Pop'N'Fresh's page

The internet is a wasteland. It can be chaotic at times.

I think that's about all I can say :P

Its true, and I know exactly what site you guys are all checking now :P

I bought the books off amazon already too.

It s a great miniature game with fantasy elements, but not a RPG anymore. After the first ten minutes of slashing Kobolds I heard the first 'Do not take my candle',after twenty minutes people talked only in metagaming speak. We agreed on the following:

You need a battle grid - you can't translate the shifting powers to simple 5-feet steps. Which took a lot of 'surprise' aka imaging from the group.
The only powers you have are combat powers, there are no social specials. Which made the village a simple 'Where do I get the Quest for Kobold slaying?' A encounter took as exactly the same time as it did in 3.5
After the second encounter my player's and me were bored to death.

I'm gonna chime in here too on this one. The rules given to the players in this adventure are VERY limited. One main thing to note, is that the adventure doesn't actually tell the DM either how to use most of the skills in the adventure, except for combat situations sometimes. This makes it hard to RP the NPC's and PC's since you're not sure exactly what you're rolling and against what DC.

The second thing is that all the characters are pre-generated, and this tends to separate a player's roleplaying ability from his character. I overcame this by naming the dwarf fighter after an old dwarf character I used to play, and the group took an instant interest in what I had to say. This in turn encouraged more roleplaying from out group, and we all had a good time.

I do understand that the combats tend to focus around the class powers, which I actually like as I am sick of dealing with PC's trying to use combat abilities in social situations, or constantly using cheesy spells to pump up their Charisma score to become good at Diplomacy or Intimidate. That is roll-playing, NOT role-playing.

So all that being said, I think WotC may have made a mistake in releasing this before the sourcebooks, as it probably will leave a sour taste in most people's mouths rather than get them salivating for the full-blown game.

I know monsters don't get daily powers, so I doubt NPC's will either. Monsters DO get powers that can recharge but you have to roll each round to see if they do or not. A good example is dragon breath.

As for the best town I've ever started a campaign in. My vote goes for Diamond Lake in the Age of Worms. We had the BEST time ever in that town, and the NPC's were a really great help and hindrance to the party. Two words.....Balabar Smenk!!!

As a Savage Tide DM with little to no time to spend on stat blocks and new rules (let alone read ahead in the adventures), I welcome 4e with open arms for one simple reason. Simplicity.

I'd rather have the barebones rules to help me guide my players through an encounter or adventure than let them get in the way of my group having fun.

And I am a huge fan of the changes for monsters and NPC's, that use different rules than players do for character creation. It gives the DM a lot more toys to play with, without needing 30 splatbooks to surprise the players every week.

I'm not dissing 3.5 or 3.0 in any way, shape or form. I'm just saying that as a DM, I don't have enough time to memorize all that stuff every week prior to our game, so less is more for me :)

I should also add, that while I will move to 4e, I will be running the Pathfinder adventure paths with 4e, and thus supporting both Paizo and WotC.

While this is true, I think people will be able to identify minions quite easily once combat begins. Still, creative DM's will probably come up with lots of great ways to throw a handful of minions into their encounters to spice em' up.

I can see it now. A simple encounter with 10 goblins wearing leather armor and wielding chipped short swords, with a single goblin in full chain with a big maul. PC's wade into the "minions" only to find out they were disguised soldiers with the minion wearing chainmail in the back :P

Can't wait!

Does the modifier change depending on the creature's role or type? I noticed this too, but only for monsters. PC's apparently just get the minor ability score modifier, and then get feats and skills instead of just a flat modifier.

This actually makes playing a monster WAY easier, as I usually ignore skills and feats in monster entries unless a specific one is needed for one of its attacks or defenses. All you really need is a modifier and a good imagination now.

Kickass.

I removed alignments from my 3.5 campaign completely and it has gone quite well so far.

Can't see them being a big deal for 4e, which I am still salivating to get my hands on.

