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I mean, that's my ideal way to handle magic items, but my players really wanted them to play a bigger role. And now they're not using them so I dunno.
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Apr 22, 2014 19:53
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Okay, I had a brainflash while thinking about hydras, as one does, and am redesigning my assassin training 'bot fight. How about this: Its body and six hands are separate creatures. Body has 80 HP, each hand has 20 HP and regeneration 5. Whenever the body takes damage, one of the hands takes the damage instead, unless it's damage from an Assassin Shroud attack. Effects and conditions still go on the body, and once the body is at 0 HP, fight's over. Attacks go the usual hydra way: one for each hand it has, with damage bonuses once it has only 2/1 left. Hands don't grow back though, what's gone is gone. They can beat it the slow way and it should be managable, if difficult, but they can also shortcut the whole thing by cleverly using the assassin without everything hinging on him. And plus, it teaches the valuable lesson to fledgling assassins that you always focus on your target and set up distractions for its defenses. Only thing I'm a bit uneasy about are the actual HP values since it's a striker-heavy party and they might end up one-shotting the hands without even meaning to. But so far, does that sound like it would work better? e: one single area attack is just gonna wreck this thing's poo poo, isn't it? Back to the drawing board. My Lovely Horse fucked around with this message at 06:31 on Apr 23, 2014 |
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Apr 22, 2014 20:51
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wallawallawingwang posted:Horse: I think including an action point ability that lets the training dummy regrow its hands instead of taking an extra action might help out. If the fight is going poorly for the dummy it spends its APs regrowing hands, but if its going well for the dummy it can spend them to press its advantage. Meanwhile I had a new idea to make handling magic items more involved and flavorful, while at the same time unsure if that's even something I want for my game. I'd have every item explicitly connected to a spirit, and the stronger your connection to the spirit, the better the item is mechanically; so you find a +1 flaming sword that has Mitch the Fire Spirit bound to it, and when you're good buddies with Mitch or feed him enough residuum or whatever, your sword eventually becomes +2, +3 and so on. Only I'm not sure what kind of thing you should have to do to become good buddies with Mitch. I thought about just getting into a friendly fight with him as a test of worthiness but if everyone does that regularly for all their items we'll never see any plot happening ever again. Then I thought about buying residuum but I explicitly don't want 10,000 GP worth of residuum to be just a thing you pick up at the store or even find in a dungeon. Maybe you have to make an appropriate ritual sacrifice of valuable goods that costs you just about what it takes to upgrade the item, or maybe upgrades just start showing up on my random loot lists in whatever form seems appropriate at that point, or maybe, as I said, I'm using inherent bonuses anyway so file that idea under "nice idea, maybe some other game." e: basically it's just the artifact system but I'm also not about to track artifact relations for every individual item six characters lug around.
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Apr 29, 2014 10:50
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Well I've been playing Disgaea a bunch lately. I think if the genesis of the idea can be attributed to any one thing, it's that. I do use inherent bonuses, just thought it might be nice to be able to get +2 stuff before the +2 inherent bonus kicks in, but then, that's just the regular item treadmill, isn't it. And as a venue to interact with the setting... nothing really keeps me from writing a blurb about a fire spirit on the item handouts but not attaching a huge subsystem to it.
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Apr 29, 2014 12:14
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Cerepol posted:What do you guys use for maps in your games? Currently using master plan to run my game using its awesome second screen function. However it makes me somewhat inflexible when they do random things that include battle yet I don't have a place ready. Basically looking for something that allows me to sketch something out quickly like graph paper or the old white on blue maps rather than something overly complicated or packed like maptools. That being said, if you want to stay in Masterplan: - keep your old maps around and reuse them. Crop a different section, rotate or flip the map, or just have the party start in another spot, and it'll feel a lot different right away. You might want to have a simple graphics program running while you play so you can make quick edits. - make simple all-purpose dungeon tiles for Masterplan so you can quickly throw something together - keep a big blank white map tile around for Masterplan, and sketch things out using the drawing mode. Depends on how handy you are drawing with the mouse. You could also prepare that image file with a grid and quickly sketch out stuff on it in the aforementioned graphics editor before you load it into Masterplan, that should at least allow you to automatically draw straight lines and geometric shapes. quote:Also in terms of availability for items in cities. What should I do or be expecting. Can they purchase whatever they want? - Magic weapons/armor/neck slot items - no frills, just the enhancement bonus - items that give a skill bonus - items that give a bonus to basic stuff anyone can do: saving throws, opportunity attacks, Action Point goodies, that sort of thing. - Potions of Healing, Resistance and Vigor, Elixirs of Fort/Ref/Will
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May 6, 2014 07:34
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Oh god, I have a new player joining my game and just got word that she picked a Battlemind. What do they even do? e: after a quick look, wreck my encounters apparently My Lovely Horse fucked around with this message at 15:56 on May 9, 2014 |
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May 9, 2014 15:49
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That's great news because there is another defender! Level 2, though. Little grace period there.
