|
Psionic should be artillery then, since their shtick is supercharging their powers by loading them with power points, and Arcane's sub-role is control anyways. You could give them some moves that conditionally generate charge (per target hit in an area burst?), and some that guarantee it, and when it's finally charged it fires its psychic laser? Better yet, start it fully charged and have it open by firing the big gun, and then let the PCs decide how urgent a priority it is to stop a second shot.
|
#
¿
Sep 7, 2022 15:16
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 15, 2024 16:33 |
|
|
I guess the main one is "let people be cool," because level 1 characters are surprisingly competent since basically all their passive class features are online. The other one is "remind people to pick a theme," or alternatively, ask that they don't; a theme is like a background or a side-class that gives everyone an extra encounter power, with the option to buy more in; it's like a Paragon Path, but for levels 1-10. Speaking of, tiers split the game into big 10-level chunks; heroic from 1-10 is your normal base-class only game, Paragon from 11-20 is analogous to entering a Prestige Class to specialize further, and Epic from 21-30 is Epic bullshit, same as before. Personally, I'm a big fan of starting at level 4, since everyone should have two encounter attacks and their first ability bump, to round off their odd scores, and enough feats to do something interesting. "[something]" Expertise feats are all mandatory math fixes, and way too good to ignore, so it's not a bad idea to hand those out for free, if you want players to have an actual feat choice at level 1. Healing is with healing surges, which I guess map nicely to Estus charges; the only slightly weird part is that healing surges are accessed in combat primarily through a leader's intervention (i.e. healing power), which is kind of thematically different from digging through your pockets and uncorking a flask. A long rest every 3-5 fights sounds right, and I think it's good to be transparent about this expectation with your players. Besides that, as far as balance things go, the wheels don't seriously come off until entering paragon (i.e. level 11) at the earliest. Common advice is to use MM3 math which fixed older monsters having too many hit points and too little damage, which is generally an issue that grows with level (and is basically a non-issue at low levels), but you can also use the handy MM3 On A Business Card, as a reference to either verify that monster stats are on-par, or make up your own, which can be fun, simple, and rewarding if you're into it. The other general issue is that making many small attacks will always seriously outpace large, single hits, but that also doesn't become too apparent for a while, once good multi-attacks and non-attribute damage modifiers become more available. Again, it's nothing to really worry about for a long time. I thin the main thing I'd say about builds is that 4e is a very rewarding game to get very deep in the weeds, but relatively easy to function at baseline. There's only a few really major pitfalls to avoid, the main ones being "have at least a +4 mod in your main stat," "use a +3 proficiency weapon (instead of a +2)," and "play a normal class with normal AEDU powers (i.e. not an Essentials class)." Hybrid classes aren't too bad or broken, as long as their classes have overlapping stats and their AC is normal, and in some ways easier to play since they have fewer passive class features. I guess it does create more room to screw things up if a player doesn't know what they're doing, in a way that normal single classes don't, but a player that does know can create a broken monstrosity regardless, so the real solution is to be open and honest about expected optimization levels. In conclusion: talk things out, have fun, and be excited when players have their moments.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 24, 2023 19:10
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:Going from a +3, 1d10 greatsword to a +3, 1d12 fullblade for one feat is the 4e status quo. The problem with giving all weapons the same proficiency bonus but making no other changes is that, in fact, no one would ever buy a +3 1d12 fullblade when they could instead buy a +3 2d6 brutal 1 (or something like that, I forget the exact numbers) mordenkrad at the same price. The thing is, getting +1/2/3 damage from a feat is not usually worth, since "par" for a damage-increasing feat is +2/3/4 by tier, and the +1 per [W] from upgrading to a Superior Weapon almost always falls short. The more I think about it, Dr. Pepper's Superior Weapon fix actually works out kind of nicely, since it generally helps the weaker types of weapons the most. Light and Heavy blades already have some of the best support from feats and enchants and stuff anyways, even before considering the extra accuracy, so Superior Weapon Proficiency (Craghammer) isn't a total no-brainer, although +2 damage per [W] makes it a pretty competitive choice compared to the gold standard of +2/3/4 damage; you could spend a feat on Waraxe proficiency for +2 damage, but you could just as easily spend it on Nimble Blade to give your Rapier even more accuracy. The biggest winners are probably the no-frills melee weapons, since a Waraxe is +2 per [W] over a longsword, and a Gouge is +1.5 per [W] over a Greatsword, Bows finally get a +3 option at all, Heavy and Light thrown weapons get a marginal +1 damage, and Reach weapons