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bathroom sounds posted:Lore-wise, how exactly do warlocks work? Why would a demon or devil or Lovecraftian ancient Thing condescend to make a pact with a trifling mortal? And what exactly is a warlock's end game supposed to be? Because the Gods are lame, maaaaan. Generally speaking you're right, though: Warlocks, Clerics and Paladins are embodying some aspect of {Greater Power}, which grants them powers. The thematic difference between all three are pretty significant, though. quote:In a world of ubiquitous magic, and one in which demons are real and their motivations well-known, why would anyone but a batshit insane Chaotic Evil idiot pledge their soul to a demon for fleeting magical power in life? The 4e cosmology addresses this, because frankly most of the astral planes are also shitholes, falling apart or randomly dropping their followers into the endless abyss instead of getting them to the right plane. Speaking of which, Asmodeus is a god, having grabbed the divine power from his original master when he murdered the gently caress out of him. Why wouldn't you want to work for the winning side?
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Jan 30, 2014 17:22
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bathroom sounds posted:I still don't understand why a demon would enter into a pact with a warlock. It's not like they're Lucifer trying to corrupt one of God's Children as part of some existential war between Good and Evil. This is pretty much the support for how they're played, to be honest: there aren't many, if any, powers that reference having an explicit patron, which tends to be something more for Hexblades. Also, it's worth mentioning that the PHB addressed your concern about their motivations. The infernal pact description is quote:Long ago a forgotten race of devils created a secret path to power and taught it to the tieflings of old to weaken their fealty to Asmodeus. In his wrath, Asmodeus destroyed the scheming devils and struck their very names from the memory of all beings- but you dare to study those perilous secrets anyway. RPZip fucked around with this message at 22:00 on Jan 30, 2014 |
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Jan 30, 2014 21:48
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I'm looking at running the Zeitgeist adventure path for people on the forums, probably as a PbP but possibly via roll20. Are there any things I should know before I start that aren't immediately obvious from reading through the provided documents? Any particular pitfalls or encounters that need to be reworked?
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Feb 4, 2014 07:56
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dwarf74 posted:Okay, so the challenge: Rogues can do well with Two-Fisted Shooter, and Drow Rogues can always pick up Ruthless Hunter to bump the damage dice to d8. The Zeitgeist CBLoader package even updates the feats to reference pistols as well, which is nice. Sharpshooter Weapon Talent doesn't work with the Zeitgeist weapons via CBLoader, but that's pretty a pretty easy fix to make. I'm going to need to update the Zeitgeist.part to include the higher-level theme bonuses when I get to that point, so if nobody's done it by then I will. quote:Wait, I'm an idiot. Why not treat the brace of pistols as a single weapon, and treat it like a Musket? This also works, in which case Ranger, Seeker, Hunter, etc. are all valid options.
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Feb 10, 2014 01:25
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Just for clarification, altitude 1 means you're flying one square above the ground - ground level is altitude 0 instead. This means you can do things like hover over an ally or an enemy's square.
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Mar 14, 2014 16:24
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Gort posted:If I do this I'm still stuck having to have a certain number of fights per session or players will just nova their dailies. I want a solution that works whether players have one fight before resting or if they have ten. Let players only use one daily power per fight. I'd separate this into daily attack powers and daily utility powers and let them use up to one of each per fight, but not more. It's similar in conception to the limits on daily item uses, or how you can only use one ap per fight barring special utilities.
