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I ran a 4e game for a few years for five players who hated charop. The way I handled levelling was to pick three non-trap feats or powers whenever a player levelled and give them the choice between those, cooperating with the player to figure out how the character gained this new power. That seemed to work pretty well.
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Mar 16, 2014 14:04
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Rexides posted:I don't know if I am in the minority or not, but I think that "Hey, I know that it doesn't entirely mesh with your backgrounds, but if you could be invested in saving that girl I promise that it will lead to a great adventure and we will all have fun" is a preferable thing to say than pretending that your players are free to to anything they want in your world but you try to railroad them at every turn. An even better solution is to turn the question on its head. Saying something like 'You've heard of this girl before -- what do you know about her that makes you interested in her fate?' is a great way to get players involved.
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Jun 18, 2014 11:00
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Torquemadras posted:Still, any tricks for encounter building? Encounters in 4e are all about the terrain. Have lots of terrain hazards that they can be pushed into or hurl enemies through, and have bits of terrain that they can interfere with, interact with, or knock onto enemies, and you're going to have a good time.
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Jun 18, 2014 11:05
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My Lovely Horse posted:NAD: Non Armor Defense, i.e. Fortitude, Reflex, Will. Armor tends to be a defender's strong suit ( Dungeon World's Grim Portents work really well here. For every threat to the PCs and the things they like, you write down a list of escalating ways the PCs can tell the situation is getting worse. So if the threat is a cult in the sewers, your list might read: 1. A body turns up in the town fountain with an unholy symbol carved into it. 2. The herbalist has all his supplies stolen. 3. The temple of Lathander is burned down by cultists. 4. Chanting can be heard from the sewers. 5. Demons burst out of the sewers and attack the city. Then every time the players take an extended rest, you advance things one step. That way there are always visible, worsening consequences for taking too long, but there is no single 'beat this time limit or die' criteria.
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Jun 27, 2014 11:58
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4E is the most accessible of the bunch, though it's still not totally newbie-friendly. If everybody there is new to it then a first-time game will likely go much more smoothly if whoever is GMing has read through the book and generated PCs for the players in advance of the session. Also, choosing which module to play is a big deal. Some pre-written D&D modules are much, much better than others.
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Jun 30, 2014 11:10
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Rexides posted:We are definitely biased towards 4E here, so you probably won't hear any suggestions for 5E. Equally, if you ask the 5E thread in it's new home in DDRD whether you should play Next you're equally likely to get a resounding 'hell no' so it's less 4e fans who are biased against 5e and more people with a basic understanding of what makes a game fun.
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Jun 30, 2014 11:20
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My Lovely Horse posted:It's customary in our group for the DM to roll by keeping a d20 in a dice cup and just giving it a quick shake. It's pretty quick and it allows the DM to fudge rolls, but I don't. My contingency for when the party loses a fight is "you wake up captured by the enemy" and that's enough of an interesting story development that it should be enough of a safety net. I always rolled dice out in the open when I was running. It's actually pretty tough to kill players by accident in 4e unless they do something really unwise; there were only two pc fatalities to combat in the whole game. One was a combination of an overstatted boss, the party being down one player, the team's healer turning traitor, and the downed character ordering his teammates to concentrate on killing the boss rather than stabilising him. The other involved the party's new healer winning initiative, running ahead without backup to grab the mcguffin, getting mobbed by enemies and cut down, and then falling to her death when the antagonist leapt out the window with her, expecting to be caught by flying minions that the party slaughtered before they could catch them.
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Jul 11, 2014 09:44
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If you want to have multiple run-ins with him before the party finally defeat him then I would base the powers around that. Give him some way of cheating death that's costly enough to him that just killing him will slow his plans down while he gets a new body, but not stop them outright. Maybe you could do a thing where killing him brings a cost to the adventurers, too: like, each time he resurrects himself he has to feed on the planet's life force to do it, so every time the players kill him the world gets a bit shittier. It's generally not a good idea to go into a fight with a plan for how the fight will unfold. I think of fights like I think of skill rolls. They're a fork in the plot, and you should have a cool thing ready to happen if the PCs succeed, and a cool thing ready to happen if the PCs fail.
