Keith Richmond's page

Delightful to see you dive into the partial vacuum left by D&D Minis, and I wish you all the luck in it. The price, sadly, is a bit too rich for my blood (and, yes, I do realize I could maybe cut back on my module purchases or something similar to make it work). I'll keep an eye on the secondary market, I guess, to see if any of the pieces plummet in value for reasons I can't guess.

On round bases: one other advantage is that you can see the map underneath the figure, even if only partially, which is often an advantage. (is that figure standing on the fire / wall / other terrain)

Frankly, this is done largely because of the size of the adventure - it's a little tougher to squeeze four levels out of Edge of Anarchy than it was for, say, Burnt Offerings. If you're worried about the physical proximity of the encounters, though, simply make All the World's Meat bigger. It's simple enough to justify the other guards staying put in the rest of the building; given that they're handing out free meat to the public, they probably get angry "customers" demanding more meat all the time. A ruckus at the front of the store shouldn't really surprise any of them.

What level range are you hoping for? I mean, I think it'd be more than fair to just get three levels out of it instead of four. You could also have more combats that are difficult (~n+2) instead of easy (~n). For example, the Lamm fight is currently 475 xp, which is an easy level 1 combat, and I'd expect a lot of people would be expecting a fight more in the level 3/750 xp ballpark there.

Fwiw, I wouldn't aim to finish the series at higher than 20th level. It only went up to 15th level in 3e, and it's really not a very epic tier module: no planar travel, no gods, not even other kingdoms, etc. If they get 4 levels per module and finish at 24th-25th level, the 'Gameover' threat of an Ancient Blue Dragon may just be 'umm, okay, we fight it, no problem'.

The first posts have started going up. More will follow later tonight (hopefully the entirety of Part 1 of the adventure).

Long Live Korvosa

Interesting stuff so far. I'm a little surprised that you decided not to combine some of the encounters. For example, you've got five encounters in All the World's Meat, but I really wouldn't have expected more than two, especially with how close together some of the encounters are.

Luck is an aspect of every single thing the character does in play. There's no need to stack the deck beforehand.

I'm all for no luck in character creation, as well.

You might consider Loviatar, goddess of pain, suffering, and torture. She, like Zon-Kuthon, is LE, and she seems to appreciate piercings and the like as well.

Loviatar is indeed where I was leaning, though I did plan on going through each worshipper and making sure it fit. Bane, Cyric, and devil worship are all easy gotos after that.

Chessenta looks like a very good pick as I do a bit more reading. I think that may be my winner. Glad to see I can make this work, since at first I was apprehensive there was a place at all.

Guess I should have believed my player who basically said the point of the Forgotten Realms was that it had everything so you could always just drop things in somewhere :)

I use all my Pathfinder APs in FR. For CotCT, I placed it in Chessenta (specifically the city of Maerduuth, but most Chessentan cities work fine). That way, it's somewhat close to the Shaar, where the Shaaran tribes (CotCT's Shoanti) could easily come into play as they wander north.

Also, by using the city of Maerduuth, I could use all of Korvosa's map and almost the entirety of it's history and city details without changing a thing in the Realms. No point wasting a great city map like Korvosa!

Cool, I'll check that out.

Was looking over some FR maps and a post-Spellplague 'Returned Abeir' Eskorn could also work I suspect. Slight changes, but it's on a sea, is a kingdom that overthrew a powerful dragon overlord several hundred years before, has a prominent undead keep, and has some place called 'Firetrees' nearby that might be interesting.

Thanks again.

No matter what I'm definitely using Korvosa mostly as written for locations and map.

Thank you very much!

So, I'm preparing to run a campaign for a group of folks. For a couple reasons some want the campaign to be in the Forgotten Realms, but not so well defined as 'I really want to work against this group' kinda things. They just like the world generically. So, sure, whatever, I'll run something in that world. So I start looking over my library of modules for possibles.

Curse looks like it might be a good fit in terms of RP potential, events, challenge, etc otherwise. So, anyone thought on if it's possible to put it in Forgotten Realms?

The distinct bits seem to be - on water, cinderlands, nearby somewhat evil empire, nearby barbarians, nearby orcs. I'm quite willing to alter some details as need be - for example, orcs could be gnolls. It doesn't _need_ the evil empire to be all that near. Without it being on water (and not just a pond) adventure 2 would have to change entirely so that seems like a serious need.