But then you'd run into problems with the class abilities. Why bother using the fighter's daily power to deal 6d6+3 damage if it deals 1 hit, the same as a regular 2d6+3 basic attack?

Plus rolling damage is just fun, as a player anyways.

As far as I know, there is a couple people on these forums already looking at converting the first Pathfinder AP to 4e. I agree though that having the DM Guide and PHB/MM will definately be needed. We just don't have enough to go on yet to properly convert the adventures, but it looks like re-statting up the NPC's and monsters will be a breeze. The challenge will lie more in ensuring the encounters add up correctly and advance the PC's at the proper rate. Also, the treasure will definately need to be reduced, which is a good thing IMO.

As for the flavor of hit points, I have always used the "bloodied" rule as an indicator to my group that a monster is now injured or showing signs of fatigue. A good example of this in the new Narnia movie (which is not very good but I digress). When the "hero" kid decides to duel the Telmarine king they go at it in full plate, both of them. The fight lasts quite a while and consists of them beating on each other with swords, shields, kicks, and punches. Each of these blows would deal hp damage, but doesn't necessarily draw blood or severely damage the person. Then the king knocks off the kid's helmet and the kid responds with a slash across the king's leg, drawing blood, and triggering the "bloodied" condition as a descriptor to the kid (or PC's, whatever).

So you gotta take hp with a grain of salt really. Our current DM for Keep on the Shadowfell is not really good at this yet, and constantly describes each and every blow as some kind of trauma to the body. If that were the case, each of our PC's would have about 6 javelins sticking out of them at the end of the first encounter, and the armored kobolds would be dead from about 5-10 wounds each.

Its much more realistic to say that your hits press back the monster, or force it to take blows on the arms or legs as it shields itself from your onslaught, than having every sword stab into the thing drawing 1d8 hp of blood out of the target. As long as your group knows you describe damage like this, they should not confuse their hits with damage resistance or stuff like that. Magic damage tends to be a hit harder to describe, but it can be done. Fire damage blisters or causes heat stroke, cold damage numbs the target or causes frostbite on one hand, acid damage burns through clothing or take off a patch of fur or hair, necrotic damage causes lesions or a fit of coughing, etc.

I think the new writeup format is pretty good. It gives the DM a quick overview of the town and useful places the PC's are likely to visit. Inns, taverns, and shops are usually the first things my party looks for and detailing those with some basic NPC info is a genius stroke in my book. Also noticed that they got rid of the gp limit of the town entry and the total assets values.

I have found the NPC stats to closely resemble monster stats, in that you don't see any skills or feats but rather its combat abilities and stats and defences. Also of note is the fact that the NPC's ability modifiers are +4 higher than their associated scores, which I have noticed for some monsters as well. This is most likely due to the "Skirmisher level 8" entry which may be adding half its level to all ability modifiers.

Kinda reminds me of some of the undead from Army of Darkness or Evil Dead 2. Its not that bad, just a tad on the cartoony side.

It was a perfect example of crowbarring a setting into a new edition of the rules.

The LG paladins in dark sun was pretty bad, then they had bearded dwarves, and medium-sized half-giants and thri-kreen. Metal weapons became way to easy to obtain. There were other problems, but it was definitely the worst conversion I had seen for a while.

The ideas they had for writing in the new psionics handbook races was actually not that bad though. The fluff made a lot of sense and definitely could have happened.

I'm actually a huge Birthright and Dark Sun fan, don't much care for the Realms, but I've been reading this thread off and on to see what kinds of changes were actually made.

Hopefully my favorite campaign settings will not be changed quite as drastically as the Realms were.

Dark Sun will be of special interest to me, as it will obviously need psionics and I'm really hoping dragonborn, tieflings, and eladrins get dumped to make room for thri-kreen, muls, half-giants, pterrans, and aarakocra. I don't wanna see a repeat of the Paizo Dark Sun fiasco that appeared in Dragon and Dungeon magazine some time ago.

My group had 5 players, and we handled the first fight relatively well, nobody used any action points or daily powers even.

