Jeremy Mac Donald's page

Did monsters change a lot in the "D&D Essentials" run? I know that classes from Essentials tended to be less power oriented, by and large, and I wondered if monsters were too.

I've done a number of posts on monsters in 4E but pretty much the bottom line is monsters changed a lot throughout the course of 4E. To the point where I attempt to use monsters created after the release of Darksun and avoid using those made before that date.

This can get to extremes with the monsters made around the time of the original Monster Manual being just aweful - a failure by WotC to really understand the role of Monsters in Dungeons and Dragons really.

Monsters improved as time went on. The original design of monsters had emphasized simplicity. The monsters had few powers and the goal was to make monsters that would fit into small stat blocks and be easy to run. It is worth noting that at this stage WotC still believed that 4E was going to have fast combat. The monsters where not only too weak - especially in regards to how much damage they did (trivial amounts) but where straight out boring - having awesome PC powers is only 1 part of the fun - beating boring monsters it turns out is not actually all that entertaining.

By Monster Manual Two the first fixes where in and this pretty much involved generally giving monsters more powers to make them not only a little more powerful but also more interesting. It helps a bit and some of the monsters have interesting powers but low damage out put still means the monsters are very weak.

Monster Manual 3 (and monsters made in books from around this period) continue the trend, damage remains far too low but monsters start to get a more focused suite of powers, which is to say not just attack powers but other kinds of helpful powers more often. Powers a better designed not to 'overlap' as much. Basically giving a monster 3 attack powers that all require a standard action is usually not ideal. It is usually only going to use one of them. However by this stage when this happens usually they at least do different things - a focused attack and a ranged attack for example. If the monster really fits I'll customize an MM3 Monster where as I will alomost always simply skip over an earlier one.

Darksun was the real watershed moment in Monster Design - they finally serously upped the amount of damage monsters can do and some of the Darksun Monsters are the most nasty creatures in the game. I don't really hesitate to use Darksun Monsters though a few of them have powers that are actually to powerful - usually something along the lines of 'first failed saving throw = death'. Also the Solo problem still exists with Darksun Monsters.

Essentials is nearly perfect - I still do some customization for my very min maxed group to make most more powerful but the tweaks are needed least for Essentials (and the books that come after). This is the best place to find Solo's in particular with most of them being designed to take into account the fact that PCs are going to try and stun or daze them. They have ways out of this sort of stuff and usually ways to take a lot of actions in a turn to challenge a larger group.

There was one final evolution right at the very end of the edition where we seemed to kind of go full circle with monsters becoming much simpler - however they where extremely hard hitting. I assume this was kind of testing for 5E. I'm not super enamored with this last design. It just does not save that much time in the long 4E combats but makes the monsters less interesting opponents but they are still basically fine and can be good for some roles.

So the answer actually is that Essentials Monsters are more power orientated not less but that is for the best...but one should avoid using more then two of the same type of monster if they are fairly complex (after effects to powers - lots of encounter or recharge when first bloodied type powers - interrupts).

Yeah, I've read them. They generally start with round one - a dragon surrounded (somehow) by a couple of hundred militia at short range. I know lots of people enjoy those kinds of analyses, I just don't find them very instructive as to how the game plays (which is what I care about).

In game - there's no way a hundred militia can kill a dragon. They'd always prefer to hire four heroes than traipse off, hoping to surround the dragon unnoticed, and then engage in a fight where more than half of them will die before they might have a chance to kill it.

I think it is worth pointing out that the fact that the army of any sizable urban centre can stop a dragon does not mean that they don't prefer to send in 'experts'.

After all with a reasonably smart dragon fifty through to maybe a couple of hundred soldiers die plus possible collateral damage. Far better to send the experts to deal with a dragon then face that.

Truth is I don't really think you and GreyWolfLord are disagreeing - except maybe in regards to the Epicness of hero's in 5E versus PF.

In this I agree with GreyWolfLord. In PF PCs are far superior to other men by 5th level and by 10th they are pretty much Demi-Gods, admittedly in a world full of other Demi-Gods and creatures that can poise a threat to Demi-Gods.

5E hews closer to a baseline where the PCs are really just more like Hero's and do not, at least nearly so quickly, reach the point where no number of lesser beings poise a threat. That army that can stop a Dragon can stop the 10th level PCs as well. In PF only the other Demi-Gods residing in the city can stop the PCs not the army.

That was kind of my thought.

To some extent the stories I've heard of very early Gygax style play seem to fit the sandbox paradigm. OTOH, none of the earliest published adventures do. It certainly wasn't part of my early experiences. Once past the middle-school Monty Haul stage, we moved pretty much straight into the "Hickman story" version, though predating that, IIRC. Nor nearly so constrained. But other than through Dragon and those who went to conventions, there wasn't as much contact between groups as there is now, so it's quite possible everyone else was deep in sandbox mode.

I don't think I came across the concept until some discussions on Usenet back in the late 90s. And didn't know the term, at least in that contect until much later.

I think to some significant degree its simply a matter of demographics. As you point out the published adventures don't really support the idea and while the system does its not really spelled out or even supported in the rules. That does not mean that mature and intelligent groups did not discover this style of gaming and get into it. I'm sure they did...but to have been part of such a group you really had to have been at least...I don't know, say, 17 years old in 1980 to have really been part of this style of gaming for any length of time. Which means if your not at least 52 years old its doubtful you could actually have been part of such a fad for any length of time. Look around the boards - how many people here are 52 years or older and where playing D&D back in 1980? That number is exceedingly small.

So yeah no doubt such games existed but very few people played in them during the actual era. Most of even the old timers around here where doing as you say Monte Haul type gaming not in depth campaign worlds done in a sandbox style during this period. Certianly I was as I was 13 years old in 1985. I was just about at the point where I'd figured out what Monte Haul style gaming was and was about to start turning my noise up at it like I was some how too mature to play in 'that style'.

There is a reason why everyone can talk about those old Adventure Modules and say what happened when they went through them - that was what was going on for the majority of gamers. One way or another your DM was leading you to the adventure and then you where going through it.

Certainly you don't see Gygax or anyone like that talking about this style of gaming and he was not running it. I just did a conversion of Isle of the Ape which was published in 1985. That adventure starts with the PCs being summoned by, I think Tenser, and he tells the PCs to go to the Isle of the Ape and get the Crook of Rao. What if the PCs have other plans? Well Gygax tells the DM that if the players balk in any way then he should stop the game and inform the players that they are role playing their characters wrong. Seriously - read the module it is in there.

I think this is in fact one of the reasons Hickman D&D was so successful - for the vast majority of groups the alternative to story driven D&D was not sandbox D&D but simply storyless D&D. Though Ravneloft and Dragonlance did a pretty phenomenal sales job as well...especially if you where more like early teens when those adventures came out.

My take is that a lot of the 'old school feel' in 5E comes from what is in essence an emphasis on fast not particularly complex combats. However crazy complex 2nd edition was much of the time in actual combat it pretty much came down to roll a d20 and if you hit then you did damage and it was the next guys turn. 5E seems to be making a concerted effort to return to that. I'll concede that when I was playing 2nd edition combats often actually got a lot more complex then that but if you stripped 1st or 2nd edition down to its core it pretty much worked like that and this seems to be what 5E is going for - roll your d20 and then its the next guys turn.

Thanks for the tips, Jeremy!

I wonder if SCs would have caught on better if the DMG had somehow described them without giving them a title. Like, if there was just a table of DCs for complex non-combat encounters, an explanation of how to use them, and a few examples. Granted, that wouldn't have made the original SC math any better, but I wonder...

Maybe. I mean ultimately WotC did do some series of articles in which interesting Skill Challenges where gone over. The big problem is that the enemy of Skill Challenges is any kind of hard and fast rules. What your really doing is designing a skill based mini game to cover some adventuring situation that is both interesting in its own right works with the adventure whether or not it succeeds (often due to the idea of fail forward) and can be explored with the use of a diverse assortment of skills. This is sort of what I mean when I say I've gone at them from all sorts of directions. I mean I'm roughly using the 4 or 6 before 3 rules (because the maths - they work) but am otherwise usually building a mini game to explore the advance the slave army or sneaking past a sleeping dragon or what have you.

Furthermore its worth pointing out I certainly have my failures even with quite a lot of experience. Heck part of that experience is in figuring out how to best get the heck out of a Skill Challenge that has gone sideways, preferably without my players knowing that they where ever in one never mind that I'm aborting it because its not working.

The problem with trying to put them into a rule book is that they really are so varied in how the DM can handle them that its hard to convey this. I mean thinking about it the last one I ran - where the PCs led their freed slave army into the war, was one where I violated my single most cardinal rule of Skill Challenges - never let your PCs know they are in one. My players figured out they where in one pretty quickly and I knew that in this case they would figure out they where in one. I just did not care for this particular scene the most important element was to role play them leading the Slave Army into the War. This was their 'We ARE the big damn HERO'S scene' of the campaign. I mean I had often been pretty mean to them early on and a lot of the time they had felt like small fish in a big pond but here I wanted to really convey that now they had made their mark on the world.

To role play that without it just being them listening to me blabber was the real goal and a Skill Challenge of them leading their army toward the climatic battle was just what the Doctor ordered. If they would always deal with the challenges of that march through having the best player handle the problem well that was no problem. After all the scene took place over the course of about a week. The PCs had more then enough time to discuss among themselves who would take point on dealing with the issues that came up.

A 4e DM once commented that SCs are best used as an informal framework to hang complex challenges on -- don't tell the players they're in a SC; just use the SC math to adjudicate the degree of their success or failure. That sounds like wisdom, and I know that many DMs like Jeremy have gotten SCs to work.

I'll emphasize that I never tell my players they are in a Skill Challenge and if they figure it out to quickly then that often, though not always, results in a busted or at least less interesting Skill Challenge because it turns into a boring scripted routine in which the players scan their skills, discuss who has the best skills that might apply and who has the 2nd best. Then the best makes the skill roll while the second best aids him. This eats up time, is completely non-immersive and is boring. On the other hand if the players are just doing stuff and you sometimes ask for a roll...well that is good gaming.

Furthermore the idea that SC are an informal framework where you start the design process but not where you finish it is key. I've gone at skill challenges from a lot of different directions over the years. There are group checks where the whole group makes some of the rolls and there was a scene with the Players trying to cross a river where I had the players describe what they where going to do. How they planned to get over the river and after I (secretly) counted about 7 or so separate events that I figured would involve a roll I rolled the clock back and said - OK lets play through this. So Gladness starts by hammering a prong into the wall to tie the rope onto...OK Mike give me an athletics check...and then Slick Rick flew across and did the same thing on the other side and...

In this case for example my players described what they where going to do organically and only after the fact did I introduce the Skill Checks. By no means is this the only way to handle this however. The main key is to try and make sure that your players don't know that they are in a SC. This does mean calling on skill use outside of SC and you should do so a lot. Reality is more often then not the scene in question simply does not justify a SC but a skill roll will be fine. This helps disguise the SC's when they do come up. You don't want your players associating Skill Use with a Skill Challenge so pick your moments for putting one in. There are a LOT of times and places where they are simply inappropriate and getting good ones means learning to recognize when you'll end up with a bad one.

Competent protagonists from the start, episodic story-telling, "Monster-of-the-Week" style. So Conan, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, Doctor Who, perhaps Spiderman on some arcs. Sadly while individual power inflation was toned down from other editions it's still too much to do that in a satisfactory manner, unless you restricted your characters to one tier of play. If they'd combined the basic structure with the "bounded accuracy" concept that's so badly implemented in 5e, that would have been a closer match for the sort of literature that D&D always seemed to be trying to do and failing at.

Here I agree with you. One of the unfortunate elements of 4E is that their is this constant number escalation that serves no real purpose but is so entwined into the system that you can't really get rid of it.