The gods can probably mostly be substituted, though I might have to wrangle some things a bit into place.

Or I just not worry about it and don't run Curse for this group (and run Shackled City or Savage Tides or something entirely different instead). :(

The one thing I've noticed with 4e is that the encounters are very even. When you throw an encounter that is even slightly more than 1/10th the XP they need for next level, you're looking at a potential TPK.

You may have a lot better luck once folks are used to playing and working as a team. 50% more becomes very dealable, and even as much as 100% under certain circumstances.

Fights that are under 110% of XP don't even expend daily abilities with my group.

Anyhow, I've stretched the levels of things a bit out for the 4E SCAP game I'm running - they're 11th wrapping up Flood Season now. A lot of monsters are quite a lot higher level in 4e than 3e... kuo toa, glabrezu, mariliths, etc.

3e and 4e are very different, and I think Erik Mona was spot on.

I will say that the hypothetical perfect system for me might be somewhere in between. But, what can you do?

I've played a lot of both at this point, and I can say with full conviction that if I am _DMing_ I would rather DM 4e by a large amount.

If I'm playing, I'll play either... but I'll admit that I'd rather play 4e at certain level ranges (depends on the group, but let's call it 1-3 and 12+ in 3e as the level ranges that dissatisfy me)

If Pathfinder had been a bit more flexible on the 'backwards compatibility' and done something a bit stronger, I'd be a _ton_ more excited about it. I want less stacking of bonus types (insight, luck, competence, sacred, deflection, natural, oh my), less ability to dump the RNG (I'm +43, you say it's AC 27? Or skill DC 30, you're... +7?), less full attack swinginess (1 attack if I can't FA vs 4-6 if I can, bleah), and faster gameplay across the board (especially at high level, oh god). I also want monsters and NPCs that you can design very quickly without 'cheating' (not to say that I didn't, but it can be a real chore to design or edit high level NPCs for instance). I think that's my big red flag list for 3e and it's all pretty dealable while still looking an awful lot like 3e, but it requires a game that is not completely backwards compatible.

Yours say "a minion dies when hit my an attack that deasl dmg" vs WOTC minions say "Hp 1: a minion never takes dmg from an attack that misses"

Yep, WotC changed the minion rules and I was using an old version(that or someone else transcribed them incorrectly).

On that note, I'm planning on doing the goblin commando soon and I'm a little iffy on something actually cool to give him.

I'll need to reread that section, but I was considering some kind of special charge ability, perhaps a leader role to help rally other goblins.

For many characters, you actually roll more dice - instead of a caster who might spend an entire combat never rolling a die for his attacks, he gets to roll not only attacks instead of them making saving throws, but instead of dice-fun-removing save or dies, he gets to roll damage.

Instead of melee types who tend to only roll 1 or 2 damage dice for their attacks, they'll commonly roll 2 to 7 dice. A 5W high level daily with a greatsword does 10d6 damage, for instance.

As for crits maximizing, that is primarily for the DM's benefit. A player who really likes rolling dice should use a high crit weapon... preferably a vicious high crit weapon. A +6 vicious high crit greataxe does 9d12 extra damage on a crit!

Okay, haven't played it, but I skimmed through it and my very quick review is that it's a solid intro module. It's a little heavy in one particular type of monster at the beginning for my tastes, but I'll grant that it probably does so for newbie DMs. My other big objection is that they cut a couple things for space reasons that they could have done slightly differently (chosen a different monster for the monster example, not been a half-elf cleric who took the feat for a bonus power)

But, after the first 3 encounters I think it's got a ton of cool stuff in it.

I'm mixed on the packaging. It's beautiful, I like owning it, but I'm worried about breaking/ripping it a lot more than I usually am about such products. Very glossy/light.

On the other hand, it seems like yet another MMORPG element that hampers in-depth role-playing

Just so we're clear... is this a mmorpg element like 'hit points'? Cause the artificer's use of it predates mmorpgs doing it and that's hardly the first instance.

I don't have a game store near me, nevermind a good one. I thought about preordering 4e through one and I just couldn't make it make sense for me to go way out of my way (3 or so towns over) to do it.

So, amazon has my money.

D&D's version of midichlorians.

