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No other class I've ever played in any game comes close to the 'pro-active support' role that Bards fill in 4e, unfortunately.
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Mar 30, 2016 20:42
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Yukari posted:Staves are 2 handed weapons, but 1 handed implements. Is it possible to hold one in your offhand, and attack with an arcane weapon power, like Eldritch Strike, and get dual implement spellcaster bonus damage to it? Dual Implement Spellcaster says it works for any arcane attack power and you're holding an implement in each hand. Same question as above but now say you DONT have implement proficiency in the weapon. I don't have a quote but my instinct is that, if an item doesn't count as an implement for you (meaning you don't have proficiency with it), then it ceases to be an implement and therefore is ineligible for Dual Implement Spellcaster. That being said if you are proficient with staves as implements... just put something in your offhand that you are proficient with. Why does it have to be a staff?
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Apr 14, 2016 19:43
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S.J. posted:Are there any decent suicide style builds for any class? Like, using my own HP or healing surges for extra damage/conditions? Blackguard is probably what you want. With the right Paladin powers they can even be fun to play!
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Apr 15, 2016 08:43
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pookel posted:To be clear, he reacts the same way to suggestions he should change the printed encounters by making them harder. He's treating the adventure as set in stone, a game of him against the party and not a thing he's in charge of adjusting to make things more fun. You can't really be a DM if you're frustrated by missing. I think I need a better idea of how much you guys are wrecking the printed encounters. Do you feel like this behavior is appropriate to what is happening at the table? If you're asking, I'm guessing the answer is no. There is no way to fix lovely behavior with gaming advice. Tell him to stop being lovely or to take a bench.
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Apr 17, 2016 09:06
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Quarterbacking is a potential problem in any game. I've even seen it in more story-heavy games ("Why didn't you tell my character this?"/"You should say this to that NPC") but it's really obvious in tactical games because the decision points come fast and furious. There's really no right or wrong answer but most gamers should err on the side of less quarterbacking rather than more. One of the most important features of 4e is the combat and if you're trying to deprive other players of their right to pick a course of action on their own or create an atmosphere where anything less than the best, preordained choice is the wrong choice, you're making the game less fun (and take more time!) as a result. Tell your monk's player you'd rather make your own decisions each round and that he should be cool with that. Don't let the pressure to pick the 'best' action get in the way of fun. Having one person constantly 'solving' everyone's actions is the highway to shittown.
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Apr 18, 2016 19:34
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The only things that will ever help with analysis paralysis is a.) rules clarity and b.) social contract. 4e is a mixed bag in the former capacity. The rules are clear in terms of their function so you never run into weird corner cases where the DM has to sit in a little bubble and ponder the philosophical ramifications of a rules call before making one. On the other hand it isn't always terribly clear what a power is supposed to do until it's been very cleanly read through ("well, it pulls the target 2 feet, and the it does XdY damage, and then I teleport as part of the effect line, and then...") which means making an intelligent decision requires you to read each line of each power. Of course, every edition of DnD is guilty of this as far as spellcasters are concerned, and if we're comparing it to the analysis of 2e or 3e's spells than 4e's powers are much clearer, it's just that everybody at the table has to read roughly the same amount of text to make a decision. The social contract part is harder to deal with. Most people optimize their actions because they want to win, and because they don't want to let down the party. Each choice therefore has the weight of, "Oh poo poo am I going to gently caress over Jim's character if I don't flank this guy?" every time everybody makes a call. Everybody has to agree to not be a poo poo about it when somebody makes a bad choice, including the DM, because otherwise you're incentivizing endless planning. Once you've set the basic ground rules ("Don't be a poo poo, roll with the punches") you then tell everybody to make quick, off the cuff decisions. 5e could be a faster game if everybody played martials but that a lot of its own problems.
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Apr 21, 2016 02:21
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Skill challenges are dumb and boring because they take something that ostensibly should be used to differentiate characters (skills) and then uses them for exactly the same purpose (gaining # of successes towards cumulative total). It tends to completely divorce the source of the roll (skill, assosicate bonuses) from the result (gain more successes) to the point where completely unrelated skills can be substituted for one another (Arcana, Athletics) with almost no change in how the skill is rolled or what the result is. There's nothing wrong with letting players use a better skill instead of a bad one, but when the only visible result is # of successes accumulated you head into Snoresville. How a skill is used, what it's used for, and what the result is should really be the important part. This, to say nothing of the fact that a player will just run down their list of skills looking for the biggest numbers and asking whether or not they can apply Acrobatics in convoluted manner X.
