What kinds of games are you planning on running now? What options do you see as now available to do under 4E? Is there something that it can do easier/better than prior editions? Tell me your ideas about what 4E can do. I would like to know others ideas. I am trying to be open to the system. My books should be here tomorrow. I have looked through them some already, unfortunately I have only been able to notice more faults than pluses. Please help me see what other benefits there are. I am trying to get beyond the "they are turning it into a grinding video game" idea that I have atm.
This is serious request. Show me the potential!
edit: bad title sound like cave guy mmm letter go missing
bleck
im not really stupid
:)
I have been reading over the books for the past week and there is a lot of things I like about the streamlined ability system. I am not sure how fighting creatures with 1,450 hp is going to make it faster but having not had the chance to play test it I cannot say for sure. The layout of the books is great and the DMG and MM both will be a great resource for new DMs. I really love the creature classification and defined roles, just not so much for the PCs. This will help the DM design encounters and maximize warbands. Yea I said it.
They should have called the book Miniatures Handbook II. It would have been a great game for that style of play. It would also help sell the miniatures which I am positive is the main objective of WoTC and Hasbro.
I enjoy (some of) the complexity and balance of 3.5 and just don't see myself playing a RPG that is so overtly reliant on the use of battlemats and Minis.
First thing I'm going to do is run the adventure in the back & H1. I want to get a feel for how it works, and the pre-published stuff seems to be the fastest way to get that experience.
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This is serious request. Show me the potential!
NO more coffee for you! :)
Hmmm. Let's see:
Minion rules make attacking the PCs with 20+ creatures a cinch.
Skill Challenges make researching actually interesting for everyone.
No more wizards with crossbows!
No more 1-2-1 movement.
1st level PCs -- finally! -- are not pushovers. You can actually fight dragons!
Cleric doesn't have to act like a medic anymore.
Fighters are actually interesting.
Rogues are, finally, bad-arsed in combat against undead, constructs, etc.
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I'm running a game of Keep on the Shadowfell (see the chop shop thread) in part because I love B2: Keep on the Borderlands, and in part because I want to have the common experience of an adventure that lots of people will have played. Its advantages are that it's easy to kitbash without worrying about future consequences as you do in an adventure path: it doesn't put much out there in the way of story or detail, making it easy to add your own: and it gives you lots of battle maps, which are important for mini-centric 4e fights.
Things I'd do that would be fun if I weren't doing Shadowfell:
- Become a patron of Open Design's Wrath of the River King project and help Wolfgang Baur design an awesome 4e adventure for 4th level. (Actually, I did do that).
- Ditch the XP system, which lends itself to grinding. Have PCs level up after every two or three sessions. Leveling is fun, and you've got 30 of them to run through - none of which are going to change the basic feel of the game IMO, unlike earlier editions where different levels had different play styles.
- Ditch powers . Run a freewheeling OD&D-style game where the players describe what they do and you use the DMG guidelines for winging it (page 42?) to resolve their action.
- Ditch classes. Have the PCs be monsters, maybe using the monster design guidelines to mke their own.
First, I am running Keep on the Shadowfell. The characters in that adventure will continue on to participate in other published modules that get released (H2, H3, P1, etc). I might port this stuff over to my homebrew world.
The other game I am planning will take place either in a homebrewed world or Forgotten Realms. It will have a heavy horror theme and involve lots of undead, underdark forays, demons, aberrants, and eventually Orcus himself as he tries to steal another god's portfolio. This is also the game that uses lots of gnolls, so the Yeenoghu article helps a lot.
Finally, the third game I have planned will probably take place in a homebrewed world, in which the primordials are stirring and the players face off against goblins, ogres, giants, titans, and elementals. In this one I plan for them to delve through the underdark to reach the Elemental Chaos and square off against a primordial (that is also the battlefield) in a very God of War 2 fashion.
I plan to use some of the setting ideas for the 4E dmg to create a homebrew type campaign. I like some of the ideas from the Nentir vale stuff, and I intend to combine it with some of the Golarion ideas to create my own hybrid 4E setting.
I want to run a more low magic game (not so much low magic, as a world low in trained spellcasters- or at least this section of the world will be), where treasure and magic items don't play such an important role. I want it to be more of a dark ages style sword and sorcery atmosphere, but to still have the fantasy monsters of dnd (ie a bit like Conan, but with dragons, orcs, giants etc..). I think the 4E rules are well suited to this. The class skills provide enough punch to the PCs that all the magic items will no longer be so important, and I can leave them out without having to make big changes to the game.