I'm guessing they had listed Essence or whatever it's called under the artificer, then decided they couldn't use that.

Mind you, I think 'astral diamond' would be a pretty decent term for it. Then you'd have '2000 gold in astral diamond dust' and it'd actually make sense for the first time in D&D as a concept :)

P.S. For those who don't know, astral diamond is the currency after platinum pieces, worth 10,000g each.

Mearls is a seriously cool guy, please don't insult him. :(

People have natural change tendencies, wanting to limit change purely for stability sake, or when unhappy to take almost any change offered. Just natural.

I would be very curious what percentage of people supporting pathfinder have actually played 4E. I'd actually doubt most or even a large percentage. There's plenty of reason to support pathfinder without having played, and many of 4E's detractors dislike certain decisions strongly so wouldn't go out of their way to try it.

Thanks for the pointer and information, Watcher.

Almost wish my donation came with a referral to you somehow :)

Look at FR.

The new edition was just an excuse for what they did to FR. They wanted to make it more popular among new gamers (or at least people less seeped in Realms lore)

This conversation reminds me of something I've said a few times while working hard on hobby work... 'Just think, if I work _really_ hard at this, I might - just might - be able to get into the gaming industry and make a quarter of my current salary!'

One of the reasons I get antsy when I see people making personal attacks on game designers and such... I mean, these aren't exactly big wigs out of touch cause they're too busy in the hot tubs of their limousines ;)

Keith Richmond wrote:

For anyone objecting to 1-1-1-1... have you actually played with it for a long period of time? Having played with both 1-1-1-1 and 1-2-1-2 for months (or years), I feel pretty confident in discussing the strengths and weaknesses of both. Most people who object most violently to 1-1-1-1 appear to be doing so from a standpoint of mathematical purity (having never played with it _at all_)... which is not exactly in the best interest of either gameplay or roleplaying.

We have played with both (along with 2-1-2-1) for a bit of time. My players simply couldn't accept 1-1-1-1, and we were fine with the other two.

We ended up using 2-1-2-1 to keep the (overly powerful) 5 ft step in check.

Works for us.

Just to verify, since one of the biggest gains is in AoE... did you alter AoE and reach accordingly, or just movement?

Actually, I'd be especially interested if you altered AoE and reach for 2-1, since then you can't attack diagonally at all with normal weapons... and... that's something.

Unfortunately, these huge changes may kill the setting for old-timers. And there may not be enough people that are new to the setting that support it.

As the 'official Living campaign' and one and only campaign setting released in 2008, I rather imagine it'll be just as popular and quite possibly even more.

What is it folks are complaining about in the image? Isn't that some netherese shadow knight on a dragon over a flying city? That sounds pretty FR to me.

Or is it just a lot of 'Change scary'? Unless I was _deeply_ rooted in one of the four or so nations that, well, expired in this particular RSE... it still looks like Realms to me.

It is indeed the 'win' of this thread.

... and I so had skimmed past it until Rodney commented on it.

Thanks Rodney ...

Interesting. I love the ideas of fear doing hitpoint damage. Food for thinking.

Mesmeric Hold (the Hold person/monster replacement in 4E) does psychic damage along with immobilized targets.

So, yeah, it works.

Thats kind of neat and I've done basically this with conversions of material from 1st and 2nd into 3.5 but its not what I'm envisioning here. What I'm envisioning is something that involves a Wiki or another program similar to a Wiki and what amounts to a group of people working together to create the final product.

That would indeed be interesting, I just assume that lacking clear project approval or declared leadership that gamers will be gamers and do their own things.

If the wiki or whatever has a clear way to distinguish between the 'idea bin' and the 'consensus path', that should help keep things on track at least.

Still I'd imagine that, even without the ubiquitous stat-boosting items, there will be far more powers boosting someone's Will save, than powering up their Int 'punch'. It's the nature of the beast that is D&D, or at least has been for the last 30 years.

In fact, I can easily forsee a point at which a wizard can't dispel his own effects (cue music to 'The Sorceror's Apprentice')

<Dum dum dubbity-dum, didum didubbity-dum>

Ohnoes! My sweeping-brush golems are flooding the tower!