The second fight, was a much different story however, and we had 2 close calls but no deaths.

I'm interested to know how your group of 3 did, what classes they picked, and how exactly did they die?

I live in a cramped condo here in Vancouver, so I don't usually have a big table available to use a battle mat. Instead I use Fantasy Grounds 2 and everybody brings over a laptop. Note so sure if we'll see a FG2 rules set for 4e or not, but here's hoping!

Anyways, the software saves a lot of paper.

My plan for 4e is to run the Pathfinder modules with the 4e core rules. That way I get the best of both worlds! yay!

I have a preference to not add any "new" races in my Golarion. That being said, most of the races will port over as is, and the Gnomes in the MM can be used as PC's, they just don't get a huge writeup like the others.

Elves and Eladrin and Tieflings I believe all exist in Golarion already, so again, there's not much new here except for the origins of the Eladrin, which most of the people here already have some great ideas on.

Half-orcs appear to be the only race that will not be supported in 4e when it is released, but I heard that it will be in an online D&D insider issue....I think.

I just wish that they had included all the core classes like the barbarian, bard, druid, monk, and sorcerer in the first release, or as online additions. Converting the Pathfinder adventures to run in 4e will get a bit more difficult without some of those.

Roll against the creatures fort defense is an excellent idea for that. The love of the table are in those decks. Most of the colorful sentences are from those decks. Some of the best deaths and most memorable are from the decks...they stay and will make them work. Why not drain ability points/encounter? a -4 dex changes their ranged to hit and AC. We are keeping those too just resetting it after the encounter.

I don't think 4e uses ability score damage or penalties anymore because they complicate things quite a bit. For instance, poison is a damage type now instead of dealing ability damage, but can cause other conditions as well. So if you get poisoned, you will lose hp as well as possibly suffering another condition, or sometimes the poison damage will continue each round unless you make a save.

So I would probably stick with just bonus hit points damage instead of ability damage to keep it simple.

Pop'N'Fresh wrote:

Standing up from prone is in fact a move action, found it in the rules.

Ooo! Ya did? Where's it hiding?

Its actually in the compiled 4e rules PDF available on enworld.org

That is a great PDF to assist in running this adventure, answered a lot of my questions.

I ruled the same way but the desciption reads about the miss being wicked jabs and cutting blows so their argument was just that. Also if a minion has 1 hp then this attack is worthless against them since the miss cant hurt them, but what about a level 1 warrior with 3 HP left? I ruled no different than you. What about the burst issue and the other questions. P.S. thanks for the suggestions. I told my characters that as DM I have enough to handle and wont make it a habit of keeping track of their characters stuff. I got enough to control, but if I spot something I will remind. Its about fun not me killing the party members. They cant wait until the main rule books come out. Hope they have backs to them! They dont really like pre-gens and want to make their classes themselves

Minions have a specific entry for them that states they cannot be killed via a power that deals damage listed in the "Miss" section of the power. I played the dwarf fighter and this was an easy rule to swallow. The fighter can, however, use his cleave power on minions as the 3 damage is not listed in the "Miss" section, but he has to hit the first target as well to deal 3 damage to the 2nd target.

Standing up from prone is in fact a move action that does not provoke, found it in the rules.

A burst always affects 1 square to begin with, then you expand that square in all 4 directions a number of squares equal to the burst rating. So a burst 1 is a 15 x 15 square, burst 2 is 20 x 20, etc.

You can't use power attack to boost up a miss with flensing strike, power attack specifically says that only if you hit do you deal +3 damage. If you miss with flensing strike, its a flat 3 damage, that's it.

I recommend you get your fighter's player to read the abilities more closely while the other characters are taking their turns.

I plan to use the decks as well, although I only have the critical hit deck. Amazon is shipping my miss deck as we speak. As we play 4e, and get more used to the rules I think many of the effects on the cards can be re-used with little to no modification.

Bleed damage should just be maxed out and be classed on ongoing damage each round, following those rules as presented in 4e. A Heal check or healing surge will stop the blood loss.