I do find that at first glance some of the powers and such feel a little too much like a video game, but I also see potential for in combat roleplay that can occur from the use of the powers. I will encourage players not to shout out things like "I attack using my Jaws of the Wolf power", but to instead actually describe the power in action. If it is a power like some of the warlord powers, which inspire others and provide healing or give some benefit to other characters, I will expect a bit of in character dialogue from the PC ie. "Thor is with us my friends. Our enemies are beginning to falter. Now is the time to finish them. Do not give up. Fight on brothers..." I will reward xp to players who do a good job at this sort of thing.
I use battle mats and minis, and I usually dm, so I'm excited about the new combat system. It looks cleaner than the 3E one, but I feel it allows for more tactical options for all characters.
Since no one really wants to see our current AoW game (which is on session 10 or so) end abruptly, and since there is probably like 14 or 15 months worth of playtime left in the whole AP for us, my group has spawned off into another night. Three of us will be playing both nights, with one leaving the AoW game completely. Dunno who else will be coming for the 4E night, but the DM for that night has announced his plans to run at least H1-H3. We may end up picking up the P series and the (presumed forthcoming) E series as well.
I'm kinda interested in running the Dungeon 4E AP as well, and might suggest that in between the AoW game, if the DM there starts getting burned out.
Cheers! :)
I'll be running a homebrew campaign using some of the flavor found in the DMG. Specifically, the whole legendary war between the gods and the primordials... Lets just say some crazy folk are trying to bring the most powerful primordial back. His name starts with "T" and ends with "dun".
I enjoy (some of) the complexity and balance of 3.5 and just don't see myself playing a RPG that is so overtly reliant on the use of battlemats and Minis.
So you don't use mini's or battlemats in your 3.5 D&D games?
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My group aren't planning on converting over, however I feel tnat the runelords campaign could work as conversion (huge amounts of work though). The attacks on the town would have a whole new feel with lots of minions running around. A more large invasion feel rather than small riad as it currently stands.
What kinds of games are you planning on running now? What options do you see as now available to do under 4E? Is there something that it can do easier/better than prior editions? Tell me your ideas about what 4E can do. I would like to know others ideas. I am trying to be open to the system. My books should be here tomorrow. I have looked through them some already, unfortunately I have only been able to notice more faults than pluses. Please help me see what other benefits there are. I am trying to get beyond the "they are turning it into a grinding video game" idea that I have atm.
This is serious request. Show me the potential!
edit: bad title sound like cave guy mmm letter go missing
bleck
im not really stupid
:)
Well we all know combat heavy games in Dungeons will definitely work.
Lets consider some of the other styles of play.
Horror: I'm not sure if 4E will help, hinder or be comparatively neutral for this style of play. The core assumption of the game is pretty gamist and that usually works against horror. That said, having recently tried to run horror in 3.5 I found there were definite weak points in that system as well unless the DM jumped the players with horror out of the blue. My players knew they were heading for undead and prepped and in 3.5 if your preparing to fight undead and your pretty high level you can get spells and magic items that are really really powerful specifically versus undead.
In any case horror is usually more about getting into your players head space and messing with them. I'm not really sure that good horror is really about the rules at all.
Intrigue: I'm very interested in this angle and very hopeful. I found intrigue to be very hard to run under 3.5 because I faced two very stark positions. Either I had a player that had pumped up his diplomacy and was a Paladin or Bard or some such and had a diplomacy check through the roof. In this case he just could not fail. If there was some kind of diplomacy roll he made the roll - his bonus to the roll was obscene. To say he failed clearly meant that the roll was close to unbeatable by mortals. Well in my game the Half-Celestial Paladin player with the unbeatable diplomacy skill died in a viscous ambush and a half-giant fighter with a spiked chain hit the Paladin so hard so many times that he exploded into a cloud of red gore and feathers. So halfway through the adventure suddenly the players don't have any diplomacy skill almost at all - after all the Paladin was the 'face' of the party and now he's dead.
Mechanically basically I could not get this to work (I had trouble with the players outside of mechanics as well, however).
That said I think a lot can be done with the skill challenge system for making the types of adventures work. Furthermore its a lot easier to judge about how good the players will be in diplomacy based on their level about 1/2 their level plus or minus some stats and maybe some feats and magic. There is a range there but its not anywhere near the range one found in 3.5. Assigning reasonably hard DCs for their level and making it so that there are a number of alternate ways the plot flows if the PCs succeed or fail and I think this is reasonably designable. As a side bonus - since my players will get XP for these encounters I'm less likely to have to deal with the one or two players I have that feel all of this yakking is cutting into their goal of garnering as much XP as possible as fast as possible.
Magical Murder Mystery: This is a kind of sub-theme that was becoming increasingly popular near the end of the Paizo era of Dungeon. I think the designers were actually thinking of this style of play when they wrote the rules. I was reading over the rituals that will allow you to use magic to discern information. Not only is it hard to use magic to just find out the answer to something but the descriptions themselves seem to harken back to this style of play. Use some of the information gathering rituals and you get a free 'clue'. Well murder mysteries are composed of clues and it seems some of these spells will make a clue salient - won't tell you who the murder is however. Just help give you information. Seems like a mechanism almost designed to help stumped players. I feel that the designers might well have had these popular Ebberon adventures in mind when they wrote out how information gathering rituals work.