Nope, sacred hamburger. Attacks and defenses scale equally now. If _anything_, I'd expect the Int attack to scale slightly (ie, +1 to +2) better as people tend to put more stat points into offense than defense

Cool reference, though :)

Well, mostly I have to assume that unless we get sanctioned in some way to make an unofficial official conversion... that we'll have multiple conversions. Different people will go their own ways on certain things, and that's just how it's going to be because there's no direct management.

In one conversion, it might go to 24th, and in another to 20th. One might not even try to track XP at all, and end up completely off kilter if you did (but that GM just has you level when it's appropriate, so what's the problem?). Etc.

My gut feeling is that there's only so much we can do without the rules. Trying to guesstimate particular creatures and encounters, sure... but figure out the final level or how much XP to allow? Eh, not so much. Not yet. In 2 months? Probably.

So, to return again where we started, I suppose that the first encounter(s) (with Die, Dog, Die) should take the PCs to the second level.

That strikes me as really quite fast... in the original, a party of 4 would only be half-way to level afterwards and would only really have a _chance_ at 2nd after Sandpoint assuming they did at least one of the side encounters (like Monster in the Closet)

I think aiming for after Sandpoint makes more sense.

It's probably worth noting that we'll probably have several different conversions of Burnt Offerings come out, over the course of events, so it may be reasonable at some point to highlight obvious splits in opinion so that people can pick and choose which way they want things. For example, the first obvious split is Festival and Fire - do you allow rest or not? Do you _require_ rest by making it extra difficult (and more xp laden)? There's at least three solid variations there, based on whether you treat it as 1 big chaotic encounter with no rest, 3 easy encounters with little rest, or 3 moderate to tough encounters with rest.

I'd not be surprised if aiming for it to end around 20th works out pretty well. In many cases, we'll be able to combine fights, so it's easy to tweak XP to a certain extent.

Not having to worry about epic destinies is probably a bonus...

Yep - if a rest is needed for pacing, I'd put it after the warchanter fight, but before die dog die. Give the impression that things have calmed down, then start things back up.

If you need to buff up the fights to spread them out more, should probably add at least some more non-minions, especially to the first fight.

Jogging? No, can't do that while resting.

Thankfully, the start of Burnt Offerings actually strikes me as _better_ as a big staggered encounter (otherwise you need to use far more effective goblins or use a horde more of them), so the hurried nature works fine.

Better for the story not to pause for 5 minutes? Check.
More exciting to have it start off fast paced? Check.

Only downside is that they can't use their encounters twice... _but_ they can use their dailies safely. Not like they'll be fighting anything else that day.

Keith Richmond wrote:

In 4E terms, there's no time for a 5 minute rest so it may be reasonable to think of this in terms of one big encounter.

Please note that a short rest, as covered in the playtest rules at D&DXP, is a 5 minute rest which allows players a chance to regain their encounter powers and use healing surges to heal up. I would suggest not treating the goblin-attack chain of encounters as a single big encounter but instead run as is and allow player a breather between fights, though only short rests and no extended rests.

I reckon this would be a perfect opportunity to show to your players the strengths of the 4th edition.

I'd find it awfully odd to pause for five to ten minutes in the middle of the goblin raid on the town... especially while they're actively trying to burn things, steal babies, kill dogs, etc.

The main loss is in encounter power uses, but you're also okay with everyone blowing all their dailies for this encounter so that helps you out. The DM can consider an optional short rest after the warchanter fight if it's needed before the commando, but I actually suspect that a nice chaotic 12-20 goblins trickle chaotically in and fight the PCs affair will show off 4e just fine...

Nice idea for a thread. I'll be happy to participate in this process... as soon as I have my 4e books.

I actually started this thread just because I wanted another constructive thread on this board... but yeah, most stuff just has to wait.

I enjoy thinking a little bit about how to get some of the encounter concepts down, maybe throw out ideas for magic items, etc. And I'm making some monsters anyways (daily column) so I might as well do some for the paizo monster minis.

Well, except the mounted guy. Really not sure how mounted monsters will work so not really bothering at the moment.

One interesting note is that people _are_ playing some 4e now with the pregens, as limited as that is, so in theory if we got a working conversion of the start of Burnt Offerings people could do that in pseudo-4e for fun. Even if we had to change half of it later.

Given that this thread is specifically aimed at making a Paizo product more useful to a greater segment of fans and not an attempt to glorify or sell 4E, threadcrapping it is particularly shameful. There are plenty of other threads to do so, and let's please keep this one solely to the conversion.

