On the other hand, they had a fatality on the next encounter where they had to fight more than one enemy. Could be they are tricked up best for anti-solo work - there still exists a trade-off, potentially. Killing solos is pretty easy a lot of the time so perhaps they aren't that optimised.
The big issue with solos is really the lack of actions coupled with being the only target. That said, from an encounter design perspective it may be sensible to have some mooks in with the solo. Not just minions, but standard monsters. From memory, a lvl X solo plus two lvl X standards should be about a lvl X+2 encounter - tough but not overwhelming for lvl X characters. Playing round with the levels can give you different mixes and numbers. That would be probably a challenge to most parties. I hasten to add I haven't tried this, but I'm thinking that perhaps it's time... Anyway, just because it says "solo" they don't have to enter the stage alone.
One can certainly throw in some helpers. My experience has been its only marginally helpful. The Players generally still know who the Solo is and they nerf it. The other baddies running around are usually more annoyance then real problem. One can get really creative of course with Solo's that are level -2 and lots of other baddies and such but this is getting beyond the scope of my point.
Wish I Had Used A Skill Challenge
So one of my players was lamenting the other day that I don't use enough skill challenges. He's correct up to a point. I don't really dislike them but they work best, in my experience, only in pretty specific types of circumstances. The 'fast play' mode for something that needs to be dealt with is one of those cases but I have never really gotten into the habit of seeing when that comes up.
I was reminded of that in a recent session. My players need to drop down a long pit and there are crossbow armed Draconians all around it and the crossbow armed Draconians will shoot the daylights out of the PCs. So after far to long playing with my players going all 1st edition on me to make it impossible to fall using ropes the shooting starts and one of the players pretty much announces - 'OK this is ridiculous we can't fight here just tell us how much damage we take getting to the bottom' Another player nods and I've already recognized the combination of boredom and frustration is pretty prevalent at the table at the moment. I quickly agree tell them two surges and move on with the game.
Its on the way home that I stop and realize that I totally missed a fantastic opportunity the whole scene could have - nay, should have been a skill challenge. 'I go totally old school 1st edition on the ropes is converted from a long boring explanation to a die roll - Dungeoneering seems appropriate etc. Success and they take less surges going down (maybe no surges if there are no failures. Fail and they take maybe a little more. Potentially that would have actually been a fun little interlude and turned bad gaming into good.
I still will probably find that I don't use all that many skill challenges - the scenes where they work don't come up in this campaign all that often. Its probably no coincidence that I suddenly find myself wishing I had used a skill challenge in the first dungeon these guys have been in in 6 levels. Most of the campaign is city based and good social skill challenges are particularly uncommon. The dice rolling can break up good role playing, you need a good answer for what it means to have success and failure etc.
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One can certainly throw in some helpers. My experience has been its only marginally helpful. The Players generally still know who the Solo is and they nerf it. The other baddies running around are usually more annoyance then real problem. One can get really creative of course with Solo's that are level -2 and lots of other baddies and such but this is getting beyond the scope of my point.On the other hand, they had a fatality on the next encounter where they had to fight more than one enemy. Could be they are tricked up best for anti-solo work - there still exists a trade-off, potentially. Killing solos is pretty easy a lot of the time so perhaps they aren't that optimised.
The big issue with solos is really the lack of actions coupled with being the only target. That said, from an encounter design perspective it may be sensible to have some mooks in with the solo. Not just minions, but standard monsters. From memory, a lvl X solo plus two lvl X standards should be about a lvl X+2 encounter - tough but not overwhelming for lvl X characters. Playing round with the levels can give you different mixes and numbers. That would be probably a challenge to most parties. I hasten to add I haven't tried this, but I'm thinking that perhaps it's time... Anyway, just because it says "solo" they don't have to enter the stage alone.
It depends. I've found that a very useful way to build up quite a challenging encounter is with artillery minions in support. They are generally very accurate, do reasonable damage, there's lots of them and because they don't stand next to the PCs generally last a lot longer than melee minions, thereby racking up damage for several rounds. Concentrated fire from artillery minions on a controller or striker will actually give the PCs a dilemma - bash minions and let the solo rampage, or bash solo and have the minions pour fire on the squishies. But in the end, solo encounters are problematic. To be honest, the best way to deal with it is probably for solo monsters to do a lot more damage than necessarily seems healthy for the PCs, so even the occasional hit will given them pause, with better defences but maybe lower hp so it doesn't grind. But then things are swingier. And even then it might be a let-down.
It depends. I've found that a very useful way to build up quite a challenging encounter is with artillery minions in support. They are generally very accurate, do reasonable damage, there's lots of them and because they don't stand next to the PCs generally last a lot longer than melee minions, thereby racking up damage for several rounds. Concentrated fire from artillery minions on a controller or striker will actually give the PCs a dilemma - bash minions and let the solo rampage, or bash solo and have the minions pour fire on the squishies. But in the end, solo encounters are problematic....
Oh yeah - your right about the power of artillery minions. Very effective against my group in particular which is so good at dealing with single enemies and generally not nearly so good with lots of enemies. Even frontline fighting minions work surprisingly well against my party.
Loving those Traps
OK so if you've been following along you know that my 4E players are in a dungeon that I, substantially, ran for the same 3E group. A few new faces and a few old friends not present but this is an interesting situation in part because I can get a feel for how the adventure plays out with between the editions.
There are a bunch of differences, for one this is a much easier dungeon - its even worked into the story on why its easier but in reality the 3E characters and the 4E characters are actually about the same level going in. Its just that by 9th-10th level 3rd edition characters are really, really, coming into their own and are now seriously powerful. The 4th level spells are in play and that means some brutal stuff like Solid Fog, easy and constant access to Rope Trick for rest and recuperation purposes etc. 10th level 4E characters are good but they just are not at the same power level as 3rd edition characters. They are just about to enter paragon which means they are at the point where people will likely start to notice that they are hero's. They are a force but not yet capable of so bending and twisting the laws of physics that they can take on and defeat whole enemy armies and such.
