Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition: Looks like we're the grognards, now.

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition: Looks like we're the grognards, now.

Arrrthritis: May 31, 2007; I don't care if you're a star, the moon, or the whole damn sky, you need to come back down to earth and remember where you came from

My favorite 4e character to play was a Shardmind Ardent.

Demoralizing Strike was my bread and butter, being able to teleport into the center of a group of enemies, inflict -4 (or higher later on) to all defenses to everybody adjacent to me with a single attack, and then pray to god that I didn't get get pulverized by them before my next turn was a lot of fun.

I ended up taking some racial feats so that my movement power upped my defenses so I wouldn't die so easily, but for the most part I had a really good time playing an Ardent.

e: Has anyone gotten single-monster encounters to work as of yet (i.e. Solos)? I'm thinking about tooling creatures to be less HP spongey and have more actions (something like 5th's legendary action stuff) to be able to work but I want to know if someone has tried this stuff already or found a better solution.

Arrrthritis fucked around with this message at 09:10 on Jun 8, 2016

# ¿ Jun 8, 2016 09:06

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 18:45

Arrrthritis: May 31, 2007; I don't care if you're a star, the moon, or the whole damn sky, you need to come back down to earth and remember where you came from

Really Pants posted:

Have you ever tried MM3 solos? They get all those things.

So you're saying I should release the kraken then

# ¿ Jun 8, 2016 12:09

Arrrthritis: May 31, 2007; I don't care if you're a star, the moon, or the whole damn sky, you need to come back down to earth and remember where you came from

dwarf74 posted:

Sadly, that's more or less precisely what I hate about Ardents and (to an even greater extent) Psions. Spamming crazy high attack penalties is about as good as an at-will Stun. Worse, in many cases, because most monsters in default 4e don't recognize attack penalties as 'conditions'.

The power points system makes it even more egregious, because they can use all of their encounter powers, or use the same one as many times as they have points. :getin:

ofc if you do nothing but Demo Strike you're not being as good as you can be to your group, but I remember one session my DM had to send ridiculously high defense dudes at us in anticipation of that particular ability.

dwarf74 posted:

The Zeitgeist Adventure Path does a pretty good job. Condition mitigation and interesting phases that present different challenges to a party are key.

Also, don't really run things as Solos; give them backup. Mixing them with skill challenges, lesser threats, terrain effects, etc. make all the difference.

Yeah that's kind of what I want to deal with. Sometimes I just want a big creature to be threatening and not have to rely on goons popping in for extra actions. I was thinking of taking legendary/lair actions from 5e and lowering HP so that the difficulty wasn't from the fight being prolonged but from trying to kill the thing as quickly as possible. I also think I read in one of these threads that someone reskinned five monsters to be different parts of one giant monster, and I'm kind of curious to hear how that worked out for them because that seemed like a good idea.

Interesting environments I feel are pretty much a standard for 4e. There's no point in giving the players all those forced movement abilities if there isn't anywhere interesting to move (in) to.

# ¿ Jun 8, 2016 13:51

Arrrthritis: May 31, 2007; I don't care if you're a star, the moon, or the whole damn sky, you need to come back down to earth and remember where you came from

Do you guys have any advice to offer to people running this system play-by-post.

# ¿ Jun 17, 2016 02:19

Arrrthritis: May 31, 2007; I don't care if you're a star, the moon, or the whole damn sky, you need to come back down to earth and remember where you came from

Yeah, from the games I played I remembered it being a bit of a bummer when in a group of 4-6 people everyone is waiting on one person to update with a reaction/turn. I was mostly wondering if that issue had been dealt with :shobon:

I was thinking of having the combats be resolved in real time (where we schedule a time that's good for everyone) while the actual game be a bi-weekly post thing, although I don't know if that's better or worse than just doing the whole thing in real time. I guess I like everyone being able to formulate their IC responses and think it's easier to meet up for shorter sessions, but i'm sure there are some obvious cons that aren't apparent to me yet.

# ¿ Jun 17, 2016 03:14

Arrrthritis: May 31, 2007; I don't care if you're a star, the moon, or the whole damn sky, you need to come back down to earth and remember where you came from

I like the idea of an AI as a backup, but I feel like having AI be the default is kind of taking away the system's greatest strength (fun, dramatic, & tactical encounters). I might as well run a more rules-light system to keep the whole thing fluid if I'm going to go that route.

That being said, I think I might reserve combat for only the really climactic moments in the campaign. It would kind of suck if the group lost momentum fighting some throwaway goblins for extra XP or something.

# ¿ Jun 17, 2016 07:19

Arrrthritis: May 31, 2007; I don't care if you're a star, the moon, or the whole damn sky, you need to come back down to earth and remember where you came from

slydingdoor posted:

Yeah the AI is just a way to take care of when people can't/won't post their turns without judging them and bottlenecking the game.

There's at least a 24 hour pause after every round or decision fork type thing where I take what happened and dress it up in the fiction. Zooming out like gives me more to work with: the play by play gets old pretty fast when there's not many choices to make or moves to take. I at least like something more colorful, and having the tides turn round by round instead of turn by turn I think fosters more interest and enthusiasm.

