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Gort posted:Maybe there's someone out there who's made a good skill challenge, but I've always found it better to just have a sequence of obstacles and ask my players how they approach each one. Skill challenges have the issue that the obstacle remains the same for like, twelve dice rolls, and the GM has to keep coming up with reasons why the player's success only gets them 20% of the way through the obstacle instead of resolving it. Yeah, for a skill challenge to work the obstacle needs to be the kind of thing which will have multiple different stages of completion. It's not for traversing a single chasm, it's for crossing the whole mountain range. It helps a lot also if your players are comfortable coming up with their own obstacles to solve with their skills, which does run counter to how 4e normally works -- so if your skill challenge is "how do you cross the mountain range" your players need to be okay with saying things like "on Day 5 food supplies run short, and I give up my own share so that everyone else can keep going -- I roll Endurance" without you prompting them with "your food supplies run short".
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Mar 2, 2021 10:50
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Whybird posted:Isn't the point of skill challenges that they're basically just a formalisation of How Things Work Normally? The big change is just that you decide in advance which kind of skill checks will and won't help (like, you can't use Acrobatics to impress the orc king into allying with you by juggling really well) and how many failures your players can have before they lose. To me the core point of skill challenges is that they're a formalization of How Things Work Normally that allows a new DM to have something ready to handle the mechanical part of off the wall PC plans for decent pacing and resolution.
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Mar 2, 2021 13:01
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I thought the Obsidian skill system worked nicely when I interacted with it as a player, not sure how much of a pain it is to run from the DM side, though.
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Mar 2, 2021 14:30
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Section Z posted:At the very least, don't act like all the modules that do poo poo like list an intimidate DC and the result is "They are very mad/scared you used intimidate, you monster." As your success for using it. I completely disagree here, dex is already much better than str without letting people substitute acrobatics for athletics. If the rogue wanted to climb walls they could have taken athletics as one of their many proficiencies. There's a reason it's one of the options for the class. Or if they were a thief who get faster climbing most DMs would probably just treat them as having a climb speed. And jumping is actually generally based on just strength, there's no athletics check unless you need to clear a low obstacle. Athletics for the bridge thing is a lot more reasonable though.
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Mar 2, 2021 15:46
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4e could be better balanced by combining STR and CON, but that would throw off a lot of stuff.
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Mar 2, 2021 16:18
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Staltran posted:I completely disagree here, dex is already much better than str without letting people substitute acrobatics for athletics. If the rogue wanted to climb walls they could have taken athletics as one of their many proficiencies. There's a reason it's one of the options for the class. Or if they were a thief who get faster climbing most DMs would probably just treat them as having a climb speed. And jumping is actually generally based on just strength, there's no athletics check unless you need to clear a low obstacle. Absolutely agree with the first point. Has anybody here seen a professional acrobat in person? I have, and they're loving ripped. If you want to be the typical acrobatic rogue (say, Parker from Leverage as an example), then you should be trained in all three of Athletics, Endurance, and Acrobatics, because all three of them are involved in the kinds of stuff that character would want to pull off. No matter how agile you are, you aren't climbing a wall if you can't even lift your own body weight. As for crossing a narrow bridge, I'd argue that the PHB1 DC of 20 is too high (the DC in 3.5, for comparison, is 10, which is what I would be tempted to knock the PHB1 DC down to), but the skill itself is the right one. I know in the Rules Compendium it's a medium (DC 12 at first level), but I prefer fixed DCs for most tasks (especially where it really doesn't make sense for a level 20 character to have a harder time at this task than a level 1 character just because the only related ability bump they took was at level 11). I know this brings the opposite problem, but unfortunately that's the drawback of applying character level to skill rolls.
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Mar 2, 2021 20:22
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Whybird posted:Isn't the point of skill challenges that they're basically just a formalisation of How Things Work Normally? The big change is just that you decide in advance which kind of skill checks will and won't help (like, you can't use Acrobatics to impress the orc king into allying with you by juggling really well) and how many failures your players can have before they lose. Skill challenges are a solution to the problem of characters of any skill level all trying checks at once even without the DM calling for a check and then hoping the DM only notices the good checks. I also try doing it behind the scenes using the system from the Rules Compendium with a number of advantages that can be used to recover from failures based on the complexity of the challenge. The only downside about doing this behind the scenes is that it can be frustrating for players unused to the concept that succeeding on a single check doesn't end the whole skill challenge. If there's too much confusion or frustration, I confess that I'm running a skill challenge.
