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Does the interaction of minions and auto-damage powers bug anyone else? Like, four minions are meant to be equivalent to a standard monster - it feels odd that they can all die to a huge zone that does 3 damage, with no attack roll and the zone continues into subsequent rounds. I guess you could just add more minions but that runs the risk that the minions go first and nuke someone down. Or give minions a quarter of the HP of a standard monster, but then that's book-keeping.
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Oct 7, 2019 17:56
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Minions are your actual cannon fodder, there to make the players feel like they're effortlessly being badasses, make the normal monsters feel that much stronger, and buffer some damage away from your main critters. Doing stuff and dealing damage is very secondary in their playbook. My credo for that issue has always been: any damage zone the controller uses to pop minions is one turn they aren't using to mess with your big monsters. If they're consistently able to cripple big monsters and pop all the minions at the same time, they're playing the game well, and it's you who has to step up your positioning game. Popular minion tricks to mess with expectations include: minion makes an attack on death, minions assist the most dangerous enemy's attack rather than attack on their own, boss monster can pop minions for benefit, minions never stop spwaning until some puzzle is solved during combat. My Lovely Horse fucked around with this message at 18:20 on Oct 7, 2019 |
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Oct 7, 2019 18:17
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If you find minions pop too easily, use 2-hit minions. But as noted, if they're being popped by a controller doing low-damage area effects then... fine, the controller is doing their job.
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Oct 7, 2019 18:24
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Shielding Swordmage is an odd one in general because their *real* defender prowess comes from their Encounter powers. The mark is nice, but Dimensional Vortex and Transposing Lunge combine to make the first two combats one big "nope." Dimensional Vortex is so good you could - and maybe should - keep it the entire game. Shielding also leads into Sigil Carver, which is an overall fantastic defender Paragon (Which, surprise, comes with another Encounter "Nope.") And that's really the Shielding Swordmage method of defending. Fighters punish. Shielding Swordmage just says "No, you don't." Fighters are secondary strikers, Swordmage is secondary controller.
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Oct 7, 2019 18:34
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Okay so I did a lot with minions. I ran several 1-20 games and one 1-30 game. By higher tiers, I found that I needed to do something beyond the very basic or it was just wasted time putting them out there to begin with. There's eventually a lot of ways PCs can deal small amounts of damage to large areas without an action cost. I had a few 'levels' of minions - I tried to keep flavor and interest in mind, and varied them up quite a lot. * There's the normal minions; work as expected. These are just fine for Heroic tier, usually. * "Tough" minions were Bloodied at a damage below (something - I think I used 5/10/15 by tier) and eliminated outright above that point. * I think I also had a "tougher" minion that was unaffected below, 5/10/15, bloodied above that, and killed outright at double that (or any crit). Some of these might have DR, too. * IIRC, there were also some ghostly minions that got a saving throw when damaged and survived on a successful save - unless it was radiant damage, in which case they died outright. * I used a whole lot of the same ideas My Lovely Horse does, too - the attack- or damage-on-pop minions are a blast and a half. With some of the tougher ones, you might wonder why I'd use a tough minion instead of a full monster. Just tracking overhead. You don't need to roll damage, and you don't need to track HP. Fine, Bloodied, or Out - that's it. If you want an even deeper in-between space, Zeitgest introduced "Goons" - these are normal monsters, but with half HP and counting as half a monster in the encounter budget. I found these were only fair if I cut their average damage output by about 1/3 compared to a normal monster, otherwise they were excessively dangerous for their cost.
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Oct 7, 2019 19:01
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ProfessorCirno posted:Shielding Swordmage is an odd one in general because their *real* defender prowess comes from their Encounter powers. The mark is nice, but Dimensional Vortex and Transposing Lunge combine to make the first two combats one big "nope." Dimensional Vortex is so good you could - and maybe should - keep it the entire game. Shielding also leads into Sigil Carver, which is an overall fantastic defender Paragon (Which, surprise, comes with another Encounter "Nope.") This reminds me of my favourite fake swordmage, the Iliyanbruen Guardian Eladrin Knight. God he was so much fun to play. You want to cluse burst the whole party? Nope, I'm not included (warp in the weave), then I hit you and now we're both over here and your burst goes off ineffectually. And now you're either slowed, prone, or dazed depending on exactly when it's happening.
