushing people around without giving up your attack every fight is different and the scenery matters to a point that after playing 4e almost any other system using a battlemap feels like acting in front of a green screen rather than on location with props. This is why Keep on the Shadowfell is terrible. Up to the point where you reach the keep it's actually not that bad. But inside the keep are 17 fights in a row, of which at least a dozen are in basically featureless rooms. The third thing to mention is the fighter class. A 4e fighter when they swing at a target "mark" them as in football for a round (get a box of paperclips to use for status effects - 4e uses them a lot). And they have as a class feature the equivalent of the Sentinel feat on targets they've marked. This means that the 4e fighter might not hit as hard as the barbarian - but they are fast enough or experienced enough that the enemy knows if they take their eyes of that badass if only for a split second they will get the fighter's sword in their face. This is the opposite of an MMO mark - but does the same tactical job of drawing attention onto the fighter simply because the enemy doesn't dare turn their back. Also as a particular point of badassery is the Come And Get It ability which is an optional fighter power where they beckon or call out a challenge to all enemies in 15ft - who then rush them and get cut down. The fourth thing to mention about combat is the warlord class. The warlord is a fighter-type who's not quite as good at personal threat as the fighter - instead focusing on inspiring others. 2/encounter they can let one of their allies spend a healing surge and dig deep to keep going. They also frequently take abilities that let them give their attacks away; the running joke is that the warlord hits people with their axe, the warlord hits people with the barbarian. (There's a build that requires a lot of sourcebooks where the warlord literally never makes an attack roll). The bard has some of these tricks of course.
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Nov 14, 2020 05:35
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PMush Perfect posted:I actually have a bunch of tips for new 4e DMs in my post history, I can aggregate them together later if you’d like (I’m on mobile right now.) I would appreciate it a lot, if you're willing! Wow, thanks a lot everyone. I'm really trying to give them a good impression of 4E. They're into tactical combat, so I think they'll love it. I can make my own campaign for them, and probably will, but if there were any truly standout adventures I figured I'd reduce my workload. Devorum fucked around with this message at 08:08 on Nov 14, 2020 |
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Nov 14, 2020 07:51
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You certainly wouldn't do them a disservice if your own campaign led up to Madness at Gardmore Abbey at level 6, and a party can come out of that adventure holding a plot device that can serve you well into Paragon tier. One caveat about the whole "combat every time all the time" thing: don't run every piddly fight with some bandits as a full tactical combat. If the players are traversing the orc fortress and there would be fights with an orc patrol in featureless corridors every few steps, run those as a challenge to avoid the patrols, or trick them, or even handle a combat as a quick skill challenge and make it cost a surge or daily power if someone rolls badly. Break out the grid when the party reaches the orc lieutenant in the courtyard, the orc warlock in his warped tower and the orc warlord with his personal guard. And speaking of "skill challenge", as described they ranged from "deeply flawed" to "worthless." You can plug in an alternative system or it's totally fine to just run things like you would in 5e. One good bit that comes out of it is the idea that for group skill checks, everyone rolls, but if half the party beats the DC they all pass.
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Nov 14, 2020 09:07
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IIRC there's a pretty good Skill Challenge alternate system someone wrote called the Obsidian System, which I used in my Heroic-to-Paragon campaign. It sets up Skill Challenges as being two-or-three-phase deals where the party is trying to accrue successes across each phase. It's much stricter about applicable skills and each party member can only roll one check per phase, meaning everyone has to contribute, even if the skills required aren't in their wheelhouse. It also grades the outcome depending on the total successes acquired across the challenge, so if you got close, but didn't quite hit the minimum required, you get a qualified success rather than an outright failure.
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Nov 14, 2020 09:18
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Devorum posted:I would appreciate it a lot, if you're willing! There's some discussion of 4e in the chat thread right now, too, if you're not following it. Nothing quite as on-point as you'll find here but possibly useful nonetheless.
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Nov 15, 2020 01:05
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IIRC there was a pretty good chain of D&D Living Forgotten Realms modules that were pretty good. Somebody had plan of compiling them all into a single campaign to go from 1-20 or so. I'll see if I can dig up what some of the modules were and link the adventures. Edit: here we go, dug it up. You can find them here thespaceinvader posted:In short: the CALI series, the NETH series, the WATE series are all pretty decent to start off with, plus a few of the important CORE adventures that set up and foreshadow the epic campaign. Between those (and the SPEC mods related to them) you can get a solid campaign going. I'd generally advise against anything earlier than year 2 adventures and even then, only H1 and h2, probably) without updating the monster maths. berenzen fucked around with this message at 06:48 on Nov 15, 2020 |
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Nov 15, 2020 06:42
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Do you need some more D&D 4e books? Trad Games Secret Santa is up, and you have about a week left to sign up! You could ask for some D&D stuff. Or anything else really.
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Nov 15, 2020 06:44
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I've been itching to play some 4e again lately, is there anywhere to play it digitally thats not a huge wall of work to get playing?
