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ProfessorProf posted:My favorite piece of 4th-edition time fuckery was a monster that had the ability to launch spells into the past. So it could do a big blast attack as a free action, but the following turn it would skip its standard action. This is very cool! Totally putting a monster like this in Strike! Speaking of which, I'm compiling lists of cool powers and traits for Strike! What are your favourite 4e powers and traits? I shall blatantly steal them for the betterment of gamerkind. One of my favourites was the souped-up displacer beast I used that reflected the players' conditions/penalties back onto them. Simple, but forced them to change away from their usual lockdown->beatdown routine.
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Sep 6, 2014 13:36
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AXE COP posted:The Frenzied Berserker paragon path for barbarians, while mostly irredeemable poop, had the most sick awesome level 20 daily I've ever seen in 4e: Wow. I was actually looking for monster powers and traits because the classes are done, but that power is perfect for my duelist class. I'm a bit at a loss to figure out how to value the effect compared to something simple like ongoing damage, but I'm sure I can number-crunch it into shape. Gort posted:Come and Get It plus a power that hits everyone next to you was a combo the fighter in my 4e game fell in love with. You'll be happy to hear that these are already in. Anyone who saw a 4e fighter knows that CaGI is the best loving power.
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Sep 6, 2014 18:26
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Torquemadras posted:So, two of my players decided to get an Armor of Sudden Recovery - and I gotta say, it's incredibly nasty. An armor that turns ongoing damage into regeneration, until the end of encounter? And worst of all, I've got a boss coming up who consistently causes ongoing 10, and I'm not sure how much of a challenge he'll be when two players run around with regeneration 10 for the entire battle. I've considered putting a smaller battle with ongoing damage earlier, to bait out the daily use of the armor, but this is ridiculous. I shouldn't have to plan entire encounters around this ability. Bait them for the time when you need it. Have a smaller encounter that gives ongoing 10 earlier. If they save the ability then they deserve it. Beyond that, just don't overuse ongoing damage. Use other effects. I agree that it's a pain because other effects tend to slow down combat while ongoing damage hastens it. But that's how it goes... My group was obsessed with having action superiority and took anything to get more actions or protect against losing actions.
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Oct 24, 2014 18:45
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dwarf74 posted:So the Zeitgeist path has introduced a new kind of monster - the Goon. It rests on the spectrum between Minion and Standard. It's basically a normal monster, but with half the hit points. homullus posted:I like Strike!'s two-hit monsters, which are a bit different from P.Dot's. If the first hit is enough to kill them, it obviously does, but if not, the second one does (regardless of the totals). In terms of damage output, I'd still put them in static-damage Minionland. Thanks, although I need to credit P.Dot whose posting about 2-hit minions got me to include them in the first place.
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Dec 24, 2014 03:09
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LightWarden posted:First one had a bunch of rooms with various smaller-than normal encounters in them plus the odd hazard. One of the best ways to handle it wound up being to load up on End of Encounter dailies and then just murderball your way through it, so every Lair Assault after that one instituted a break point somewhere where End of Encounter effects ended but you didn't get a short rest. I made a paladin with TONS of lay on hands for a lair assault. Had more heals than any leader, while still being a defender. Heals were melee-only, but that's the tradeoff.
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Jan 28, 2015 22:28
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Hey 4e fans, if you've been looking for a new 4e-inspired game that tries to fix 4e's problems using modern design and without going back towards 3.5, I've got a Kickstarter for you! You've probably seen me posting about it over the past couple of years, and now it's finally finished!
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Jan 30, 2015 18:26
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NutritiousSnack posted:Congrats at breaking your goal already man. Any idea for stretch goals? Thanks! Got the first two announced. At $4000, you get Titans, which are basically huge boss monsters with specific mechanics to back that up. At $5000 you get kits, which are a bit like a non-combat version of classes. If you want to be able to see the future or be in charge of a gang or to save others by taking their suffering upon yourself, it helps to have specific mechanics for those things. Kits give you those mechanics and add to your character's progression. If you want that stuff in Strike, go convince your friends to pledge!