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Jun 27, 2014 21:43
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Gort posted:But how do you prevent players using the same daily power every fight? That's not in addition to "daily powers recharge after short rests", it's instead of it. E: Pseudo quoting the post above this cause I'm on a phone, but the one per milestone per tier restriction is weird. On the other hand "only one daily attack power per fight" should be pretty easy to track, and it'll give the pc's a more consistent power level per fight rather than just shitblasting the last fight of the day. RPZip fucked around with this message at 22:34 on Jun 27, 2014 |
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Jun 27, 2014 22:32
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palecur posted:What about adopting the 13A recharge mechanic? Why? Okay, just to clarify everyone's point here, there are generally two main flavors of problem with 4e combat. 1) Players tend to hoard resources like daily powers until they're put in a position to use it or lose it. This tends to lead to situations where players will not spend daily powers until the last fight of the day; given the power of dailies, this also often trivializes that last fight as players burn through the rest of their resources like they're drunk. Given that the last fight is often the climactic moment of a given adventure - the cackling wizard in his tower, the dragon in his lair, whatever - this can lead to cases of anticlimax where the fight against the minions was considerably harder than the fight against the boss. 2) Fights in general often have some degree of 'alpha striking' - when you can press the DELETE button on a monster or two before they get to act, you significantly lower the threat level of any given fight. This, in addition to the 'players having a boatload of dailies for the last fight', often results in it feeling somewhat unsatisfying rather than a difficult but fun fight. The design of D20 games in general is riddled with this, since there's no real player incentive not to hit your best move right off the bat. 13th Age has two solutions for these problems, one for each. Their daily powers will sometimes recharge after battle, which encourages you to spend them early on in the day and then maybe extract more uses out of them, and the Escalation Die plus the higher baseline defenses for 13th Age monsters means that you're often more likely to connect with powers if you sit on them for a turn or two. That's not even factoring in some powers which explicitly won't work unless the Escalation Die is at a certain value or higher. For the first problem, I think the simplest solution by far is to give the players incentive to spend those points, because otherwise they will lose the ability to spend them all; limiting players to one daily attack power (and one daily utility power) will, at a bare minimum, result in players spending their daily powers on the last three fights or so, rather than saving them all for the last encounter. Recharge powers can do this too, but that will result in more powers being used over the day - not the end of the world, but it means you'll probably have to adjust the encounter difficulty upwards somewhat, and it's a somewhat more complex solution. The one-power-per-fight method also means you don't need to handle much, if any, intrasession bookkeeping if you ended without taking an extended rest. For the second problem, something like the Escalation Die is a pretty neat solution, although it's worth mentioning that what it boils down to in practice is "players miss more on their first and second turn". Or just accept it and roll with it, I think it's much less of an issue than the boatload of dailies is. One daily attack power per fight is simple and it works, so v0v. E: quote:2. One daily/encounter does nothing but greatly limit my options as a player. If I want or need to front-load an encounter with several dailies, I'm crippled. If I use the wrong daily (for any number of reasons that I can't foresee), I'm crippled. If my daily misses, I'm crippled. If my character is built around his dailies, I hate this system. If my character is built around his at-wills, the system gives me an arbitrarily unfair play advantage compared to the former. One action point/encounter does the same thing, but people rarely have too much of an issue with it. The point, or premise, of one daily per fight is that players dumping "multiple dailies" into an encounter, especially multiple players, means it has usually ceased to be an encounter to any meaningful degree; this, plus the fact that players like to hug their resources and never, ever spend them ("the reason why you end every RPG with 800 Potions in your backpack you've never used") means one fight of the day is usually shitcanned for no great reason. And man, what character is 'built around dailies' to that degree, where only spending one per fight instead of two would represent a significant nerf? There are characters built around at-wills, like the martial E-classes, but "giving them an arbitrarily unfair play advantage" against classes with dailies is not exactly something that strikes me as a terrible idea given how shittily those classes scale. RPZip fucked around with this message at 23:23 on Jun 28, 2014 |
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Jun 28, 2014 23:18
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OneThousandMonkeys posted:-Lay on Hands/Ardent Vow and barbarians are completely broken by this proposed system I'm pretty sure neither Lay on Hands nor Ardent Vow are daily attack powers, although I'd exclude them from any sort of daily utility power shenanigans as well, since they don't really fit either model being a mostly-legacy mechanic. Actually I'm just going to skip the next few ones since I think they're missing an essential issue, namely that it's daily attack powers that would be restricted - those are the ones you pick up at levels 1, 5 and 9, with a supplement at level 20 from your paragon path and a replacement or two along the way as well. It probably makes sense to just not restrict daily utility powers, since they tend to be much smaller in scope, even though that still often leads to player hoarding until they can just vomit them all out. It's a solution to an observed issue, namely that players are disinclined to spend limited resources unless not doing so will result in losing them. Putting a cap on the number of dailies you can bust out in one fight is that incentive, and it's by far the simplest one. quote:Also I am wondering which of the melee classes are going ot be the most battlefield mobile? I love the idea of running from enemy to enemy and stabbing them or literally getting the killing blow. Rogue or Monk, although Monk tends to deal more with clumps of enemies than isolated ones.