I'm not sure if our combats are faster at this stage but they are still very manageable at least. At this point in 3.5 I might throw 30 Draconians at them and watch them make mince meat out of them. Here I'm more in the 10-15 range and the players are feeling the pressure. Now a lot of that is that I so control the monsters power - if I say the Draconian blows up when killed and everyone in sight takes ongoing 10 save ends that really gets their attention. I mean a 4E group can mitigate this sort of thing but not really stop it. The players are much less able to really get their defenses out of range of the Draconians. I mean my Baaz are only 4th level baddies and against this party they don't exactly hit a lot but they do sometimes hit and when they do its not insignificant damage. The range of challenging monsters is a little further spread out in 4E. Not a ton but its there. This is especially true because the high AC defender and such is very hard to hit for such a low level creature but the cleric and such are not nearly so tough.
However what really struck me in that last session was the traps - they worked so well. I mean the PCs avoided some got hit by others but generally they where scattered through the encounter and when they came up it was fun. In 3rd it generally felt as if the PCs made a point of practically nerfing all traps by the time they got to 10th. My 3rd edition group blew a spell to autodetect all the traps in the complex. Even when this, for various reasons did not work they always seemed to have a reasonably easy out. The trap filled dungeon became a slog against way to many enemies that they killed in large numbers while avoiding the traps of the place.
Here the traps almost always have a chance to work - I mean my players got lucky a few times with some pits but that just meant that they managed to come up short and not fall in (miss effect - stop in the previous square and your action immediately ends). It felt dramatic which was not something I could really say about the same situation when I played it in 3rd.
I mean I hesitated before sticking my players in this adventure and was wondering if I was just crazy - in our 3rd edition campaign it was a bit of a low point. Yet when my players where packing up for the night after this session they were all excited - this had been one of the best encounters they had been part of in a bit.
As I note up the thread a bit - near the end of 4Es run WoTC redesigned 4Es traps making them simpler to use and much more clear. I really must say that they are a real pleasure to play with. Early 4E traps like pits where supposed to give a lot of options but really that is not what we want from our traps - we want them to be simple and clear cut and provide fun. If you want a really complex trap with lots of moving parts design a skill challenge...there is a time and place for just such a menace - but the 30 foot spiked pit trap is not that place.
Well that Solo Worked
So my players encounter the second of three Solo encounters in this adventure. There are something to the tune of 10 or 11 non-solo-encounters in this sizable, encounter heavy adventure so its still a case of most encounters not being with solo's.
Furthermore after my issues with the Hydra I revamp this solo encounter. Originally it was going to be with a Behir and its potent War Troll Companion but I go back and revamp the encounter replacing the War Troll with a Grell Philosopher and a Grell Rift Renderer.
The encounter is quite a fun one but its also one that I have to be pretty over the top to pull off. For a 9th level party I'm hitting them with a 13th Level Solo, a 13th Level Elite and an 11th level Elite. Oh and they have been through several other tough encounters prior to this one meaning some good dailies are already used and the surge count for some members of the party is really poor.
After all of this we have the monsters themselves. They are just mean. On round one the Behir storms forward and swallows the parties defender. The Defender is so healthy and resistant that he's actually not taking much damage in the Behirs tummy but you can't really do much as a defender from inside the Behir's stomach. The Grell Philosopher has several nasty attacks, including one that dazes and a particularly nasty one that I modified so that it says the PCs randomly attack one of the possible legal targets - including friends and that the fact that the power could hit a friend is not revealed to the target initially. During the fight the Barbarian unloaded with a crit off a daily power and then found out that he had just maimed the party's Companion.
The Rift Renderer can grab targets and teleport with them - it 'stole' one of the PCs and then proceeded to head down the hall away from the encounter which had the PCs freaking out.
Oddly enough my players are calling me an evil SOB right and left but they are loving it. Players finally prevail but one of them is down to 0 surges by the end and it was definitely looking touch and go for most of the encounter. Still the amount I had to stack this fight to get a challenge out of it was pretty extreme.
Unfounded Fears
So I'm looking at some of the older posts on this thread and I hit this one:
...4th has no solution to the problem since it technically deals with this in a pretty similar manner - PCs have the Thievery Skill and its supposed to come into play in this sort of situation...course one can end up facing the same sort of issue as the 3rd edition DM.Mainly 4th avoided the problem by...avoiding the problem - or trying to do narativist end runs around the problem - trap has power X - X is true; explain X. Some how haqving to explain how a monsters power still works in an implausible situation does not even come close to the same story with a mechanical trap. The sheer number of things a monster could potentially do allows for some sort of explanation to be worked out - but traps are mechanical and always behave the same...so X is true can become insanely hard to swallow.
Hence the favoured 4E solution...don't use traps that have these types of issues - notice the prevalence of 'blaster' type traps - the trap is some kind of robot and it shoots you with its turret. That is sort of an OK solution well except for the fact that turreted blasters are anything but iconic and can get boring eventually - not to mention it does not really address the situation at all.
Not to say that I have a solution or anything. I mean what brings this post up is an ambush type trap in Tallow's Deep that involves the players going past a spiked pit when the baddies start trying to stab them through holes in the walls and knock them into the pit.
In 2nd edition this is done with dex checks - I don't recall it working out for the monsters even when I ran this in 2nd edition but can't remember the details. The key however is no one cares if the PCs think their way around the trap in 1st or 2nd - that's what they are supposed to be doing.
3rd faced the problem I described above...Think the players used strong characters with tower shields (they used to wander around with extra tower shields) to block the whole wall and go past.
Now I'm trying to figure out what I'm going to do to try and make this work in 4E. I mean I suppose I'll give the Draconians some kind of push power if they hit with their spears...hmm...if I give them an opportunity action type interrupt and specify that the wall does not get in the way of them making opportunity attacks it might work...or I might end up trying to figure out how the power is supposed to work if the players block the trap with a table or something...that'd be a problem...blocked powers don't fraggin exist in 4E.
Thus I can already see a lot of awkward adjudication when trying to run this...and a bunch of players calling b.s. I'm tempted to simply erase the whole thing or rework it so that its not such a problem...but I'm also curious to see what this train wreck will look like - I mean what if its not a 'real' train wreck...or...or...maybe it'll suggest something to me for a good way to handle this sort of thing in the future. I think I'll stick with the encounter and see what comes of it. Small enough that it should be OK as a learning experience.
Well it just so happens I ran this spear based encounter a couple of weeks ago and can report on how it all worked out. Thing is my problem with 4E traps is substantially mitigated with the introduction of the well designed late 4E traps I've been gushing about in recent posts.
