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Prison Warden posted:I wonder how viable a Gunslinger class (like in pathfinder - except not loving awful), that focused entirely on crafting and using guns effectively, would be. I know a few people who would love to play Roland of Gilead and a Gunslinger could be a neat Martial Controller idea. Yeah, I could see it working as either a Controller (SUPPRESSING FIRE!!!) or Striker
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Feb 2, 2014 03:24
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PeterWeller posted:Sewers are city based campaign's most obvious dungeon. And THIS is why every video game has a sewer level. It's all a rich tapestry.
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Feb 13, 2014 18:16
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Most of the MM1 monsters are replaced in the Monster Vault, but for the MM2 I use the "MM3 on a business card" formulas to adjust the numbers. A bit of work but there are some cool monsters there.
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Jul 17, 2014 04:40
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Started writing up guard powers- mostly fighter rewordings but I have hope that as I get more used to the ad hoc formulae I'll be able to come up with more original ones with similar effects. (I'm trying to simplify some of the weapon specific ones though). Observation- a lot of fighter powers would be good for a pro wrestler type if you gave them something to bypass the "requires weapon" bit. Feat or class/theme feature? (I'm trying to really limit growth of the former.)
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Nov 19, 2014 19:05
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Drewjitsu posted:You understand that there is a pro-wrestling class in the game, complete with amazing feat support right? First things first I actually posted that in the wrong thread. I'm doing a 4e retroclone with a space opera flavor and meant to post it in the retrocloning 4e thread but I'm getting a few good pieces of advice here. Monks have the whole tie to psionics, and while that's mostly flavor I'm going to be focusing them much more on Wisdom. (All classes are much more tied to a single stat, with most of their powers keying off it, with the expectation that that stat will be at least a 16. Backgrounds/themes are being expanded to handle more of the non-combat material so you're effectively combining three things instead of two.) That might work for some brawler/wrestler types but not all. In rethinking the fighter/guard class (the archetypes I'm thinking of for inspiration are characters like Chewbacca, Groot, Lt. Worf) it makes sense that they inherently work unarmed pretty well, they're not as weapon-dependent as their D&D counterparts. For some alien species it makes sense to give them a "natural weapon" feature but basically all of them are kind of brawlers already. Also the default multiclass monk feat doesn't seem to actually give Unarmed Combatant. I'm going to look closely at those too since I want feats to be way cut back. Specifically I was thinking Comeback Strike, without a weapon, is basically Hogan hulking out. I'm looking for the best way to present that as an option. (Specifically because in the fluff I've come up with one alien race that resolves political conflicts through what is effectively pro wrestling.)
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Nov 20, 2014 00:21
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Poison Mushroom posted:The mental image of a warlord with a barbarian strapped to his arm like a shield made me chuckle. The words "fastball special" come to mind.
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Jan 2, 2015 19:10
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What made the class/role thing click for me was the forum LP, and Medibot's sacred librarian of Ioun being an Avenger (IIRC). The class primarily describes what you do in combat, with a few restrictions on skills.
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Jan 3, 2015 19:44
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Moriatti posted:Maxwell Lord is working on a retro clone that would work nicely, but failing that, why not just use the weapons/armor from SE, cull the races to ones with good SW analogues and suggest Battlemind/Ardent? Seems like an easy swap? By "working on", read "adding to in fits and starts between bigger writing projects". I've got the non-utility powers for one class written up and most of those I feel like I'll need to replace with something less derivative. A couple of bits of advice if you just wanna hack 4e though: Ranged combat tends to be canonically more prevalent in Star Wars, especially among enemies (stormtroopers, battle droids, etc.) Jedi have the whole 'deflect lasers' trick, maybe other melee combatants should have some similar options so they can close ranks with the enemy and force them into melee. Or just have more melee opponents (the KOTOR stormtrooper equivalent has a melee attack and early drafts of the movie gave everyone laser swords.) Since armor really isn't much of a thing (apart from people who wear it to look badass) you may want to replace AC with a general Defense (apart from the three saves) and give each class a flat bonus equal to the AC they'd get from their class's most common armor (though this does cut out check penalties which I never cared for anyway.)