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Jul 13, 2014 14:51
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For starting GM advice, has anyone mentioned Masterplan? It's a free piece of software that lets you design monsters, build encounters with them, and then handles a lot of the bookkeeping in the fight. When I was starting out GMing 4th Ed it was an absolute lifesaver to me. It's compatible with the Character Builder, so you can import your PCs from there. It used to be compatible with D&D Insider, too, so you could nab the statblocks of monsters from there. Sadly that got shut down due to  but you can still manually enter the statblocks yourself.
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Aug 5, 2014 09:35
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Effectronica posted:Temp HP never stacks, so it just ends every turn its in stone form with 5 THP. But I'd have to look closer to see just how bad it is. Actually, a monster which turns to stone when bloodied, slowly regains HP, then comes right back at you would be pretty cool for a boss fight which pursues the party through a dungeon of setpiece fights before they find a way to turn its regeneration off.
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Aug 10, 2014 11:20
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I had a similar problem with the Adventuring Day: combats happened so infrequently that my players could basically take a day to rest between each one. I got around it by changing everything that recovered daily (recovering powers, surges, and AP) to recover after a week spent tending wounds, restocking equipment, and generally recovering. There were still the same number of battles in between the rest periods, so the balance stayed the same, it was just the pacing that changed.
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Aug 15, 2014 10:57
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On the spiderblooded: I did a similar thing once with a necromancer who'd stitched live rats under the skin of his zombies. I think their effect was that when they were bloodied, all those rats pouring out of them gave them Aura 1 with a nasty effect on anyone starting their turn in the aura. I can't for the life of me remember what it did, though you'll probably want to tailor it to the role you want the monster to have anyway.
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Aug 24, 2014 16:22
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It's totally unrelated to your dangerous terrain idea but what if you had a bunch of different areas in the fight that were from different areas in the past -- say, one was from a peasant's revolt, one was from the orcish invasion, one was from the undead assault -- and when enemies moved from one bubble to another, they switched from rioting peasants to orcish warriors. They'd keep any damage taken and conditions but might suddenly have a completely different set of actions.
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Aug 26, 2014 18:36
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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.
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Aug 27, 2014 09:16
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What if the key wasn't a physical object but a password that only three of the workers, now ghosts, were entrusted with? Aside from hunting one of them down, the party need to persuade them to hand it over and decide which of them they can trust. At least one of them wants to trick the PCs into letting them possess a golem body and run free. E: Also, each one of them knows the password to open the control room, but the room has an automated guardian that won't be fooled unless all three ghosts are there to cooperate and shut it down. However, one of the ghosts knows how to disable the automated turrets in the room, one of the ghosts knows how to turn off the runes that speed up the guardian, and one of the ghosts knows how to stop the guardian calling in mini-golem backup. Whybird fucked around with this message at 09:36 on Oct 8, 2014 |
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Oct 8, 2014 09:25
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Nihilarian posted:SHUT UP NAVI Welp, that's my PC sorted for the next time I play 4th.
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Oct 9, 2014 09:34
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It is an Elder Beholder which was transmuted and stripped of its magic. That thing wasn't a crane game but a highly secure holding facility / torture chamber, which is why it was so hard to win. It will trade them information on the place they just looted and others like it in exchange for the help it needs to return to full power.
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Nov 18, 2014 09:18
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It would feel fairer to me if it was something the gnome could do and the player could prevent: maybe the gnome has a minor action that lets him nick the shadow (if he's adjacent / makes a roll / etc) and whenever he takes damage, he drops it and the assassin can go get it back. Fakeedit: and then the shadow, having spent some time detached from the assassin, picks up a the ability to detach and reattach itself on command and becomes his sidekick.