The most obvious example is in the skill DCs. They go up by 1/2 per level and the recommended DC by level chart does pretty much the same thing. As I mention above I go so far as to essentially chase the PCs with the recommended by level DC ratings in order to keep them bounded as mere mortals for as long as possible. This simply means that, on average, the DC to pole vault over a counter rises at about 1/2 a point per level right along with my PCs increases. Its pretty much always about the same target number. That is a bunch of calculations that really don't need to be in the game. If it was not so built into the system I'd rather that PCs skills don't rise except when they boost their stats or if they decide to actually pick up Skill Focus or some such. In this manner one could have set DCs that, very slowly, get ever easier so that by 16th level or what not Pole Vaulting over counters is simply trivial.

Seems to me that it lends itself towards a Monte Haul style of game play. Its practically a Wargame rules set with a thin layer of storytelling mechanic wrapped around it to give resolution mechanics to the non-combat events that tie the fights together into a narrative.

It was an interesting idea, but sadly it felt far too much like playing a very slow version of some kind of video game. Blue Drake is right. It would have made a great video game engine. It makes a piss poor storytelling apparatus.

If you feel like using it to run your games, skip the grand plot, make characters motivated by exploration and money, google up a random dungeon generator, and enjoy the combat.

This is the exact opposite of what you want to do with the system. It won't work. For the combats to take advantage of of the high mobility in combat and all the forced movement powers you need to design your combats carefully. Your looking at something to the tune of roughly 5-7 combats per level and each of those combats should be well thought out. They need to be in an interesting environment where the powers and mobility are going to be shown off. An automated Fish Processing Factory, for example, makes a good scene for a combat. Here your going to want to explain all the interesting features on the map and how they work (Actually write this stuff down on the map so your players can see it). You want to know which direction the conveyer belts go and how much forced movement they do per turn and when that forced movement takes place. If there are counters with fish on them then you need to know what the Athletics DC is to move over them without slipping and what happens if you flunk the roll. In this example I went with creature falls prone, slides one space in a random direction (use a d8) and ends the current action. If a PC or monster uses a Power like Drop Kick to push an enemy into the automated Fish deboner then you need to know how much damage the Fish deboner does. Etc, etc.

If your not spending a lot of time on your encounters (both in designing them and in playing them out) your probably doing it wrong. Because of this limit the number your going to handle in the adventure but make those that come up excellent encounters.

On the other hand the out of combat adventuring can be really quite excellent. The system is intentionally set up so that all characters are roughly equally good inside and outside of combat and you don't have to worry about the mage or cleric using a spell to solve the adventure. No such spells until the highest levels. This means that all the Players get to have fun when the weapons stay sheathed. There is no Bard whose job is to talk to all the NPCs nor is the fighter useless outside of a fight. Use this to make elaborate adventures between the fights.

In particular I've found 4E to be an excellent system for city adventuring and my current campaign focuses on the PCs being investigators that solve various kinds of mystery's.

My most recent Adventure was called Tinker Tailor Soldier Spider and if you think that your pretty sure you recognize most of that title...yeah your right.

In fact I ripped off Le Carre's novel completely. I spent hours taking notes on the 6 part BBC miniseries until I new the plot backwards and forwards - then I turned it into a 4E D&D adventure. Anyone that has read the book or seen one of the movies (I recommend the BBC mini series - it was excellent) knows that the story is all about the discovery of a Mole in the upper ranks of the Spy organization and the story is about how that spy is ferreted out. Of course in my version I interspersed this with 6 combats...though the first took place to foreshadow the adventure and the last three where final combats that took place once the Mole had been discovered and backtracked to his handler. My examples of a fight in an automated Fish Processing Factory is from one of the combat scenes I ran in the middle of this adventure.

In any case as even at 14th level there are no spells or magic powers of the PCs that would allow the PCs to side step the adventure (via intelligent use of a spell or more likely a combo of spells) the PCs were forced to interact with my cast of weird and wacky NPCs until they got to the point where they believed they had figured out who the Mole was. Then they carefully had one of the other NPCs they had talked to feed the mole (false) information that they knew would be significant to the Moles master (The aforesaid Spider of the Adventures Title) and this sent the mole racing off to tell his master what he had just learned. They then just followed him back to The Spiders Secret Base and the final epic climax.

A big one in my case as the PCs have been facing off against the shadowy Spider (who pulls all the strings from behind the scenes) from level 1 and in the final fight one of the Players revealed that he had secretly been one of her agents since the beginning. When he turned around and gutted the parties cleric there was chaos at the Game Table. Of course I had worked all of this out with the player in question before this combat but for the rest of my players - well I've never had one PC betray the party before so it was a pretty dramatic scene.

In any case this is an example of what 4E is good at and if you have a hankering to do some investigative style city adventuring I recommend the system. No plot breaking magic to ruin your adventures and no single class (such as a bard) whose entire role within the party is to shine outside of combat...thus making not fighting this particular players 'spotlight moment'. Swords being sheathed is no players spotlight moment and they are all expected to participate and are roughly equal to each other when doing so.

I agree with your points 1 and 2 but not necessarily with 3 and 4.

I'll start with point #4 because its the easiest. If Skill Challenges don't work for you well then don't use them. If they do well then go right ahead. Game works either way so just go with your preference.

All that said I have found that its pretty easy to get a crappy Skill Challenge and I've found that making good ones often require quite a bit of work as well as some idea as to why it is you want a skill challenge in this spot for them to be good...most of the time. They do work quite well for major trap disarms and the like as well. In this case they are just being used simply as a kind of compromise. Yes the characters can use their skills to say shut down the mechanical monster...which is more variable then simply saying it has to be killed through HP damage but they need to do more then just make a single skill roll (because that would be too easy).

Point #3 is were I'm not all that clear on whether I agree with you or not. I mean I have no idea what you mean by 'Mythic'. OK I would not really want a basic Blacksmith that took up adventuring most of the time mainly because one can do better in the Drama Department. A Blacksmith with 'something' in her background that can be used for character development is fine however. Maybe her Father had some dark secret that will become relevant later in the campaign or maybe she is actually related to the Fey or who knows...but something is better then nothing in this regards for the same reason TV show characters work better if they have interesting elements in their history...its just better drama and story telling.

On the other hand I have found that 4E works best for me when it is essentially 'grounded'. When the PCs are pretty much mortals with some cool combat moves as opposed to fledgling Gods. 4E does a very good job in this department as well. The Dm sets the vast majority of the DCs so one can pretty much chase PCs with target numbers appropriate for their level for a lot of the game. Hence sure you can pole vault over the counter as part of your move...if you can make a DC medium Acrobatics or Athletics check.

This is good stuff as 4E combats are often pretty mobile and the PCs have limited access to the really crazy stuff the DM can keep them in this range for a really long time. The whole friggen party does not have access to fly. Its not going to happen. One character this turn might be able to leap 15 feet into the air and make a swing with a power, which is pretty fantastic for a 10th level character but its not quite at the point where the whole group flies over the mountain...something they are not going to be able to manage until very high levels.

I've stated this sort of preference at length before but as a rule I'm looking at my PCs as being pretty mortal until around 5th level and even after that they are more like James Bond until 16th. At 16th...well now they are Mythic. That's the point when they really are starting to takes steps toward destinies and such that will reveal that they are newly risen Angels or the like. At this point I'm going with DCs that make pole vaulting over the counter trivial and putting DCs for ever more crazy stuff into the adventure.

I think the system really does support this sort of thing. Other Editions can have some pretty tough Orcs but in 4E they are pretty much on the table right until about the end of the Heroic Tier. I'd say Elite Veteran Guardsmen and the like are also challenges roughly to this point and the PCs then go through a period where only Famous Named Mercenaries and such are on their level right up until the point where the PCs get to 16th level. After that their really are no more 'mortal' threats that really phase them. Only Arch mages and the like are now on their level. At this stage they have gone beyond the Ken of mortal men and their deeds are the stuff of bards songs. By 21st and beyond their deeds are the stuff of legends. People will be talking about them when the countries they have grew up in fade away and new nations arise...

Going to pretty much agree with the crowd here regarding Night Below. In some significant ways I think this extended adventure might actually be better for a group of Teenagers then for the 'I've seen it all before' adult D&D player. Night Below uses a lot of pretty iconic Underdark tropes but does not often really push any boundaries. Your jaded adult player will find that the adventure holds few real surprises but for Teenagers this will be the first time most of them have encountered these tropes. It'll all be new to them.

I would suggest maybe Dragon Mountain. It is fairly inoffensive and involves lots of different types of adventures. Given the size of the module, it is almost Adventure Path-like in that requires several side quests and is extensive before and after reaching the actual main dungeon/lair. It's a 2.0 ready adventure, so minimal adjustments are needed and the level progression is fairly consistent.

The problem with Dragon Mountain is that to really get the feel the adventure is going for you have to have been playing long enough to have developed a low opinion of kobolds. Then when the little buggers are slowly dragging the PCs down in the adventure its all the more impactful that its kobolds doing this.

A good 2nd or 3rd campaign adventure - or fine for a group that is maybe returning to 2nd edition.

...and it starts to emerge that Israel was looking for a fight, probably to break up any possibility of a unity government between Hamas and Fatah.

A number of things stand out for me here. For starters using this as a pretext to launch such a bloody attack is pretty far beyond the pale.

Secondly it stands out that Israel has repeatedly condemned Hamas as an evil terrorist organization but then decides to launch a brutal attack against it when there seems to be some chance that it might come under less radical leadership. Strikes me that the governing body, especially the current right wing governing body, wants there to be an angry radicalized terrorist organization on the border. Helps so much with domestic politics if their is an Enemy at the Gates.

As to the tunnels - the back up apparent explanation for all this bloodshed. Have they ever been used to attack civilians? I can't find anything except attacks of Israeli soldiers. Furthermore is this really the most effective solution? Invade Gaza to find the tunnels? I mean if the problem is tunnels that come out on the Israeli side of the fence why go to Gaza to find them when one could spend their time rather peacefully looking for them on the Israeli side?

The delaying tactic that you've mentioned is employed by both sides - Hamas often demands that prisoners (often "heavyweight" prisoners - those who either executed or orchestrated some of the worse attacks against Israel) will be released and construction stop not only in settlements, but also in Jerusalem, as prerequisite terms for peace talks. And, often, after getting what they wanted, they also find a reason to blow up negotiations.

It's a pattern that repeats itself in both sides, which suggests that the issue is not as simple as disputes over lands. Both sides need to accept the other's right to exist, and they don't seem able to. I just used the recent term of acknowledging Israel as a Jewish state as a very clear cut example. I think acknowledging reality IS a trivial thing (as we can all agree, Israel is a Jewish state and a national home for Jews), unless you think that reality needs to change.

There is no way the Palestinians are going to concede that and all it implies (no right of return, no single state option etc.) without at least a major Israeli concession of some equal magnitude. Demanding that it just be given up, for free, as a condition for everyone to even sit at the table was clearly intended to insure that no one would ever sit at the table and the Americans would go home.

Lord Snow wrote:

This is why I (and most sane people) support the two-state-solution to the conflict - Palestinians get to gain independence, illegal settlements are either destroyed or become part of the new Palestinian state and the two nations declare a ceasefire. After such a solution takes place, remaining terrorists who decide to act against Israel on their own volition will be jointly handled by the two countries. A similar in agreement is in effect between Israel and Egypt, and it works rather well.

It used to work rather well, but the current Egyptian government no longer honors it. You have the U.S. to thank for that scenario going south. Just Israel has been too busy to notice one of its long-time friends is no longer friendly.

Your kidding right?

The pro-American Egyptian Military overthrew the democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood government and are currently dutifully hunting down the Muslim Brotherhood supporters and other anti-Isreali elements.