What actually happened here was I gave the Draconians reach 3 poolarms. The ones that got the pole arms usually use Glaives in any case (reach 2) and have threatening reach as well as the ability to slide a target that is hit. Then I carefully design the intersection so that the PCs can't stand back and shoot the baddies - if they want to get close enough to have a legal shot then they are close enough for the pole arms to work.
Its actually a reasonably tough encounter for the players who are trying to rush their way past the intersection. Their defender gets slid into the pit and the dwarven invoker seer spends the entire encounter playing 'Dwarf in a Pit'. He literally manages to get out of the pit three times only to be knocked back into it. By the end of it the whole party is pretty much laughing about his misfortune. The player is sort of finding it funny and frustrating all at the same time. Lots of 'No - not the pit'. Anyway the bottom line is the encounter works great as have all the encounters in this adventure so far. Some how this adventure is just playing spectacularly in 4E, better then when I ran it in 2nd and much better then when I ran it in 3rd.
Threats to the Nentir Vale
I've been filling out my 4E collection and Paizo just sent me my order of Threats to the Nentir Vale. I always like monster books - they are one of the few books I actually use off line as I simply find flipping through them looking for ideas on what kind of monster I need some how works for me better then trying to use the monster builder for inspiration (Monster Builder is where I go to create the finalized product...the monster that meets my specifications if you will).
Sadly for me this is just about the last of the 4E monster books. Might be a few monsters left in some of the books I buy as I fill out my library but no books devoted just to monsters.
Furthermore its one of only two really excellent monster books. As a rule when I'm adding monsters to my campaign I want to see that they are from either the Monster Vault or Threats to Nentir Vale because the quality of these monsters are very high and they tend to work well with 4E. If neither book has what I'm looking for then I'll consider Monster Manual III as its pretty good but I'll have a pretty critical eye when looking at the monster and expect that I will need to make some changes. If I'm still out of luck then Monster Manual II can be used but you really need to expect to make some modifications to the stat block at this point and anything before this probably just not very good. You can also go with late era Dungeon magazine monsters or some of the monsters from the last few adventures but stay away from the rest of it.
Threats to Nentir Vale does a good job of being the opposite of Monster Vault in that it presents monsters that are not classic examples of their type but are specific to a region and have powers and such that fit with whatever the region them is. So we have yet more goblins and orcs but the goblins and orcs presented are not generic but examples of what you find in these specific tribes. They are generally excellent examples of the monsters with some theme or 'culteral' based powers.
This is generally what one finds with this book - groups of monsters that are a little more detailed then the generic versions found in Monster Vault.
The standout here are the various dragons, each of which comes with unique powers that move one into a space where one starts to think of Dragons as all being individualized. Essentially every Dragon is a Dragon but all dragons are also individuals with their own unique powers and abilities. Works well for something as powerful as a Dragon and I have to say that I really liked the Dragons on offer in this book though I wish they had a Blue one as well.
The groups of monsters are nice in this context as well - you usually need pretty sizable groups of monsters in 4E and the book presents groups that can work together well - I find this approach much more satisfying then the 'recommended encounters' approach taken in the early books. Never bothered with those - I can just group monsters together myself if it comes to that but here we have small organizations.
The book is best for the Heroic Tier - this I'm a little bummed about as my players are heading for Paragon but there are a handful of good Paragon creatures...though as one gets to upper Paragon the list starts to get awfully short. Nothing at all for Epic - a major gap in 4E really - finding good Epic monsters is a major pain.
Obviously I don't use the Nentir Vale myself but I think I could fit most of these organizations with some tweaks into my campaign world.
Anyway I really liked it in general, considering it to be the best of the 4E monster books.
I'm feeling nostalgic for 4e today, and wanted to say how happy I am to see this thread. Thanks Jeremy.
Note sure if you'd ever run it again or not. What I will say is that 4E in its final days is a far better game then what first came out. Personally I think this is true of all versions of Dungeons and Dragons and maybe especially 3rd and 4th.
In effect most of the big early problems with 4E have been addressed and a lot has really been improved. I'm going on on this thread recently about how much I like the new traps - they are really very good mixing and matching modern style traps mechanics based traps with some old school feel, and in 4E its easy and common for them to come with some cinematic elements as well. Pit Trap has to be the most common trap in all of D&D and in 4E the modern version is simple to run and adjudicate plus if it misses you then it has a miss effect that ends your action. Really basic rule but one that makes it feel as if a PC just came up short or managed to jump back when the trap was set off - it comes with some cinema attached which is important in 4E games - your looking for that look and feel that says this is a simulation of a big budget fantasy movie.
The monsters have become markedly improved etc. etc. Its a really good game that more or less finally came into its own right about the point WotC choose to move on...ain't that always the way. Of course anyone who does decide to run 4E should focus on the later material - not for characters - those where errata'd constantly so they work (more or less) at all stages (but make sure your using the last errata). WotC did not tend to errata DM side stuff, they just updated things moving forward. This one should use Essentials for charts and such and the later books for monsters and traps. I actually wish I could set up the Compendium so as to exclude earlier works - I can search by a single source (which I do use) but most of the time I want everything after about Dungeon #180 and books on or after Darksun. Does not let me search like that but the entry always says the source so I can muddle through.
Personally I'm not really planning on leaving - the remaining weak points I've been smoothing over with house rules and could easily see myself using this as my base system (with house rules) for the rest of my life. This is especially true as D&D Next is not making any attempt to create a game that has the look and feel of a big box movie...making this kind of a unique version of D&D. This is cinematic high fantasy D&D in a world where most versions of D&D are chasing after some kind of a 'gritty' feel. Nothing quite like it really exists and I doubt ever will again.
Somethings Changed...
So it dawns on me recently that there has been a bit of a shift in what is lethal in my game. Anyone who's ever played 3rd knows that there is this point that you cross over around 10th level where what kills your PCs changes from direct damage to failed saving throws.
This is sort of like that - well OK its not but it seems to have happened about the same point in time. My players are rapidly approaching Paragon and what is dangerous to them and how the danger plays out seems to have made a subtle shift.