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Mar 2, 2021 20:35
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Halloween Jack posted:4e could be better balanced by combining STR and CON, but that would throw off a lot of stuff. Or just having three stats - strength, skill and magic, but once you start down this path you kinda realise that ability scores don't actually add anything to the game at all.
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Mar 2, 2021 21:26
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picking your secondary stat was meaningful and a valuable component of 4E it isn't the best possible implementation of that design choice, though, you could have just had subclasses or specializations and achieved nearly the same thing
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Mar 2, 2021 21:28
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Yeah if powers just read "3 + Tier" instead of "Your Con Bonus" (or whatever) you'd have had basically the same result without all the fuss.
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Mar 2, 2021 22:27
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you effectively would, but if you then follow the thought to its logical conclusion... why even bother having a linear escalation of numbers, if the player doesn't have any way of influencing them? The one benefit of 4e's Ability Scores was that they were part of how you specialised your character, since each class would have two or three Ability Scores that their abilities key off of, so you could be like, "Okay, my class has a bunch of Int-based forced movement effects, and I want to be the Forced Movement Guy, so I'm putting my 14 in Int" and that's a discrete choice you get to make. Tuxedo Catfish is right that this isn't the only way you can handle this, there are less granular and more thematically interesting ways of getting similar mechanical benefits.
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Mar 2, 2021 23:16
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Narrative reasons. Specifically, knowing that you did 1d10+5 at level 1 but now deal 1d12+11 at level eleven, such that if you ran into a level one enemy - or a level one adventurer - you'd paste 'em.
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Mar 2, 2021 23:20
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Ferrinus posted:Narrative reasons. Specifically, knowing that you did 1d10+5 at level 1 but now deal 1d12+11 at level eleven, such that if you ran into a level one enemy - or a level one adventurer - you'd paste 'em. I dont wanna discount that outright for folks who enjoy it, but like the 'narrative' of linearly increasing stat numbers is a very specific and kinda bizarre sort of narrative to tell. Like 'narratively' if I run into another Kobold with a sling it will always be the same strength as the ones I happened to fight on my first adventure because kobolds with a sling are a monolith is just kinda wonky. To say nothing of stories where you might want to be set back occasionally instead of constant steady progress of 'power'.
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Mar 2, 2021 23:24
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Yeah, I agree -- I find the bits of levelling up that are fun and satisfying are gaining new abilities and ways to interact with the rules, not making the numbers you have higher so that they keep track with other numbers that are also increasing.
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Mar 2, 2021 23:33
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Ash Rose posted:I dont wanna discount that outright for folks who enjoy it, but like the 'narrative' of linearly increasing stat numbers is a very specific and kinda bizarre sort of narrative to tell. Like 'narratively' if I run into another Kobold with a sling it will always be the same strength as the ones I happened to fight on my first adventure because kobolds with a sling are a monolith is just kinda wonky. To say nothing of stories where you might want to be set back occasionally instead of constant steady progress of 'power'. Not all kobolds with slings are the same, but those guys might still be. Or, like, the town guard in a particular city might be only level 3 or level 5, such that if you visit the same place in paragon tier they'll see you as Lu Bu rather than John McClane, and if you come back in epic tier they'll see you as Godzilla. 4e would absolutely work without inflating hitpoint, accuracy, defense, and damage totals, but those steadily-growing numbers aren't pointless. They create a particular power disparity which can be fun to narrate or plot around.
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Mar 3, 2021 05:52
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I think there's implicit ideas in 4E that if your rider is tied to Constitution etc. instead of a solid number, then (A) it allows you to branch out in potentially interesting ways by word searching "Constitution" in character options and seeing what stuff comes up that you could also be good at if you spend the resources (B) It allows two characters with the exact same ability scores and class to play very differently, instead of being equally good at everything because their secondary is always a +3, and thus why have we even bothered rolling different characters after a certain point. Basically your ability scores each represent possible build paths you could take or locked yourself out of in favor of X. If it were not ability scores it would be some other function doing this, so it serves as short-hand. There could certainly be fewer ability scores (as few as three in 4E given how it cracks out mechanically). You could also certainly flatten out the math in 4E, but this isn't really accomplishing much and you may regret what you lose if it's done wholesale. I've done this to monsters before as a DM before when I wanted to use a concept earlier than its level says I can, but I did it sparingly and when I really wanted to use my purple worm mini and spice up a lower-level game with stuff people didn't expect.