I mean last year we had the rather Orwellian speech by Obama along the lines of 'We will not say it was a coup, we will not say it wasn't a coup - we'll just not say'. This of course because America made the mistake at some point of passing a law saying that they won't send huge sums of foreign aid to countries that throw coups and depose democratically elected governments...but since America really wanted this military to oust this democratically elected government that law had to be...err...ignored.

Anyway at this point Egypt, and in particular her military, are one of the top recipients of U.S. Foreign Aid and for good reason.

From Wikileaks
"President Mubarak and military leaders view our military assistance program as the cornerstone of our mil-mil relationship and consider the USD 1.3 billion in annual FMF as "untouchable compensation" for making and maintaining peace with Israel. The tangible benefits to our mil-mil relationship are clear: Egypt remains at peace with Israel, and the U.S. military enjoys priority access to the Suez Canal and Egyptian airspace."

Now this is from 2009 but if you replace Former Air Force Commander President Mubrak with the Former Commander and Chief of the Egyptian Military President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi it amounts to the same thing.

I'm not quite sure why you don't just use Greyhawk? I agree that it is unlikely to get much, if any, new support but you should be able to take the material you already have and build a whole campaign around that.

Do we really need a pile of posts arguing about Scott's behavior back in the edition wars?

Please.

Well I was not on Candlekeep so no idea what happened there and I'll concede that maybe WotC was not exactly walking on eggshells in their marketing but my general impression is that whether or not you where insulted seemed to have a hell of a lot more to do with whether or not you liked the direction things where going or not.

Scott might not be the same age as you but I'm in the ballpark and yet was not insulted...probably because I liked the direction 4E was headed and that really seemed to be the divide.

I think this whole aspect is magnified by the fan base. I mean I feel like WotC really is walking on eggshells with the release of 5E and yet despite bending over backwards to not be insulting if you go looking among some of the crowd of 4E adherents that don't plan to switch (of which I am one) you'll still manage to find a reasonable number of people angry at WotC and claiming that everything they say or do is basically a laser guided insult to 4E players.

My feeling is that whatever the flaws of the 4E marketing where it pales in comparison to what fanbase projected onto events during what was a very polarizing edition change.

(I can't believe Paizo's spell check flags lich; that's just shoddy workmanship! :P )

No such thing as a Paizo Spell check...restricted words yes but no spell check. Its your browsers spell check.

I'm seriously doubtful regarding the wider audience element. There are a number of well received classless systems out there. Hero System for example but none of them really manage to garner as much love as the class based systems.

I think a big part of the love for class based systems is it works as a short hand for who has what party role and most groups want that built in element of co-operation in their game. In effect this insures that the players are different, are going to support each other as part of a team and are all going to be important.

This element is more difficult to achieve in a classless system. If everyone is looking at a blank slate and then starts to create their character its more difficult for the game to be about these characters co-operating to overcome challenges and its less likely that the adventure will be one that everyone has a near equal opportunity to participate in.

Now that last could be addressed by a good DM but for a game company I suspect its a hurdle - how to design an off the shelf adventure when there is no baseline for what kinds of characters are going to be playing in it? One can get D&D groups that have problems handling the adventure because they are none standard but at least they know why things are posing a problem for them. You'll here a lot of 'Some one should really have made a thief...now what guys?' and that sort of thing. In a classless system you can't really expect anything and that is hard to design for. I suspect this is one of the reasons why most of the classless systems out there are much more tied into their background material. Its classless but the game itself is about X so design characters that can do X. The premise actually focuses character creation and your players are back to building a team. In this case one meant to deal with whatever the premise of the RPG is.

Classless, especially with very a wide exponential of premises for what the RPG will be about, present a fairly high hurdle for the group to initially overcome before they can really understand the game and how to play it. Without the direction inherent in either a premise or a class based system your down to the groups making their characters and then going through the DMs adventure and all through this early part of the campaign both the players and the DM are busy essentially learning how to play in/create a functioning adventure. All of this can be overcome but it seems historically one does not really see the masses going out to find this sort of system to play in.

Jeremy Mac Donald wrote:

Zardnaar wrote:

Apart from that have a lawyer handy as well. Make it look at least superficially similar to BECMI/AD&D/3rd ed which are covered by the OGL.

Your mistaken here. There is absolutely no wording in the OGL that says anything one way or another about 1st edition, 2nd edition, BECMI etc. There might be wording about 3rd. The OGL was never meant to facilitate cloning BECMI, it just so happens that it allows pretty much anything - want to make a super hero game well go ahead and people did and in the same way as you can use the OGL to make a superhero game you can use it to make a BECMI clone or a 4E clone.

Just make sure you don't include intellectual property like Mind Flayers or Waterdeep. All that said best to have a lawyer look things over.

The OGL was only granted to mechanics that were printed in the Systems Reference Document (SRD). Unless WOTC changed it's mind and put up a 4th Edition SRD that I don't know about, you'd have to license the mechanics from them.

A good example of how to take pretty much any 4E concept and convert it into the OGL can be found in the 13th Age SRD - check it out.

It is irrelevant what WotC put out in their 4E license because your retro clone is coming out under the OGL. Mechanics can't be copyrighted the thing you have to stay away from is intellectual property and that is stuff like Waterdeep and Mind Flayers. Yeah before you start charging for a clone maybe you want to pass it by a lawyer to be on the safe side but on the face of it so long as you stay away from intellectual property there is no reason you can't clone 4E.

YMMV, of course, but at my table saying "f@+* you" to the DM happens with regularity and is usually followed by me cackling with glee.

Heh - this is true for me as well. If I can't get at least one of the players to say 'Your an a~#*!*!' during a session I start wondering if I messed up on the session or some such.

I've also had a situation fairly recently where I denied a player a class, well a Theme really in my case but same thing pretty much. The difference may have been my reasoning as the player wanted to pick this kind of crazy 'your possessed by something from the Far Realm' type choice and I pretty much said 'Oh man that is such an awesome option and one day I really want to do a campaign where we can look at this sort of thing 'cause the Far Realm rocks and the whole Cthulhu madness thing is cool...but it does not fit with the plot line of the current campaign you'd be taking an awesome choice that I would, by necessity have to ignore and that would be such a shame. Pick something else and we'll save that story for another campaign'. The fact that I told the player that he could not be all about the Far Realm in no way means that I can't have some villain, for one reason or another, be about the Far Realm in my opinion.

Can't imagine my players complaining about this either.

lokiare wrote:

snopes there are lots of things more complex...

A link to a rant on an internet messageboard is not proof.

True though the human organism is not the most complex organism on the planet so its improbable that the human brain alone is the most complex thing around.

Interesting finding, maybe the most interesting finding of the Human Genome project. We are not as complex as we thought we where. When they began to conduct the Human Genome project scientists had already done the DNA for a number of living things. Some of them really small like virus but also lab mice and fruit flies. At this point many groups of scientists made bets on how many genes they would find in humans when the Human Genome project was completed and it was of course essentially a guess by each scientist on how much more complex you think humans are then Lab mice.

Well it turns out that whoever chose the lowest number of genes always won the pool because scientists generally estimated that we would have between five and ten times as many genes as lab mice...we don't, we have roughly the same number of genes as lab mice. It was a shocking finding - I mean most species of cactus have more genes then we do. Completely at odds with what everyone and their brothers dog (in the scientific community of course) expected to find and it turned the whole science of genetics on its head for the next decade.

Of course in the years since we have essentially come to understand what the heck it is we are seeing and these days you read in Wired Magazine that they plan to make Dinosaurs out of Chickens. In reality what was found was that evolution does not, as previously thought, necessarily make more genes - its actually all in the timing. Hence if you fiddle with the timing in expressing the genes of Hens you get Hens with teeth. Chickens are dinosaurs and if you want them to be more like their ancestors well we are getting to the point where we can do that...in theory we can do the same with humans, by fiddling with the timing of gene expression we could make a human that had strong characteristics of our ancient ancestors.

As to the Cacti...the reason they are more complicated then we are is because they have to be. Cactus can't move...mammals essentially get off easy - we can have a handful of genes that essentially say 'IF this place sucks THEN go to some other place'. Can't do that if your a cactus so you need to evolve genes to defend you from being eaten by different parasites and more genes to deal with what to do if it does not rain for a decade etc. etc.

Sounds more like some sort of VR. Beam me up Scottie.

Its missing my friends and their stupid jokes. I go out on Thursday night to hang out with my friends - sure we slay dragons but that is not the primary motivation. Being with my friends is the primary motivation.

I'll pass thank you very much.

D&D Next is perfectly balanced, perfectly dull and perfectly restrictive. It is to role-playing what minimalism is to the visual arts. There is zero flavor and even less creativity or care in D&D Next. Honestly, it reads like something a Ritalin-addicted sixth grader might have come up with during middle school class, when he was supposed to be paying attention, but wasn't.

Overall, my impression of the game is infinite sterility and laziness. For example: only four totem choices for the Barbarian. Really? Are Barbarians in D&D only familiar with four types of animals? Or can they for some reason only acquire power associated with four types of animals? Also, the rest of the Barbarian's abilities are all about rage. In D&D Next, all Barbarians are alike: raging, angry, vicious warriors with a few token animal-related abilities. What about the possibility of noble savages, loving caretakers of the earth, shamanistic barbarians, seafaring barbarians, and so on? Because all Barbarians are assigned abilities which absolutely shape the flavor of characters in a single direction, all Barbarians in D&D Next are basically the same. And this is bad. Very bad.

Likewise, Druids only have five animal shapes to choose from. All of them have zero flavor - they all have name like Shape of the Steed, Shape of the Fish, Shape of the Hound, etc. More laziness. How about names like Canine Shapechange, or Avian Metamorphosis? See how easy it is to be creative? But the idiots at the D&D department of WoTC are unwilling to make any kind of mental effort to come up with good abilities and good names for them.

Also, Druids gain an ability called Evergreen, which is supposedly the plant ability that allows evergreen trees great longevity. This is one of the dumbest and lamest things I've ever heard of, because it isn't within a larger context of a Druid subtype that specifically acquires plant-related abilities.

I've heard alot of people say that D&D Next is a return to old-school gaming. This is false....

Wow...you went through all the trouble of signing up on Pazio just so you could tell us this.

Anyway instead you have these greatly inflexable power system they came up. The limition of such a system is...

1) I think there are about a handful of character concepts I could have built in 3.5/PF that would be impoosible to build with all the souce books 4th ed churned out. So it gives you a illusion of choice that you had in 3.5/PF...without delivering it.

I think 3.5/PF likely allows more possible options, though there are many that don't feel the same, but its not really an illusion of choice. Both systems offer vastly more options then one will ever get to play...even if you stick to just this system until they lay you in your grave. Furthermore its not completely one sided. One of the strengths of the power and multi-classing system was that it made many popular options function well. The most obvious being Gish. Hence there are concepts that one can realize in 4E much more easily the in 3.x.

2) The power system made multi classing almost impossible...when they finally gave rules for it it came with large warnings: "This may break your game." Which again cuts deeply into character flexabilty...goner are the Wizard/Rogues and Fighter/wizards...probably replaced with new classes...but those came with even more Powers...also driving up the complexity needlessly.

Well they never did break the game and in fact work very well. If I had to guess I'd say the Paladin/Warlock is probably the most popular combination. It is not needless complexity any more then it is needless complexity to add more spells then just the ones in the core book to Pathfinder. More spells offer some more options and this is especially important if one wants to introduce different kinds of spell casters.

4E starts off with making it so that newbs can learn and be effective very easily but there is a very large and deep system to master for those that want to delve into it. Obviously that is the kind of game WotC wants to make because it allows many splat books but then it happens to be true of 3.5 and Pathfinder as well.