Also players can always pull the stop request line if they need more than 24 hours to figure whatever out. I expect that might happen in more lethal and tricky encounters. If everyone takes this option it'd be no different from other PbPs which I think is a good thing. It's opt out basically.

Would you be willing to post a grogsbane post-mortem in here when the thread ends? I'll probably end up starting my game before then but I'm still interested to know how much of a success it is vs what kinks still need to be ironed out.

The way you just described it sounds a lot better than what I thought it was.

ProfessorCirno posted:

Ask Really Pants how to do 4e PBP because I'm in their Zeitgeist game and it's still going after a year and a half and it still owns bones

I'll take a look and (possibly) send them a PM. Thanks!

Arrrthritis fucked around with this message at 10:32 on Jun 17, 2016

# ¿ Jun 17, 2016 10:06

Arrrthritis: May 31, 2007; I don't care if you're a star, the moon, or the whole damn sky, you need to come back down to earth and remember where you came from

Is there a comprehensive guide to using running 4e games in fantasy grounds? There's an avenger in my group, and right now we're doing a lot of the oath stuff by hand, but we're wondering if they have support for the oath of enmity type of buffs/debuffs it brings.

# ¿ Feb 7, 2018 20:27

Arrrthritis: May 31, 2007; I don't care if you're a star, the moon, or the whole damn sky, you need to come back down to earth and remember where you came from

Mostly marking oath of enmity targets and applying oath of enmity effects from avenger abilities. She's playing an oath of retribution avenger so it would be really nice to have a way to keep track of all damage bonuses she gets on attacks.

# ¿ Feb 7, 2018 21:59

Arrrthritis: May 31, 2007; I don't care if you're a star, the moon, or the whole damn sky, you need to come back down to earth and remember where you came from

thespaceinvader posted:

And honestly, giving everyone an 18 in their base stat is

fine

like, it's an option for point buy.

The game is balanced around the possibility of it.

I actually did this in a game I ran and people had a lot of fun playing around with secondaries and not having to invest everything in Accuracy.

# ¿ Jun 24, 2019 15:54

Arrrthritis: May 31, 2007; I don't care if you're a star, the moon, or the whole damn sky, you need to come back down to earth and remember where you came from

PMush Perfect posted:

I�m considering making a FF Tactics/Final Fantasy 5 inspired hack/campaign of 4e, where you can change classes between battles. Your level is consistent, but what powers you can move between classes increases as you level, including certain mastery bonuses. I can�t imagine it working much past 5 or 6, but slower, cinematic leveling would be fine with the inherent variety available from the class swapping mechanic.

For example, you play five battles as a Fighter, you get the option to replace one of your other Encounter powers with a Fighter power whenever you swap classes.

There would need to be a LOT of prebaked work done, including basically all of the classes prebuilt; the variety would come from customizing the class builds, not the builds themselves.

That would be pretty dope, and i'd be interested to see how this pans out.

# ¿ Aug 17, 2020 17:47

Arrrthritis: May 31, 2007; I don't care if you're a star, the moon, or the whole damn sky, you need to come back down to earth and remember where you came from

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

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

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.

- 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.

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.

# ¿ Nov 13, 2020 22:52

Arrrthritis: May 31, 2007; I don't care if you're a star, the moon, or the whole damn sky, you need to come back down to earth and remember where you came from

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.

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.

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.

# ¿ Nov 14, 2020 04:19

Arrrthritis: May 31, 2007; I don't care if you're a star, the moon, or the whole damn sky, you need to come back down to earth and remember where you came from

DalaranJ posted:

I just watched a video about non 4e D&D where a person effectively proposed using �minions�, and they took what I thought was a surprising stance on it. So, let me ask here, a place which will know a lot about �minions�,

When you use minions is it better for the players to know that they only have 1 hit or to obscure that information?

If you're not going to tell your players what is and isn't a minion (which you should, because blowing encounters/dailies on minions sucks), the information should be telegraphed in some way (making them uniform in their token/mini design) to give your players some intuition room to figure it out.

# ¿ Dec 17, 2020 18:17

Arrrthritis: May 31, 2007; I don't care if you're a star, the moon, or the whole damn sky, you need to come back down to earth and remember where you came from

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.

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.

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.

# ¿ Mar 15, 2021 21:03

Arrrthritis: May 31, 2007; I don't care if you're a star, the moon, or the whole damn sky, you need to come back down to earth and remember where you came from

Orange Devil posted:

One of my players is playing a Warlord, currently at level 3, almost 4, and I'm having a really hard time finding fun and useful magic items for him to find. He's the type of Warlord who spends most of his turns allowing others to make extra attacks and doing a bit of healing. He's already got magical armour, and given how little he uses his weapon I'd prefer he buys one eventually and finds things that are a bit more impactful.