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Feb 3, 2015 03:06
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My Lovely Horse posted:Enemies in this game are too drat complicated. Even with running the actual combat outsourced to a laptop as much as possible I keep forgetting vital traits and reactions. Last night the Invoker blasted a whole bunch of dudes across the battlefield and I didn't notice until a whole round later that they could negate 3 squares of forced movement. I didn't retcon anything and ignored that trait for the rest of the fight, what's done is done, but it did annoy me. I'm gonna keep things really simple from now on and use enemies with a basic attack, a signature attack and as little else as possible. Occasionally a boss enemy who might have more complex powers or maybe one immediate power. Not sure what else I could do - Masterplan has reminders for some stuff but there's only so much screen real estate and it's all competing for my attention. My house rule: "trigger: when first bloodied" means "trigger: when I notice that it was bloodied and I forgot to use this trigger" I always forgot those triggers.
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Feb 22, 2015 16:58
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12Apr1961 posted:So, I wonder. The math won't be off unless you miscalculate. But you want to think about the types of tactical and strategic questions the system asks. In a vacuum, that's boring because there's just this obvious right answer of how to attack. Use multiattacks if they have no resist and use big single attacks if they have resist. But in context, it seems like it could be pretty good: imagine a ranger who has multi-attacks but no big attacks and a barbarian who has the opposite. The ranger and the barbarian want to take out these two priority enemies before moving onto the others. If they split up and each focus on their strength, they finish faster. But if they focus fire, they take the first enemy down quicker at the expense of taking longer to deal with both together. Is that tradeoff worth it? That's a good tactical question! Now if the ranger can just choose a multiattack and a big single attack and have both on the same character, you've cut out what was interesting.
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Feb 15, 2023 23:23
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True, but D&D by it's rules mostly has players losing result in death. You can choose to ignore that, and you should. But even then, D&D doesn't do anything to make losing fun or interesting. "A good GM can do that." When that's all there is to say, that's a failure of the game. What kind of narrative has the protagonists never lose? You might be able to point to some. "Competence porn" is a term I've seen thrown around. And you might think D&D is a good fit there... but then you look at what it's like outside of combat, and the huge range of the d20 makes the characters notably inconsistent and often incompetent. It's literally the opposite of what it's like in combat, where the basic assumption is the players will always win. What kind of narrative is that? A drat weird one. If this D&D made losing fun, you wouldn't get GMs saying "I only ever fudge things in my players' favour." Implicitly, if they always fudge towards whatever is dramatically satisfying for the players, and they always fudge in favour of the players, it's because they know that losing doesn't feel dramatically satisfying. Even fixing character death, the consequences for losing a combat are often deleterious to the flow of the emergent story. But also, the way losing works is crap! The first player out just sits around for ages while the other players slowly get chipped away and drop out one by one. In a loss, all the mechanics that make for fun comebacks and tilt the odds in favour of the players winning just end up drawing things out and making them dull and bleak.
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Feb 16, 2023 23:58
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I feel like fixing the narrative bits - what happens when the players lose - is easy enough. I've been grappling with the issue that it's actually tougher to fix the player-elimination aspect. One character goes down, now the party is outputting 75% of its expected damage, so the fight goes slower and monster damage gets more concentrated on the survivors. Another character goes down, now the party damage output is below 50% of what it was. The defender is still up - they're going to take a long time to wear down and probably can't do enough damage to win the thing. Meanwhile, the first player to get out has been sitting on their hands for a long while. It's boring for them, they don't get to contribute. Like with Strike! I fixed the narrative stuff and thought I didn't have to worry about it anymore. I thought "ok, the players can lose a fight and it's all taken care of." But with more experience, I've found that this aspect of the problem is still there - that losing fights are sloggy fights. So in my latest game Tailfeathers, there is no player elimination because it's a sport, but I've been working out things to do for Strike! to fix it, and those ideas would apply to 4e, too. I think you could have for each class some cool powers that characters only get after they are taken out. For some classes (necromancers, psionic classes), it's easier to think of stuff than others, but making it so having your character down doesn't mean you have to sit out the rest of the fight is a cool option that works really well in 4e's reskinning-friendly framework.
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Feb 18, 2023 05:06
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Yeah, 1 free expertise feat is the easiest rule. Only runs into edge cases when characters have a build that uses two different weapons. I'd just give expertise for both in that case.
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Feb 23, 2023 18:23
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