3) Almost every concept need Powers made to make that concept workable...again this is highly ineffective and complicated...as you need to look though how many books? Even looking though DDI could be tough. And if they did not have powers to cover your concept...well than you have to either hope your GM has the time and ability to make them..or will allow you to do so.

In fact you handle this the same way as one handles spell casters in 3.x. There is no requirement to have memorized every spell in the game to pick a spell caster in 3.x because you know what the casters pretty much do. You can skip memorizing their 3rd level spells until you get to a level you can cast them. Same in 4E. You have a rough idea what sorts of things the class can do, after that you focus on picking their powers when you actually get to choose them. This is especially true because I don't think you build character concepts based on specific powers but on the broad gist of what the kinds of powers the class gets access to. Any specific power outside of the at wills chosen at 1st level are only used at most once per combat. The result is that the important element is the general thrust of your powers. Most classes however have a number of possible general thrusts that once can take. The more advanced players learned to mix and match general thrusts to get even more honed toward whatever concepts they where aiming for...well presuming they where trying to get laser like focus. Sometimes one is going for utility and trying to cover all the bases that one can.

4) And than you had the endless power books...what at one time two a month...so you having powers made at agreat speed...chances are they will mess up...which was the reason why there was endless errata.

Well yes. Upon initial release there clearly was a need to get a lot of powers out there. The initial offering was kind of giving one the tools to make just a couple of themes per class because one generally only had a few power choices per level. The extra books put a lot more options on the table which I think was needed early on. Became much less common later in the edition when that initial need had been filled. It also meant that the ways one can make a class grew somewhat exponentially because you had the obvious themes that where being supported but advanced players figured out whats of mixing and matching the themes to create new concepts.

In the end however I think your pretty much slamming the system for being a class based system. Worse yet its a class based system that your only going to become truly versed in by actually playing for long hours.

For example there are different reasons to take the different leaders in the game. Clerics have the best healing and depending on how the cleric is built that can go from very good for example with many melee focused cleric meant to also fight to the truly unreal (a pacifist cleric being the epitome of a healing cleric). Meanwhile a Warlord can heal but really shines in granting his allies actions and saves. Other leaders have strengths and weaknesses as well and one does not get to know all the subtlety's without playing. Its easy to look up what a class more or less does but if you want to be an advanced player and understand which leader is the best at granting debuffs then that takes time at the table.

This just happens to be a feature of large games with tons of supplements detailing vast numbers of options. I'd not know all the ins and outs of all the classes in Pathfinder without playing a lot of Pathfinder and if I decide to, from the outside, try and master Pathfinder just by reading the books I soon realize that there is simply far too much material to do that. This was true of 3.5 as well. This does not make either of these systems uselessly complex. It just makes them complex.

This is what stands out most with your complaints. The things that you seem to really be slamming 4E for happen to also be true in some significant element for 3.5 and Pathfinder. In every case you mitigate the issue through experience with the system. Play for some time and you master the systems and learn their subtleties. Your issue seems to be that you can't go from expertise in 3.5 straight to expertise in 4E.

And I agree with you about Next not being that way - When they announced Adventure/daily balance not encounter balance, that was a good chunk of it...

I agree with your post and this part I have a comment on.

This bit kind of throws me for a loop. I mean from a game design perspective I can't see the advantage here. Adventure based balance, aka the five minute work day, simply makes it harder to make good adventures. If one goes with encounter balance then the adventure has exactly as many encounters as are needed to tell the story. If one goes with 'adventure balance' then the adventure is supposed to have some specific number of encounters...and the story must conform to this as opposed to the encounters conforming to the story.

Its one of the areas of difficulty with 3.X. You've got this great story put together but so often that really just means one encounter for the day - maybe the village your passing through is hit by slave raiders or what have you...and the wizard, knowing the group will sleep afterword goes nuts with the high level spells. No need to save them.

In effect the adventure is forced to be about something that is a string of linked combats just to keep the game from becoming Wizard presses the I win button...the difficulty is how many story's involve strings of combats? My experience is they don't naturally occur all that often hence everything starts turning into a dungeon (though it might look on the outside like a bakery or a wizards tower) because dungeons are pretty much the natural habitat of a string of combats.

Soundsto me like they designed a game to be tactics, thus leaving many gaping holes and so GMs are loving the feeling of freedom of haveing those holes remain unspecified, thus they say the game is good at story but then complain that the adventures are designed for tactics.

Then why include a diplomacy skill - clearly its not needed.

In fact they did a number of things clearly designed to help with low combat games.

* The obvious one is that the DM and the players are not playing the same game and the rules emphasize structure for the players and freedom for the DM.

* The skill system is set up so that the classes each come with a physical, knowledge and social skill.

* A clear move toward rituals with an emphasis even here on avoiding plot breaking magic.

* All classes designed out of the box to be good both in and out of combat.

* No face class or skill monkey class - but the attributes associated with those classes spread among the other classes so that everyone participates when swords stay sheathed.

Rob Heinsoo created a game that is exceptional for telling stories. A real understanding of the subtleties of the rules makes that clear.

Mike Mearl's would seem to hold that Keep on the Borderland represents the epitome of D&D storytelling. For him it probably does.

Not that WotC was ever any good at making story based adventures in any case. The good stuff like Murder in Oakbridge always came from 3rd parties even in 3rd edition. Even beyond this - if WotC decided to eschew the story telling elements in favour of tactics they did a poor job of it even here. 4E is actually not very good at many small combats down some dank hole. Fewer more epic combats play better to its strengths in this regards.

In any case one of the big saving graces for the 4E DM is because of the emphasis on limiting plot breaking magic and the well balanced skill system the 4E DM can pick and choose from the best story orientated stuff from other era's and run that. Something like A Hot Day in L'Trel can be converted and run for 12th level 4E parties which does open up a lot of excellent material. Personally I think many of the Paizo APs make fantastic gaming in 4E.

However in 4e, if a dabble in something and learn a power, then I am just as effective with that power as someone who has been using it all their lives. That is less realistic then the dabbler learning a new power at novice level and needing to train and sudy with it just as long as the master did in order to become a master at it.

For me whether or not it is more or less realistic is less important then a different element. If you go back to your grade 10 English class one of the things your teacher probably taught you is that in good literature the characters in the story are changed and grow based on the events that take place over the course of the book (or other story telling medium). In my opinion Dungeons and Dragons is essentially a story telling game so I personally feel this element is an important one.

3.x's system means that there are a lot of trap choices and some options that would be good are straight out bad if taken later on. So if I'm just learning to be a monk then I get monk powers but they are very weak. That might be fine if my party and I are all still very low levels but clearly there is a point past which choosing monk levels are effectively off the table. If we are now 10th level its simply to late to go monk become a spell caster etc. because what one gets is so weak that it might as well be irrelevant. In character build terms these choices are inflicting brutal opportunity costs. Hence 3.X emphasizes planning out your character build. Its best to sit down very early in your characters development and plan out everything your character will take out to whatever level the campaign will go to.

In 4E your not punished for making the choices later because their effectiveness is scaled to your level. What this means is you don't have to decide what direction your character is going beforehand but instead you can do it as the story of the campaign develops. In effect 3.x's system encourages characters to be 'immune' to the story that is developing in the campaign itself because the PCs effectiveness is dependent on following the plan the player worked out right near the beginning. 4E PCs can be planned out from day 1 - I have a player who does this but its not required and even he has commented that 'this is his build unless...'

The unless part is because, in my campaign, sometimes dramatic events take place and characters change or grow because of what took place in the story. So one of my players was a psion and it came to pass, during the campaign, that he had a 'Fall from Grace' during a very dramatic scene in the temple of an evil Goddess. The PCs where trapped and defending a bunch of townsfolk but were being overwhelmed. It soon became apparent that the PCs faced two choices. They have the speed and survivability to flee this scene but the townsfolk do not and would therefore die however our Evil Goddess has had her attention attracted to the events unfolding in her temple and she has hatched a dark scheme. She offers one of the players another alternative...pure unadulterated power...enough power to win this battle and there is just a small price...ritual human sacrifice of one of the townsfolk...well and she'll forever have her talons in the PC that performs the human sacrifice because she has plans for an individual of his rising stature. Its just one little townsperson to save all the others. Surely here the ends justify the means? So the player decides to go for the pure power option and after a powerful scene with that townsfolk pleading and begging for his life before being ritualistically murdered the PC in question acquires enough power to win the battle. These events dramatically changed two of the PCs at the table. One of the characters had now become a pawn of an evil Goddess while another PC, the only one who witnessed the sacrifice, went from being an unaligned rogue to devoting his life to the causes of good in order to 'pay for not stopping what my character had witnessed'.

From this point forward both characters where know going down different paths then the ones their players had thought they would take when the campaign had started. The 'Witness' player was maybe more attached to his 'build' and he would change alignment and spend about the next two levels doing some mechanical dabbling in elements that supported his characters new ethos as a paragon of good. Mechanically this player was a rogue who had become an Exalted Champion and picked up some of the powers associated with moving in that direction.

For the player that 'Fell from Grace' though this was a complete game changer - he was no longer just a psion he became a cleric in the service of this evil Goddess and began to pick up cleric powers. As a DM I supported this change by giving him boons (essentially magic items that are inherent to the character).

The important thing here for me is that deviating from the PC 'build' did not really harm the characters involved. They did not need to follow a per-ordained blueprint or significantly loose effectiveness. Neither player was now 'optimized' to the same degree but the powers they picked up are good at the level of play their characters operate at since 4E tries to make all options good.

In 3.x I doubt my players would have allowed something as minor as committing human sacrifice to effect their 'build' since it is simply to punishing to suddenly, later in a characters career, start down a new route, especially a cleric (because mixing spell casters and non spell casters without a ton of careful planning right from the start is a big mistake).

In reality I'd never have even put this sort of option on the table in 3.x because I think its bad DMing in that system. If a player makes this dramatic character defining story choice and allows these significant events to actually change his character then from this point forward the character looses tons of effectiveness and the player won't have as much fun when we are exploring the dungeon or getting into a rumble going forward. Far from being good storytelling its actually kind of a dick move by the DM since you've laid this trap for the story orientated player to fall into.

Hence, for me, the fact that 4Es system better supports character growth and evolution based on the story unfolding over two or four real life years or however long the campaign goes is a big deal. This is really important to me as a player and maybe especially as a DM.

I will admit that 4E has room for role-playing over roll-playing, BUT... it is not conducive to such. The focus is on tactics, and it plays like a video game at the table. Miniatures have become almost a necessity (try to play 4E without using miniatures sometime). I remember the days when we needed nothing more than a pencil, character sheet, and dice to play the game. Miniatures were an option, not a chance to make more money by selling essentials.

New players (and even a few veterans) get so caught up in the mechanics that role-playing tends to suffer. People think that they can't do anything that isn't on the cards. I was so proud of one of my players when he first used his Timely Distraction ability and shouted, "Look! An owlbear!" Only later did I realize that such was exactly what was typed on the card.

Can you roleplay with 4E? Sure. Does 4E promote role-playing? No, I'm sorry, but it does not.

Might not be in the paint job but there are some elements under the hood that can make it very good for roleplaying. Basically speaking if your running another version of D&D consider who much role playing your players did from levels 1-5 and then compare that to later levels. What I think you'll find is that at levels 1-5 your players did a lot of interesting role playing - well at least if the adventures you ran them through supported it.

If your players needed to find something they had to start talking with NPCs because it would be the NPCs that had the info.

If your players had to get somewhere then they take a horse and they bump into all the flavour the DM can devise on their journey.

If they encounter obstacles they use their skill system.