Encounter Challenges: I that the design of the game will help with scenes involving jumping from rooftop to rooftop or getting through crowded squares full of people etc. again the basic mechanic that all players have at least 1/2 their level in every skill and that those with trining and feats might get that maybe another 8 points higher means that its possible to design such encounters without knowing exactly what the players skill choices are as long as you know about what level your designing adventures for. This is also true for some kinds of puzzles and traps. The basic skill levels that you know all players have makes it easier to create certain kinds of puzzles and traps. You'll know that all the players have at least a 50% chance of grabbing the swinging vines and using them to leap to the other side and some players will probably have a significantly better chance. Your in a better position to throw challenges like this at the party without quite as much danger that it'll just stop the adventure dead in its tracks. Furthermore if you design the challenge so that there are lots of things the party can do (a skill challenge basically) such as read the glyphs or push the statue across the floor your going to end up with challenges that all the players get to participate in. Fun for everyone is the hope here.
In conclusion:
I don't think this is anything resembling a full list of all the kinds of adventures possible. Exploration of far off lands has not been addressed nor has something like running a Barony but here is a sample of some of the ones I've thought a bit about.
I think the rules are designed well to support some very interesting styles of play beyond simple hack and slash. Will WotC give us adventures that make use of these rules? I don't know. They have never been particularity exceptional in exploiting the full potential of their rules even in the 3.5 era and that may not change. But just because the WotC does not exploit all the opportunities inherent in their rules does not mean we won't see some great work out there. Companies like Necromancer Games could fill the void, furthermore I have to assume that even if WotC fails to really push the envelope with their in house products they will still presumably recognize a great adventure that uses their rules to the full extent if its submitted to Dungeon and, of course, DMs can make full use of the skill challenge system and the closer to baseline skill system to make exciting encounters in home brewed adventures. Beyond this WotC has made it something of a goal to use the skill system in things like combat encounters so we may well see some elements of this appear even in their more hack heavy adventures - probably alongside combat.
I'm going to take all those wonderful things out there that were produced for previous editions, but which never had a proper home, and I'm going to stick them front and center. All the "generic setting" adventures the give away as free downloads on Wizards, the Fantastic Locations modules (two of which, interestingly enough, have already been official tied into the setting--Dragondown Grotto and Fields of Ruin), the cities and organizations in books like Cityscape. Before there really wasn't a place for them anywhere in D&D, but they were so specific it was hard to do much else with them but scavenge them for parts. Now I get to really use them. There's been a whole world written specifically for them. I love it!
Second I'm going to dive head first into the new stuff. I want to crack into the Shadowfell and the Feywild version of the Underdark. I want to pit guys against githyanki pirates out on the astral sea and dig up some secrets of the old Nerathi Empire. It all feels really fresh and new and I can't wait to start messing around with it.
I plan to run things in my homebrew world. I'll begin with a slightly modified Keep on the Shadowfell, though I'm not sure what I'll use from the upcoming modules (we'll see!). The PCs are going to face the cult of Tharizdun and their efforts to release their dread master. To that end I'm changing Kalorel from the H1 module a little bit. He'll be a mid-ranking cleric of Tharizdun, instead of a devotee of Orcus.
Rise of the Runelords - Starting this one in two weeks. Several of the characters have already been created, and I've been having fun creating/converting monsters. I think I'll ditch xp for this one and level the characters at least once/month (which is four one-hour lunch sessions).
Birthright - I'll be playing in this one starting later this summer. Characters already created (I'm a dwarf cleric of the Raven Queen). The DM is using the Birthright fluff and maps without the blood rules. The Dragonborn are the Vos, the Tieflings are the Khinsani.
Savage Tide - I tried doing this back in January with gestalt characters (two players) and a bunch of variant rules from Unearthed Arcana, but it faltered after one session. I'm looking forward to doing it again in 4e once I find another player or two for a weeknight game.
Ptolus - I've been running this in 3.5 once a month or so, and the characters have just hit 7th level in the Night of Dissolution adventure. Still not sure whether to convert or reboot this group, but I know I'll be transitioning to 4e.
Age of Worms - I'd still love to do the last half of this campaign. We made it through the Champion's Games, but there's so much more to love about it. Perhaps once I've got a group familiar with the rules I'll consider running the back half starting at the paragon tier. Plenty of good elemental creatures in the MM for substituting into a certain Wind Duke's tomb.
Obviously, I'm all about prepublished adventure paths. Initial testing with Rise of the Runelords suggests that conversion will be relatively easy and fun with the 4e DMG.