Normal, double, or triple damage is replaced by the 4e mechanic of max damage on a crit. Nuff said.

Ability damage can just be bonus damage to your roll, again maxed out. So if my attack does d3 Dex damage, just add 3 damage to your roll, and explain that you struck the target's leg or something.

Other spell-like crit effects may be more difficult to figure out, but as long as they follow most of the other rules of 4e, they should work fine as is.

One other thing to consider is the saving throws, which are as previously mentioned, defenses of the target now. So an effect from the deck that requires a Fort save would now require the attacker to roll against the target's Fort defense.

Man, we played through the first 2 encounters last night for this adventure, and it was AWESOME!

We had 5 players who chose the dwarf fighter (me), human wizard, halfling rogue, dragonborn paladin, and tiefling warlord. My comments on 4e so far?

I like the dying rules, very dramatic and unpredictable. The melee classes were not really that useful against the kobolds (due to their shifting ability) until we figured out we could charge them and attack before they shifted away. The warlord was not very useful for either of the kobold fights, mostly due to bad rolls. The wizard was of great help until the last fight, again due to bad rolls. Her burst spells were deadly. Dragonborn's breath attack is pretty good. The fighter's daily power was awesome to behold, I took out an armored kobold in a single hit! The group was very impressed. The marking abilities are very handy as well. The rogue was VERY useful for moving the kobolds into melee range of the melee characters. Healing surges were useful, but very low-key as they usually only kept you in the fight for another round or so.

The fights were very dramatic and exciting and constantly moving all around the map, as opposed to the 3rd edition fights where the fights start at range, close to melee, and then never move. The different combat styles were very very evident, and everybody felt they contributed.

The only question that we could not answer was if getting up from a prone position costs an action and provokes an opportunity attack. We ruled it didn't provoke and costed 1 square of movement. That seemed to work fine as it really only came up when people were healed after being in the negatives.

Most of the crit and fumble decks can be used I would say, but I think 4e did away with ability damage, so I'd probably just add whatever ability damage to the maxed damage roll, and max it as well.

I am eagerly awaiting to play this tonight with a group. Picked the dwarf fighter as my PC and after looking over his abilities, I can honestly say I am so excited I barely wait to leave work!

The only downside is that we will probably only get to play for 2-3 hours :(

Actually, I and my group (currently in Savage Tide) don't like saving throws at all anymore, or spell levels either. This may be because my 3.5 group has pumped up their saves so high that they only fail 25% or less of the time, and they are only 15th level. I don't even bother using most of the monster spells or spell-like abilities anymore as they are practically useless and have super low DC's. And before you cry "twink" the PC's in my group are actually 1 level below the recommended level for each adventure, have only the treasure from the adventures so far, and are not using any non-WotC books or products.

I'm glad to see them go in 4e.

Quote from page 153.

"Such weapons deal +2 points
of damage on a successful hit against a creature’s whose
DR they overcome. This bonus does not apply against
creature’s with DR/magic."

So in both your examples the monsters have "magic" as one of their DR types, and hence, PC's would get not get the +2 damage bonus against these monsters, ever.

Not sure if it was already mentioned, but having the lunar cycle on the calendar would help.

For some reason its always nice to be able to tell your PC's where and how full the moon(s) is. Also useful for how bright it is at night when in the wilderness.

I wonder how these decks (hit and fumble) will work with 4e? Most of the effects like double damage convert directly to maximum damage in 4e. But some effects like bleed pose an interesting opportunity to use your healing surge for the encounter.

Other effects that deal ability damage are the ones that concern me, as 4e is rumored to be removing ability damage (thankfully).

I think if you just posted the conversion, and didn't include all the flavor text it should be ok, assuming you don't copy stuff word for word that is.

Most of the conversion should be relatively simple and I love the fact that most of the monsters won't need magical powers to be effective anymore.