that really didn't need any help get nothing extra at all. Moreover, none of these changes benefit Light or Heavy Blades, which have enough going for them already. Dagger users are still never going to hand in their daggers, because Rogue Weapon Talent says "when you use a dagger" and not "a sharpened frisbee," and daggers specifically can be used as a spellcasting implement for sorcerers. On principle, I'd agree with treating weapons as generic stat-blobs to describe as you please, but D&D is a crunchy and fiddly game where people want weapon categories to matter a lot, and doubly so in 4e where weapon group-specific feats and enchants count for a lot. Verisimilidude posted:How many feats do you need to take before the dagger starts dealing more damage than a weapon with literally twice the damage range? The short answer is "zero," either because a dagger can be thrown with pretty good range, or because weapon dice don't matter if you're using it as a spellcasting implement. The smarmy answer is "when DPH/(20HR) > 2W." In practical terms, this means that if you hit 13/20 times, then the +1 is worth 1/13 of your current damage, so for a 1[W] plus mods attack, it's worth it when each hit does 26 damage, which is a moderately high bar that a striker will eventually clear; conventional wisdom says a Standard skirmisher should be dropped in 4 hits, so you should expect this from your striker by, say, level 9 or 10, when a Standard should have about 100 hp apiece, and you should probably get there sooner, too. Marginal accuracy counts for more when your base accuracy is lower, and the extra damage per [W] counts for more when you're throwing more [W] around. But that's not actually true, either. The marginal difference between a +2 and a +3 weapon is usually only 1 damage, so you can cut that delta in half, and a Striker pulls ahead when their average damage is at 13 a pop, which is possible as early as level one. For a Rogue, their dagger-specific weapon talent gives them an extra +1 to hit on top of the already-high proficiency, so that cuts the delta in half as well. For reference, a bog-standard stab of the dagger can easily average 14.5 damage (2.5 dagger, 5 flat DEX, 7 sneak attack) at level 1, which makes it worthwhile already. And powers with lots of [W] tend to be overcosted and under-par, anyways, so good powers will tend to have lots of hits of single [W] regardless. Alternatively, if you're a Defender or Leader, the on-hit rider effects are probably more important than the damage anyways, so again accuracy is more important than an extremely marginal amount of damage. So, I guess the medium answer is "it depends, but not much," and the long answer is, once again, "zero." So yes, that +1 to hit is pretty much always worth more than +1 damage per [W], and daggers are really at +2 to hit over their competition if you're actually using one as a weapon. Each little marginal edge might not look like a lot, but when you stack them all up, it eventually does make the difference between hitting on a 7 and hitting on a 2. And besides, turns in 4e are too long to spend 10 entire minutes accomplishing nothing at all. lightrook fucked around with this message at 19:55 on Jan 27, 2023 |
|
#
¿
Jan 27, 2023 19:50
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:Even though the 2/3/4s are often mutually exclusive with using a superior weapon and therefore make the question of fullblade vs. craghammer moot, there are characters who can't or don't want to jump through the specific race/weapon/keyword combos that turn the 2/3/4s on in the first place, and in that case a generic 1/2/3 feat bonus to damage booster fully stacks with a superior weapon and the question of balance between different kinds of superior weapons becomes relevant again. I could see the argument that +3, 1d12, high crit is just as good as +3, 2d6, brutal 1 (maybe you're critting really often somehow?) but I'm not convinced that it's okay to simply give swords slightly worse stats than hammers on the basis that swords have better feat and item support. I would in fact assume the opposite; since feats and items are written on the assumption that hammers are +2 proficiency weapons i.e. broadly worse than swords, I'd expect them to be better. At the very least, they're different - sword bonuses to OAs compete with hammer bonuses to pushes (or whatever it was, I forget these details) but one isn't just a strictly superior version of the other such that it can be said to properly compensate for weaker stats. It does mean that Superior Light and Heavy blades are pretty much always worse than other Superior melee weapons in a vacuum, but no one was taking Bastard Sword proficiency anyways without it being subsidized by, say, Githzerai weapon training, and Military Heavy and Light blades are still better than most other Military weapons by miles anyways, purely for reasons of accuracy. It would be pretty reasonable and logical to think that non-swords have better feat and enchant support since their base stats are worse, and there are at least a handful of gimmicks for most weapon groups, but no, Light and Heavy blades really are just an embarrassment of riches, with lots of advantages in addition to being more accurate. I think the one place where things break is grabbing, say, a Gouge off Dwarven/Eladrin/Hobgoblin weapon training, which would be a pretty massive +3.5 damage over a +3, 1d10 greatsword. but those feats are pretty high-value to begin with. In practice, within our group, some people chose to take advantage of the rule and grab a Superior weapon, and others would rather save a feat and stick with a +3 military heavy blade, and then there's me that decided it was worth spending a feat on Greatspear proficiency to get a +1 to hit and literally nothing else. Fundamentally, I do agree that choices need to be interesting, or else they shouldn't be offered, but 4e is so fundamentally sword-biased as a game that even when Superior swords are strictly worse than other Superior melee weapons, it's still not a cut-and-dry choice to beat your swords into plowshares and your enemies with a hammer.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 27, 2023 21:55