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Nov 15, 2020 09:47
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berenzen posted:IIRC there was a pretty good chain of D&D Living Forgotten Realms modules that were pretty good. Somebody had plan of compiling them all into a single campaign to go from 1-20 or so. I'll see if I can dig up what some of the modules were and link the adventures. FWIW I never did get round to compiling them into a single campaign, because I long since stopped playing, but it shouldn't be too hard to work out at a speed of around 2 mods per level if you play up, or 3 per level if you play at-level, you're looking at around 50 sessions from 1-30. The EPIC mods are honestly really good and surprisingly well balanced, especially when you know by that stage roughly what you're expecting from them, and they're written really cinematically, there are some excellent set pieces.
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Nov 15, 2020 15:51
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kingcom posted:I've been itching to play some 4e again lately, is there anywhere to play it digitally thats not a huge wall of work to get playing?
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Nov 15, 2020 16:22
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So I have a gimmicky brawler fighter/monk mc goliath and i want to get in reach shenanigans. other than stoneblessed at paragon which other ways can I find to punch people from afar like Monkey D. Luffy?
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Nov 15, 2020 17:14
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dwarf74 posted:I have not used Roll20 for 4e but it looks like it was almost designed with 4e in mind. the main problem my group had is that the 4e sheet doesn't make nice macros unless you put way more effort in than you have to for like pathfinder. it's pretty annoying. other than that it works great and hey maybe you don't like super snazzy macros anyway
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Nov 15, 2020 17:34
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Kobold Sex Tape posted:the main problem my group had is that the 4e sheet doesn't make nice macros unless you put way more effort in than you have to for like pathfinder. it's pretty annoying. other than that it works great and hey maybe you don't like super snazzy macros anyway There's an offsite that makes some real snazzy power macros here http://4e-power-builder.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/. OP please add it on the resources!
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Nov 15, 2020 17:38
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Plutonis posted:There's an offsite that makes some real snazzy power macros here http://4e-power-builder.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/. OP please add it on the resources! Oh that's rad! A Foundry setup would be even better but that would require doing a bunch of coding by hand in Javascript. Whatever crazy diamond does do it is gonna have the perfect way to run 4e online though.
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Nov 15, 2020 17:49
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Devorum posted:
You really want PHB2 added, among other reasons because the only controller option in PHB1 is Wizard, which as of PHB1 raw didn't really have a strong handle on what the controller role actually entails. It's fixed over the course of various splatbooks and stuff, but it's also very easy to just allow PHB2 and get Druid and Invoker up and running.
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Nov 15, 2020 18:46
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Just skip controllers entirely and add a warlord instead, even if you already have a warlord
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Nov 15, 2020 20:13
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Plutonis posted:There's an offsite that makes some real snazzy power macros here http://4e-power-builder.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/. OP please add it on the resources! kickass
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Nov 15, 2020 20:17
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I've been using that power builder for my game that started at the beginning of covid lockdown. It's so very very good.
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Nov 15, 2020 22:15
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I'm thinking of running the D&D Encounters season 3 (Keep on the Borderlands: Season of Serpents) as an intro to D&D/4e for my new housemate's siblings and my partner. Anyone remember it? Anything to adjust/avoid/remake?
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Nov 15, 2020 23:34
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Plutonis posted:There's an offsite that makes some real snazzy power macros here http://4e-power-builder.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/. OP please add it on the resources! This was what stopped me from playing 4e in roll20. Holy poo poo is that helpful. kingcom fucked around with this message at 01:11 on Nov 16, 2020 |
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Nov 16, 2020 00:09
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Gharbad the Weak posted:Just skip controllers entirely and add a warlord instead, even if you already have a warlord Yeah, I don't really like the controller concept at all. Like, to me, the point of a 4e D&D fight is to have a cool and weird opponent show up, do it's cool and weird powers, then the heroes do their cool stuff and defeat it, all on some interesting terrain. If the opposition is permanently stunned, or taking a -10 to all actions and can't successfully use a power, it removes half the point of the encounter.
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Nov 16, 2020 11:07
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Controllers are definitely the worst role in 4E, especially since Defenders already have control as one of the things they can do to fulfil their role, and most classes have accesss to some AoE to kill minions with (and then Sorcerer exists). Really, they should just have been designed as Defender/X or X/Defender instead.
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Nov 16, 2020 11:33
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kingcom posted:This was what stopped me from playing 4e in roll20. Holy poo poo is that helpful. It's incredibly good and also completely unsearchable, I'd strongly recommend downloading it for later use given it's currently hosted on some obscure server in the middle of nowhere.
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Nov 16, 2020 12:17
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Speaking of controllers and minions, minions are all over the place in terms of their relative power. It feels like more thought needed to be put into exactly how killable a party should find them. By the rules, they're meant to be worth a quarter of a standard monster each, but depending on the party or the exact rules for the minion, they can be worth a lot less than that. Area auto-damage powers, in particular, make me feel as a DM, "Why did I even bother putting these guys on the map". I generally feel that you should at least need to hit one of their defenses to defeat a minion, otherwise why even bother putting them in an encounter. Then there are power imbalances in minion designs. Ones who get to do a ranged attack on death are probably the nastiest kind, miles more powerful than ones without an "on death" power. It's a shame really, because minion rules in general are an excellent concept that every tactical RPG should have, but I've yet to see an implementation of them that I'd call perfect.
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Nov 16, 2020 12:30
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