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Oct 7, 2019 19:30
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thespaceinvader posted:If you find minions pop too easily, use 2-hit minions. But as noted, if they're being popped by a controller doing low-damage area effects then... fine, the controller is doing their job. Yeah, my party doesn't have a controller, but there are numerous "spend this daily to do an attack and also 2 damage to anyone who starts next to you for the rest of the encounter" powers that just mulch minions
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Oct 7, 2019 21:45
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dwarf74 posted:Okay so I did a lot with minions. I ran several 1-20 games and one 1-30 game. By higher tiers, I found that I needed to do something beyond the very basic or it was just wasted time putting them out there to begin with. There's eventually a lot of ways PCs can deal small amounts of damage to large areas without an action cost. This is good poo poo - thanks!
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Oct 7, 2019 21:46
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Gort posted:Yeah, my party doesn't have a controller, but there are numerous "spend this daily to do an attack and also 2 damage to anyone who starts next to you for the rest of the encounter" powers that just mulch minions This kind of situation is exactly what those sorts of powers are for...
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Oct 7, 2019 22:14
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Gort posted:This is good poo poo - thanks!
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Oct 7, 2019 22:26
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Gort posted:Does the interaction of minions and auto-damage powers bug anyone else? Like, four minions are meant to be equivalent to a standard monster - it feels odd that they can all die to a huge zone that does 3 damage, with no attack roll and the zone continues into subsequent rounds. Most of the best MM3 minions gave them a way of resisting some things or having their deaths mean something - for example the orcs got a free swing when they died and kobold minions got a reaction to scatter when the auto-damage AoEs came in. (Ranged minions didn't need this as they could spread out but melee did).
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Oct 7, 2019 22:32
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I'm fond of Shielding swordmages because of the time I reflavored a Warforged Shielding Swordmage as Pepsiman in an XCrawl campaign.... .....that lasted all of one combat before it burst into toxic black flames because the DM wanted to run things TOTM and it was functionally impossible to be a defender(or indeed do much of anything, I was not the only person who wasn't happy)
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Oct 7, 2019 22:53
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Minions in 4E are generally too easy/worthless to the point they're not worth using and should be rated at half their default XP cost or have more damage. Two hits also acceptable, but you're penalizing strikers bad at that point.
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Oct 7, 2019 23:24
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Sodomy Hussein posted:Minions in 4E are generally too easy/worthless to the point they're not worth using and should be rated at half their default XP cost or have more damage. Two hits also acceptable, but you're penalizing strikers bad at that point. I don't think "minion popping" is a viable controller niche. That was one of the early 4e ideas that never really panned out.
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Oct 7, 2019 23:36
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dwarf74 posted:That's what damage thresholds are for - making it so Strikers have better odds of popping them. Pretty much every class has minion popping options that they don't have to drift far from core role to pick up, and in addition a defender is difficult to distinguish from a controller in overall battlefield role, leading controller to be the least important role in any group generally.
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Oct 7, 2019 23:49
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Sodomy Hussein posted:Pretty much every class has minion popping options that they don't have to drift far from core role to pick up, and in addition a defender is difficult to distinguish from a controller in overall battlefield role, leading controller to be the least important role in any group generally. *non-essentials class Thief, Slayer, Cavalier and Blackguard got no AoEs Plutonis fucked around with this message at 23:54 on Oct 7, 2019 |
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Oct 7, 2019 23:52
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Plutonis posted:*non-essentials class Thief has a movement option to elbow a minion in the head when they attack a serious target. Not the best but better than nothing.
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Oct 7, 2019 23:58
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Minions are there to die easily and make your PCs feel awesome, and so should just be completely ignored for XP budgeting purposes 99% of the time.
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Oct 8, 2019 05:27
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Plutonis posted:*non-essentials class Even then you can pick up a theme that bridges this gap.
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Oct 13, 2019 20:42
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Lemon-Lime posted:Minions are there to die easily and make your PCs feel awesome, and so should just be completely ignored for XP budgeting purposes 99% of the time. I really super disagree with this idea unless you're running a game where every encounter is insanely lethal. Like the whole point of playing the game is for your PCs to feel 'awesome!' If you give XP for murderin' real good-like, then don't stop giving it just because the targets aren't good enough for it (but they're still good enough to allocate mechanical resources towards) edit: if they're good enough to roll for, they're good enough to grant XP
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Oct 17, 2019 08:31
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Yeah, I don't buy that one because minions can still beat your initiative and being hit by four minions is still considerable damage. I guess the question is how much XP a minion should be if they can't be killed by auto-damage powers. A third of a standard monster? Half?
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Oct 17, 2019 08:50
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Gort posted:Yeah, I don't buy that one because minions can still beat your initiative and being hit by four minions is still considerable damage. If you turn off auto damage powers in your game because you don't want them to be used for what they are for, we've got bigger problems than minion math.