|
|
|
Jack B Nimble posted:So, I like how well 4e handles it's set piece battles, but I also thinking tossing the odd monster lurking in the shadows is an important tool for tension and pacing, and 4e isn't really built for these kinds of low intensity combats - they'd be trivialized by encounter powers. So, I talked to my players and got some initial buy in on the idea of restricting the party to at will powers if it's just one or two minor monsters. I guess my question would be what you want these encounters to accomplish? Normal 4-5 turn encounters are interesting because you have a suite of buttons to push and need to find a good time and place to push each one, but reducing the game to at-wills kind of flattens your choices and therefore the tactics. If the goal is to create some tension and bleed some surges, I guess the conventional answer is to run the exploration as a skill challenge? That said, I was really impressed with how combat exploration played out in a game ran by the wonderful GDE. Every room in the dungeon had a few enemies to fight, with always a few plinking away menacingly from the next room over, to invite the players to deal with them. The whole floor is budgeted as one encounter, (or maybe a little more, since the monsters attack piecemeal?) but the enemies are dispersed and attack in waves, which discourages the usual tactic of opening strong with your biggest guns, and creates just enough uncertainty to make everyone feel anxious about blowing their encounter powers - maybe THIS room is just about under control, but the NEXT one might be trouble if I don't keep anything in reserve, was the sentiment I remember personally. I think the key is that monsters would harass at range if the players didn't advance to Deal With Them, and the whole encounter felt pretty excitingly chaotic with both players plunging forward into danger, and monsters occasionally appearing in the rear in "cleared" rooms as a nasty surprise, so there was plenty of tense decision-making in handling multiple fronts. I personally would not run a 2-turn trash fight, although I can't speak for your group's preferences. But if you string three or so of them together in a row, I think you'd have a pretty interesting and dynamic skirmish that also has a very different feel from a conventional knockdown brawl.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 6, 2023 05:09
|
|
|
Jack B Nimble posted:
Dark Sun Inherent Bonuses are meant to replace/supplement magic item enchants, which is separate from and stacks with Expertise feats that give a +1/tier Feat bonus to attack rolls. "Free Expertise Feat" is a different and common houserule to give everyone one for free, since it's otherwise far, far, far too good to pass up. Epic-tier Implement Expertise, on the other hand, is the equivalent to Weapon Mastery, which expands your critical hit range, and includes the word "Expertise" by coincidence only. Superior Implements are analogous to Superior Weapons, and give you extra perks for your spending a feat. They still carry Implement enchants like normal implements, so you could have for yourself an Accurate Staff of Ruin, for example, Accurate being a superior quality and Ruin being an enchantment, and Wand Expertise stacks with all those besides. Your player should keep Polearm Expertise, though: they might have thought it doesn't stack with Inherent Bonuses, or that they don't need it anymore since they're getting a +1 from their Inherent Bonuses anyways, but a player should have both, and scrapping for every +1 to hit is pretty much never a bad idea.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 22, 2023 21:07
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 15, 2024 16:33 |
|
|
Jack B Nimble posted:Ok, gotcha, I'll have everyone pick out one free "expertise" feat, such as pole arm expertise. Thank you for the write up, I haven't actually cracked open a rulebook yet so details of game balance are taking a back seat to "uh what NPCs are even in this game? Where does the first adventure take place??", But it's almost time to play so characters are getting made. Right, there are the original wave of vanilla Expertise feats that give attack bonus and nothing else, and then there's the better ones that give some marginal (or more than marginal!) bonus in addition. They're both feat bonuses though, and as always named bonuses of the same type (i.e. Feat bonus) will never stack. If you'd like, you can allow access to the good expertise feats, or you can only allow free access to, say, Versatile Expertise, which can apply to any weapon or implement but doesn't have any extra riders. It's notably also the main way of having expertise in a weapon used as an implement in a class that doesn't do so normally.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 22, 2023 23:46
|
|