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May 25, 2016 21:06
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Khizan posted:Somebody in this thread told a story about a player who maxed out Endurance and tried to use Endurance for all their skill checks. Win an argument by repeating yourself until the other side caves in out of frustration. Lose somebody tailing you by running up and down staircases until they can't keep up anymore. That kind of thing. There is nothing wrong with this if the group is willing to take it far enough, no. Like, if there is a scene that results from those off-the-wall skill uses, and that scene is cool, then I don't think that's a problem. Like, if you want to tell me you know enough about locks to somehow argue your way out of an interrogation, then that's cool, but tell me what the hell that is. "I roll Acrobatics. I do a backflip and the dude interrogating me is so impressed he lets us go" sounds funny on paper but it gets pretty tedious after fifteen or sixteen sessions. It isn't memorable if it's part of an unending litany of go-nowhere suggestions. As a one-off or two-off, it's fun and potentially hilarious. Your examples are great because they tell us how the skill is being used, and it's being used in a fairly believable way. If the DM or other players wanted to riff off of that, they could.
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May 26, 2016 02:08
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Engaging this argument in good faith and no just joining the dogpile: Level disparity in 4e is a going to lead to a Bad Time unless somebody is a heal bot. Engaging with the combat system is what character classes are designed to do, with a possibly vestigial nod toward theme reflected in the class's fluff. Almost everything besides healing depends on rolling to hit; and after a certain point, a high level disparity guarantees you won't contribute to the combat by dint of the fact that you are incapable of hitting, or that conversely, the enemy absolutely cannot miss you. It's not a huge level gap either; anything more than 3 or 4 levels is going to lead to nonlinear jumps in difficulty. If having characters at the table who are there primarily for moral support or for their roleplaying interactions at the expense of agency is important to your players, then nobody is going to tell you otherwise, but in my experience it's pretty rare to have somebody volunteer playing Jimmy Olsen to the party's Superman. There are a couple of ways to view 'optimization' in light of DnD. Coming out of the early days of DnD and MMOs, it was kind of a dirty word in some circles, along with 'power gaming', 'min/maxing', 'rollplaying' and 'rules lawyering'. It was seen as something somebody does at the expense of the DM and/or the expense of other players; one player breaks the rules over their knee with zero or near-zero downside, running roughshod over problems that the DM had devised as group challenges or to keep the group on the narrative track. However, 'optimization' has a hidden caveat; characters are optimized for something. You can be optimized for everything, sure, but that's not usually what people mean. If I make an 'optimal' warlock, and decide my gimmick is teleporting everywhere, I only care about being good at telepotring (my gimmick) but not necessarily about killing enemies or breaking the game. It's important the characters be good at their gimmick because it allows the narrative to connect more easily to the mechanics. If I'm playing Conan and I try to break a wooden gate in half, it's pretty demoralizing to fail Athletics check because I actually suck at Strength-based stuff. I have successfully run a game with three PCs without any major problems, and it was not a particularly combat-oriented group. I went out of my way to give them alternative forms of healing, one-use items, and NPC helpers, and they could dismantle most of my encounters with very little trouble. Sometimes dice are gonna roll against the players, but it shouldn't be a regular occurrence. Recognizing the action economy imbalance is absolutely key to balancing small groups, and giving off-turn or minor action options to players is critical to make up the difference.
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Jun 3, 2016 02:48
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No Luck Needed posted:so easy is fun? We all get participation awards now? gently caress that. In D&D you have to earn levels, earn magic items, earn gold, and earn that prestige I wouldn't say those two things are directly comparable. When you play DnD, you have to play with the group. You don't get the option to go grind wolves alone in the forest until you catch up. Imagine if you were only allowed to play an MMO with up to three to five of your RL friends; and whatever level you were at, and they were at, you had to just get dragged along with their content regardless of how much fun it is for you. After a certain point you can no longer meaningfully interact with the content and you might as well not be playing. Further, in Mario, you're describing a skill curve; DnD doesn't have a skill curve. Usually the tactics are straightforward. You just have to exist and pray that you survive and that the DM is merciful enough to give you bonus XP to catch up to the group. If you had some option to catch up that didn't involve having a game that was less fun for you, the player who was left behind, than it would be different but you don't. In that environment, each missed game makes a player more likely to stop coming to your games forever, which isn't a great practice. If you want to reward players for attendance, at least consider non-XP based rewards. More gold for players who show up. Rare items. Not poo poo like +X to hit, but wondrous items and divine boons that give players more options rather than more competence. Then you get to provide an incentive without encouraging a steep slope into non-attendance for your low performers.