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May 9, 2014 16:18
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What would y'all make if you had to build a character to the following specifications: - functions as secondary defender and secondary leader in a six-person party that has a full-time defender and leader already - as a defender, takes attacks for the team, as a leader, mainly heals - isn't overly concerned with dealing damage - flavour-wise, has to pass as a dwarf worshipping a particular god, so has to include the divine power source - ideally CON/WIS-based - pre-Essentials, no Dragon magazines That's what my unoptimal-paladin-playing buddy wants to redirect himself towards and I'd like to be able to suggest one or two things to him, even though I have this feeling that the answer is something like "lower CON, raise CHA, take feats for more healing surges and maybe a leader multiclass, carry on as you were."
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May 12, 2014 10:07
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The guy's ideas about how 4E works and how it actually works don't always run concurrent to each other, let's put it that way. When he makes a character that's supposed to soak up damage, sure he picks a defender and gets defending powers and extra healing surges and all that, but he also maxes CON because CON = HP, even though it's insignificant in the grand scheme of things. I can't come down too hard on this because 1) it's his character, 2) it doesn't make him completely ineffective and 3) he's the sixth wheel in a party that otherwise covers all roles, I figure he's got a little leeway to experiment. That's also why there has to be an actual divine class involved. I doubt he'd even change from paladin if the alternative wasn't exceptionally good. I'm just sourcing some advice so I can maybe make up one or two quick alternative builds and say, hey man, keep doing what you do, but how'd you like your guy if he looked like this? Or otherwise, stuff that supplements his idea and can be tacked on to what he has already. How does Healer's Mercy hold up in practice, for example? He could get that easily and it seems right up his alley. Using a standard action and weakening him isn't that big a deal because he wants to go for support more than attacking anyway.
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May 13, 2014 07:52
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Hey you and I know that but I know better than to wrap this particular player's head around it. v v
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May 13, 2014 16:26
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To start with, I suggested an alternative build to my paladin buddy - CON, WIS and CHA at 16 each, one or two powers exchanged for CHA-based ones, and Devoted Paladin. One less Lay On Hands per day but each would be roughly about 1.5x as effective, plus with a CHA mod above +1 he could actually start properly defending as his Divine Challenge becomes a notable threat. Not super great by any means but I think it'd work fine for his particular needs.
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May 14, 2014 19:27
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4 is pretty much it though. Usually you can just about go up to 5, especially if one is a noncombat encounter.
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May 28, 2014 09:18
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Mine are all hoarders. Last adventure day I think I saw one or two dailies used between the six of them, action points I pretty much have to prompt ("you know you're getting a milestone after this fight, right"), and in three adventure days they haven't used a single item power even though they picked their own items. That's probably how you know you can get them through one more encounter but they do run out of healing surges long before they run out of other resources. Their problem, really 
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May 28, 2014 12:18
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The answer is you shouldn't run Keep on the Shadowfell as written because it has outdated monster mechanics and would still be a terrible combat slog if it didn't.
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May 28, 2014 14:07
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I need to step up my game. Last session my players were a man down and his PC was a companion character for that session, and they still went through four encounters without blinking and had plenty of surges and daily powers left by the end of it. Only time things got remotely tight was when the bard was almost dropped by an errant crit on a nasty recharge power but that was gone as fast as it came. I don't mind and they're having fun, I'm just starting to feel faintly silly playing up NPCs and monsters as "holy poo poo don't mess with this guy, whatever you do don't go in the basement" and they're messing with the guy and frolicking in the basement and come out casually dusting themselves off going "you guys see something down there?" with jingling pockets. They're only level 3  Next time I'm planning for a swamp which is lizardfolk territory and by god that should at least be noticable. Or else I'm just gonna start playing it for laughs.