Now this whole post needs a friggen huge Caveat - I play with a huge house rule in terms of death and dying. The minute you go down you make your first death save and any time you roll a 1 on a death save you instantly die unless you can some how reroll (not modify actually make that roll again so it does not show a natural 1). Another big caveat is that I don't hit downed characters except inadvertantly...the monsters are trying to win the fight so downed characters might be in the blast of the dragons fire but and the dragon is not taking steps to either include or avoid the downed PC (hence some danger of death through negative bloodied but not something that specifically comes up). Very occasionally I use a monster that will specifically stop and try and eat downed PCs. I telegraph this to the players so they know whats up and its almost always instinctual - the monster wants the PCs brain and is to stupid to realize that it needs to win the fight before eating time can commence.
At low levels my house ruled death and dying rules were very dangerous but the players eventually found way to get those rerolls. Only a few in the party but how often do you make death saves? never mind death saves where a 1 comes up. Once the party can reroll that a few times its no longer much of a danger...
Well it wasn't except that now we are on to the monsters that really play havoc with the PCs. Cleric can't give you that reroll if he is dazed. The death save element of this is becoming a much bigger deal as well. A player makes the first death save immediately when he goes down the PC might well be making the second on that same round (when the PCs turn comes up) and that can lead to being only one death save away from dead - a big deal with the cleric is currently under the effects of a condition that takes him 'off the board' or if the party is so screwed up at the moment that no one can come to the downed PCs aid. At low levels the players were rarely suffering under action denial of their own but as the levels have gone up 'big' conditions like stunning and restrained have proliferated and now its really possible that a player can be about to make a critical death save and no one can get their to help him.
Finally I've entered into a part of the game where the PCs are individually being screwed over as opposed to things being really about the group. At low levels things tended to play out so that the party more or less all were up or all were down. Players could rotate into the front line as necessary, sure the defender was better then the mage but it was not extreme. However as the levels have gone up so have the extremes.
The defender can stand toe to toe with the most nasty of monsters and really take a beating and practically laugh it off. If the cleric is the one that, for whatever reason, is in front of the monster every attack the monster throws out hits (because the cleric has crap defenses comparatively) and the attacks are phenomenal (because usually they are being used against a half way invulnerable defender).
This combined with the shear lethality of the late era 4E attacks by higher level monsters means that in any given (tough) fight we have some PCs that are just being screwed while right beside them a PC might be practically fine. In my group its routine for the parties defender to have something like 12 surges while half the rest of the party has only one or two left but the mage has not been much of a target recently so he happens to still have close to his full compliment of six.
I've found all of this pretty interesting since my players seemed convinced that they had 'broken' my death and dying house rules when they found ways to allow the natural 1 effect to be rerolled. This might have been true for a level or two and I've been concerned about this aspect but in the last few fights I've seen the players in tight spots mainly due to awesome monster powers and the resulting uneven damage allocation among the PCs.
This has also changed how the group wins and looses a fight. At low levels chances are whole group was screwed when a fight went south, it was a case of everyone winning or everyone loosing. With the way damage and effects have become much more uneven its become much more possible that just one player dies and then the party regains the upper hand and wins the fight. This element is what, I think, reminds me of 3rd edition. In that a player blows a saving throw and dies - the rest of the group is much weaker for having lost a character but has a good chance of just persevering and winning the fight.
Lethality is something I always keep tabs on and this is the situation as of roughly low Paragon. It will be interesting to see where we stand at high paragon or Epic if we get there. Likely this is not my last post on the topic.
Ideas on Monster Challange
With my PCs about to make Paragon I’ve been thinking a bit more about the various ways one can make monsters challenging. I can think of five different ways one can make monsters challenging. The first is to do nothing much but make sure that there are a lot of encounters before the PCs get a full rest. In this case the players have to conserve their power and the later encounters are often quite challenging.
All the other options boost the power of the encounters and in this case I can think of four options. One is to make the monsters higher level. This is a pretty broad way of boosting monster power – the monsters get higher defenses, more hps, have a better chance of hitting with their attacks and do more damage with each attack.
Alternatively one can just have a high level encounter through the use of massive numbers of bad guys. Higher encounter level but the monsters remain of level very comparable to the PCs.
The other two options are to make the monster more durable – just give it more hps, or make the monster meaner – give it powers that really screw with the PCs.
All of these options have upsides and downsides and I don’t really think there is a best solution for every circumstance. I’ll say that the increased number of encounters is the option I choose most rarely. My experience is its just to many combats that one has to wade through per plot point and the fact that the first two or three of, say five, encounters are not really dangerous means a number of sessions without much in the way of threat to the players. The fact that I think this was supposed to be the ‘default’ mode for 4E makes my job as a DM a little more demanding as a DM because I’m going to have to do something to up encounter power when I only expect to have between one and three encounters before my PCs take a long rest, and even three encounters is unusually high in my campaign – one or two much more common – so they need to be tough.
Higher level monsters or an encounter with a heck of a lot of bad guys are both interesting options, higher level monsters in particular are actually a very moderate choice – a lot of different aspects of the monster are improved a bit and this tends to be a pretty even handed way of boosting the encounters threat. It might seem almost like cheating but truth be told if there is no particular reason to take one of the other options then this one makes an excellent default choice.
Lots of bad guys are fun but only in moderation. These tend to be seriously long encounters. Besides the possible plot issues of having a veritable army swarming the PCs (in my mostly city based campaign its not necessarily easy to come up with an excuse to have army group centre jump the PCs) it also just takes a heck of a long time for the PCs to wade through the horde of bad guys. I’d save this style of encounter usually for some point where the plot tends to be forcing the PCs to accomplish something. Escape the building while hordes close in from all over has worked very well for me – but took three sessions to play out. Just be wary because when this encounter backfires it goes really, really, wrong. Three sessions of high excitement is great, if exhausting, gaming. Three sessions of drudgery while the PCs kill Orc #157 can be phenomenally dull and its not necessarily easy to get around the encounter if it does go south.