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Jun 3, 2016 03:39
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ZenMasterBullshit posted:I honestly didn't know Fighter's had Brawler options, I guess that's going to be what I go with. I've never really understood the 4E multiclass rules though. Is it just a feat I take and I get the class features or is there some weird Power selection thing I have to jump through now? Often times the biggest source of confusion about 4e's multiclassing is that there's an expectation that there must be something else that goes along with it but generally, nope, it's a cheap way to get access to a skill+something else. You can do some fun char-op types things with multiclassing by tagging into another class's feats and PPs but it's not even necessary. Multiclass feats are generally 'better' than other skill feats in that they give you more bang for your bucks, balanced around the idea that you can only ever take one.
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Jul 6, 2016 23:10
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The Crotch posted:I've been snooping around Roll20's 4e LFG without much success for a week or two, and I've just now stumbled on the most bizarre thing. I am so confused about what this rule is even trying to accomplish.
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Aug 18, 2016 05:30
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Cthulhu Dreams posted:Someone I know is thinking about starting up a 4e game but he is concerned he tends to have a fairly mixed group show up on the day. There are probably 4 people who are there 100% of the time and 3 people who have much more mixed attendance levels. This has been replied to already but this bears mentioning. 4e basically balances around one PC = one monster per encounter as a basis, assuming everything is appropriately leveled. This holds true with as few as 4 PCs and as many as 6 but if you go above or below that guideline things get a little worrysome. It's not hard to balance on the fly - just add or subtract monsters as appropriate depending on the the encounter size. What can make this more complicated is actually on the player side of the board. Multiple leaders or defenders can radically change the way a DM is forced to design an encounter, at least if she wants it to be any fun; action economy is king here, and having more actions on the PC side of the board, especially when those actions include total board lockdown on the menu. I would say push the part-timers toward classes that are either strikers or which are fun but fill no concrete role (Warlock, for example, or Monk).
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Sep 4, 2016 19:22
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OneThousandMonkeys posted:Meanwhile if you have more than six characters, and let's say a majority of those characters are out of position for whatever reason, then someone's about to get dogpiled with monsters. Yes, also this. I find large groups work best with multiple engagements occurring across at least two fronts or else you end up with one guy getting hit seven times, which is not really intended balance.
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Sep 4, 2016 21:16
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I'll never understand hybrid chat. I feel like I could play 4e forever and never run out of vanilla options.
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Sep 8, 2016 19:02
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Loel posted:Had an interesting thing happen. Well, that level gap is pretty extreme at mid-heroic but it's not beyond the pale if everybody is using all of their stuff, did they have any difficulty hitting the level 8 things AC at all? Also owlbears are just kind of nasty in general with their combo.
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Dec 21, 2016 20:36
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Cthulhu Dreams posted:It's been a couple of months but something along the lines of doesn't think of it until he gets floored. It's specifically healing word he forgets because he regularly uses healing strike How do you visually track the bloodied condition in your game? Specifically, with regard to PCs?
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Dec 22, 2016 14:51
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Here's an easy comparison: in 3.5x is really easy to 'waste' actions and 'waste' heals if you use them at appropriate times. In 4e, if you're not healing, you're 'wasting' your heals and 'wasting' your minor actions, since you probably don't have any other use for them and using surges without the use of a power is worse than being healed.
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Dec 24, 2016 03:34
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P.d0t posted:I know the general consensus is that "Heroes of Shadow" is poo poo and "Heroes of the Feywild" is a good book, but what's the feeling on "Heroes of the Elemental Chaos" (generally, but in particular the options for specific classes)? I came away with 'functional but dull' for pretty much everything in there, which I guess is okay to good for E products.
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Jun 12, 2017 14:21
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I like Storm of the Dave, though I might amend it to Storm of the Dennis. Slightly  because of brief dude butt. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pr7Y0kZ67o0&t=26s
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Sep 19, 2017 21:15
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I mean if it were me I'd just play a melee-ranged sorcerer, take all fire attacks, and describe all my Flame Spirals as a whirling dervish of burning blades. But it can be real hard for a new player to wrap their head around that.
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Sep 22, 2017 01:30
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