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Jun 10, 2014 21:47
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I hear XCOM is pretty good. What I'd really like to do in the swamp is a Predator parody. Maybe I'll reskin a dragon as the most dangerous and sneaky lizardfolk of them all.
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Jun 11, 2014 06:14
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My Lovely Horse posted:I need to step up my game. [...] Next time I'm planning for a swamp which is lizardfolk territory and by god that should at least be noticable. Or else I'm just gonna start playing it for laughs. The Belgian posted:dragons are basically big lizards. they can fight dragons But more importantly, what's a good budget for an encounter with two combats back-to-back for a 6 character level 3 party? 1500-1600 XP, thereabouts?
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Jun 27, 2014 08:52
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Changed layout is one thing, but the mechanics were indeed also changed to make enemies more exciting to fight. It mostly works out to higher attack bonuses and damage and less HP and lower defenses. An individual monster is more likely to be "holy poo poo he's wrecking us, kill him quickly, phew that was close" than "well he's not down yet but he hardly damages me anyway so I guess it's the At-Will again, jeez it's been four turns, die already." With two leaders you can probably play a bit fast and loose with your players. Combats can be tougher since they have twice the healing available, other obstacles can more frequently cost healing surges since they get so much more out of each surge with two leaders around, and overall they can probably go longer (ie. more encounters) between extended rests. If PCs still drop below 0 that seems like it's well paced, actually! If you frequently find the party arriving at the last encounter before an extended rest with very few surges and that leads to serious problems regularly, maybe consider going with less encounters between rests. My Lovely Horse fucked around with this message at 10:19 on Jun 27, 2014 |
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Jun 27, 2014 10:17
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Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition: Aim for the NADs
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Jun 27, 2014 10:20
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NAD: Non Armor Defense, i.e. Fortitude, Reflex, Will. Armor tends to be a defender's strong suit ( )On resting: there are short rests (encounter powers regained, spend as many healing surges as you want) and extended rests (all powers, HP and healing surges regained). Characters can take a short rest after every encounter, extended rests should be less frequent, generally every 4-6 encounters. That works best as something that everyone just agrees on, rather than enter into a DM-vs.-players metagame where one side constantly comes up with schemes to let the party rest and the other constantly has to try and shoot them down. Officially a short rest is 5 minutes and an extended one 8 hours, but a lot of people tend to play it by ear and simply give out extended rests at opportune moments even if they don't involve eight hours of sleep for the characters. The short rest should always be given. Things just don't work out otherwise. You can occasionally have two fights in one encounter, just budget it as one very hard fight and have two waves of enemies. If your guys are having an extended rest after every fight, yeah have a chat with them about it and come to an agreement, i.e. they should be aware that you're pacing for several encounters between extended rests. Once they know that spending all their surges in one fight will become not a smart idea. Very basic good tactics: monsters do their best to get directly to the non-defenders and take them down. It's the fighter's job to stop them from doing that. It may seem cruel but believe me a fighter is more than up to the task (if he doesn't forget his mark). My Lovely Horse fucked around with this message at 11:50 on Jun 27, 2014 |
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Jun 27, 2014 11:45
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That is pretty great and I shall steal it immediately.
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Jun 27, 2014 12:03
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There's a pretty decent difference between "when the players think they might need a rest" and "when the players need a rest" where the former more often than not is equal to "not fully rested" (and if yours are trying to find ways to rest after every single fight it does seem they skew in that direction). A 4E party can probably go into a fight with no dailies left and two surges between then and still come out fine. Not a hard one, though, be fair. Still though, when you're a player and you decide to play 4E, you've actively decided to play a fantasy fight game where you can go a good while without resting and still kick rear end, and I guess I don't get why you'd then turn around and say "actually can I rest more". Same with the 3.5 spellcasters really. Like, that's not something anyone at the table should butt heads over when you're already sat down to play.