Durable is a rather obvious idea but not one I had really thought of in a while. Pretty much the argument goes that players like to hit with their powers but if they do then the monsters tend to end up being quite dead quite fast. The idea here is to really boost the hps and then the PCs can hit but the monster(s) will survive whatever they throw out and therefore remain challenging. This is another concept I like but in moderation. It all sounds good on the surface but it has some draw backs – mainly its kind of grindy. Sure the PCs do the obvious and stun, daze, blind and weaken the monster but even though it has not been able to anything for five rounds it still has 60% of its hps so eventually the PCs will run out of powers and then the monster will get its revenge. In reality this really is what ‘more hps’ means – the monster is screwed until the PCs run out of juice but it has so many hps that they do eventually run out of juice. Now you can do this with multiple monsters but in the end for the encounter to be challenging your doing the same thing with more bodies…two of the monsters are screwed but then the other three will get their revenge. Truth is if you’re the DM none of this is wrong but most of the time I approach this from a different angle – not so much more hps as unusual monster powers – either the bad guys actually have healing (and we all know that should be rare) or this is your regenerating monster – which is why its durable. In my experience between these two circumstances and a handful of others your going to get your quota of durable monsters and only the plot should really push you to adding monsters with tons of extra hps.
Finally there is my admitted favourite option – make the monsters just mean. Give them powers that really screw with the players. This can be dangerous since its easy to make the power too good, though I find that I’m more likely to think a power is to good and tone it down more then I should have then the reverse. Still it is perfectly possible to have a power that really gets out of hand. Nonetheless I go down this path a lot. Nothing will make your players sit up and take notice then when you start really messing with them and that is not hard to do in 4E – the DM can make any power he can think of. I had cold based Draconians fighting the party recently and when one of them died there was a close blast 3 that did cold damage plus ongoing 10 cold and restrained (they where caught in a block of ice) all save ends but with an immobilized and ongoing 5 after effect an a slowed after effect after that. Needless to say the PCs despised these guys as they really screwed with the PCs every time the PCs killed one. One of the highlights was having the players yelling at each other Don’t kill it! It’ll blow up and get me!
I always know I’m doing well when the players are making comments like “You bastard – you make monsters we don’t want to kill…what kind of sick DMing is that?”
Darksun Creature Catalog
So I picked this up even though I don’t run a Darksun Campaign. Maybe I was just Jonesing for another monster book. That said my campaign world is pretty much a large island with various civilizations around its circumference and most of the middle of the island dominated by a huge desolate wasteland with names like ‘The Cracked Lands’ and ‘The Gouged Lands’.
Looking over the monster book I can see how I can use some of the monsters here – often with a little reskining. Some of the monsters would fit in my campaigns desolate wasteland, some might, after reskinning and probably updates, make good inhabitants for the ‘Lost (Dinosaur) World’ feel of some of the islands that surround my campaign world (and this is material I’m going to need – my PCs will visit such a ‘Lost World’ sometime during Paragon for the campaign).
There are even a number that could be slotted more or less anywhere because there is nothing particularly Athasian about them. A few of the NPCs would be fine with a bit of a makeover for example. That still leaves a lot of monsters that are specifically Athasian and just won’t fit anywhere else but that is to be expected – it is an Athasian book after all.
I find myself looking for ways to toss these monsters into the mix in large part because I really like a lot of them. Two major reasons for that. One is this book actually fills a slot that I just can’t see being meaningfully filled in any of the other good (good in the case of monsters means late era) 4E monster books. The book is absolutely chock full of monsters that sit in the mid to high paragon right through low epic slot. Almost all the other monster books for 4E focus mainly on the Heroic through low Paragon tier and yet I, so far, have seen no reason to think my current, or even average, campaign would not extend until at least mid epic. Admittedly I’ve only played through High Paragon so far but the system seemed to handle that and this was under a DM that was not doing a lot of adjustments to the monsters. If the DM is willing to get into the guts of what makes a good monster I think 4E should be able to handle reasonably high level play with comparative ease.
This might be particularly important for my style of encounter creation where I deal with even unique monsters by taking some other monster as a base and modifying from there. So having more bases in the mid paragon to mid epic to work with is very helpful.
The second reason involved the powers of the Darksun Monsters. More then any other 4E book the Athasian Monsters are just mean. Its pretty clear why Darksun is the monster book that really heralded in a rethink of how the designers viewed the monsters in the game. Always before monsters on the weak side may have not bothered the designers to much but for Darksun nasty monsters is part and parcel of the theme and Darksun’s critters deliver in spades. Even more then the later Monstrous Compendium and Threats to Nentir Vale I can see, in the Darksun Creature Catalog, elements of monster design after my own heart. In particular we see ‘mean’ powers. Powers that stick out because of the impact they are likely to have on the combat. We also see monsters with more powers – especially an emphasis on having the monsters do more then just attack – defense powers and movement powers that let a monster do a number of interesting things in combat. Its something I try and do with my baddies.
Unfortunately it can all be praise and I can’t say I think Darksun’s beasties are actually better then the last two monster books. One thing that is clear is that the Monster Compendium and Threats to Nentir Vale’s monsters where made with a clearer understanding of 4Eisms in mind. In particular its clear that the later monster books had a better grasp of the action economy in 4E. The Darksun Monsters simply don’t have enough ways of preserving their own actions or enough ways of getting more actions. The Solo’s in this book will actually be slaughtered by correct level players at least the higher level ones. Phenomenal attack power is pretty useless if the players make sure the Solo is stunned for the whole encounter – and weakened and suffering –10 to hit…and…and.
The later 4E monster books understood this and are much better able to deal with this reality of higher level play – Darksun’s monsters simply don’t.
Still all in all I’m happy I decided to get the book and in fact think I’ll find myself using it much more then I originally expected – if admittedly with lots of modifications to make up for some weakness in the monsters design and to transport the creatures in question from Athas to my Homebrew. To bad I can’t say the same for The Plane Above…I can’t think of anything I can take from that book for my game.
How Mutable is your Dungeon?
So in one of the posts above I delved into the idea of having something in the dungeon that was or was not in place depending on if the PCs where around. Its an issue I was struggling with in large part because I tend to view my adventures as unchangeable once written. I really dislike changing things around after I’ve written them, I figure I should have designed a good adventure prior to putting the PCs into it in the first place – plus you don't get much in the way of the DM being on an off night (i.e. being a jerk) if he is sticking to the material.
Thing is I’ve gone and broken that rule in the current adventure – part of the reason, or at least my rationalization, was that I did not ‘fix’ the map after the adventure was created. I already had the map since this is the dungeon that my players had been through in their previous campaign. I completely rewrote the adventure of course to make it a 4E adventure and to take into account the fact that circumstances had changed in this dungeon since their last characters had substantially cleared the place but the map I kept. It just seemed like too much work to go into GIMP and completely recreate it.