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Dec 4, 2014 13:07
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My advice for ship-to-ship combat would be just to run a melee on the deck of your ship, with skill checks needed to steer the ship into a position where it can fire on the enemy, to man the cannons, and so on. Do this while the enemy ship has adds swinging across onto your deck, cannons pounding your ship with AOE, and you've got a pretty cool fight. Think of it like the ship battles in Pirates of the Carribean. Nobody cared where the ships were relative to one another except inasmuch as whether they were in cannon range. What mattered was the things that were going on on the deck.
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Jan 9, 2015 08:59
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In the game I ran, I had the IC explanation that the world had a plague called the Shivering Sickness that primarily affected people who travelled long distances in high-stress circumstances (i.e. PCs). Most of the time it had no effect at all, but it could flare up and leave someone just about capable of walking around aland following simple orders, but utterly useless at getting anything done. When a player was away their PC was down with the Shivering Sickness and tagging along but not really contributing (and I downstatted the combat encounters a bit to compensate)
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Feb 6, 2015 18:32
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My Lovely Horse posted:In addition to simpler monsters I think I'm also gonna go with averaging monster damage for a while and see how that works out. Speed gain will probably be negligible, but maybe it helps if I don't have to devote brainspace to first-grade maths at random intervals while six people wait for the result. What if you assigned the job of handling the damage rolls to the players? Instead of  "Take 12 damage" just tell them "Take 3d8+2 damage".
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Feb 24, 2015 13:40
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My Lovely Horse posted:Yeah for a lot of people character class is explicitly a job description that exists in the world and that people know about and more often than not go to school for. I have a player who introduced herself, in character, to an NPC only as "dwarf battlemind." Still wondering if I should just ignore that or say, gently caress it, somewhere in dwarfland there's Battlemind Academy I guess. If there's one thing Dungeon World has taught me it's always be asking your players about their characters. What is a battlemind? How did you train? Why did you choose to become one? How are battleminds seen and treated around the world? Do the dwarves have a different attitude towards them?
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Mar 27, 2015 08:44
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Khizan posted:This. I personally think that extended rests are better defined as something along the lines of "a rest that you take with a reasonable expectation of complete safety" or something along those lines instead of just "take six hour rest." This was the approach I used when I was running a campaign where fights happened pretty infrequently. I think my definition of 'an extended rest' ended up being 'long enough that you miss out on something important'.
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Apr 22, 2015 08:13
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I'll also add that if you're looking for a game with 4e-style tactical combat and fail-forward mechanics outside of a fight, then Strike! is a goon-made RPG that has both of those things, and also goes a good way towards fixing many of the issues that other posters have identified with 4e (feat bloat, the need to assign ability scores to your class's strengths, slightly wonky maths at higher levels, long fights at higher levels)
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Jun 1, 2015 12:35
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The best advice I can give is to have a plan ready for how the plot progresses if the players fail the test. Ideally find some way for the players to discover that there's another, tougher way too. That way, their passing the test isn't a foregone conclusion and the test actually has some tension to it.
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Jun 12, 2015 17:25
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I think what the slot machine is missing is a way for the players to interact with it other than fighting baddies and blind luck. What if each of the reels is spun separately from a different lever? Each is positioned on a different wall of the room, and it's a minor action to set one spinning (with standard-action skill checks to influence what it lands on). The PCs have to get it to land on three keys to progress. Also in the room is a hard-to-kill monster: bloodying him takes him out for a turn but then he comes back in, healed up. They have to hold him off while getting the reels to land on three keys and preventing him from respinning successfully-landed reels himself.
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Jul 14, 2015 11:10
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Effectronica posted:Alter the stakes in a way that doesn't rely on numbers. Hostages, timers, things that need to be regularly attended, etc. Make the assumption that monsters are all going to get splatted in short order, and then use them as distractions or as delays rather than as something that forces a losing condition. This guy has the right of it. Throw things that can be negative fallout even if the party have technically won, and use terrain and hazards to interfere with their tactics. Memorable fights are rarely just memorable from being really hard -- they tend to be because of other crazy poo poo that goes down during the fight.