The main challenges with converting stuff I can forsee are the Pathfinder creature's unique abilities that really set them apart from anything else. Although I think if you have the Fantasy Bestiary and Savage Beasts pdf's them most of that can help with examples.

I'm using Savage Worlds for my next campaign, which will either be Birthright, Dark Sun, or Pathfinder. I'll usually let the player's decide which one they wanna play but I'm assuming they'll want to head back to Athas or Cerilia before they try a new setting like Pathfinder, since they are just wrapping up Savage Tide.

Yeah, 4E is really really different. You could probably use the deck(s) with True20 or Savage Worlds relatively easily though and their effects would probably be way more deadly.

I've been using it for Savage Tide and my group has some mixed feelings about it.

I have a psychic warrior with a keen falchion (crit 15-10) and he seems to draw at least 1 card per session. He enjoys the unpredictability of the deck but sometimes the effect chosen doesn't really benefit the group that much.

I have another player who insists on drawing a card every time the warrior does just for fun, as he insists consistently draws better (more useful) effects.

I am planning to use these cards for my next Savage Worlds game as well, although this will be more for flavour than actual mechanics, since d20 and SW use very different rules.

I saw in one of the Pathfinder issues, on a wandering monster chart I think, that you can use 4th level fighters for some of the lower level guys. Probably give them something similar to the Gray Maidens, masterwork bastard sword and heavy shield, masterwork full plate, etc.

No clue on what the higher ranking ones would be though.

Hahahaha, you're right.

Unearthed Arcana had some rules for weapon group proficiencies which I enjoyed. Each class got to pick a certain number of groups based in their starting proficiences, with the fighter coming out as having the most of course.

There really isn't much benefit though to having tonnes of weapon proficiencies as most characters tend to pick one or two to focus on.

Weapon damage dice will not go away anytime soon I would imagine.

I seem to recall a random encounter list from one of the Pathfinder books saying that the average Hellknight was a 4th level Fighter.

However, after reading the awesome journals in RotRL it would seem they'd need a feat or something similar to the Hippogriff Rider guys that lets them call a Hellhound to assist in tracking down criminals.

Maybe some improved versions of the feat could call in bigger badder fiends.

I'd probably recommend you check out the article on WotC site about magic item slots then. Because if your PC's are like mine, they go through all the magic items in all the books and make shopping lists of stuff they want.

What I found is that there are way too many slots in 3.5 for magic items, which leads to way too many magical bonuses to a PC and a lot more bookkeeping. By combining many of the magic item slots (from the 4E rules) you reduce the bookkeeping, and force your PC's to really focus on what they need rather than what they want.

Now that fighter will really need to decide if they want to go defensive and use a shield, or offensive and use a set of bracers.

Archade, thanks for actually posting a playtest report, and not another "I think we should change this rule because..."

I'm guilty of a couple of those, but have totally lost interest in those kinds of threads now.

Great work, let us know how your campaign progresses.

I'm curious to know if the multiple attackers were using the aid another action during their grapples, or if they were all trying to grapple individually? It would seem to me that having 3 buddies giving you a +6 to your grapple check would be more effective than having them all try to hold on their own.

If these were all individual grapples, could you post some playtest results for them using the aid another action?

I have a feeling the Paizo guys wanted to see this action used more in their rules.

I still think 1/2 level (rounded down) + ability mod + 10 is fine.

This is what most monster abilities use to figure out DC's so why not for the PC's too?

I think with the use of careful DM planning, magic items can be either minimized drastically.

I am currently thinking of some ways to reduce the need and use of magic items in my campaigns.

A few ideas I have been throwing around are:

- reducing the number of magic item slots for each character. Head, torso, arms, legs, a cloak, and 2 rings on the fingers should be enough. Then of course potions, wands, weapons, etc. are all fine as is.

- magic items are very hard to find in stores. Most stores will only sell minor items. Selling stuff is likewise hard for most high price items. This encourages characters to create items themselves or find specific people and roleplay such transactions.