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Jun 27, 2014 13:42
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The Belgian posted:The level 4 black dragon is great. I was using him as a 'winged demon' with my level 3 players. They seemed to be doing p well against it although we had to end the session before the encounter was over.
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Jun 29, 2014 16:52
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Challenging my party with more and harder encounters went really well. We got through four combats last session and they're still good for a fifth, and finally used their item powers for once. They might even be good for a sixth fight after that, we'll see. Now, though, I need a way to challenge a fully rested party in one combat that keeps them from just steamrolling the thing, without making that combat much longer than a regular one. I'm thinking there could be a boss, he has an endless supply of minions (both monster type minions and regular monster lackeys), take down the boss and win the fight but all his dudes are in the way. But they're really good at taking down the boss. Or I come up with a boss that has two or three separate forms, or I just make it clear it's the final fight of the storyarc but there's no extended rest right after and make it just a normal encounter, I guess. Storywise, the boss is the grey eminence of the city who's set things up so he controls the city as well as the goblins and bandits outside, so they all funnel cash to him. Local revolutionaries have figured him out and want him gone so they can take the city in the confusion. e: I could also just give them only a partial extended rest before that fight, say everyone gets full HP, 1/4 of their total healing surges, and a choice between recovering their daily power or a further 1-2 surges. Just pulling numbers out of my rear end here. Not to open this can of worms again but man if the power economy leads to situations where I have to plan poo poo like that, per-encounter ressources really are the way to go. My Lovely Horse fucked around with this message at 10:37 on Jul 7, 2014 |
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Jul 7, 2014 10:25
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Hubis posted:IF you go this route, it's worth considering that 4 surges is by definition enough to bring a PC up from 0 to full health, and 2 surges is exactly their bloodied value. Thus, if I'm doing a "Limited Rest" scenario, it's something like: I think I'll keep it simple though and make a gimmicky combat with infinite minions and a boss. It's the conclusion of the assassin's storyarc so I'll make the boss hard to reach except if you happen to have one particular skill set. They can still just steamroll it if they want but I'll drop hints that there are some extra XP to be had if they let the assassin have the spotlight.
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Jul 8, 2014 07:47
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They've got to hit first. Then you have to fail two saving throws, that's two whole rounds that pass. In those two rounds, you can try to escape a mind flayer's grab, your buddies can try and pull you out or push the mind flayer away, they can give you additional saving throws with a heal check (which, if it fails, doesn't count towards failed saving throws for that effect, remember), some of them are bound to be able to give you saving throw bonuses... Think about it less as an unfair punishment for bad luck that comes out of nowhere and more as introducing a situation where tension runs high quickly and everyone scrambles to get their buddy out of a really tight spot.
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Jul 8, 2014 13:44
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Last weekend I entirely by accident reduced a PC to negatives so badly she was 1 HP away from actual death. It can happen faster than you think, and it reminded me that I still don't have a contingency. Of course, the beauty of 4E is that the leader could get her up and running again in the same turn.
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Jul 8, 2014 19:26
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Mind you when I say "entirely by accident" I mean more like "first a bunch of minions focused fire and brought her to low single digits and then a standard enemy sealed the deal" which now that I think about it, if you did want to kill a PC, sounds like the one thing that'll reliably do the trick. But that's why I like 4E, I can play monsters smartly and for keeps and almost always the PCs have a way to do a big comeback.
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Jul 8, 2014 19:34
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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.
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Jul 8, 2014 21:59
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The D&D wiki has a handy index for both: Traps and hazards here, Terrain here. There's some more terrain in the Rules Compendium as well. Do note that the ones from the DMGs and MotP need some adjusting because DCs are way too high. Check any given DC against the DCs by level table in the DMG, note if it's easy, normal or difficult, and substitute the DC from the new table in the Rules Compendium. Managed to take a paladin in plate armor out of a fight entirely with an unmodified pit trap because between the high DC and the armor check penalty it became mathematically impossible for him to climb out. Also from my experience monsters work better than traps in a combat encounter, but fantastic terrain is always good and you can add as much as you want without getting a stupidly high XP budget.
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Jul 13, 2014 14:34
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I'd argue that not just paladins, but defenders as a whole could probably use one or two additional surges. I like it, though, especially the Death/Defeated rule, which is an idea I've been mulling over for a while myself but haven't gotten around to bring up to my group yet.