Its no accident that 3rd edition adventures like Shut In, Murder in Oakbridge and The Andurian Job are low level adventures. Make them much higher and each of these adventures will be resolved by the mage and the cleric players getting together in their room at the Inn and focusing on their spell lists - magic could actually solve all of these adventures with a little intelligent use. The problem of course is intelligent use of ones spell resources is not really roleplaying per se.

What 4E pretty much id was extend out the feel of levels 1-5. My 10th level 3rd edition characters never talked with the locals because they teleported everywhere. My 10th level 4E characters recently spent an adventure riding all over the south of the Empire looking for clues to a person of interest and I devised interesting scenes with the locals through out that journey. Some where serous, some where meant to be high magic fantastic in the sense of a travel brochure some where done for laughs and in a few I forced my players to sit while I droned on for 6 minutes to cover some element of interest in my homebrew (likely more of interest to me then to them). The point is they are getting up there in levels but they still need to use mostly mundane means of travel so they encounter the local flora and fauna during the journey.

As my player pass 11th level they are going to be in a couple of adventures in which they are, defacto, counter intelligence working against a foreign operative who has her hooks in everything in the capital city (their home base for the entire campaign). They need to analyze the clues and talk to NPCs through out this adventure to eventually narrow things down and figure out who she is.

In 3rd you don't do an adventure like this - see your players have a contract with you and that contract says that when they are 10th level they won't use their wide access to 4th and 5th level spells to prove to you that they can break your game...'cause if they put their mind to it they can. The magic system is awesomely powerful in the hands of intelligent players. You in turn don't put them into adventures, like the above, where they are going to be inclined to break that contract.

In 4E they don't have this kind of game breaking magic - they need to go out and talk to the NPCs and figure out the clues.

So it may not have been advertized and WotC, for reasons I could never fathom, may not have made these types of adventures but I do. In 3rd this actually blew up in my face and I learned not to do this style of game - keep them in the dungeon or on the lost island where the system worked. In 4E I can continue to play with mysteries and intrigue well past 1-5th level because the system supports it.

Yeah, I consider the Essentials stuff a botch too -- at least the player stuff. I lost a lot of interest in new 4e stuff after PHB3.

My real problem with Essentials and points forward was that they started to try and make 4E as much like older editions as possible. By this point Mike Mearls was lead design and 4E had never really been his vision of D&D. So from this point forward we essentially have 4E material that seems to focus on elements where 4E is weakest in some vain attempt to make it better while at the same time the areas where 4E is strongest are being completely ignored.

That is not to say that every rule change is bad or anything but the focus is simply off. I use much of the Essentials rules but I have a critical eye when using it in order to make sure that the system is actually doing what I want it to do and I play my campaigns in a manner that focuses much more on what 4E is good at...something WotC appears to have never discovered. Instead we get endless dungeons with endless smaller encounters. This element is not 4Es strength but we get little that would seem to pay attention to the elements that are 4Es strengths such as a focus on the skills and adventure design around such elements as well as fewer more epic feeling combats interspersed with role playing. Mike Mearls wants lots of dungeon delving but 4E will never be a very strong system for delving into huge dungeons. Huge dungeons feature to many small combats and don't usually suggest really interesting terrain elements. 4E works better out of the dungeon or with small dungeons that show off interesting elements like Goblins on a Ferris Wheel and the like.

Interestingly I allow my players to use the essentials classes if they want. Don't have any takers at my table - after a brief experimentation they where pronounced to be boring in comparison to the AEDU style classes where you can get a lot of excitement from the interaction of all sorts of cool moves. It can be slow to see this stuff play out but if your paying attention combat does tend to look like something out of a modern fantasy blockbuster with people flying all over the place and being knocked down or back or...etc. Essentials characters don't really have that instead trending toward much more generic damage or builds that always do the exact same rider every round - knocking the bad guy down is much less interesting when its what you do every round of every combat.

Interestingly enough my main power gaming player considers the Essentials classes to be more powerful. Or at least if you make the right builds they are. In his view consistency is king in Optimization and you want a character that can consistently totally screw with the bad guys in predictable ways every round. However he eventually abandoned even his super powerful character with a comment along the lines of 'I love powerful characters - what I discovered was I love having fun even more'.

I think this depends magnitudes more on the GMs ability then to a game system. A system like this is certainly better for GMs of lesser ability (which doesn't mean good GMs can't love it) but really that is as far as system goes.

I think this is what WOTC thought they where making and it was what they wanted to make but its not what they actually created. This is in fact one of the areas where 4E is weakest. Its great for teaching newbs to be players but its not a good system for the newbie DM.

At its core 4E is a DM fiat with guidelines system. What one gets is DM fiat in the 1st or 2nd edition sense. Huge parts of the game are essentially made up by the DM. There are no rules to cover a ton of stuff in the book - nothing at all except the infamous page 42. How does fire work? The DM makes it up. What happens when the house starts caving in? The DM makes it up and so on and so on. In a DM fiat system every bad personality quirk of the DM can get out there and put a damper...sometimes a big damper on the fun. I suspect those of us playing 1st and 2nd edition as teenagers used to bump into this all the time. The DM on a power trip or the DM that was not confident in herself or any of a wide range of flaws and these could really hurt the game. Its all there with 4E as well...it has all the flaws of a DM fiat system because it is one - the DM does not just have rule 0...rule 0 is half the game.

Now that can be disguised because PCs are anything but rule 0 (this is one place the system diverges from 1st or 2nd). PCs are built and everything they can do is pretty much spelled out so the players can be confident in what their PCs can do but everything else is under the control of a DM who is using pretty much DM fiat to run the show.

There is a little help in 4E in this regard - I said DM fiat with guidelines. The guidelines are in the section on the DMs toolbox. Essentially they are a series of tables that say 'if your PCs are of X level then these are the numbers you should be seeing'. This helps a DM to not make having the burning roof falling on the PCs head be to lethal (or too irreverent) and insures that the DCs for the skills are in line with the players level. Its a good element but it only goes so far...and a good DM can get a lot of mileage out of looking at the numbers and then knowing when and why to break them.

Nonetheless if I meet a DM who really is inexperienced this is when I'm going to be saying they should go and pick up Pathfinder, it'll be great for them. Fantastic Adventure Paths to use as they're adventures and there is a rule for near any situation that might come up. Sure you need to have a whole bunch of books at hand to play but if something is on fire there is a rule for that...the inexperience DM does not have to decide what being on fire means...he can just look it up in the rules. The rules will tell the DM what it means to be on fire or in a blizzard or what have you.

As Sunshadow pointed out to me on these forums if your DM is not very good you get a far better and more consistent game playing Pathfinder then you do playing 4E. Pathfinder tells the DM how to play and mitigates the bad DM. 4E gives bad DMs all the power they will ever need to screw things up royally.

Now if you are an experienced DM then power is good - If you know what your trying to convey with the blizzard then DM fiat allows the DM to sculpt the scene to deliver the look and feel the DM desires but its asking to much to expect a newbie DM to manage this element.

I wonder if 4e was just meant to tap into the evermore popular "kick in the door" and "play according to 100% premade rules" styles that seem to be harder and harder to get away from.Ilive in a metroplex for the last 3 years and I can't find anyone who doesn't proscribe to the above styles and that just gets sickening when I am not that style myself.

I blame mmos and video games.

I think if your playing this way your likely to miss some of its strengths. 4E is really good at interfacing elements in the scene and making them part of the scene, particularly during combat. Once your versed in how 4E uses movement and skills it should be clear that you can use these mechanics almost like lego to build things into the scene and it can by anything the DM can imagine. However you'll likely need to write this stuff down (though I suppose a real master could make up the rules on the fly and try and keep them consistent). What I mean is 4E is very good at letting the DM design an encounter where the PCs are all in Kyacks and its up to the DM to decide how these kyacks behave and interact with the current environment.

I had a scene like this where the PCs had to traverse underground white water rapids on some stolen little goblin boats (while other goblins tried to intercept them). Lots of forced movement and trying to keep control of the boats during the scene as well as a list of what skills allowed the players to do what with the boats - because all PCs are passable at all skills in 4E I did not have to worry that one PCs would not be able to use the boats - though there where some that where straight out trained in some of the skills...they could really go all James Bond in those little boats.

Bottom line is you want scenes with fighting on conveyer belts and such in 4E and that takes some design work...if your DM is just grabbing 5 monsters and putting them in a room with a chest...well that is a waste of the skill system and a waste of the fact that they have all these powers that are each pretty much 'perform a cinematic stunt stolen from an Xena episode'.

This is a big budget movie simulator - play up the cinema! No one wants a lightsaber duel that just sits there. Get the environment in on the action. 4E characters AND monsters are good at moving around - give them places to go.

4E allows far better roleplay opportunity for the DM.

My reasoning - It's far easier to prep for and run the game, so as a DM, I have tons more time available to craft out intricate storylines, design cool adventure locales, and develop cool recurring NPCs. I can also create more of the story as I go instead of having to plan every encounter in advance - it takes me literally seconds to select the critters needed for almost any given encounter, so I'm ready for whatever curveball the players throw at me. And plotwise, I'm far more likely to be the one throwing the curveballs at them.

This element is true but I think it goes beyond this. 4E is actually really well designed to handle things like mystery or political intrigue type adventures and it can do so up to quite high levels.

With my players now 11th level their next two adventures will be about acting as counter intelligence in a major metropolis where a villain has infiltrated herself into the highest ranks of society and is now pulling all sorts of strings. They need to figure out who she is and put a stop to her.

I can do this sort of adventure very well with 4E in because the subsystems support this sort of adventure. For starters there is no real 'face class' and no 'skill monkey'. No one PC that will be the person doing all the playing when out of combat. Every class pretty much is trained in a physical, knowledge and social skill meaning that they are good at it. For this type of adventure its all about the social and knowledge skills but it will not just be one player involved in these scenes but all of them though some are better then others at different times. Each of them has something to contribute.

4E characters are good in and out of combat through out their career. meaning you don't get into a situation where the characters have been to long in the dungeon and no longer function properly when they are in a city based adventure.

Furthermore while rituals can help they where designed carefully and its impossible to use them exclusively before epic level to solve the mystery's poised by the adventure. What I historically found with D&D when doing higher level mystery type adventures was that the solution to such adventures essentially came down to the wizard player making good use of the divination school of magic. Most of the adventure really took place in the room in the inn where the Wizard player carefully utilized magical power to ferrit out what was going on. If one has a problem with quadratic wizards in the dungeon it can be that much worse when your only job as the fighter is to mop her brow while she casts spells.

4E does not really allow that to happen. My players will have to get the answers the old fashioned way (or more or less the same way 3rd level characters did it in other editions). Find the clues and talk with the NPCs looking for more clues. Visit places and discern what was going on.

One of the things that 4E did extremely well - maybe the thing that I like most about it was extend out the 'sweet spot' for political intrigue and mystery type adventures. They went from being something that played well only at low levels to being excellent up until at least Epic (After which the wizards get access to the real powerful plot breaking magic and its back to playing 20 questions with the Gods to answer the questions posed by the adventure'.

How are you not complicating it by giving Megaman E-ups that essentially make combat longer and more drawn out?

If you only have X amount of HP and 3 CLW potions the DM will only give you a challenge that you can survive with that limited amount of HP

If you have X amount of HP, healing potions, and surges then the DM will need to give more dangerous and more numerous opponents as you'll be powering up through the dungeon.

You'll usually find the opposite in actual practice. 4E characters are, compared to 3.5 characters of equal level significantly weaker. Healing Potions are actually not that common past around 6th level - they are too weak to waste a valuable healing surge on. What was really done was a kind of switch in difficulty level of the game. At 1st your really resilient. You have surges come out of your ears and don't usually take much damage from an attack so your actually pretty tough. By 3rd-7th your not so tough when your getting hit but you can know drink a healing potion and get back a full 10 hps which is not to shabby for that level. Get up to 11th level and now your in a world of hurt. Every hit does 1/3 to 1/2 your hps. Healing, actually reasonably good healing, mainly comes from a handful of powers the party has and even your second wind is no more then a stop gap.