And lastly, I hate how the latest splat books seem to keep increasing the efficiency and power of magical gear. In my next game, I'm planning to restrict this to items in the DMG and the Pathfinder RPG. Anything else needs to be researched first (requiring some lengthy study and expenses) and then created by the PC himself.

Personally, I think this is the best answer to the 15 minute day.

Man, UA is awesome as a tool box to pull from!

Recharge Magic would keep the group going all day long, without futzing with the core Vancian system.

Vecna would be pleased! :P

My god, that is quite frankly the best magic system I have ever seen. Not only does it reduce the need to rest after every 2-3 encounters to get spells back, it also reduces the strain on the cleric casting their cure spells, and also makes spellcasters really think during combat.

No longer do they blow through all their spells highest to lowest level and then rest, they really gotta plan ahead on their strategy.

This rule is freakin awesome.

Open Locks should be included in Disable Device.

Keep Sleight of Hand in Theft. Stealth will be powerful enough without including picking pockets as well.

I'm on board for seeing Fly either dumped or rolled into Acrobatics.

For me, as a DM, skill points are the hardest part of designing an NPC for me, with all the synergy bonuses, armor check penalties, etc. Its also really hard to figure out where skill points were spent in a monster stat block.

I love this new fast track "trained" or "untrained" system and think it should be kept.

I'll add my vote to removing iterative attacks. I'd rather see more emphasis on the abilities that grant one extra attack only, like flurry of blows, rapid shot, two-weapon fighting, etc. This is more of a flavor thing for me than game balance or mechanics, but I am a firm believer that iterative attacks greatly reduce your mobility in combat.

Even if this doesn't make it into the RPG, I'm sure using the Saga rules or making a house rule would not be too hard.

BM has a point here. Armor as AC is in fact more balanced and easier to manage than the whole DR rules.

However, in light of that, there are some good Armor as DR rules out there, but sadly, they are not from UA.

If you have it, take a look at the rules in the Game of Thrones RPG by Guardians of Order. Its out of print now, but it has some very simple rules for armor as DR.

At the core of it, your AC bonus from armor is replaced by DR. So full-plate would give you DR 8. This can be bypassed in many ways however. They have a called shot attack which has multiple uses.

Some of these are the basic called shot (-4 penalty) to hit a specific body part. There is a called shot to bypass armor which imposes a penalty of twice the DR of the target. And a few others.

They also use defense bonuses with these rules, but they are not very high.

Actually, dwarves get some automatic proficiencies too, as do half-orcs. I actually like these as they encourage the race to use weapons that their races favors without having to spend a proficiency feat.

Half-orcs like the big 2-handed weapons, dwarves are axe/hammer guys, elves like the long slender blades and bows, etc. etc.

I say keep it.

Also, I don't think the race part becomes "invisible" at higher levels due to the way skills work now. A flat +2 in a skill becomes invisible real fast, but actually being considered "trained" in that skill means it goes up every level. Another great change IMO.

I can see the rationale behind a LOT of the skill groupings in the Alpha release.

I have already combined Listen and Spot, and Hide and Move Silently in all my home campaigns, and my players love it.

I firmly believe that there are far too many skills in 3.5, especially when you consider all the specialized skills such as Craft, Knowledge, Perform and Profession.

So I say the less skills the better.

Although I do agree that Climb and Swim should remain as separate skills. This is easy enough to imagine since Balancing, Jumping, and Tumbling are all obviously related. But if you look at rock climbing and swimming, these are very specialized sports and require years of training to become proficient at.

I actually dislike the usage of magic items all together but I still let my players have free choice of whatever they want in our Savage Tide campaign.

Even with that and the min-maxers in the group, I have had a whole slew of PC deaths. Every player is on their 2nd, 3rd, or 4th character in that campaign, so now the characters playing are totally different than the ones who initially started the campaign. Kind of a disappointment as far as story goes, but as my players have learned, these adventure paths are really tough and if you don't get the magic gear you want, its just that much harder.

I can't wait to run Pathfinder with True20 next though, since that game system doesn't require magic items at all.