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Aug 28, 2015 17:41
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Prison Warden posted:Straight up steal the Opera from FFVI for background. Add an actor who is not a combatant but on stage, trying to stay in-character to stop the audience realising that this isn't part of the performance.
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Nov 22, 2015 15:08
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User0015 posted:I want to engage my players in combat (4e seems like it excels at this) but also engage my players outside of combat. Do you mean in terms of character building, or in terms of roleplaying that isn't about fighting things? For the former, my approach when I ran 4e with players who weren't into character building was that whenever a level-up was due I'd pick three or four choices for each player that were all good, and then present them to the player as an IC decision on what the character wanted to train in next. Honestly, if it's not a thing a player enjoys, my advice is not to force it upon them. For the latter, 4e doesn't have much in the way of rules that affect things outside combat. You can roll on skills, and you can let players perform rituals, but that's basically it. To my mind, that's a strength, not a weakness: crunchy rules are great in combat when things become a minature wargame, and outside of combat you can let things get a bit more fluffy and allow your players to freeform ideas and roll with their punches.
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Jul 7, 2017 20:24
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thespaceinvader posted:Death spirals in 4e are possible, but they're usually easy to avert through monster tactics, and if they do happen, it's ALWAYS possible to find the party a way out, even if it's a deal with Death. My approach as a GM is that something should only get gametime if there's uncertainity over how it will end. "The party are all killed, end of campaign" isn't a fun or satisfying ending for most fights, so the uncertainity has to come from other places. This means that generally, as I plan each fight I will plan out what happens in the event that all players are knocked out of the fight. Sometimes, I have to stretch this a bit ("the ravenous trolls eat one of you, and leave the others behind because they're full") but if I'm finding I have to stretch terribly far, it's usually an indication that this isn't an important enough fight to spend half an hour of game time simulating.
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Jul 9, 2017 11:03
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4e encounters are quite easy to scale for party numbers -- each enemy has an XP cost based on its level, and you have an XP budget for each encounter based on the number of players and their level, so it's not hard at all to add additional enemies on the night. I've run games quite comfortably with six players before. The main challenge with a bigger party is that it will take longer between each player's turn, and if you have a couple of players who are bad at making decisions then that can mean people get bored waiting to act. It's worth encouraging new players to buddy up with someone more experienced who can explain the rules to them and discuss strategy, if that's possible. The other thing to bear in mind is party composition. Success in D&D4e relies a lot more on the party all working together, so if the party are missing any of the four roles (striker, leader, defender, controller) they will have a much more difficult time.
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Dec 28, 2017 15:21
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It'd be a nice to have but it's by no means essential -- it's more than you want to make sure you don't have six defenders or something like that.
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Dec 28, 2017 17:16
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Yeah, players shouldn't ever be making a "Do we continue with the plot?" roll -- a better solution is to roll to see what benefit or harm their knowledge -- or lack of it -- causes. So for example, if the plot is that the players learn the Book of Holy Rites has been stolen, and then go to stop the thieves using it to summon a demon, then even on a failed roll the players know the three possible locations where it could be used -- however because they have to check out all three, the thieves will have time to prepare for their coming, and they won't even know what the thieves are planning to do with it -- just where they've taken it. On a successful roll, the players know where it's been taken, what they're going to do with it, and what kind of demons are going to get summoned.
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Mar 17, 2018 10:15
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The best way to make 4e combat fun and dynamic is to make the battlefield fun and dynamic. Give the players secondary objectives, things the enemies are trying to do that they can stop, things they're trying to do that the enemies can stop, and terrain that they can use or that can be used against them, and battle will be chaotic enough.
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May 23, 2018 17:34
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The thing I like about the adventuring day is that by making daily powers a thing you can't use in every fight, you give the party more ablative armour so there are more steps between "A-OK" and "dead", and they have to make difficult decisions about whether to press on or fall back. The thing I don't like about it is that it takes a day -- often my plots are paced so that exciting things happen a day or so apart. The way I get around it is that anything that RAW recovers after a day instead recovers after a week or so's rest and relaxation with the PCs doing the kinds of things they enjoy doing for fun.