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Mar 3, 2021 06:03
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Whybird posted:Yeah, I agree -- I find the bits of levelling up that are fun and satisfying are gaining new abilities and ways to interact with the rules, not making the numbers you have higher so that they keep track with other numbers that are also increasing.
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Mar 3, 2021 07:07
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There's a certain element of 4e's design where the expected outputs of the system are kinda well documented- the MM3 card, Page 42 and its revisions etc.- but in designing a character they are obscured a little by theoretically fungible things like your ability scores and choice of weapon and so on. Like, one of the things I found out early was that the game expects a PC to hit a monster of their level at least 55% of the time- which translates to rolling a 10 or better, so basically you hit unless you roll "bad". Makes it easy to read the dice at a glance. (And yeah it's easy to get even bigger to-hit at level 1 but you get the idea.) Characters are expected to take so many hits before dropping, etc. In theory you can create a system with more or less the same results that's very abstracted, and that's kinda how Strike! works- you roll a d6 and get some kind of success on a 3 or better. And that's good, if you don't want to go through all the intricacies of getting your number to that point. That allows the chargen to focus more on the specific powers you have and how they interact and what you *do*. But there is something to be said for the agency or even illusion of agency the player has. The way chargen's set up, it's very hard not to get something around what the math expects- if you just put your best number in your class's best score you're probably going to be fine. But that is your selection, and you reach your to-hit total combining your ability score and your weapon/implement and your class abilities and you can finesse these to get it higher and so on- you have many options to make your character *just so* and it just so happens that it'll usually end up with a character who has X chance to hit when they attack. You have a +7 to attack not because that's the flat bonus everyone gets, but because *your character* is strong and uses a greataxe and has a talent that makes the axe more effective and so on and so forth. There's also a lot of hidden stuff with some fighter powers having extra benefits if you're using X weapon but of course if you take that you probably will be using that weapon so it's not really much of a drawback. Most attempts at using 4e's ideas in other games do simplify this part because that's where design has moved but I think it's there for that reason- it's supposed to scratch the itch that 3.x's players had for finding the best way to make their PC, while theoretically taking out most of the failure points.
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Mar 3, 2021 07:59
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Ferrinus posted:Not all kobolds with slings are the same, but those guys might still be. Or, like, the town guard in a particular city might be only level 3 or level 5, such that if you visit the same place in paragon tier they'll see you as Lu Bu rather than John McClane, and if you come back in epic tier they'll see you as Godzilla. I don't disagree that the ability to have enemies much stronger or weaker than you is good, but it feels like the easier system would be to always have the players at Level 0, and if they return to an enemy they now outclass, restat the enemy from its original Level 0 numbers to Level -4.
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Mar 3, 2021 08:17
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You could technically do that to the same effect, but I think it'd actually be harder to keep track of how each enemy's level shifts as your players level up than it would be to just remember that this guy has 30 hp and 14 AC and that's that. It also feels better to go from doing 10 damage to 20 damage than it does to watch enemy HP shrink from 30 to 15.
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Mar 3, 2021 08:22
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This is always the trick with any system with levelling (both in TRPGs and the computer kind)- and even outside of specifically RPG games, there's questions of how the environment should scale with the player's growth in power. Like the way 4e does it does have the drawback where the kind of monster you want may not be statted at the level you want, though you can fix that by changing the numbers (and either beefing up or drawing down special abilities). But it does have the advantage of D&D being traditionally a game with a poo poo ton of different monsters and like eight kinds of goblinoids and so on.
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Mar 3, 2021 08:53
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Maxwell Lord posted:The way (4e) chargen's set up, it's very hard not to get something around what the math expects- if you just put your best number in your class's best score you're probably going to be fine. Yeah, but that's basically just setting a trap for players to fall into. They might be like, "Well, I want to be more of a defender character, so I'll make constitution my best score" and tank their attacking stat. If you remove the stat number part of the system the optimal player loses nothing (they were always going to put their best number in their attack stat) and the non-optimal player loses the ability to make a bad character who misses all the time. Realistically, 4e was never going to drop or even simplify the ability score system - it's insane how many D&D players declare the naff "six stats that go from 3-18 that you extrapolate a bonus from" attribute system to be essential to "D&Dness".