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Jun 29, 2014 10:02
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Agent Boogeyman posted:How about this? The ancient warrior was a mighty Deva Paladin, and in order to defeat the previous evil had to contain the evil entity in a living vessel, so he chose himself. Only it turns out that the contained vessel would become possessed, and in a last ditch effort to destroy the evil for good was forced to kill himself in hopes that would finish it off. Only it didn't. 1000 years later, the Oracles have seen a new evil and the twist that wouldn't be revealed until late game is that this new evil is the Deva resurrecting... as a Rakshasa. Thus the players' quest to find the artifacts and the Deva's body to resurrect him is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Good job breaking it, heroes. I'm pretty sure this is going to be the plot to the next Diablo game. quote:The main thing you're going to want to watch for is the way that a race to resurrect a big hero means that the PCs' greatest achievement is to cheerlead an NPC who is bigger and cooler than they are. Don't let this happen, it's not fun for anybody. The hero was so powerful that he grew, and grew, and grew in size and stature until he towered over the world. When he fell, his body split into many pieces, each of which the heroes will have to recover and reassemble in order to reanimate him. But the long, long death and darkness have caused his muscles and nerves to atrophy to near uselessness, and his body has changed from flesh and bone to rock and iron. Fortunately, the heroes can direct each body part individually for the climactic final battle and form the coherent whole. http://youtu.be/7mQuHh1X4H4?t=1m3s
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Aug 27, 2014 09:42
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In my continuing quest to find interesting options or ideas, does anyone have an opinion on what the best 4e Adventures were (paths or single-shots) that aren't Neverwinter or Madness of Gardmore Abbey?
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Sep 15, 2014 14:38
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dwarf74 posted:This is part of the OP.  I was also thinking of the Dragon adventures - there's a few interesting ones I've picked up, especially Lord of the White Field which look interesting, but I'll take another look at Reavers and such too.
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Sep 15, 2014 19:11
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You guys are overthinking Hammer Rhythm. It adds a Miss: effect line to all melee weapon powers that don't already have one, specifically "Miss: If you have a Hammer or a Mace equipped, deal CON damage to the target." Miss effects don't deal damage to minions, so it wouldn't trigger.
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Sep 16, 2014 06:16
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Have you considered letting him reskin some powers to necrotic damage? He's working himself over pretty good because of everything that resists that type anyway, and reskinning powers elementally is supported by the DMG as it is.