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Jul 17, 2014 06:12
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I'm planning to give my party the choice between three temporary companions. Each of them should ideally add something unique to the party, but be easy to run because it's a six person party already (it's not supposed to be a permanent or obligatory thing at all). In the party, I've got a Battlemind, Bard (Virtue), Warlock (Fey) and Assassin as well as a bastardized Paladin who mostly acts as a secondary leader and an Invoker built towards striker. My companion choices are thematically a valiant knight, a idealistic murderer and an arrogant sorcerer. I'm thinking: Knight: Soldier (Leader), a front-line defender that can grant attacks, Warlord style Murderer: Artillery, the glass cannon, along the lines of a ranged rogue Sorcerer: Controller, probably closer to what a PC Wizard would be There's also an element of compatibility in balancing these, the way I'm envisioning these NPCs the party would probably clash least with the murderer (so he can be slightly less unique/useful) and most with the knight (so she can be slightly more). The sorcerer would add something they don't really have right now but is an utter dick. Option 4, no clash of personalities but little additional use, is to go it alone. Decent start?
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Aug 5, 2014 14:52
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My group regularly lays down a -5 right now at level 3, albeit as a 1-round encounter power (Witchfire). Still. Actually it didn't do them much good against the one big solo they went up against so far. Sure it shut it down for one turn but it was still drat near a TPK.
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Aug 5, 2014 20:24
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djw175 posted:Do IB also bring crit dice? I also forgot boons and grandmaster training were a thing. I'll have to look at how to incorporate those into my item regimen, because we do use items in addition to inherent bonuses.
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Aug 6, 2014 19:29
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AXE COP posted:Does that scale off the IB?
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Aug 6, 2014 19:54
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Huh I suppose as described in the DMG 2 it isn't an enhancement bonus. Maybe I'm thinking of the Dark Sun thing. In any case, I use inherent bonuses and items from wishlists, and I keep them separate. I figure once everyone has their items I'll just start levelling those up when the PCs would find an appropriate level item.
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Aug 6, 2014 19:59
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So which one is in the offline Character Builder, with or without crit dice? e: does it even display the crit dice anywhere? My Lovely Horse fucked around with this message at 12:02 on Aug 7, 2014 |
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Aug 7, 2014 11:42
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I had some wererat combats in my game where the map featured dilapidated walls with holes just big enough for rats. The wererats could slip through at will and retreat to regenerate some HP, the PCs would have to take the long way around and find doors or spend the effort busting through the walls. Coupled with a few soldiers guarding the doors it worked perfectly.
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Aug 10, 2014 13:55
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I'm making a Lair Assault style combat for my group for the first time, would like to check if I'm on the right track. I spent the XP budget for a level+5 encounter evenly on three combats, each on its own map, and I'm thinking after each fight I could give them one turn's allotment of actions each (so 1 standard, 1 move, 1 minor) to spend on utility or recovery powers. I was thinking the standard action could be used to spend a healing surge or regain an encounter power - is that too strong? If yes, should I scrap it entirely or switch it around to something like "spend all your actions for 1 HS/1 power" or "standard action to regain a power, but only if you haven't any left"? (They're level 3, so 2 encounter powers each, except the battlemind, who would regain power points.) Positioning on the next map would be free within a tightly limited area, but you could spend the move action to extend your options a little. That one's just a vague idea. Pretty sure I'm overthinking this as it is.
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Aug 14, 2014 19:18
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 09:45 |
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Trip report from running my first proper skill challenge, i.e. with no alternative rules and entirely as written, as part of a combat encounter: it was way cool and tense and everyone mentioned how much fun it was afterwards. They had to spot and close three negative energy conduits while zombies and skeletons were attacking, and they actually hosed it up on the very last one and accidentally summoned a wraith and still thought it was great. Will definitely do again, as often as I can get away with. Trip report from designing and running my first homebrewed lair assault: it went okay. Took a long-rear end time and I never had the impression they had much cause to really feel threatened, largely because the THP factory paladin kept them trucking along quite nicely all the way through. They still enjoyed it for what it was, though. Will do again but only as a thing for very, very special occasions, and with ample preparation time both IC and OOC.
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Sep 7, 2014 16:37
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