What has actually happened here is the difficulty level has been reversed from the traditional progression. Your strong (and the game is easier) at low levels and it gets harder and harder as you progress to higher levels.

Yes you've got better powers and such but the margin for error is actually shrinking. At low levels you can be a bit sloppy by higher levels the margin is shrinking and you need to be playing well to persevere - all this of course can be modified by your DM via just how strong the monsters are of course but all things remaining equal players have it easier (they have more margin for sloppy play) at low levels then they do at high levels.

Historically D&D is lethal at low levels but easier as you gain levels. 4E reverses that.

DigitalMage wrote:

GM Elton wrote:

I had a hard time GMing 4e.

I am curious, what aspects made it hard for you? Was it preparation? Remembering rules? Adjudicating rules?

It was a rules lawyer. He tried to keep me with in the rules the game had set, but I wanted to do things my way. If I wanted big explosions, I wanted big explosions. If I wanted a man like Samson with Cloud Giant Strength, I wanted a man with Cloud Giant Strength.

I had a hard time doing 4e and I'm not going to dm 4e again, because I might attract the same type as a rules lawyer again. It's not that the game is badly written. It's not cool for a DM like me to Dungeon Master. Especially when I'm attracting a rules lawyer like that.

The weird thing is I literately think you had a player pull the wool over your eyes. One of the issues with 4E is that the DM has to be careful because he can do anything - and the system even makes doing that easy...but with such power comes danger. An example from my posts on my campaign is concerns about Dinosaurs and Dark Elves. If I boot up the DDI Monster Builder I can de-level a Tyrannosaurus so that its just a challenge for 3rd level characters. Its simply a matter of lowering the level on the monster and their is a tool to do that in the program that adjusts all the numbers as you de-level. The danger is do you really want to set a precedent that a big dinosaur is only a challenge for 3rd level characters? Faced with this I choose to hold off on that adventure until the PCs where 6th level and then made the Tyrannosaurus a juvenile...but I could have de-leveled it - nothing was stopping me - certainly no rules - heck they even gave me the tools to make doing so easy.

Another example is with an NPC. My players fought a Roof Walker, well the guy walks on the roves so among the various powers I gave him was one that allowed him to climb 10' as a trait. Since the rest of the players would either have to actually climb the wall using athletics or have to leap up my baddie had a real advantage in the fight...could always stay out of melee because he could move over the terrian much easier then they could. If one of them had been a monk or an avenger then this would have not been true because both clases emphasize mobility and the PC would have powers of their own that would likely have allowed them to circumnavigate the changing elevation.

The NPCs do whatever the heck it is you want them to do...in fact you give them powers that allow them to do just that.

So if you want a guy to have Cloud Giant strength you can raise his strength stat or you could give him a power called Rippling Muscles or some such that allows him to do whatever it is you want him to do.

The really odd thing here is that its not just that you can make up powers...you almost have to make up powers. I mean unless you only use monsters from the books and choose never to add an NPC (and therefore ignore the making monsters and NPCs parts of the rules).

It is part of the day to day process of being a 4E DM that you will make up powers - you'll even find yourself hunting around for inspiration from non-D&D sources just so you can think up new and interesting ones. There will always be unique NPCs that figure into the game and once such an NPC is in play the DM is going to have to make up stuff for that NPC...stuff appropriate to the look and feel the DM wants for the NPC. If she is a cat burglar then the DM will make up powers that help her be a cat burglar. Furthermore 4Es high fantasy theme means the powers are going to be stuff like 'she can walk tightropes without having to make checks'.

I have a suspicion that your player either no longer plays 4E or tries to brow beat any DM he has into believing much of the junk he is saying. He'd be shut down fast if he met a 4E DM that had really run a full on campaign because such a DM is going to know full well that in reality all of 4E is the DM making stuff up. Its actually how you make an adventure - the DM makes stuff up and then there are 'by level' guidelines in the rules that allows the DM to convert the stuff he made up into level appropriate mechanics.

So, for example, one does not look up how fire works...the DM looks up the rules for hazards and obstacles by level and then makes up rules for how 'this fire' is going to work. How much damage it will do to what radius and how (or if) it spreads etc. So if my players are in a burning building I'm using a guideline system to translate my ideas on what that means into mechanics...and it means whatever I say it means - maybe this building drops flaming timber on your head every turn...maybe not - I decide because I designed it. I had help in that the guidlines tell me that the burning timber should probably do withing X range of damage for a party of Y level and that any skill checks the PCs are going to make while in the burning building should have roughly this range of numbers for their level.

Welcome to my (mostly) Dark Fantasy World
So my homebrew is meant to be Dark Fantasy - has always been that way since I originally designed the first iteration when I was 14. What is interesting here is how well I have been able to get that point across in this campaign when compared to my previous campaigns. I think that 4E has made this more possible in a number of ways but three that come to mind at the moment are:

Global Feel: I've mentioned repeatedly how easy it is to use the minion rules to give allies to Team Good. Simple to run and yet still fairly effective due to the fact that you don't really have to track them. If they take a hit they die but their attacks and Defenses are reasonable. So they definitely contribute without being a lot of paperwork. This has allowed me to have the PCs be in a significant number of situations where they are not alone in the encounter but are something of the star of the show in an encounter with a bunch of allies...the militia or arriving watchmen in a crisis etc. The result is a kind of expansion of scope in the kinds of encounters I run - in particular having the PCs be part of the group holding a key outpost during an attack and such. From a campaign perspective its easier to run story's putting players in the middle of the big events of history - not just the strike group that is after the BBEG but scenes that convey why such a strike group will be needed.

Sandbox Skill System: The design of the game to facilitate having player operate well both in and out of combat automatically (for the most part - dex based PCs have issues here) has really encouraged me to make longer and larger elements and scenes that don't focus quite so much on getting to the action despite the fact that my players really like combat. That they are all engaged in the build up helps to convey the larger issues of the world and the skill system is so versatile that you can - if you want - have a pretty open ended element to all of this...with the big caveat that 4E really rewards well designed combats once it comes to a fight...so the DM has to be essentially avoiding combat except at pre-designated points where he has put in all the work to make a great combat scene.

The Power System: One of the interesting elements of the power system is how impactful it is when you do custom design a PC something. The whole narrative basis to the game means that when you want to convey to a player what they are getting when they fall to the dark side you can make them special unique powers that deliver that message. The conceit that everyone is unique really allows the DM to highlight what is uniquely important about a PC that has turned toward evil. In my case its all about handing out specially crafted Pact Boons to that PC...though the well crafted encounter specific powers I gave one PC when he sacrificed a human to his Goddess in the evil temple conveyed the message strongly as well. The fact that powers are unique to each class makes highlighting elements for a specific player for story reasons much easier.

In a previous campaign in 3.5 I gave a PC a baby dragon familiar but once you slot everything into the rules it seemed to loose something and eventually the player chose to slot out the dragon for a better feat...since giving a player a dragon familiar in 3.5 was just a story element behind more or less forcing a PC to take the dragon familiar feat. In an interesting way what I found with 4E is that, while I love the games balance, I also love my ability to scew with that balance via customization.

In fact I plan to give the party (and really one PC in the party) a companion in the near future but that companion is unique to the character and the party - its not a trade off for improved defences or some such.

On a side note in this department the player is a pixie but a kind of hard drinking, gambling sort of pixie. The companion I have worked out for him should provide some fun as its essentially a fey magic pixie horse but the really good kind...I've actually been watching episodes of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic to get the personality down...I essentially plan on giving the player a My Little Pony for his 'pixie warhorse'. Should cause quite the stir for my 40 year old male player! I can't wait to see the look on his face or the ribbing he gets from the rest of the group when they figure out its a My Little Pony.

Jeremy Mac Donald wrote:

Why should those that stuck with 3.5 in the form of Pathfinder even care?

I can only speak for myself but as much as I love Pathfinder as a game and Paizo as a company, there's still the fact that I have had a 20-year long D&D history before 4E put an end to my customer relationship with D&D. So while I certainly won't stop supporting Paizo/PF, there's still the wish that D&D Next will be a form of D&D I also will care about.

Your quoting me completely out of context here.

The context was why should people who play Pathfinder care enough to throw a fit about 4E books not being compatible with 5E?

Midnight Gamer wrote:

Seriously though, this country has changed so much since I was a kid, I don't even recognize it.

I'd guess my parents felt the same way when they got older and the world looked like a different place.

Yeah, and look how much smaller they made everything now.

I think its less that the world is more screwed up now and more than you're realizing how screwed up it is.

Can't say I agree. I'm probably more relaxed in this regard then my parents generation.

My parents lived in a world that was perpetually 30 minutes away from an extinction event. As concerned as I might be about terrorism its just not on the same level as a full scale thermonuclear war.

In terms of peace of mind things really are better now.

So I'm back in the DMs chair with my main group and busily prepping for my next campaign. Going to talk about it on this thread. Now most campaign threads belong in a different section of the boards but my purpose here is not to talk about what happens in my campaign so much as to talk about 4E based on the the types of things that come to my attention while prepping and playing in this campaign. I do a lot of conversions of adventures from older editions so there is likely a lot of focus on elements of converting adventures to 4E.

I've decided to start my campaign off with with Tim and Eileen Conners Escape From Meenlock Prison and I'm about halfway through that conversion at this point. I'll delve into my thoughts on converting this adventure in my next post.

I think part of the difference in newer players want to play characters that are heroes right out of the box. Some of us older players want to play characters that become heroes (or die trying).

I don't think this is actually a split based on editions at all. Instead I'd argue that its really a style issue. The problem is not 'hero's from the get go' but DMs that write plot elements about the hero's. In effect if every player controls a 'stable' of PCs chances are the game is going to be pretty brutally lethal.

On the other hand if your character starts out with a 2 page background and you and the DM spent an hour and forty five minutes at a coffee shop prior to the first session working out how your secretly the youngest son of the Rivenrell Merchant House who was traded to a demon when you where just a toddler in exchange for a cure for your eldest brothers ailment...well now you can bet that the DM is not out to get you before this story develops a lot more.

Its not video games or 'new players' that are the root of this - we see the beginning of this style way back in 1E with the release of Dragonlance. The real culprit here is player driven sub plots. Once the story starts to be sp3ecifically about the players and the game is being interwoven around them then their death starts becoming extremely disruptive to the campaign as a whole and they stop dying nearly so often.

Not sure what your DM does but one of the first things I do when I sit down to run a campaign is choose the lethality level. Reality is the DM controls that element of the game and can dial it forward or back at will (I don't even mean fudging - I never need to fudge). My most lethal campaign was actually in 3.5 since I choose a lethality level of 'on average one character will die per level...the other five will make it'. They did not die at exactly 1 per level - there was some clumping with half the party wiped out and some levels no one bought the farm but looking back I note that over a campaign that went to 14th level I got exactly 14 characters.

This was actually a higher lethality level then I had run in 1st and much higher then what I was doing in 2nd (because of all those plots in 2nd...did not want to kill anyone and disrupt the story).

The bottom line is that the game is as lethal as the DM decides it will be irrespective of edition. Furthermore the DM should be making that choice based on what style of game he plans to run (probably in consultation with the players). If its full of player sub-quests then lethality will need to be dialed down while a 'back to the dungeon' style game where the players themselves are not particularly integral to the plot can be one were characters die reasonably often. No doubt most DMs choose some kind of middle ground which is fine but does have some danger of getting into DM favouritism (DM does not want to kill off the player that was just possessed by the Goddess of Knowledge) so that has to be guarded against.