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Oct 17, 2019 09:16
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Sodomy Hussein posted:If you turn off auto damage powers in your game because you don't want them to be used for what they are for, we've got bigger problems than minion math. This seems like a bit of an overreaction. Making a particular minion monster that's immune to auto-damage powers is not equivalent to "turning off auto-damage powers", it's more like to having a monster with damage resistance. Your argument would only work if literally every monster encountered in the game was immune to auto-damage powers, and that's not what I'm proposing.
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Oct 17, 2019 09:32
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Darwinism posted:I really super disagree with this idea unless you're running a game where every encounter is insanely lethal. Like the whole point of playing the game is for your PCs to feel 'awesome!' If you give XP for murderin' real good-like, then don't stop giving it just because the targets aren't good enough for it (but they're still good enough to allocate mechanical resources towards) I'm talking about the XP budget for encounter design, not about awarding XP, because I haven't done XP-based levelling pretty much since 4E came out. Most of the time you can add minions to encounters without budgeting for them just to pad out how many enemies there are in a fight, because they'll die before they really get to do anything. This makes your PCs feel cooler for beating lots of enemies. This doesn't apply if the minions are a genuine threat for some reason (i.e. you built the encounter around their abilities, or they fight from far enough away that a PC won't be able to blow them all up immediately with an AoE power). Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 10:00 on Oct 17, 2019 |
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Oct 17, 2019 09:54
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Definitely include minions in your XP budget, but if a fight ends up being much easier than you thought it would be, you can use those minion bundles as periodic reinforcements
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Oct 17, 2019 17:55
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S.J. posted:Definitely include minions in your XP budget, but if a fight ends up being much easier than you thought it would be, you can use those minion bundles as periodic reinforcements Really that's probably the best idea, use them kinda like XCOM 'Pods' where the minions are reinforcements packaged around maybe another monster as the pod leader. budget for them if they start in the encounter and then well... they're minions, you probably don't need to worry too hard if the encounter ends up too easy and you have to throw a few more monsters in.
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Oct 18, 2019 06:18
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I was reminiscing about my 4E character today and figured I'd post about her since I commissioned art of her after playing in a 4E Dark Sun campaign for 4 years (of the 6 years the campaign ran from level 1 to level 27). Theodosia Leodopulous of Balic Level 27 Human Swordmage Theme: Templar Paragon Path: Praetor Legate Epic Destiny: Reborn Champion  She ended up becoming Dictator of Balic after serving Andropinis as a templar faithfully up until his death (long story). She then modernized the city-state and worked with the freed city-states of Tyr and Urik to destroy the Dragon. Scarred and maimed from the final battle, she left Balic for parts unknown. I don't think I'll ever play a character quite like her again.
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Nov 26, 2019 19:28
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That sounds like a hell of a good story and a hell of a good campaign. I also ran a Dark Sun 4e game, and the PCs deposed at least one Dragon King (I think Abalach-Re) but also gave Dregoth a free rein to return from his imprisonment.
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Nov 26, 2019 19:33
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dwarf74 posted:That sounds like a hell of a good story and a hell of a good campaign. The campaign was amazing. The DM managed to work in all the big Dark Sun hits--the party had run-ins with nearly every major player on Athas, killed a few sorcerer-kings (a resurrected Kalak and Andropinis), saved Hammanu from an extraplanar entity, went to the Grey and the Land Behind the Winds, and even restored water to the Dune Sea. Looking over her final character sheet really makes me miss 4E (I only play in a 5E game now) and how unique your character could be. Thea specialized in teleportation magic and she just has so many spells and attacks that are teleportation/rift/movement-based. I compare that to 5E where we have a warlock, sorcerer, and bard and yet we all feel so similar in combat because we all share a lot of the same spells. I also loved how aegis marking worked where you wanted to be as far from your mark as possible. Such a cool twist on tanking. This isn't to say it was perfect. I nearly quit the campaign after we got a thri-kreen monk in the party, who by epic-tier was taking 15+ minute turns every single round. I think the DM actually made him change his epic destiny after several of us complained about it becoming unbearable--the only time this DM ever forced someone to change something on their character sheet. He did ask me nicely to trade out Hypnotic Swordplay for Dimensional Slash though--mainly because at the time we also had 2 rogues and he got annoyed that we stunlocked a big boss to death on more than one occasion. I also didn't like how fights toward the end of the campaign just became too easy no matter what the DM threw at us--and we weren't even particularly min-maxed. Even his hardest fights weren't really a threat so much as a grind. I remember him saying that he boosted the Dragon's stats but the Dragon had to roll a 17 or higher to hit most of my Swordmage's defenses once she got her stances (she could be in multiple by this point) up. Combine this with the monk who even with his epic destiny changed could do 200+ damage a round and the game just became fundamentally broken. It was neat to see extremely high level play but he made the right call to not continue to 30.