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Jun 21, 2018 23:30
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Hi! The next session in my current game (it's a spellpunk setting under the 4e ruleset) is going to open with a three-way shootout and I have a gnawing concern that I've bitten off more than I can chew: The PCs were hired by one gang, Faction 45, to rob an abandoned facility. They went in and encountered another gang, the Bastard Dogs, who they're pretty friendly with. After burning most of their dailies taking down the lurking monstrosity that had caused the facility to become abandoned and rescuing one of the bigwigs who was trapped inside, they've headed out with their Dog buddies and completely forgotten that Faction 45, who are watching the entrance for them, are at war with the Dogs (and specifically hired them to stop the Dogs from looting the place first). The session's going to start with a firefight between the 45ers and the Dogs. The 45ers got armed with high-tech spellguns earlier in the plot, so they're gonna be dropping a lot of ranged attacks and terrain effects. The Dogs are lower-tech, and melee focused. There are two named NPCs, one in each gang, who I established earlier were present. There's also the exec they rescued, who's going to try and get away from any gunfire. On top of this, an Imperial skyship has just shown up, and on seeing scum like the PCs, the 45ers, and the Dogs shooting it out in front of their facility they're going to blindly open fire: the area in range of their guns is going to roll forward at 3 squares per round, and anyone ending their turn inside is going to eat an attack vs Reflex (plus, all the dust that the gunfire is scudding up will block vision). The ultimate goal of all parties concerned is to get to one of two pickups at the far end of the combat area and get away before they're chewed up by the aerial fire, but both sides also want to rescue the exec and to settle each others' hash if at all possible. I've no idea who the PCs are going to side with; they might just try to leave both sides to fight it out. So my concern is that there are an awful lot of moving parts in this fight. Both the faction leaders are statted as Elites, with them having 4 Standards each as backup. On top of that there are 6 PCs, the exec, two vehicles, and a moving wall of skyship-flavoured pain. Kinda feels like I'm setting myself up for a bookkeeping nightmare. Has anyone else done something similar as a GM and lived to tell the tale?
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Aug 20, 2018 21:57
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"Anything from Essentials" is a pretty good metric -- that series was written by someone who, if we're being charitable, didn't understand a word of 4e's design ethos, and if we're being uncharitable was actively trying to sabotage his own product.
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Feb 1, 2019 18:17
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thespaceinvader posted:There are plenty of 'save-or-take-effect' things in 4e IIRC. There are things where if an attack hits you, you take a save-ends effect, and when you fail your first saving throw the effect gets worse, but a saving throw is still always "make this roll on your turn to see if an ongoing thing stays or goes away". A good alternative to an aura that reduces saving throws is an aura that reduces one or more defences (AC, Fort, Reflex or Will).
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Apr 11, 2019 17:57
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Most of my players hate charop and are bad at it, so I just pick three feats that don't suck for them, come up with an IC description of what they represent, and let them decide what they're learning as an IC choice.
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Jun 24, 2019 17:41
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Here are mine for the PHB1 classes: Fighter: Get enemies stuck to you so they spend all their time hitting you and not someone vulnerable. Paladin: Zap enemies with holy might if they try to hurt your vulnerable friends; laugh from behind a wall of solid metal when they try to hurt you instead. Ranger: Dance around the battlefield finding whichever enemy needs to die the most and smacking them down. Rogue: Hit enemies for huge damage while they're distracted by one of your friends, and drop status effects on them when they're not. Warlock: As above but with magic, and also you power up when enemies get dropped. Cleric: Heal and buff your friends as you shoot holy magic at your enemies. Warlord: Heal and buff your friends, and move them around like pieces on a chessboard so they're in the right position to beat your enemies. Wizard: You don't hit hard but you can lock down lots of enemies at once so that your friends can pick them off at their leisure.
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Dec 21, 2019 13:55
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