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Mar 3, 2021 11:54
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Gort posted:Realistically, 4e was never going to drop or even simplify the ability score system - it's insane how many D&D players declare the naff "six stats that go from 3-18 that you extrapolate a bonus from" attribute system to be essential to "D&Dness". It's because D&D has nothing that qualifies as "essential D&D-ness" except for ability scores and fighter/wizard/cleric/rogue. 
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Mar 3, 2021 12:03
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Gort posted:Yeah, but that's basically just setting a trap for players to fall into. They might be like, "Well, I want to be more of a defender character, so I'll make constitution my best score" and tank their attacking stat. If you remove the stat number part of the system the optimal player loses nothing (they were always going to put their best number in their attack stat) and the non-optimal player loses the ability to make a bad character who misses all the time. That feeling when my Dex Fighter who took slight of hand for giggles has to pick up the slack on stealing keys while everyone nods their head how good this is for Rogue build variety 
Section Z fucked around with this message at 12:15 on Mar 3, 2021 |
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Mar 3, 2021 12:07
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Gort posted:it's insane how many D&D players declare the naff "six stats that go from 3-18 that you extrapolate a bonus from" attribute system to be essential to "D&Dness". It is essential to D&D-ness. It's not essential for a tabletop RPG. It's not essential for a fun game, or a good story, or whatever. But it is essential to D&D. It's one of the defining characteristics of the game. It's part of what makes it D&D, as opposed to some other system. Same with Fallout and its SPECIAL stats, or VtM's dots. Khizan fucked around with this message at 12:17 on Mar 3, 2021 |
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Mar 3, 2021 12:15
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Khizan posted:But it is essential to D&D. It's one of the defining characteristics of the game. It's part of what makes it D&D, as opposed to some other system. Same with Fallout and its SPECIAL stats, or VtM's dots. Nah. I think the only one you're even close to a point with here is SPECIAL, since they literally named the system after the attributes.
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Mar 3, 2021 12:53
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Lemon-Lime posted:It's because D&D has nothing that qualifies as "essential D&D-ness" except for ability scores and fighting man/magic user/cleric/thief. Gort posted:Nah. I think the only one you're even close to a point with here is SPECIAL, since they literally named the system after the attributes. I would think the system for conflict resolution is the singular most important part of a system, but how you get the variables you plug into that conflict resolution system seem pretty important to the overall game system. Like d20 systems are defined by using a single modified by variable d20 roll vs. a target number, this is the central pillar of conflict resolution between two different states. However the variables that define that number being derived from the specific stats D&D uses is one of the next layers out so as to make it D&D. karmicknight fucked around with this message at 13:03 on Mar 3, 2021 |
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Mar 3, 2021 13:00
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Just sounds like the "but if a fighter does damage on a miss it's not even D&D any more!" brain worms we used to see a few years back to me
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Mar 3, 2021 13:32
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I'm a huge proponent of shifting the system's basic ability scores one design level up, as it were, and making the basic stats Fortitude, Reflex and Will, probably starting out at +4, +2 and +0, and going from there, changing as little else as possible.
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Mar 3, 2021 13:51
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I've written a d20 game that uses Might, Agility, and Wit, and uses Charisma as a stunting stat that also applies to every save. As soon as I did this the game became exponentially easier to design.
Name Change fucked around with this message at 01:24 on Mar 4, 2021 |
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Mar 3, 2021 21:35
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My Lovely Horse posted:I'm a huge proponent of shifting the system's basic ability scores one design level up, as it were, and making the basic stats Fortitude, Reflex and Will, probably starting out at +4, +2 and +0, and going from there, changing as little else as possible. Although this does create the narratively baffling situation where analytical mental abilities that were based on Intelligence are instead based on Reflex. Rename "Reflex" to something like "Acuity" to account for that and you're good.
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Mar 4, 2021 01:53
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Ill, Skill, and Will.
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Mar 4, 2021 01:55
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I want to design and incredibly deadly, but also quick encounter. The idea is giving my monsters a huge +initiative bonus, and 1 encounter power that does on average (or possibly just does) about 2/3 my weakest character's HP in a party of 5. I was thinking of making these turbo deadly critters minions, or just have low HP and Defenses in general. Can this be a fun game of rocket tag, or is it too much? I want them to be very scared of monsters and things in this area they're going through, and I want to do a lot of bite sized combats, which means they have to be extremely deadly and have little HP, does anyone have good ideas for making very small combat encounters for a 5 man group?