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Nov 27, 2019 06:56
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I ran a 4e Dark Sun game for a couple years, but we ended up jumping ship to Godbound to reduce the amount of prep work I needed to do and reduce the combat focus of the campaign. I sent off that section of the campaign by having the lich Yarnath from the Slither modules they released siege Tyr to get the rest of the Crown of Dust fragments. The arc culminated in the lich summoning and binding Ul Athra to himself and breaking down into a giant monster, which the party and their NPC allies pitching together to take it out after crashing Yarnath's own walking fortress into it. The Godbound powers they've been remade with are the primordial equivalent of radiation poisoning. The things that saw the world born aren't really supposed to die.
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Nov 27, 2019 08:10
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I'm about to start running a 4e game for the first time (apart from a couple of abortive attempts right when the books came out). My plan is to do the Slaying Stone into Red Hand of Doom, but I had a couple of questions regarding RHoD in 4e and whether I've understood the differences between 3.5, which it was originally written in, and 4e. 1. My understanding is that a typical "adventuring day" in 4e is about 4-6 encounters, but RHoD isn't really conducive to this - if you're not familiar with it, you're trying to hinder the advance of a hobgoblin army by bouncing all over the map tackling various objectives. It looks like generally there's only going to be 0-1 encounters per day, other than the big set piece areas. I've seen some suggestions that restricting an extended rest to only a night in a tavern or other safe location would be sufficient, but I'm worried that the reverse problem will occur and they'd sometimes have to tackle 8 or 10 encounters between their extended rests. I did think maybe I could keep the safe night as meaning everyone can get an extended rest, but if they rest in the wilderness, anyone who doesn't actually sleep the whole night through is not going to get the benefit of the rest. Presumably then they'll rotate the watch so each player will get a chance of being at full strength in turn. Will it cause balance problems to have only some players at full strength? Is this likely to still allow them too much rest? Also, are there any rules for if you don't take a rest too often, or is the penalty baked into not getting the benefit of the rest? 2. We're going to be playing on Roll20, which I haven't really used before, so any tips you have for that would be helpful. 3. Anyone who's run the adventure before, do you have any particular advice? In my reading, one criticism I saw was that the army moves maybe slightly too slow to properly pressure the players, did you find that to be the case?
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Nov 27, 2019 10:52
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The resting thing works best if you don't take it so literally and mostly ignore the bits that say how long a rest takes. Disconnect the idea of an adventuring "day" from a calendar "day" entirely. Just keep track of how many encounters they've had, and once you hit 4-6 or the PCs are sufficiently exhausted, declare an opportunity to take an extended rest. Be upfront and transparent about this and make sure your players are on board. If there are days of travel between locations and the party will have slept, you can agree that it's not a rest because they have poo poo to do, they're hustling, and they're getting in only the bare minimum of sleep. If the extended rest happens to take place in the wilderness, agree that it's safe by default and there's no need to muck about with watch rotation. It also helps if you have bad things happen if the party rests before they've "earned it." If they use those two days' travel to do a big extended rest even though they've only had one or two fights, well they'll arrive late and the hobgoblins have ransacked the destination. If they retreat from the dungeon to rest, they return and find the dungeon deserted or fortified. Basically, doing those 4-6 encounters earns the party the right to rest safely with no bad developments. Or key it into managing the speed of the enemy army: They don't advance by X in Y calendar days, they advance by X per extended rest the party takes. although honestly the real trick is to design areas and objectives so they fit into 4E's adventuring day corset, this might be somewhat difficult if you keep all the 3.5 trimmings outside of pure monster stats. My Lovely Horse fucked around with this message at 11:15 on Nov 27, 2019 |
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Nov 27, 2019 11:08
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The standard adventuring day is 4-6 encounters, so you can massage things into that format (drop the more boring fights, but if they're cruising through the others you can always pull those encounters back in) or convert some encounters into skill challenges (e.g. a night raid where most of the party creates a distraction while the rogue torches supplies and then they all GTFO, on a failed challenge they go into standard encounter mode). My inclination is to do the above with an extended rest being in town only, so the issue of the enemy army moving too slowly is implicitly addressed as well: the players might return to town to rest up during the campaign, but doing so eats time and gives the army opportunity to advance. I have not read or played RHoD myself though so this is a suggestion based on your description, take it with a grain of salt.