I've asked him for a wishlist and it's basically just items which support his healing, which is what I also already found on my own as good candidates (and his armour already helps with this also) but I don't want to give him just healing stuff and turn him into a walking band-aid because boring. There's other generally useful items ofcourse, like a neck-slot item or a shield, but the issue there is that it is very likely that other party members would take priority on those items because they'd likely get more use out of them. He's already starting to get behind on number of items compared to the rest of the party and I don't want this to get out of hand.

So long question short, what are some good lvl 5-10 magic item recommendations for a Warlord?

There are weapons you can give a warlord that will better enable their granted attacks. I believe Chieftain's Spear/Polearm is the type you're looking for? But there might be others available that provide a similar benefit.

# ¿ Nov 12, 2021 17:14

Arrrthritis: May 31, 2007; I don't care if you're a star, the moon, or the whole damn sky, you need to come back down to earth and remember where you came from

Verisimilidude posted:

How do you all run skill challenges? I've been letting my players know that they're in a skill challenge and ask them to contribute in their own unique ways with their chosen skills, giving unrelated skills a higher DC than normal. So far this has proven to be successful, but I'm curious how other people run them. Do you obfuscate a lot of information from the players? Are you upfront about a lot of information?

An example of a skill challenge would be very useful as well! I know the book has a couple examples, but I'd like to hear about real world uses.

I mostly use it as a framework for how many obstacles/skill checks the players should face when going to their destination (broken up between dialog/encounters/puzzles/etc), but I try not to run skill challenges RAW because they are very tedious to go through as a player.

# ¿ Mar 7, 2022 17:17

Arrrthritis: May 31, 2007; I don't care if you're a star, the moon, or the whole damn sky, you need to come back down to earth and remember where you came from

DoubleDonut posted:

Does anyone have any tips for making in-person play a little easier for new players? The current incarnation of the character builder can be a little annoying to get working properly, and it presents the player with every single feat alphabetically which can be pretty overwhelming, plus I�d like to spend an in person session making characters together instead of just sending everyone home to do it on their pc. But then calculating stuff quickly and keeping track of what stuff you�ve used can be kind of a pain; I was thinking maybe making cards for everyone�s powers and items to make it easier.

I�m also a little concerned about overwhelming people with options with feats, but I think if I just give everyone the big fest taxes for free (expertise, mba primary stat stuff, improved defenses) and tell them to pick what seems cool we should be okay.

It helps to get an item to represent when a target is marked (either by a striker or defender mark) or suffering a status condition. The IRL 4e group I played in used M&Ms/Skittles so that whoever killed the creature would get to eat its marks.

A draw-erase mat with different colored markers helps with zones. Alternatively, get a bunch of different colored strings/yarn and associate a player with a color.

# ¿ Apr 12, 2022 15:13

Arrrthritis: May 31, 2007; I don't care if you're a star, the moon, or the whole damn sky, you need to come back down to earth and remember where you came from

Verisimilidude posted:

Heard two new points against 4e that have really blown my mind and I�m still processing them:

1. �Encounter powers are bad, because it doesn�t make sense to have a power you can only use once per fight.�
2. �At-will powers don�t make sense because where are the characters getting the energy to produce the effects? An infinite energy source?�

There were a bunch of other negative points but they�re your more run of the mill stuff. Video game, healing surges bad, powers bad, etc.

Just glad to be hearing fresh bad takes so many years later!

Do they have similar problems with vancian casting or are they okay with someone memorizing fireball and forgetting it after two uses?

# ¿ May 1, 2022 20:05

Arrrthritis: May 31, 2007; I don't care if you're a star, the moon, or the whole damn sky, you need to come back down to earth and remember where you came from

Gao posted:

On my return to running 4e, one thing I found out very quickly is that it's easy for a player to make a given skill really high. Like to the point where I realized that the level 2 warlock in the party would succeed on at level hard bluff checks on a 1. I ended up house ruling that a nat 1 was always a failure so that there was at least technically a risk. I'd talk to your players about not going too nuts on maxing out skills if you want skill challenges to mean anything.

IMO I try to take the opposite approach. If a player gets a +12 to arcana at level 2 I figure they'll just get different degrees of success depending on what they roll, because they want their character to be the Arcana guy. But at the same time I try to get them to roll skills that they wouldn't normally be good at (and still have a moderate chance of failure)

# ¿ Jan 24, 2023 18:13

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 18:45

Arrrthritis: May 31, 2007; I don't care if you're a star, the moon, or the whole damn sky, you need to come back down to earth and remember where you came from

YggdrasilTM posted:

Your health and stamina is the total and HP and HS. HP are the "active" part, HS the "static" part.
HP are the external level of this iceberg; they are not your whole health and stamina, but you risk to die if you lose all of it.
HS are your emergency reserve. Your body ability to keep on and healing. You can use it to replenish the active part, but you need to do something to tap into it: magic, ki, pure willpower, or just plain resting.

edit: I OBVIOUSLY reversed HP and HS, now it's fixed.

I mean, if they're going full dark souls/elden ring with it they could just reflavor healing surges to be their estus flask.

And maybe Dragonborn get a better estus starting out

# ¿ Jan 25, 2023 15:28

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