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Oct 16, 2014 09:19
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OneThousandMonkeys posted:You can put a charge kit on literally anything, it's not really a metric to judge blackguard on. Blackguards can be cool because they're the only class that can abuse two big vulnerability packages. They can natively inflict cold (and necrotic) on all their attacks, so they can pick up all the neat classless frost-related stuff, and with a radiant weapon they can also get a lot of use out of the Paladin base support for radiant damage. This is a partial build I was poking at for a game and never finished/ended up making something else, and it's Tiefling-centric, but it shows off some of the crazy bullshit they can do. Dread Smite has great synergy with Icy Clutch of Stygia and Lasting Frost in particular, and with Morninglord you start slapping people around with Radiant vulnerability on top of that. Note that there's exactly zero charge optimization (save for Impaling Spear, but that's also "every attack-optimization") because, while effective, that package tends to bore me in actual play. ====== Created Using Wizards of the Coast D&D Character Builder ====== level 13 Tiefling, Blackguard, Morninglord FINAL ABILITY SCORES Str 13, Con 17, Dex 9, Int 11, Wis 13, Cha 23. STARTING ABILITY SCORES Str 12, Con 12, Dex 8, Int 10, Wis 12, Cha 18. AC: 18 Fort: 22 Reflex: 19 Will: 25 HP: 104 Surges: 13 Surge Value: 26 TRAINED SKILLS Religion +11 UNTRAINED SKILLS Acrobatics +5, Arcana +6, Bluff +14, Diplomacy +12, Dungeoneering +7, Endurance +9, Heal +7, History +6, Insight +7, Intimidate +12, Nature +7, Perception +7, Stealth +7, Streetwise +12, Thievery +5, Athletics +7 FEATS Level 1: Wrath of the Crimson Legion Level 2: Icy Clutch of Stygia Level 4: Cold Adaptation (retrained to Battle Awareness at Level 11) Level 6: Cunning Stalker Level 8: Weapon Proficiency (Gouge) Level 10: Imperious Majesty Level 11: Lasting Frost Level 12: Impaling Spear Feat User Choice: Mighty Crusader Expertise POWERS Blackguard daily 5: Majestic Halo Blackguard utility 6: Bless Weapon Blackguard daily 9: Ray of Reprisal ITEMS Radiant Gouge +3 ====== Copy to Clipboard and Press the Import Button on the Summary Tab ====== RPZip fucked around with this message at 20:51 on Oct 16, 2014 |
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Oct 16, 2014 20:45
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thespaceinvader posted:Icy Clutch is almost worthless, your enemy should be dead long before it has a chance to fail a save against the ongoing. You never hit with a Cold attack so you have no way to activate Lasting Frost. Dread Smite is a Paladin Attack power that does cold damage and applies Lasting Frost. It also applies ongoing cold/necrotic damage (save ends) that will get the Lasting Frost damage vuln when it ticks on their turn. At any point after level 16 the target would also have vuln 10 Radiant for any follow-up attacks. And dang, do you guys not face a lot of elites or something? quote:E: And Light Blades are where it's at for weapons; you get +hit with CA from Nimble Blade and +Damage with CA from Light Blade Expertise, and you can still pick up Surprising Charge. Rapiers. Nimble Blade is nice but the build is feat-heavy as it is (note the lack of a weapon focus feat); without it you're getting +2 damage with CA but your W size drops from 2d5+2 (avg: 8) to 1d8 (avg: 4.5), which isn't exactly a great deal. I went for Mighty Crusader over Spear Expertise for flexibility in being able to grab implement powers off the PP and not eat the to-hit penalty, plus being able to cast them whenever. quote:If you're running a Blackguard and not using Power of Strife what are you even doing Character was a) a Tiefling and b) worshipped Amanuator for the PP. If you're gonna go human and forgo the morninglord stuff it's a decent pick. E: Wait, I forgot that Ardent Strike is MBA only on charges, that's a terrible idea.