The result however was that as I began to run the adventure I noticed issues that had cropped up in this adventure the last time we played through it – mainly pacing issues. Stuff like having two exceptionally hard encounters right after each other. Not a lethality problem because I was reasonably certain that the PCs would use one of their long rests (they are on a time limit so Long Rests are kind of a resource – they have X number before a counter invasion of the Dungeon will occur and they know of the approaching army so they know how many long rests they can take before the clock runs out). Still the idea of having two really hard encounters beside each other was not good pacing. Further some of the secret doors connecting the Dungeon up could have been better placed for flow reasons (you don’t want the PCs finding the entrance to not very exciting encounters just as they are building to the climax of the adventure).
Hence – after the fact I started recreating the map and moving the encounters about, not all in one swoop but as I noticed the problems. I’m getting better pacing out of the adventure by doing this but I’m not so happy with having to change things on the fly – it feels like I’m not playing strictly fair with my players and its something of a crutch. I should have caught these sorts of issues during adventure creation and it might even hit the PCs with a suspension of disbelief issue later in the adventure when they have a map of the complex to use in planning the defense of the dungeon and it does not all line up with what they went through previously (though I don't actually suspect this – the last time they where here was like six real life years ago).
Thinking about it I think I made the right choices to make the changes I did but I dug this pit myself by not redoing the map. Nonetheless I probably would have not caught all the changes I’ve made even if I had redone the map…but if it had been fewer problems I would probably have just left them and tried to learn from my mistakes for the next time I built a Dungeon. In the end, the more I think about it, the more I think that in future I’ll stick to trying to have the adventure be run as I have written it – still don’t necessarily have a problem with the their/not their encounter if it makes for a better adventure but I want to have written the adventure that way in the first place.
Monsters that can’t be beaten
Kind of a two for one deal on this post – it was supposed to be about whether the DM should stick unbeatable monsters in the adventure…but then my players went ahead and beat the monster.
I think a lot of players are, quite possibly justifiably, leery about the DM that sticks an unwinnable encounter into the adventure. After all how are the players supposed to distinguish between some encounter that the NPCs are talking up because its tough and yet the players are expected to be hero’s and beat it and the encounter the DM has stuck in that they can’t beat. I empathize with this element and yet the DM often has reasons for sticking in an unwinnable encounter – the obvious one is foreshadowing. The monster or villain cannot be beaten now but later in the campaign it will finally be taken down. Another common theme is the monster or villain that is a feature of the this part of the world. Likely this villain was never supposed to be the target of an attack in the first place.
I can think of a bunch of plot reasons for such a monster – I mean I don’t hesitate to have ‘limitless’ bad guys after the PCs in some kind of an escape scene – so why not a big bad monster?
In fact when we really consider it such encounters have been in the game forever and they are not likely to stop being part of the game. I mean this type of encounter has already occurred in my campaign – in Salvage Operation (Salvage of the Ocean Empress in my campaign). There is a Kraken in that adventure who is destroying the ship the PCs are on and they need to escape. This is a clear plot point in the adventure and I doubt the players will normally have any issues with this scene. The problem in fact tends to come up when there is a mismatch between what the players think the encounter is about and what the encounter is actually about. In Salvage Operation the Kraken has special rules and the encounter is clearly non-standard so the players are not likely to be confused as to whether the encounter is winnable. Its really only when they are confused about how they are supposed to deal with such a monster that the players are likely to become angry and it is reasonable for players to expect the DM to give them some kind of a clue.
In my case the monster was something of a known entity but in an unusual manner. This was the third solo in my Re-Creation adventure which the players (but not the PCs) had been through in the previous campaign in 3.5. The monster is a Roper and in the 3.5 campaign the Roper was a reasonable encounter for the group as a CR 12 or 13 monster for a 10th level group. Thing is in 3.5 CR could be pretty bloody rough. I mean in that version of the adventure their was another monster of the same CR that the PCs slaughtered with comparative ease…then they hit the Roper and it beat the crap out of them. At the time it was a complete surprise to me – I had no idea how powerful the strength drain attack of the Roper was and my players barely got out alive and the NPC that was with them never made it.
Well in the current version of the adventure my 4E PCs are essentially mopping up after ‘The Great Hero’s’ who were their previous characters. However because 3.5 characters are much more powerful then 4E characters the adventure has the 4E characters fighting much weaker opposition and the plot reflects that…and then we have this Roper that was never killed by the previous party – and is therefore still around. But it must be one heck of a monster if it could beat off ‘The Great Hero’s’ – so now I need to create a Roper potent enough to reasonably have been able to beat off a party that was, in that adventure slaughtering forces 2and 3 times the size of the ones this group is hard pressed to beat. Can’t use the basic 4E Roper for that – the 4E Roper is not actually that powerful…plus I need to give this Roper the signature powers that stood out in that last adventure. No strength drain in 4E so I used weakness if the PC is grabbed and then made the Roper into a Solo, then I pumped its level up to 17th level (Encounter Level +7 for my group).
My players also found some writing by the Draconians that warned other Draconians to stay away from this area so my players both had warning that there was a dangerous monster this way – furthermore if they thought about it it should have been clear that their was no need to go this way, Draconians clearly don’t and they are here fighting Draconians.
Furthermore my players would have some chance to recognize this encounter before it actually went off since they should remember one of only a few encounters in that last campaign that they ran from. They have been here before and know just how dangerous this encounter was the last time.
Nonetheless as powerful as this Roper was I knew that the PCs had some chance of beating this monster. I mean level +7 is ridiculous but my PCs are pretty phenomenal against Solo’s. I actually decided to give them a reward if they managed to pull this off. DM gives the players wealth by level but one of the areas the DM has control over is whether the magic items are rare or not – so this adventure had two stashes of magic items…if they beat the Roper they would get their magic gear in the form of mostly rare items but if they did not then they would find uncommon magic items in a later room.
It all played out in a scene my players will remember for a long time. As the encounter began to unfold my players, kind of one by one (except for the two that where not in the previous campaign) began to recognize features. Entertainingly enough they recognized the place on an emotional level before they remembered the details. So there was a lot of ‘I recognize this area…something really bad happened here – I think maybe a nasty trap’. Finally the old players worked it out…this was the room with the Roper (now The Legendary Roper of Creation). After some debate they decided to push forward but ‘be ready for anything’.