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Jan 18, 2015 18:46
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The view of tactical combat (or any combat) as something separate from "roleplaying" has been around for a while and yeah, it's one of those toxic memes that murders good discussion. Every action you choose to have a character take is "role playing", even when it's just "hit that guy".
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Mar 27, 2015 22:00
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It's sort of a given, though, that the players aren't going to see all of the stuff you prepped, even if you're not running a hexcrawl.
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Mar 27, 2015 22:40
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For my retroclone I'll probably define skill challenges as, instead of "x failures and you're out", every failure creates a hindrance or negative effect. You can push forward and get the thing you want done but drag along some negative baggage later. You find out the location of the bad guy's lair but you attract attention from local toughs, you get the duke's signature on a treaty but you make some enemies at court, etc.
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Mar 28, 2015 02:00
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Selachian posted:Seconded. The Zeitgeist adventures were what confirmed to me that my taste has shifted: fewer but more interesting combats over more but faster combats. I think the way 4e is built kinda naturally nudges you that way- I've been tinkering with a dungeon and have found myself dropping and merging combat encounters to make the ones that exist more interesting. This is probably the biggest shift from prior editions- there's less gradual attrition of resources and more focus on the encounter.
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Apr 17, 2015 23:50
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I believe it's been shown that we respond better to irregular rewards than a completely predictable stream.
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Jun 25, 2015 06:45
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Hell, as many problems as 5e has, there was at least some cursory attempt to kind of balance the game sorta. With their newest game GW actively made no attempt at game balance and is asking the players to work it out on their own. In a competitive non-RPG. The forum closure is really just the latest in Wizards' long history of not having any idea how to handle the Internet. This is a forum where if you go a sub forum or thread and decide "I'd like to chime in" and log in, you are then directed not to the page you left or even the forum front page but the entirely useless "community" page.
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Sep 17, 2015 00:38
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Presumably the box sets are expensive because you get the counters and maps and so on. I do kinda regret not going for the DM kit. (Though I'll likely have to run a game online anyway. Once I figure out how that works.)
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Sep 21, 2015 04:20
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Khizan posted:Eh, they have dex as an option, so they're fine. There are more optimal choices, yeah, but gnoll is perfectly good for any dex-based class in probably a solid 95%+ of games. IMO, bleeding edge char-p is probably more detrimental than helpful unless you're doing ultra-hardcore lair-assault poo poo. This is something that always strikes me as odd about the thread. The big selling point of 4e over other editions is supposed to be that it's pretty well balanced and there aren't any trap choices and it's hard to make a character that's really not good mechanically. And yet charop abounds.
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Oct 11, 2015 16:49
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Generic Octopus posted:This threshold for 'broken' seems kinda low. You have to sort of filter everything a little on this thread. For "seriously broken" read "a little better."
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Dec 8, 2015 06:14
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gradenko_2000 posted:Conclave is a very 4e-esque game, and even goes one better by adapting it to a hex grid and allowing for asynchronous turns, though I'm not sure if there's a large active community or how much content there is. I've never gotten past this one starting encounter (the trees I think?) I can find no way to avoid the enemy killing me first, because there simply aren't that many options to start with.
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Dec 20, 2015 04:56
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Is DDI totally dead now? I knew they were blocking new signups.
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Jan 7, 2016 00:24
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What really is the big advantage of the Dancing weapon? Its power is it hovers and you can attack with it, but it hovers in your square and you use it like you would any normal weapon action-wise so it seems like an entirely cosmetic effect.
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Mar 8, 2016 06:54
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I see, guess I wasn't reading that properly.
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Mar 8, 2016 15:02
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I think more that hazards that only hurt the PCs should be treated as part of the XP budget since they're part of the opposition, but things that aren't budgeted should be things that work against everyone.