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Oct 16, 2014 23:28
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thespaceinvader posted:Dread Smite does not hit. To hit you need to make an attack roll and equal or exceed a defence, dread smite does neither. Ergo, Dread Smite cannot activate Lasting Frost, which requires you to hit with a cold power. It doesn't apply off the initial damage (Dread Smite, Trigger: You target an enemy with an at-will weapon attack power, Effect: The target takes cold and necrotic damage equal to blah blah blah) because that isn't a hit, and that goes off whether or not you actually connect. It applies off "If the triggering attack hits, the target also takes 5 ongoing cold and necrotic damage (save ends)." It requires you to hit the target and applies a cold damage effect, and it does both. The fact that it is checking another power's roll instead of generating its own doesn't seem like it should make a difference. The alternate reading is that, because the at-will attack power is now inflicting cold and necrotic damage (save ends) on a hit, it gains those keywords. Either way, it should apply. What would be nice, but doesn't work with the timing rules, is if you could use Dread Smite to inflict cold vulnerability before the actual at-will attack lands. The auto-damage effect will hit before you roll your attack, but it won't trigger Lasting Frost unless the weapon attack lands and inflicts the ongoing. quote:Icy Clutch might have some value when facing elites or solos, but... well, in 3 or 4 levels of playing a tiefling blackguard with icy clutch at paragon, I think I managed to trigger it all of once, and it didn't get the vuln at that point. It's a very expensive thing to buy as compared to, say, Weapon Focus. +6 damage maybe once per encounter if you're lucky versus +2 damage every attack? No contest. Well, at Paragon it's 11-12 damage plus cold vuln for another 5, which is a pretty hefty chunk of damage. You can also actually go ahead and pick up both, even though I didn't; Imperious Majesty is nice but not inherently required, for example. I can see triggering it being a problem on things that aren't elites or solos, though. You're correct on the Gouge vs. Rapier thing - in my notes I'd had the Gouge listed as a +2 weapon, which it clearly isn't, so I'm not sure where that came from. I think it's viable because the spear support is pretty good, comparable to light blades (if you are gonna go for Surprising Charge, that bigger W dice becomes significant) but the lower prof bonus means it washes out some of the advantages. E2: Speaking of my notes, I also have "works better at epic" in here. The radiant vulnerability may not be significant depending on your party comp until late, but it is a way to get some extra punch in during epic tier where they might otherwise fall behind. RPZip fucked around with this message at 23:55 on Oct 16, 2014 |
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Oct 16, 2014 23:50
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thespaceinvader posted:Nope. The power doing the hitting is not dread smite, and dread smite's damage is a separate thing entirely. In order to trigger Lasting Frost your at-wil needs to do cold by itself. Dread smite then triggers, and pings the vulnerable straight away which is nice. Dread Smite references what happens as a result of another power, but it doesn't change anything ABOUT that power. It's dread smite that applies the ongoing, not the at-will. The trigger on Dread Smite is "when you target an enemy". That autodamage goes off before the attack roll is made; the only way to get cold vuln on that ping would be if you hit with another cold at-will attack first (minor action, AP, whatever), and then made another attack and triggered Dread Smite on that. The order of operations that I'm proposing with Dread Smite is as follows; 1) You declare you're attacking Brofus with your melee basic attack. 2) You decide you're going to use Dread Smite (trigger: you target an enemy with an at-will weapon attack power). 3) Dread Smite triggers, dealing X amount of cold and necrotic damage to Brofus. It then attaches a rider to the Hit: effect of the at-will weapon attack power, namely "The target takes ongoing 5 cold and necrotic damage (save ends)." 4) You roll the attack and resolve it, using the Dread Smite Hit: addendum above if applicable. The order of operations you're proposing is: 1) You declare you're attacking Brofus with your melee basic attack. 2) You decide you're going to use Dread Smite (trigger: you target an enemy with an at-will weapon attack power). 3) Instead of resolving Dread Smite right now, you wait resolve the attack first instead. 4) You roll the attack and resolve it normally. 5) Dread Smite now triggers, dealing the ping damage, and if the attack hit then it also applies the ongoing cold/necrotic damage. I dunno why you'd wait until afterwards, though; whether or not it's a reaction (do it after that step) or an interrupt (do it right now) doesn't actually matter, and it's not like those terms are exceedingly well-defined anyway for these purposes and it's a free action to boot. If the power was worded as "You attack an enemy" I think you'd be right, but it's specifically called out as targeting an enemy; it should go off before the power is rolled. You're right that this fucks people specifying frost pretty good, but it seems like the more natural way to read the power is to trigger the effect when it's, uh, triggered. On the other hand, I'd also let anyone bringing a Blackguard to the table resolve it in either order as they liked, because they're not exactly trying to cheese out the game by bringing a Blackguard.