Well off goes the encounter and the players are freaking early on as this things defenses (except for its ‘weak’ reflex) are off the charts…and then the Gods of Dice make their presence felt. Now at my table we use precision dice and, honestly, they work. I mean I don’t have lucky and unlucky players at my table. I used too but since we started using precision dice it just is not true any more. Sure sometimes there is a player that is getting lucky or unlucky but it really is variable – and great, I’ll never go back.
Well for this encounter there was luck and lots of it. After a few players had gone with some good rolls like 14 and those missed my players are starting to really freak out. They already know that this encounter is quite possibly one they are not meant to beat and it appears that even good rolls don’t work…and then it all suddenly shifts in their favour. In the next two rounds my players will roll five criticals. They are pulling out daily debuffs and they are critting with all of them. Furthermore I can’t hit to save my life. With the bonus to hit with this monster I need to get a 7 or better on average but I just roll between 1 and 4 a good 50% of the time. Even after all of this and the players getting the Roper past bloodied they are getting scared – it could still go south and they have gone through their powerful dailies and the monster still has half its hps. Then one of my players is finally in position to go off with a powerful combo and he picks up his two d20’s indicates which one is which power and says OK guys this is it. He tosses the dice on the table…they both come up showing 20, a 1 in 400 event. By this point they have had 7 criticals in something like 15 rolls to hit and they are getting 18s and 19s surprisingly often even when they are not rolling 20s. After this the Roper just does not seem to have a chance. Luck starts to average out but its just too late. The Roper is down to ¼ of its hps, the players not badly hurt and its been debuffed out the wazoo. They take it down and there is much yelling and cheering. I give them their pile of rares and let them in on the meta-game knowledge that the adventure had a rare treasure trove and a standard treasure trove and they just earned the much more powerful rare version. Session ends with the players salivating over the phenomenal loot and everyone talking about the insane run of criticals. Great session overall and I guess this is one final reason to occasionally stick such outrageous creatures in the adventure…its pretty hard to top the players sense of achievement on those rare occasions where they know that the monster is practically unbeatable and they manage to do it anyway.
Great story :)
The Reverse Dungeon (and why mine did not work)
My players have finished off my most recent adventure Re-Creation. It was designed to be a trap and ambushed filled complex originally based off of the Dungeon adventure Tallow's Deep. But I had converted it to be where the bad guys created Draconians, as I cover in posts above, one of the twists was this was an adventure that my players had done in 3.5 and in the 4E version they where actually just going in to sweep up the dregs that their much more powerful 3.5 characters had left behind.
I thought I had a pretty interesting finale to the adventure. The PCs would clear the place out then they would bring down their allies which was an alliance of humans and Lizard Folk that where on team good versus the Draconians, lots of friendly minions basically. Then I would invade the complex with a final Draconian force of very large size and pretty much we’d have a full on battle on our hands. Not to much of problem here, 4E does this sort of scene really well though there where a few short cuts that where made. For one I split initiative into two parts – bad guys turn and good guys turn. This worked reasonably well though there were a lot of readied actions that made things a little messy and I had to rule that some effects did not impact on minions because it would have become to much work to record that.
That said it turned out that my PCs pretty much fought the attackers in the first hallway of the complex. I mean I made a huge map of most of the dungeon – so big it barely fit on the sizable game table we play on and maybe 1/8th was used in the whole encounter.
I had envisioned that he battle would take place through out the complex but really my players where keen to bottleneck the attackers in the entry tunnel. Thinking back I feel there where three reasons for this. One was that this is probably just good strategy to begin with. If the baddies are running rampant its hard to keep control of the situation and my Players where keen to avoid that. They where more keen because their escape route in case it all went wrong was to close to this entrance – the layout meant that they could not fall back far without compromising their one escape route so that really pushed them to fight as far forward as possible.
I also gave the PCs access to the traps that could be made functional but the PCs had come to understand that all Draconians had been made in this complex in the first place and suspected that they would know the secret doors and the traps location…this was actually true.
Finally when I organized the attackers I did the pretty standard DM activity of having it so the weaker guys went first then the more powerful baddies and finally the most powerful baddies.
The combination of all of this I think turned what might have been a mobile battle into something more of a static combat. It was still fun but failed to achieve the epic feel that I had been aiming for.
If I do this again I need to consider this finale right from the start. The entrance into the reverse dungeon should not be a single point and it really should not have a conveniently located bend that allows the PCs to channel the attackers into a kill zone.
The bad guys probably should not know about the defenses of the place since that means that they don’t really have any value and the PCs won’t try and use them. The design, especially things like escape routes, should not force the players to fight far forward.
Finally I think this encounter might have been one where I could have forced the PCs back by leading with the best troops and working backward. As it stood the PCs found that their defenses only started to collapse and force them to be mobile right near the end of the encounter and by that time there where not many bad guys left to make this into a mobile battle in any case.
I'm planning on converting Way of the Wicked from Pathfinder to 4e, and the second adventure has a reverse dungeon. So this is very interesting to me.
The reverse dungeon is sprawling, has multiple entrances, and even a bunch of teleportation circles. One of which the PCs won't know about at first. In addition, the dungeon has a central point (a ritual chamber) that must not be disrupted, so the PCs might put guards at the (known) entrances and hole up there, moving to tangle with threats when presented.
Well I'd be interested to get your break down on how it went after you run it. Hope it works out.
Well its important to recognize that your not really limited by much of anything - its all in how you word the powers. Not sure exactly what you have or what it is you want them to do but I'm sure its doable.
One option is the horse is pretty minor is to treat the horse and rider as one creature...give the rider attacks with the horse as minor actions. I believe we see this in Goblin Wolfriders.
Or you can treat them separately and give the horse a triggered power - free action triggers at the end of a charge does X Y and Z.
You can even do both...give both the horse and rider triggered powers and then have the powers go off whenever either of them charges...however I'd at least hesitate on this with some standard horse as it is a little outrageous. You want that sort 'double charge' more for someone riding a giant lizard. Still if you have some kind of reason that this rider can actually charge twice in a round - well you can design the powers to allow that. In this case though make sure you emphasize in either the power name or in your flavour when running the guy so the players understand that this guy can do this because he is the ultimate bad ass when on top of a horse.