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Apr 12, 2016 14:49
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This is kinda sounding like not a good DM. It's one thing to dislike encounters being easier than they're supposed to be, but refusing to do anything about it either is just insisting on misery.
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Apr 17, 2016 06:08
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Really a DM should be a fan of the players. If you've somehow managed to assemble a super powered strike force that laughs at level appropriate encounters, the appropriate response is "Wow! Good job!" And then bring out the big guns.
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Apr 17, 2016 18:36
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I'm a bit confused as to who is arguing what now. This thread tends towards CharOp discussion quite a bit, but the whole point of a balanced design like 4e is it doesn't require a lot of System Mastery. Like the one thing you have to do is put at least a 16 in your class's primary ability (18's better obviously, but the system was designed with 16 as the base line.) Beyond that, you can do whatever, play a Gnome Warlord or give your Paladin an axe because the Order of St.Badass trains everyone as lumberjacks. That said, the jump between levels is big enough that yeah, all the PCs should be the same level.
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Jun 4, 2016 20:21
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ProfessorCirno posted:The bladesinger owns because it looks exactly like the sort of thing you get from UA these days. It's a perfect window into what was to come in the next edition. Fluff-wise I'm pretty sure the concept was "Elf Fighter/Wizard" from early editions. So mechanically it's a bit conflicted because it's "swings a sword and casts spells" and they're trying to fit that into 4e's tactical framework.
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Aug 26, 2016 18:46
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Another element is that 4e's math relies to a certain extent on teamwork and allies giving each other extra attacks and buffs and heals- one on one the monsters are on average a little more resilient in terms of how many hits they can take, but it's in the synergy that the PCs have the advantage. In a theoretical solo combat (which isn't ideal in many RPGs, but sometimes a story can lead in that direction) a PC may have to really nova.
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Sep 4, 2016 20:53
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Arivia posted:Yeah, it shows off how creatively bankrupt the whole thing is. There's no actual content to it, nothing to grab onto. The sample campaigns are even just Star Wars and Avatar the Last Airbender with the names filed off. It's just terribly written. And if it's terribly written, the rules are just another heartbreaker, and there's no actual creativity in it, then it's not worth playing. Strike is the kind of game people would laugh at for fun in Fatal & Friends, except it's not even interesting enough to be covered there. It's a generic rules set. The rules are the key thing, and as far as I can see they're good. They're not a replacement for 4e but they're good.
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Dec 11, 2016 03:15
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Thing is, it's the sort of thing you see in fantasy stories so to just plain rule it out feels like you're cutting off a lot of story options. Focus is one thing but a good heroic fantasy game shouldn't feel like you're doing something wrong if you veer one inch off the path of "group tactical combat in large open spaces with varied terrain".
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Feb 28, 2017 04:15
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If anyone's interested in playing a horror-themed 4e game on Roll20, I'm recruiting for one now and have been having a little trouble scaring up the numbers. A couple of slots left anyway.
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Mar 11, 2017 06:56
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Hell the game's math is built around the assumption that you have a 16 in your prime stat. 18 is better but RAW the game is built on the assumption that you hit an enemy of your level on a roll of 10 or better, or 55% of the time. The enemy hits around 50%, and this is before the effects from specific powers, marks, etc. come into play and that all tips the balance in the PCs' favor.
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Mar 12, 2017 02:31
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There's one power in one of the PHBs that lets you choose between +1 to hit, +2 to a defense, or +3 to damage, so I've seen that as a good sloppy estimate.
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Nov 22, 2017 22:59
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Caphi posted:You can access it from here but I'm not sure how well it works if you try to create an account or newly subscribe to Insider. I had my account deactivated because I changed cards, but tech support were able to get things working again. Outsourced labor turns out to be better than the guys Wizards normally have doing their online content.