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Nov 27, 2019 11:12
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Thanks, that makes sense. I could almost do an amalgamation - only allow extended rests in towns, but make sure that they have an opportunity to head to town/similar safe place every 4 to 6 encounters. Or if there are 12 encounters total, they can choose to either take on three 4 encounter days and fall behind, or two 6 encounter days and stay ahead of the army. The adventure is pretty well written in that regard, as there are the "main missions" you have to accomplish which will be 1 or 2 days in one location, but there are plenty of "side missions" or semi-random encounters you can spread about to make up a full adventuring day. One other thing I was wondering, is how finely tuned are the monsters. Because the story is based around a hobgoblin army, obviously there are a lot of encounters with goblinoids, and to stop that getting stale I was thinking of reskinning other monsters like orcs or gnolls but giving them the goblins' signature traits. So for example, one of the early mini-bosses is a bugbear sorcerer. If I used Maladrick Scarmaker from Threats to the Nentir Vale but swapped out Pack Tactics (the gnoll ability, 5 extra damage on attacks when a target is adjacent to two or more of your allies) for Bushwack (the bugbear ability, +4 to attacks against isolated targets) will that greatly affect the balance? Should I re-work the other numbers a bit more?
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Nov 27, 2019 13:31
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That should be roughly fine but remember that monster abilities hugely define their intended combat role. If you're not planning on having gnolls specifically in this campaign, it's probably much better to altogether reskin the gnoll (or any other creature) as a variety of goblinoid and give yourself some extra variety this way. It's not too far-fetched that some goblin tribe would have Pack Tactics. It's not even far-fetched if you do also have gnolls, a lot of it is in the description, but if you don't have them it's easier to obfuscate.
My Lovely Horse fucked around with this message at 14:16 on Nov 27, 2019 |
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Nov 27, 2019 14:12
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I've never loved the 4e adventuring day. Combats take a long time to play out, so having filler encounters that are just there to drain resources a bit is not particularly interesting. You can (and I do) avoid filler encounters, but you get balance weirdness with characters spending tons of dailies and healing surges in a single encounter, which makes it harder to judge challenges - a party blowing dailies and surges like there's no tomorrow is a very different beast to one that knows it has to economise. I'd prefer it if the game's combat was balanced around the encounter rather than the adventuring day - so an adventure with a single combat in it is as easy to balance as a dungeon crawl with five combats. Consequences reaching beyond the combat you're in should be the exception, not the assumed default.
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Nov 27, 2019 19:01
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Aston posted:2. We're going to be playing on Roll20, which I haven't really used before, so any tips you have for that would be helpful. Roll20 has a built-in 4e character sheet that works pretty well. It also has a macro template for 4e-style powers, but they're a pain to create. They link a macro builder Google Sheet from that wiki page, but the last time I checked it out it wasn't much better, so I made my own. Mine doesn't handle some of the more niche stuff like psionic augmentation but you may find it easier to use. I'm not really satisfied with it but I also haven't had the time and energy to rebuild it to a better standard.
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Nov 27, 2019 21:04
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Back when I ran 4th edition players regained one action point, one daily power, and 1/3rd of their healing surges (rounded up) every milestone. No long rests. They'd level at the end of every adventure, at which point they got all resources back. It worked really well for pacing. KPC_Mammon fucked around with this message at 21:16 on Nov 27, 2019 |
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Nov 27, 2019 21:14
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My Lovely Horse posted:That should be roughly fine but remember that monster abilities hugely define their intended combat role. If you're not planning on having gnolls specifically in this campaign, it's probably much better to altogether reskin the gnoll (or any other creature) as a variety of goblinoid and give yourself some extra variety this way. It's not too far-fetched that some goblin tribe would have Pack Tactics. It's not even far-fetched if you do also have gnolls, a lot of it is in the description, but if you don't have them it's easier to obfuscate. Actually yeah, skinning it as different Goblin tribes with differing tactics does allow you to go with all sorts of enemies tactically, or even think about it politically, if you wanted to put that kind of time in. Or you could just go with one-offs, a goblin is a goblin is a goblin, they're not going to be entirely uniform farceless enemies
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Nov 28, 2019 11:09
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KPC_Mammon posted:Back when I ran 4th edition players regained one action point, one daily power, and 1/3rd of their healing surges (rounded up) every milestone. No long rests. They'd level at the end of every adventure, at which point they got all resources back. How did you handle daily item powers? Did the whole system still work out okay in later levels when PCs would have more daily powers altogether?
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Nov 28, 2019 15:25
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