Following on from the above.

I'm not actually certain that we get all that much from having simplified monsters. The goal is faster combats, yes?

So do the simplified monsters actually get us there? Now if your doing really long combats and its bothering you I'd actually suggest recording your next few combats and then analyzing what is actually slowing things down. I suspect the answer only comes down to the monsters a few.

In one your DM is taking forever to play tactically well with each monster and, being less familiar with the monsters then the players are with their characters this is really stalling things out.

I think this is really common and I think the game 'suggests' that this is the way it should be played. Its the wrong answer...the DM is NOT playing chess with the players no matter what it looks like. The DM is providing his players with chess problems for them to solve but this goes only one way, not two.

What happens is the DM has all these monsters and in one of these epic 1 1/2 hour combats we actually find out that the DM took like 45 minutes to run 'Team Evil'.

You never want that to happen - the DM should strive to run all of Team Evil in about the same length of time it takes one of his players to run their turn. That may be impossible but that is the goal.

You get there by glancing at the monster glancing at the board and then making a snap decision - don't second guess yourself - don't weigh the options don't think to much at all just do and resolve what happens. Generally the DMs first instinct is not that bad in any case, maybe not perfect but reasonable. If you can do anything less then a solo or elite in a minute or under then that is good. The Solo's or elites can have slightly more though but not a lot - you want them done in 3 minutes maximum so thinking about anything for more then 30 seconds is not a good plan.

I'd make exceptions for only a small handful of monsters. Dragon's, Illithid's. Eye Tyrants, Vampire Lords or really smart NPCs. Only this small handful of baddies should see the DM slow down to mull things over for the length of time a player might take to consider things...each individual DM should have their own list of such monsters as the real 'trigger' for this behaviour is if the DM will stop having fun if he looses a Dragon or whatever to stupid play. Hence this is just a protect the DMs fun caveat but make sure its exceptional not the norm.

If team evil seems to be under performing then you have two options (I'd do both). One is a tactics section that tells the DM what to do for each monster depending on circumstances and highlights whatever synergies the DM is hoping to pull off. This should help to make the monster run real fast so its no go if the DM finds himself rereading the tactics page every time its his turn...enter the session knowing what is on that page and use it just to jog memory. The other, more common way to even things up is just to give team evil more benefits - more levels is common (and is not to bad if you want fewer combats worth more XP) or go into the stat blocks at creation and tweak them up.

Again the goal is to provide your players chess problems - they need to feel they have to play well to win but you need to have the leeway to play a lot more sloppily and still have them hard pressed. I suspect that something like half the groups that complain about how long 4E combats take would not complain if the DM did not have Team Evil taking close to half the length of the combat.

Bringing this back around to why monsters should be complex is because if the DMs job, in combat, is to make things interesting for the players then monsters with powers really helps - the DM makes a snap decision to use one of the powers (probably what appears at the moment to be the best) and throws this zinger at the players. This keeps the players working on 'solving' the chess puzzle on their turn and provides the DM with one of a number of 'mechanical' elements to allow him to keep things interesting without slowing things down.

Note that if the DM is running really fast you actually open up space for the DM to use monster elements that are normally verbotten like heals and such because the rounds should go faster - this does not make such moves ideal in monster design or placement it just makes such options 'less bad' at the table but that is enough to mean that such elements can be in play a little more often without really harming the game.

I wish we had a split thread option here. It often seems to me we finally get into some of the more interesting debates on page 18 of some long boring edition war thread.

Jeremy Mac Donald wrote:

I just don't think this worked, at least not for most people most of the time. In effect this was 4Es design goal. Maybe not quite as simple as this but really close. MMI is full of monsters that are just not that much more complex than this but the problem is everyone thinks they are complete sleepers.

Except 4E was designed so combats would last longer. I'm good with combats being 3-5 rounds lasting no more than 10 minutes.

Doable and in some systems absolutely excellent. However I have yet to see this work really well in D&D. As I argued above I don't feel older editions that where faster actually managed to do a good job in this department when actually compared to the modern editions and where it worked it tended to do so because the DMs worked at it to basically complicate simplicity.

The reality, in my experience, is that three ogres in a room getting killed - even if its only 25 minutes to kill them is not very interesting...especially when this is the third room you have killed three ogres in tonight. How this was actually fun when I was 14 years old I'm at a loss to explain...but every time its come up for me in the last 10 years (I convert a fair number of old modules) its only been good when it turns into some kind of running battle or some such...and I think it was only exceptionally good even back in 1E when that sort of thing happened. Fundamentally the problem is simple combats are not very much fun so most of the time there needs to be some other element carrying the weight

If combats are supposed to be long engaged processes, you need to have a larger variety of powers to use against the players. In fact, in a perfect world they would have a unique action for every round they are expected to live through.

Straight up this is why the Monster Vault's are really just so excellent. Its in them that I think 4E monster design finally really hit the mark. Here the monsters really are very well designed to do almost exactly what your contending is ideal. Now its not actually ideal - truth is we want some variance - there are good reasons why minions should just get one attack - makes them simple to run and they don't generally live that long...on the other hadn sometimes its good for them to get one or two other elements as well. Maybe a move power to make them trickier to kill or maybe they blow up when killed which makes them interesting to interact with. Depends on what the DM is doing - sometimes dead simple sometimes a little more complex but only once in a blue moon for very specific minions should they be quite complex. Mooks should get a little more but simplicity for the DM to run still rules the roost here while elites need to have a fair number of 'features' and solo's should expect to live 8 rounds or so and be able to do something new and exciting about five times. Some repetition is necessary for a monster in order to give it 'character' show what its 'thing' is all about but the Solo's also need access to at least one 'game changer' something just outrageous and a couple of gotcha's in order to keep them interesting.

In any case I am very happy with the Monster Vault products in terms of really enhancing what I think 4E really does best which is big 'epic' style combats where it might really take a while to play through them...but they are just packed with interesting elements and you balance it out by having fewer combats over all.

I've generally found you still need about three combats in a day for this to work well, this comes down to healing surges...if you want your group to feel desperate in terms of healing surges you need to make sure that the first two combats get them to really use everything but their daily healing powers. This should have half of them running on fumes in terms of surges by the middle of the third combat.

Note though that the first two are still exciting...there is only so much healing a group can use in a fight so there should be at least a few hard choices during these combats. Also try and avoid really healing heavy groups...they burn through their surges like mad and can't make that third fight while at the same time tending to feel 'grindy' in the first two.

I also HATE the "GM's girlfriend" sterotype--the stereotype of the girl who's just playing to please her girlfriend and doesn't know s*+& about gaming--and it's sad to hear that stereotype is based on real people (many stereotypes are, but still).

This one I think is cultural. In fact where I have seen this most often is in sports. He is off to see the football game so what is she doing? She is off to see the football game with him...isn't she a trooper.

Reverse that and have her off to [insert stereotypical female activity] and asks him along. What is he doing? Drafting a letter to Amnesty International since being forced to participate in whatever her passion is clearly violates the Geneva Convention.

On the other hand I don't want to discourage the behavoiur to much. After all the majority of stories I have heard from woman on how they got into the game start with either "My brother bribed me...and one day I realized bribes where now a perk not a prereq" or "My boyfriend convinced me to play - I'd eventually dump the boyfriend but not the game".

Can someone sum up Maure Castle in a nutshell?
Your all going to die.

To me, the quality of the modules in LG and the early LFR modules were about the same. The difference was that a good DM was absolutely crucial to the LFR modules being even moderately successful, with the not so good attempts and unbalanced tables leading to atrocious experiences. With LG, the only time I experienced such bad experiences with when very specific players/DMs were at the table; most of the rest ended up being average with about the same amount of truly great experiences.

Price of powerful mechanics - you can get yourself into deeper trouble with them

4Es system is extremely good at giving each individual DM what he is looking for in the game.

This is the beauty of the system. It is an extremely powerful DM side tool that allows each of us to craft the kind of D&D we are looking for. What I mean by 4Es skill system being DM side as opposed to Player side.

If you think about it, and presupposing that the DM is using the DC by level chart from page 126 of RC, then the challenges that a player can overcome are only marginally decided by the player (when he decides what bonus to each skill he has). In reality what the player can overcome is decided by the DM - not so much by picking DCs but literally by picking whole adventures. Your players are what they encounter.

As DMs we actually create these heroes - we define what kind of heroes they are, what they can do, and we do so from the moment we choose or create an adventure for them to interact with. This is why two different DMs can have a different answer to what the desired granularity in 4E is. When you decide that X adventure is appropriate for players of Y level you are defining what kind of heroes you have - you are defining what they can, and conversely what they cannot do. If I have a different view of granularity I get different heroes because my different view of granuility means I choose or make adventures based on a different criteria.

In effect an adventure is level appropriate because I, as the DM, say it is. In fact I do that implicitly when I created the adventure. If I have it so that there is a mansion that is being repaired and there is all sorts of thin scaffolding on the side of the mansion which becomes the scene of a running battle above the streets that adventure will automatically be level appropriate no matter what level I choose because in creating the adventure I used the skill DCs from page 126.

Compare and contrast with 3.x/PF which is a Player side system. The rules tell you what all the DCs in the game are likely to be. The numbers on their characters are absolutes – the characters can or cannot climb a sheer cliff based not on what the DM says but on what the numbers on the characters sheets say when compared to what the rule in the books say.

While its never made explicit in the books there actually is a 'correct' level in 3.x/PF that the scaffolding adventure should be run at. If the players are above that level then the challenges presented by the scaffolding are trivial and its not an engaging scene while if the level chosen is to low then the challenges presented by the scaffolding are practically impossible and there can't be a scene on the scaffolding because the players are not competent enough to go on it without being near certain to fail their balance checks and fall off.

Hence this is an important style mechanic for 4E if you don't always want the look and feel of your adventure to be generally identical. For example I might be looking for a really high fantasy campaign set in Ebberon with all sorts of amazing stunts but MK is currently doing a kind of dark and gritter Ravenloft campaign. Its important that both he and I can craft the look and feel of our campaigns to suite the style of what we are playing and in this I might be much more permissive with what kinds of scenes I want my players involved in when compared to what MK is doing Its important here that the system supports us both.

Nor is it even necessarily the case that people playing in the same world should all be using identical challenges. If I take a world like Darksun and run a campaign there one of the first questions I'm going to ask myself is 'is this Darksun where the hero's will kill the Dragon and return rain to Athas?' or is it 'The Crimson Sun eventually claims everyone - victory is transitory and defeat ultimately inevitable - your bones too will eventually be bleached, scoured and forgotten in the sands of Athas'. My answer to that question will significantly impact the look and feel of my campaign but the base system will support either option because, at the end of the day, it does what I tell it to do as opposed to it telling me what is or is not appropriate for my PCs of X level.

Interested to find out what happens to Ghaddafi. The regime seemed to crumble very quickly after what was a pretty slow start. I mean for some where in the area of 5 months it seemed like things where pretty much stalemate and then its been nothing but one rebel victory on the heels of another in rapid succession for about the last 5 weeks. Tripoli in particular was fast - I was not even expecting them to start for something like a week.

Its almost odd to hear something where one actually feels like the West backed the correct horse and it worked out. I'm beginning to think we ought to start getting the French to to be in charge of deciding which wars in places with names we cannot pronounce to get in on. They have a surprisingly good record post 1962 Algeria.

Can we have a strong military that can defend us without policing the Earth?

No. Its only real purpose is to police the earth. So long as it is strong it will do so because it has no other reason to exist and it will need to justify its existence to the taxpayers.

Furthermore it can only exist in a form made to be used in some far off foreign land - there is no other job that it can fulfill because no other reasonable job exists. How do you place an order for new armoured fighting vehicles when there is no known threat for them to be compared against? What speed should they be designed to have to do battle with a non existent enemy? DO you tell the designers that it is meant to operate in the Colorado River Valley and do battle with a resurgent Amerindian threat? How long before these specifications reach the general public?