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Jan 2, 2018 20:03
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Ferrinus posted:Eh, "sit permanently in the +to hit stance" is equivalent to having a favorite at-will, which lots of characters playing normal classes do - does a ranger really choose between Twin Strike and whatever else 95% of the time? It's still choosing which of two powers to use, even if the choice is obvious or so opaque as to be uninteresting. I actually think a +hit stance AND a +damage stance were a really lousy move on the devs' part, because depending on how the math shakes out you could have players choosing the +damage stance (to do damage, right?) but actually reducing their expected DPR compared to what the accuracy stance would have offered! I mean that’s because Twin Strike is kinda OP. It’s one where the designers didn’t quite appreciate just how much better an extra attack is than most other bonuses.
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Aug 23, 2020 00:45
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Lemon-Lime posted:Here's how to make a working 4E character: pick a class and a build. Pick a species that has +stat to the class primary stat and ideally the build secondary. Pick the powers that match the build. Congrats, you're 80% of the way to optimal play. Honestly I don’t like the “pick a species that has these bonuses” bit, species should be a flavor choice. You can get fine stats without it.
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Aug 23, 2020 00:47
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Lemon-Lime posted:They're not a flavour choice in 4E, they're a mechanical character option like any other, and you absolutely need an 18 in your primary and 16 in your secondary for the maths to work out properly, which is not something you can do if you don't have racial modifiers to stats that actually matter to your class and build. The "flavour choice" is that you can just as easily refluff your species in 99% of cases. That would make it a pretty bad game if players are punished for taking something that’s not an optimal stat combo. Thought 4e was supposed to be well balanced without trap options.
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Aug 23, 2020 01:21
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neonchameleon posted:So I guess that stats in your world should be utterly meaningless then. Because everyone in every game is "punished" for sub-optimal choices. Well right, but you don't need the right racial bonus to get a 16 or even an 18, those are in the arrays. Like, I agree, the game communicates clearly that you should put your best score in your class builds' primary stat (and it's kinda rare to end up with stats where you don't have at least one 16 unless you either go with one of the broadest arrays or screw up with point buy.) What it doesn't say is that you need to align your choice of character race in order to get an 18 or better. That's something the player base has generally found works better but it's not required to have a character who will fare well in the system/not be completely outclassed by everyone else. All I've been saying on this is that D&D 4 is a well balanced game where it's pretty hard to make a "bad" character- you kinda have to try. That doesn't mean charop isn't a thing but it's more optional than it was in 3rd.
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Aug 23, 2020 02:17
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Lemon-Lime posted:It's impossible to get 18 in your primary and 16 in your secondary without at least one +2 from species. Either of the literally only two arrays that matter (18/14/11/10/10/8 or 16/16/13/11/10/8) will get you to 18/16 as long as you pick a species that gives you bonuses to at least one of your stats. The maths, especially at higher levels, are absolutely built around you having a starting 18 in your primary and a starting 16 in your secondary. That seems counter to what the devs actually said, unless you've got a source that says otherwise. If you get a 16 in your primary (i.e. a +3) and the average weapon/implement (+2) you've got a +5 to your attacks, +3 for some weapons which makes it +6, average level 1 monster AC is 15, hence, you hit on a 10 or a 9, meaning a 55%-60% chance. So generally speaking you can look at the dice and say "Oh it's double digits, I hit." (Now you can get this even higher, the fighter gets a +1 to either one-handed or two-handed so they can potentially have +7, 65%, Rogues get a dagger bonus, etc.) Now it does slow down at later levels, that's generally agreed as a mistake (though the assumption was people would be getting more synergy bonuses) and why the DM should give out the Improved feats at... 5 or so, I think the consensus was? Like worst case scenario in this you're essentially one point of bonus behind, meaning you hit 5% less. This may be notable but you're not exactly dragging the party down either.
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Aug 23, 2020 20:53
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Worth noting that if they don't have a controller, mobs/minions will be more of a problem- it's not insurmountable (other classes do sometimes have access to AOE stuff) but it might be a consideration.
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Feb 23, 2021 04:23
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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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