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My preference would be to ditch marking wherever possible, and replace it with a reaction/aura power of some sort. Marking sucks because it's just another thing you have to keep track of (also it makes very little sense on the table, so it's really hard to explain to people sometimes).
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Jan 30, 2014 04:23
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fatherdog posted:It makes simulationist sense too, provided you're not a goddamn idiot. Well that's a little rude  I'm probably a little bit biased because a player in my campaign is a Swordmage, which stretches marking a bit further than usual. It's probably not quite as bad with other marking defenders, but with the swordmage it's often a case of "OK, well that guy/those guys on the other side of the room gets a penalty to attack other people because [reasons]." I mean I know, magic and whatnot, but over time it becomes a little bit abstract, which seems to make it hard for players to track what's going on. I don't really care one way or the other for "simulationism" except in so far as it provides a basis for people to intuitively understand the mechanics based on what they see on the board and what they understand about the world. "If someone tries to attack the guy next to me, I'll punish them for it" makes intuitive sense. "If this 1-5 guy(s) I shouted at last turn attacks someone that isn't me, it's slightly harder for them to hit (and maybe I can perform some rider ability on them as well)" is a lot less straightforward. Plus, keep in mind that marking is a 1-to-1 mapping, so if you've got 2-3 soldiers, not only do you (and the players) have to remember who is marked, but by whom. Yes there are ways to track this, but it is still extra book-keeping that can get annoying. I just don't really care for marking as a system personally and I feel like that's a completely valid opinion to have. 
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Jan 30, 2014 15:53
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Rexides posted:I am toying with the idea of static monster attacks and active player defenses. Basically, the monster's attack becomes a DC 10 + attack bonus, and the players get defense rolls which are the defenses - 10 + 1d20. That way they have to actively try to block/dodge/resist the attacks while I am just standing there spouting numbers like an rear end in a top hat accountant. Has anyone tried something like that? I do this, and I like it a lot better. Let the DM call the rolls, and the players determine how they turn out (it's a fun reversal of the power dynamic that keeps players engaged and spreads the work out for the DM).
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Feb 7, 2014 20:18
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Back when I ran 4e (we're kind of on hiatus) the best sessions I ran, in terms of everything from table efficiency to player enjoyment to the utterly meaningless metric of how much fun I as the DM had, were those adapted from the "Lair Assault" model. Depending on the adventure I'd alter it a little, something like offer a normal Short Rest as a trade off (after 3 rooms, you have to choose whether to go straight to the end or take a breather and deal with something harder) or as a reward of some sort, but in general it just seems like the *right* way to do something like 4e.
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May 28, 2014 13:53
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I have a friend who was running it and asking for advice. I told him to turn every room into a random encounter/wandering monster -- roll a d6; on a 1-4 the room is empty. This speeds things up, and gives you a handful of "backup" events to play with if you want.
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May 29, 2014 20:48
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Start with a pool of experience for a single encounter of (Party Level+5). Use that to allocate 2-3 encounters of From PL-3 to PL-1, and a finale that's PL-1 to PL+1. Include things like traps, and consider the possibility of some encounters being skippable, or being triggered if the party makes a mistake of some sort. When you run it, just pretend "Short Rests" don't exist -- treat all encounter powers as daily. Anything with "Encounter" duration lasts the entire event.
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May 31, 2014 21:47
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Gort posted:If I do this I'm still stuck having to have a certain number of fights per session or players will just nova their dailies. I want a solution that works whether players have one fight before resting or if they have ten. I'm not sure such a possibility exists with 4e as currently implemented; a certain degree of weardown/attrition is built into the system. I've had similar problems with "wilderness" adventures -- since they party's been camping for 4 days, it's pretty hard to challenge them with ANY kind of single encounter unless it's tremendously over-level. You could do something with Milestones/Action Points, weakening the players after an extended rest but building them up over the day/adventure. For what it's work, I usually treat "ADVENTURE" as the Extended Rest, and then I add a "Full Rest" every time they set up camp: +2 Healing Surges, +1 Daily Power. Gort posted:Won't that just lead to players using their one favourite daily every single fight? So what? I could see this being a problem if there's one really spammy/exploitable power that they definitely want to use all the time, but for the most part you should be able to incentivize a little bit of decision making on the players' part for what daily they want to use.
