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The Leper Colon V posted:This is the right decision to make. The alternative is that the players go through the whole game with no sense of risk. Why do you need to fight tactically if the DM's gonna always make sure you just barely survive? Yes. My players started enjoying my games a lot more when I took down the screen and started rolling in the open.
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Feb 6, 2014 19:58
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For those of you who've done so, how well does "eliminate the 'day,' everything recharges after each combat" work out? I was considering making dailies encounter powers and regular encounter powers reliable, then halving everyone's number of healing surges (if that's even necessary...), but while I remember people here loving their games without the adventure-day concept, I haven't played in a game like that and I don't remember what everyone was doing.
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Apr 11, 2014 21:14
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Frankosity posted:So I'm going to be starting a game of Dark Sun 4e soon, and it's my first time running D&D - or much of anything, really. I've got all the published adventures for the setting earmarked to help me get into the swing of running the system, building encounters etc., but having heard about how dire a lot of the published campaigns are I just wanted to check if they're actually, you know, good. Just saw this, so it may not still be useful, but: Vault of Darom Madar is very good, Marauders is very not-good, and Bloodsand Arena is a better intro than Sand Raiders and definitely worth running even if you don't use it as the introduction.
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Jun 26, 2014 23:25
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Frankosity posted:I've got a question that maybe a more experienced GM can answer, on that note: near the conclusion of the module, it says that the vault itself contains treasure equal to 10 level 3 treasure parcels. Should I assume that that means just to actually use the level 3 treasure parcel list? So, 4 magic items from levels 7-4 and ~900 gold? That's what it means, but I didn't; assuming you're using inherent bonuses, that's a lot of treasure to be giving a Dark Sun group at that level. I gave my group about half; one steel weapon, one pair of magic boots, and half the recommended gold. Frankosity posted:Incidentally, what makes Marauders so bad? It's really bad at evoking the Dark Sun feel** right from the start, what with the dwarf representative giving out scrolls to adventurers in a city where reading is illegal, and hands out way too much treasure. It's absurdly unbalanced; the first encounter is demoralizingly hard and feels arbitrary and out of place, with a templar from Urik randomly assaulting the party in Tyr, and there's a fight later against a level 8 (brute, no less), a level 5 and an elite level 4 when it's entirely possible the party is still level 2 (and which also feels arbitrary and out of place). There's almost no plot to speak of, just a series of fifteen encounters that might as well be on literal tracks for all they have to do with one another. Even the "dungeon" is a railroad; it doesn't have a single side room or any direction to explore that's not "forward." And when the party gets through all that, the "climax" is the big throwdown with the forces of the raider lord that the adventure has been discussing and dropping notes about, but that the characters won't have heard of at all unless they decide, unprompted, to make a Streetwise check at one of two points in the adventure (the first of which they may not even get a chance to). **EDIT: I'm reminded that there's also a ton of water. "The water from the stream gathers in the center of the tunnel leading to area F2, creating a pool 15 feet deep. A character can cross the pool by making a running long jump across the narrowest portion (DC 9 Athletics check)." disaster pastor fucked around with this message at 16:38 on Jun 27, 2014 |
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Jun 27, 2014 16:34
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OneThousandMonkeys posted:So essentially it's constructed like a pre-Murder at Baldur's Gate Encounters module, i.e.: X poorly-balanced encounters with some "read-this-aloud" sections instead of decisions for anyone to make (even the DM) or any roleplaying at all really. It's entirely possible to get through Marauders without the players having to make a single in-character decision, let alone actually roleplay.
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Jun 27, 2014 17:37
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Agent Boogeyman posted:For the Marauders module I didn't even think twice about the whole "Characters who aren't of special status in Tyr probably won't be able to read" thing, so that's pretty hilarious. Were you all ex-slaves? Whoops! Well guess you can't start the adventure because you can't read the parchment with all the funny lines! To be fair, the module does suggest two alternate ways of starting the adventure! (In one, one of your relatives has a nightmare about the exact location of the adventure. In the other, a shop owner just comes up and announces that the location has been discovered and you should go there.) (Also, starting the adventure with either the stupid nightmare or the stupid shopkeeper makes it a 150 XP minor quest. Starting with the messenger and all the detail the module writer wants to force on you makes it a 750 XP major quest, with a 750 GP reward.)
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Jun 27, 2014 19:14
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Frankosity posted:How do you handle metal weapons as loot, out of curiosity? At the start, they were non-magical items I put in a magic item loot spot. Now, any magic weapon they find is also going to be metal, but they find a magic weapon once every 5–7 levels, so it's still a huge deal.
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Jun 27, 2014 22:43
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