Thanks Keith for the clarification.

Well, now the problem is with intelligence which is 8 as well but has a -1 modifier.

Hah! Thanks.

Cool thread... wrong forum?

And yeah, open playtest / development is awesome.

I think I saw a mistake with the strength modifier of the goblin warchanter.

Please check it out.

4e monsters add 1/2 their level to their displayed modifiers so you can use the number for ability checks/attacks, other skills. So in this case, it's 8 gives -1, plus 1 for level 2 = +0.

And Goblin Minion - so just the Goblin Commando / Dog and the beginning is set.

What do you think about ghouls? I'm kind of loathe to bother with ghoul fever since its very easy to resist, and very easy to cure (especially with a simple Heal check). I'd almost prefer to have it cause a persistent condition, maybe a type of poison that if you die while afflicted changes you into a ghoul.

Sounds good - I am not a big fan of inconsequential abilities, so sure... no more ghoul fever :)

Thanks, Antioch.

And now a Goblin Warchanter

I'm interested in doing stats for pretty much everything in Burnt Offerings, ranging from goblins to sinspawn.

Your conversion blog from yesterday could probably get tossed in here. It's got lots of good points.

I'd not be surprised if the pyro changes to just set some random goblin on fire if it misses.

I mean... we do want to make it _really_ likely at least one goblin gets set on fire. Hmmhmm.

So, yeah, I think you've convinced me on that one. Simpler design _and_ more burning goblins? Okay.

These guys seem really tough to me (based on the tactics section in the PF1 book). That doesn't mean I don't like them. :)

Hmm, tough in which way? 1st level 4e monsters are fairly tough, yes - I could have gone with minions, but that felt like they'd have less chance to use their abilities.

That said, I don't really like how pyromaniac works. Maybe rolling 2 attacks per ability (?) is common in 4e monsters.

It happens - it's not ultra common, nor ultra rare. In this case I went that route because using the attack rolled would likely _also_ miss an alternative goblin target. I'm okay with autohitting and killing goblin minions, but for the 'set on fire' effect it needs to hit a real person.

Of course, alternatively it could just hit the skirmisher himself.

There's also no rule about the dogslicer breaking on a 1, which would cause the goblin to flee in terror.

Nope, I went with it hurting itself instead. I intended to have the minions use that rule, but not the pyros (among other things, because the pyros _have_ another weapon)

As volunteer conversions, we're not as limited by space so having lots of options for people sounds great.

Just figure I can prod this slightly every now and then until release day and we can get serious... so, a possible look on Goblin Pyros.

Went with skirmisher.

I'm good with picking up errata, and with changing things to get the appropriate encounter with the new edition... but I don't really see a need to do things like add enlarge potion drinking goblins.

Funny you should mention goblins playing with fire, since Goblin Pyros was my monster for the day and I took a similar line of thought, though not quite the same.

I'm absolutely ecstatic that we finally know what's going to happen, and can kick some of the angst to the curb.

Now I just need to find time to work more on converting Rise of the Runelords :)

I, too, am really tired of iterative attacks... but I don't think you can take them out and be backwards compatible.

Though Bo9S tried, but honestly you quickly hit an 'I almost always hit' iissue, since as far as I can tell you're supposed to hit on your early attacks and miss on your later attacks, with iterative, so with just one attack... hit, hit, hit, hit...

I think Paizo made a logical decision in going with 3.75 - it seems very likely it will have short term success and act as a great advertisement for the company.

Long term, I believe that at least 80% of D&D players will switch to 4e, but 20% of D&D's fanbase is more than enough to provide for an RPG company.

It may even supply enough money to the company for them to support both editions well, which will cost them money and focus, but provide them greater coverage.

Meantime, with the Pathfinder discount, even folks switching to 4E like myself have more than enough reason to stick with Paizo at least through the initial storm.

I like a lot of the ideas behind what I see in the pdf, even if I disagree with the underlying math behind some things... but I'm tired of the math of 3.x, so I'm not the target audience. I am curious how well they'll sell in August 2009... more than a year after 4E comes out, with everyone already having 3.x books.

Of course, in 10 years they might be selling reasonably to people who need replacement books.

Or have switched to 4E, with leisure, and retrospect, and ability to make an educated decision.

I wish them all the luck.