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Jun 27, 2014 15:11
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Roctavian posted:Unless it serves some story purpose, I just handwave wilderness encounters and have the players come up with funny stories about what happened on the way across the desert or whatever. "Remember when jimbo spilled the waterskin and we got attacked by salt lizards? Good times" et cetera and we can spend more time in dungeons or with npcs. This is one key thing I've learned: it's basically really hard to have "inconsequential combat" in 4e, due to the depth of the fighting systems and how managed by the rest of the game (resources, etc). Even the easiest/simplest of fights is either boring, or drawn out long past it's being a forgone conclusion, or (often) both. Thus, the instinct to roll wandering encounters or whatnot that you might have can really be counter-productive in 4e because it can eat up such a tremendous portion of the session for little gain in advancing the narrative. Instead, 4e lends itself a bit more towards the "planned adventure" (though not necessarily railroading) than it does the "hex crawl" style of play. I've had to really learn to fight the urge to throw random encounters at players when they spend too much time wandering around between story beats, since that only ends up exacerbating the problem. The reinterpretation of "Extended Rest" as "A full night in the inn", or "a week/month between adventures", or whatever is a good move I think because it gives you more control over the pacing. From there you can maintain tension by giving the players a moderate reward while resting, or even go so far as to say "these woods are dangerous and the conditions inhospitable; you regain little stamina from a night's sleep in the wilderness" (thus letting them recover nothing while wandering). If they're not getting their Big Reset every day in the woods, then it allows you to handwave events and do things like ask for Climbing/Nature/Athletics/Endurance checks, and hit anyone who fails for -1 Healing Surge. Basically, keep the real combats to story beats, plot-centric stuff, or things that really have to be "battles"; everything else you should abstract by a degree or two if you can. The "Big Reset" of Extended Rests gives you very few things you can punish like that, but if you change those rules somewhat then you have a lot more options.
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Jun 27, 2014 16:03
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Use another system e: not trying to be glib or dismissive, but a lot of those things are just kind of core to the mechanics of 4e.You can adjust some of them substantially (like throwing out "rests" altogether and going for the Lair Assault approach) or modify a bunch of them slightly, but as people have pointed out, there can be a lot of unintended consequences. Honestly, it sounds like you mostly have a problem with one particular power/character(/player?) in particular, so maybe warping the rules around them isn't the best solution. Hubis fucked around with this message at 22:39 on Jun 28, 2014 |
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Jun 28, 2014 22:34
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I guess all this arguing about how to restrict dailies so they don't break encounters/force players to use them just seems like a lot of work and artificial restriction just because you don't want to tell characters they can't have an extended rest.
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Jun 29, 2014 17:09
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Gort posted:This all smacks of that "A good DM can make a good adventure no matter how bad the rules" excuse you hear people use for bad games. I'd sooner the rules supported what I want to run than to have to keep coming up with excuses why the players can't play in an optimal manner. It seems like your saying "NOVAing is an ideal strategy and I need to change the rules to make it non-viable, because if players NOVA all their dailies in one encounter then they'll put themselves in a really bad situation" Either it's a strategy so good as to be a major problem, or it's a mistake the PCs need to learn to avoid. Learning "the hard way" doesn't have to mean killing the party, but it sort of feels like you are frustrated with the way the power economy works in 4e making encounters too easy (which is a real issue, definitely) but not really willing to have them pay the price. It reminds me a lot of how Monopoly gets ruined by all the "house rules" like the Free Parking lottery.
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Jun 30, 2014 02:46
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My Lovely Horse posted: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. 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: "Short Rest" => Spend up to two (2) Healing Surges OR regain up to two (2) Encounter Powers OR some combination of the two "Extended Rest" => Spend up to four (4) Healing Surges; Regain 2 (two) Healing Surges OR regain up to TWO (2) Daily Powers OR some combination of the two I like giving players two surges, because if a player is Bloodied then it's enough to make them not Bloodied but not quite full, and if they were not bloodied than it's still enough to let them top off.
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Jul 7, 2014 15:12
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And, as mentioned, Raise Dead is like a level 9 (?) ritual
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Jul 8, 2014 17:45
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My Lovely Horse posted: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. Having ravenous monsters continue to gnaw at downed characters is a great way to force the players into doing something other than alpha-striking a single monster at a time and I highly recommend it.
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Jul 8, 2014 19:29
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| # ¿ Apr 30, 2024 09:58 |
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From my understanding, this is basically how combat in FATE systems work -- you joust back and forth invoking Traits and accruing bonuses until you have enough modifiers to land a killing blow with a huge margin-of-success.
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Jul 11, 2014 22:16
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