America has no natural enemies - it borders only two nation states and both have such small armies that they are literally incapable of invading the US. If either tried they'd run out of troops to garrison their conquests after a few hundred miles - an American citizen militia would simply toss them back out.

America's enemies in the world are all, rightly or wrongly, made by America. Almost every last one of them can be traced to activities taken by America in some foreign place and those that believed that America had come to this place to oppress them.

If the weapon exists then its wielders will advocate for its use and eventually it will find receptive ears and its use will always be in some foreign land because there is no defensive role for it to fulfill...no enemy for it to defend against.

Oh, and just so we're clear about my position on larger taxes on the rich and the corporations, I'm against them. I think we should just take everything they've got and blow it all on housing and public works. And beer.

This does not actually work. What you end up with is a bunch of pauper former wealthy people but practically no actual wealth. Basically speaking all those hundreds of billions are not really doing much of anything except sitting in little computer accounts pretending to exist. So long as this 'money' is nothing but a bunch of zero's in a computer program it has only a pretty marginal impact on the economy as a whole.

However if you throw a revolution - shoot all the rich - take all their 'money' and try 'distributing to the people' (by whatever mechanism) the 'money' actually hits the economy and when it does people try and use it to buy actual physical goods.

Here is the key - there are exactly the same number of actual physical goods after the revolution as there where before the revolution (discounting a bunch of high end cars and some mansions). The number of goods has not changed but the amount of money that is trying to buy those same goods just massively increased. The result, as we know, is inflation, the prices of the goods goes up to reflect the increased money supply now floating around in the economy and, once all is said and done, everyone is pretty much just as wealthy after the revolution as they where before it....its just that bread now costs $24.99 a loaf.

On the other hand if you redistribute the wealth by taxing wealthy people and using that by setting up programs that push the top strata of the lower class into the bottom strata of the middle class then these same people become blue collar workers - or maybe computer programmers or importers of low cost hot peppers from the Dominican Republic...in effect they make s%$+ or facilitate it being traded for. Which actually tangibly increases the amount of stuff available in the economy...which means there is more crap for people to buy and the economy grows.

Killing the rich gets you nothing but redistributing some of their wealth in order to enlarge the middle class (ala the 1950's and '60s or turn of the century Europe) has been really effective way of growing economies.

This is a surreal conversation. The same one Whispering Cairn is in...if you don't own it you can download the PDF from Paizo for a measly $5.

I agree with the OP. 4th ed is a great game. Just not a great roleplaying game. A great tactical mini game is what it is.

Or you can use it for non-combat or combat light adventures.

Fundamentally the skill system itself has become the major way the players interact with the world outside of combat. To compare and contrast consider the earlier edition wizard or cleric utility spells. These are often defined as role-playing. Sure they where but it was a manner of interacting with the adventure that only the spell casters could participate in. What has happened here is that many of these utility type spells and their effects on the game have been pulled from the wizard or clerics spell repertoire and moved to the group as a whole as part and parcel of the skill system.

The skill system remains at the core of how 4E players handle non combat obstacles, with the exception of puzzles, for all levels of play at least until one approaches epic level. Note also that this applies only to obstacles - in many cases the scene involves an NPC whose goals or agenda is not at cross purposes with the PCs, in such a situation your down to pure role playing, no dice rolling needed.

During the last part of Paizo's run with Dungeon there where some excellent low level murder mystery type adventures. There have been a handful of good mystery type adventures in all editions of D&D however a defining characteristic of this has almost always been that they where very low in level. This is required because, once the cleric and wizard, gained some levels the answers to such mysteries became a matter of the wizard or cleric memorizing spells and then using those spells in an intelligent manner to answer the questions posed by the adventure. While this can be a very fun way to play the game its strengths are only highlighted if you have one or two players and they are both spell casters. If there are more players in the party then long periods of planning and discussion that do not include them are likely to cause a problem in that the spotlight has now, for too long, focused on some of the players without meaningfully including others.

Another example of such use of utility spells in older editions was party mobility (things like mass flight or party teleports) or use of such utility spells to control the emotions or behavior of the NPCs.
All of this is, by and large, either gone, of limited use or potency, or only comes online at very high levels (Oracle - which is a ritual that allows the players to contact a God and ask questions is 21st level for example).

What is important here is the amount of adventure design space that this opens up. You can now design adventures that are higher level mysteries or intrigues or otherwise not combat focused. So an adventure about finding out who killed the Kings favorite mistress, and why (The DM might want to complicate things by throwing in a noisy Queen who must be kept in the dark about the existence of such a mistress) is something the whole group engages in and its the subject, potentially, for a significant series of sessions. By moving the investigation of this outside of something that could be answered primary with magic and into something that was handled in individual encounters by the whole party using the players reasoning and skills we open up design space for intriguing non combat adventures.

Consider also that the limited nature of the mobility magic on tap for the wizard and cleric means that adventures about going places (maybe they need to do a B&E to recover critical information etc.) become much easier for the DM to design and now must be overcome by the ingenuity of the players and their combined skill suite.

There is now more potential for the journey to be the adventure. If the players want to get to the other side of Mount Doom they need to either climb it, go under it or maybe find a pack of Griffons and convince them to carry them over it - their magic is not powerful enough to get the group to the other side by casting a spell (unless the DM wants that to happen...then there is a convenient air ship tied up nearby).

Alternatively we can get into something more action packed here - like a race across the city to catch the fleeing 'person of interest' (or maybe its a race through a crowded city with a prize purse and other teams). While your players have some mobility powers that will play here they are limited in nature...and maybe more importantly - range (if the thing they need to get over is more then usually around 40' feet they are going to have to actually climb it) - your group as a whole is mostly glued to the ground. This opens up design space for all sorts of interesting obstacles within that chase or any other encounter involving movement or obstacles. Maybe they are fleeing - mass teleport as a ritual takes to long to be a quick exit - the scene must be resolved by the players actually making a break for it and using a combination of their movement powers and their skills to get through the obstacles that stand in the way.

If you think that some key NPCs have some of the answers you seek you now have to ask them, or black mail them or save their lost lover or some such to get them to co-operate. Taking over their mind with magic is not an option that is usually on the table. A whole significant part of the adventure for the entire group now can revolve around getting such information from an NPC that for whatever reason is not willing to simply cough it up.

When they are 14th level design a political intrigue adventure - they can't crack it using magic, they'll need to interact with your cast of weird and wacky (and possibly creepy - or funny) NPCs the old fashion way - by talking to them.

My whole point is there are a ton of very interesting non-combat focused adventures that have been completely opened up by the limitations built into 4Es magic system and by the fact that most of how the players interact with these elements have been moved to the skill system or to a pure role playing context.

Look a little closer at the Skill System and you should notice that each class generally comes with training (and is therefore quite good, or at least passable) in a physical type skill, a knowledge type skill and a social type skill. Its not perfect and its a little muddled once we really start bringing in the whole array of classes, but its still more or less true. This means that in any given skill based encounter usually some significant number of players can get in on the action. This works really well when your designing your non-combat adventure because everyone gets to participate. This is a key part of the design that makes all characters both good in and out of combat. Its important to note that 4E does not really have a 'face' class. There is no one character who - by design - is just better then everyone else when the swords remain in their sheathes. Non-combat adventure is not the part of the adventure where the Bard gets to shine...everyone is supposed to be able to shine during some parts of the non-combat adventure. This allows you to spend more time out of combat - you need less of it to appease your players just designed to kill stuff. Since they get their social skills automatically with their class and should be just as good as any other class in such circumstances there is every opportunity for them to have fun.

It says something about the system that it is easier to get your Goddess to raise you from the dead then it is to get her to answer a simple question. A little disconcerting maybe but its good game design. Gods that answer questions closes off good adventure design space...coming back from the dead, not so much.

That and Lindisty's anecdote above just make me question the casual way rape is tossed around by some GMs and players. The question being "What the @#$% is wrong with you?" I'm not saying it cannot be present in a good story, but it damn well should be born of a consentual agreement between all the players involved, and should always be guided by a modicum of tact and sensitivity for people that have had to deal with that in real life.

I guess what I'm really getting at is some folks just need to be punched in the throat until they learn some social grace.

I agree. It really is a tricky issue. I don't think its one where there is a kind of blanket rule on whether or not it is allowed. Search dark corners of the internet and you'll find RPGs (usually pbp) that are essentially erotica. Sign up for something like that and you know what your getting into.

If the players did not sign up for that sort of thing then I think players raping anything is quite simply off the table. Just don't. When the DM says they run a 'realistic' game that is not some kind of license to have creatures commit sexual assault on the female players characters. In fact, at this point, I've read so many stories like this (not just this thread) that if you happen to be female and being introduced to a (male) DM who makes a point of bringing up how 'realistic' his game is you should probably see that as a huge red flag.

Thinking of my own DMing I'd generally limit rape to something that is either in some ones back story, maybe as a motivator for why they are doing what they are doing. Maybe bring this to the front with some kind of plot device of players tracking a villainess when they learn that their patron has some really dirty skeletons in his closet that explains in full or in part the Villianesses actions. After this the players are facing an interesting dilemma depending on the exact details of the what took place and what the Villainess is doing for her revenge.

Even here its something to be careful with. I could easily see a female player getting super uncomfortable with where the story is going...which can be such a tricky thing and individual dependent. For one woman it might be part of an emotionally powerful story that makes the whole thing that much more meaningful and worth attending and for another this might be on the verge of making her physically ill and she does not want to play anymore. I guess I'd still go for it if I thought the story was good enough - but I'd be ready to abort this, apologize to the player and promise never to bring such a topic up again.

Its generally a topic that I think gender discriminates in terms of RPGs (in real life to of course). Far and away the most I've ever had rape come up in a game was under a female DM who ran Days of Our Lives - the Sword and Sorcery Edition.

This game was an emotional roller coaster ride (that was the point really). Many, many, sessions in an NPC, some one we knew and trusted, rapes one of the female players characters (we new he had a crush on her, but...) and she (the female player) literally has tears streaming down her face so the game suddenly comes to a halt and we are asking "Should we stop"? and the player in question says through gritted teeth (still crying) "No, we can't stop now, we are going to catch this guy and I am going to kill him". In a game of emotional highs and lows this was some pretty heavy stuff.

It actually kind of paled in comparison too two sessions later. We've caught up to the bastard, beat him down, throw him into a room and the female player who was raped goes in to confront him. Well he's begging for his life "I always loved you and you just seemed to look right through me no matter how hard I tried, please don't hurt me." Some how its just really pulling on our heart strings, one of the other female players says "Maybe we shouldn't kill him"? I remember that I could not sit still any more. I jump up and am basically running around the table saying "I don't know, I don't know anything anymore...anyway its Sarah's choice." (Sarah was the player of the female character who was raped). She's pretty conflicted too...I think she really liked it that he had a crush on her. Needless to say all the girls are crying by this point, that happened so often that we started calling the game 'the waterworks sessions'. The girls would start out somewhat spread out but about every third session they'd all end up in a gaggle on the couch crying. Not always bad stuff - once it was a wedding that had them clinging to each other crying.

Anyway we finally drag his ass out to the edge of the woods, strip him down and give him a walking stick and Sarah's character says something like "I'm going to leave it up to the Gods to decide. I don't know if I'm hoping you get eaten by a bear or survive as a hermit but you had better never return because if I ever see you again or hear from anyone that your back in civilization I'll kill you, there won't be a second chance."

Needless to say this was some of the most powerful gaming I've ever been involved in and yet I won't even try to emulate it as a DM - I think my gender precludes it.