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Oct 17, 2014 00:18
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quote:Yes, because that's how the rules for free actions work. RC 197 is the reference: "If an effect has a trigger but is neither an immediate action nor an opportunity action, assume that it behaves like an immediate reaction, waiting for its trigger to completely resolve." It's a triggered free action which doesn't need to be an interrupt to function, so it resolves as a reaction. A reaction to the trigger 'you target an enemy with an attack' happens after that attack. Reactions don't happen after the step in the attack sequence, they happen after the whole attack (but in between attacks of a multi-attack power) per RC196. Huh, fair enough. I don't actually own a copy of the RC so I wasn't aware they'd actually clarified it, I thought it was still left in the PHB state of "not well defined" so resolving it immediately made sense to me, comparable to the Backstab ability for thieves. quote:That all being said, I'm not desperately invested either way, and the Blackguard needs all the help it can get, so bending the rules isn't exactly going to hurt anyone. Except the monsters, which is the goal. But RAW, doing it this way actually hurts the MORE... But costs you Morninglord vulns. Yeah, that means the build doesn't really work. Oh well, it was a neat thought; I'll keep it on the backburner as an idea for another time. quote:Overall though, the whole thing's more-or-less a wash because the Ranger's still burning you off into the dust with Twin Strike > Minor > Minor > Immediate. Also this.
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Oct 17, 2014 00:54
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fatherdog posted:He took Wrath of the Crimson Legion, why on earth would he be taking Virtuous Strike? Wrath of the Crimson Legion is tiefling only. The only way to get to pick an at-will as a Blackguard is by being either a human (take bonus at-will instead of heroic effort) or half-elf (do half-elf things with the at-will you steal from another class). If I could pick from the main Paladin list I wouldn't be keeping the base at-wills, which are worthless for a CHA-primary blackguard since they run off STR instead.
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Oct 17, 2014 18:50
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Echophonic posted:Ok, this is going to sound strange, but what's the best way for me as a PC to limit how hard an Avenger can murder me? I think I can mitigate the others somewhat with some damage resistance of various types, but the Avenger will be tricky. I think I'm on track for a story-appropriate heel-turn and I'd like to have my pieces in place for when the weapons come out. If your character kills himself first rather than trying to PvP in a game that's not at all designed for it, the Avenger can't do poo poo to you.
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Oct 23, 2014 03:37
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Asking for a friend: Are there any really good Eberron articles that were published in Dragon or Dungeon that are worth tracking down? Looking specifically for stuff that was published in 4th edition, and from a DM standpoint (read: Not 101 Warforged Feats).
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Apr 18, 2015 03:37
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berenzen posted:Is there any serious harm in baking in BuaBS/Auspicious Birth right into the classes? I'm looking at running Zeitgeist campaign when I get a bit more time, and like spaceinvader said, it's not like it ends up being a ton of HP over a character lifetime. It's pretty bad design. It comparatively weakens CON primary classes (Some Warlocks, Battleminds) and CON secondary classes (loads of things), and it's not like those classes (CON primary in particular) were especially powerhouses before. It also removes one of the good things backgrounds are used for, namely patching the sometimes over-restrictive class skill lists and giving people more flexibility in character design. Most games I've seen ban it, which is the right decision I think.
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May 21, 2015 00:54
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Prison Warden posted:I don't think this part is actually an issue, as the whole point of baking the effects of Born Under a Bad Sign/Auspicious Birth, presumably, means that the background slot is still open for use. The effect of those two options is too good, which is a bad design as you're kind of loving yourself over if you don't take it. Either bake it in or chuck it out. Sorry, I meant that the background itself is bad design, although you're right that if it's baked in you regain the skill list flexibility.
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May 21, 2015 01:34
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