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Mar 4, 2021 22:58
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There's an old standby to generally shorten the battles that is basically "halve monster HP, double monster damage" and I think especially if this is a contrast to how you usually do things it'll work fine for what you want and is somewhat tested to work.
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Mar 4, 2021 23:04
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Boba Pearl posted:I want to design and incredibly deadly, but also quick encounter. The idea is giving my monsters a huge +initiative bonus, and 1 encounter power that does on average (or possibly just does) about 2/3 my weakest character's HP in a party of 5. I was thinking of making these turbo deadly critters minions, or just have low HP and Defenses in general. Can this be a fun game of rocket tag, or is it too much? I want them to be very scared of monsters and things in this area they're going through, and I want to do a lot of bite sized combats, which means they have to be extremely deadly and have little HP, does anyone have good ideas for making very small combat encounters for a 5 man group? It kind of depends on the area. I'd be tempted to use minions of two or three levels higher than them, with lower defences but high attack and damage, and a decent stealth bonus so that they get a surprise round semi-regularly. I'd advise against going too deadly though - rocket tag has the disadvantage of going south very quickly, and I'm kind of assuming you don't want to risk a TPK.
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Mar 4, 2021 23:25
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gtrmp posted:Although this does create the narratively baffling situation where analytical mental abilities that were based on Intelligence are instead based on Reflex. Rename "Reflex" to something like "Acuity" to account for that and you're good. Fast alchemists can clear 20 metres and hurdle 2 blasts shields in a few seconds when a potion is about to explode. Smart alchemists realised it about 3 seconds earlier.
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Mar 5, 2021 03:21
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Aw yeah, I'm running a 4E game again. Cairn of the Winter King into Madness at Gardmore Abbey, I've been wanting to do this for a while. I'm prepping maps and tokens and looking through my old notes and books and it's coming flooding back to me how well designed a game this is and what tactical opportunities it opens up. Can't wait. Also, refluffing opportunities. One player wants to play as a Skaven-like rat person (just not as evil) and long story short that's just what halflings are in our world now. Another said he wanted to make "a soap mage who magics the floor slippery and poo poo" and I said, looks like you're the wizard taking Grease and Icy Terrain. So. What's the way to play 4E online these days? I want as many marks checked out of the following: maps and grids, lighting and sightlines, initiative and condition tracking, and if it's not entirely too much to ask a function where you can just select targets and a power and it rolls attacks and applies damage automatically? Don't need voice chat, we got that covered. Is it Roll20? It's gonna be Roll20 isn't it.
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Mar 14, 2021 19:44
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My Lovely Horse posted:Aw yeah, I'm running a 4E game again. Cairn of the Winter King into Madness at Gardmore Abbey, I've been wanting to do this for a while. I'm prepping maps and tokens and looking through my old notes and books and it's coming flooding back to me how well designed a game this is and what tactical opportunities it opens up. Can't wait. If you're willing to get your hands dirty, it's Foundry. I'm saying get your hands dirty because I don't know what the 4e module (if any) is like, but it's best-in-class for heavy tactical RPGs.
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Mar 14, 2021 19:47
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Have a look at owlbear.rodeo. It's very lightweight and basic, but it's pretty easy to get up and running and not intimidating. I don't know if it would be good for 4e, but I use it for mechwarrior: destiny (a much more narrative, collaborative game) and it works fine. (and it's free!)
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Mar 15, 2021 17:16
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My Lovely Horse posted:Aw yeah, I'm running a 4E game again. Cairn of the Winter King into Madness at Gardmore Abbey, I've been wanting to do this for a while. I'm prepping maps and tokens and looking through my old notes and books and it's coming flooding back to me how well designed a game this is and what tactical opportunities it opens up. Can't wait. Foundry is nice but you would need to code a 4e module for it, as there isn't much available aside from a sandbox. Fantasy Grounds is pretty good for running 4e online if you're able to get the character builder files and the like. It isn't as user friendly as foundry or roll20 is, but it does a lot of the combat math for you when implemented properly. Roll20 is okay at it. There's less buy-in from the player side and the character sheet is very lacking but it can get the job done if you're willing to do a lot of the crunch yourselves.
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Mar 15, 2021 21:03
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