Another answer is you can string powers together. Power A charges and does nasty stuff...hit or miss causes secondary effect = use power B (Follow Through or whatever you want to call it) which is a power that causes a charge.
There are other ways of doing this as well...for example give the NPC a trait that means he can use two standard actions on his turn. I'm sure I could think of more ways t pull this off as well.
The take home message is that your not really limited by the action economy - you want a monster that spends its turn cycling through 30 powers? word each power so that it gets to use another one at the end of the first ones use or give it more actions or...or... Now 30 powers is out of control and I don't expect any DM to ever do something like that but the point is you can. The DM is limited only so far as the DM chooses to limit himself.
That means your limited only by what seems reasonable for your campaign...its the look and feel of your campaign that should be deciding what can and cannot happen in your game. Though keep in mind that chances are what your players can do is already pretty outrageous. Getting 4E to simulate hyper realism is probably off the table.
The problems with dungeons and character development
As my Players finish off my big ‘ol dungeon I find myself relieved and I think my players are too. Damn dungeon took forever and while a lot of it was pretty good it highlighted some of my problems with dungeons which is mainly that they are these static things which might have a lot of story weaved around them but rarely have much development. One does not really learn about who ones characters are in a dungeon and I think that is a problem. Its one that is made worse in large 4E dungeons. I mean this thing had 13 total encounters and two or three of those where multi-session events though a few where only ½ session encounters. All in all I suspect that my players where in this thing for between 12-15 sessions and considering that we miss sessions every so often for one reason or another I peg the play time at a good 5 months. 5 Months to play through what was 3-4 days in game time is pretty extreme.
In particular I went into this with players that had a lot of ‘buy in’ in my campaign and came out with all of that having kind of fizzled. It had just been too long in real time while to little was changing in game time to allow me to keep this sort of buy in up. Furthermore the whole experience tends to focus the players on their ‘builds’. If most of what they do session after session while weeks turn into months in the real world is play through combats – no matter how varied (and these where not exceptionally extreme in variability – by the end they could list most of the important stats of most of the different kinds of Draconians) then the players start thinking more and more of their characters as pieces in these combats and focus increasingly on how they can get the most out of these ‘pieces’. Even beyond this I have a couple of players who tend to grow bored with their ‘pieces’ and look to change it up – by retiring their old character and bringing in a new one.
In the end I’m not 100% sure what I think the solution to all this is. I mean the obvious one is don’t do dungeons but that strikes me as very much to restrictive. A better answer might be ‘don’t do big dungeons’ which I think is reasonably sound advice though even here I doubt I follow that idea except as a rule of thumb. Big dungeons come up sometimes and its not like this one was ever really bad gaming it was just not character centred gaming. If anything I’ll evaluate how well the ‘not dungeons’ of the next two adventures work out and see what I think of all of this after that…but I’ll also make sure that I don’t do all that many big dungeons…because they really do put quite a crimp in a developing campaign.
A Rant About Gorgeous Maps
Well I'm a little hot under the collar at the moment so maybe I should not be posting but...
Well I just finished off taking a very pretty map I bought off the internet and turning it into something that is really rather ugly. The problem is that the map needs all sorts of indications on tons of its spaces to convert the underlying image into game mechanics. For me that means putting a bright red letter in the squares and doing a legend down the side of the map that tells the players, mechanically speaking, what the terrain in the square means in game play.
None of this is a problem...the problem is actually two fold. One is that the maps I purchase online tend to be to 'cluttered'. To many of the spaces tend to need some kind of an explanation. Worse yet there is a strong tendency for the artists to go for a 'realistic' look and ignore the damn grid. They include a grid of course because our games require it but they pretend that it does not exists when sticking objects on the map.
This results in me having to define things like whether a square is legal or not and also where the walls 'actually' are. It also means deciding if the underlying objects are or are not in the space and that means more notation so that my players know if the objects are or are not in the space...all of which makes the map ugly.
It has actually dawned on me that my personal maps look better once they hit the table. Not because I am a better artist - I'm not even in the same league, but because there is no need to define things like 'where a wall really is' or if a hex is legal or not. These are always obvious on my maps because I make them with the grid in mind. My markings are also generally much less obtrusive and more functional and again its because the map is designed to be the scene of an encounter and the map reflects that. Sure one can cheat a little in this regard - take objects that clearly would not effect play and have them ignore the grid to get a more realistic look but I really wish that the artists that made gridded maps would actually make maps that did not feel as if the image was made and then a grid superimposed on top of it since these look mighty fine but are not any good for actual play - at least not without making a mess of the pretty map first.
Preach it, brother.
I'm sure the concern has always been that if the image conforms to the grid, everything will look blocky and artificial. IIRC, the general rule with 4E maps was any square into which a terrain feature bled was treated as having that terrain feature - unless it was water, in which case there was always enough "land" to stand on if there was some land in the square. While it worked in theory, you ended up with a lot of nonsensical cases like creatures gaining cover from a sliver of pillar that bled into their square or taking a movement penalty from the six inches of rubble in their square.
And Yet More Thoughts on Monster Design
One of the things I kind of wish I could do is talk to some of the people that designed the monsters for 4E. Especially the later era ones like those from Monster Vault and the Darksun Creature Catalog. I’m busily putting together encounters for my most recent opus and it dawns on me that I am, once again, trying to come up with defensive powers as well as interrupts and powers involving movement plus something the baddies can do with their minor actions.
I feel like I can look over nearly any non-minion monster in the late era and find a plethora of different kinds of attacks, which is fine as far as that goes, but the baddies rarely have any powers to help them defend themselves, often don’t do much to help themselves move around the battlefield and usually will just waste their minor actions. Solo’s are better, but still deficient, in this department but the rest of the baddies are just not ‘all there’ at least to my way of thinking.
I mean I can somewhat see how one can get away with this in the heroic tier. Its quite a while until the PCs really get their act together in this regard so the ‘missing’ bits are not noticed that much. After all the PCs often can’t do much to defend themselves or do anything interesting with their minor or interrupts either. However as my players move into Paragon I’m feeling that this is a big part of the reason the PCs start to seem so much more potent then the monsters for their level – the players are always doing things and lots of things if they can manage it...and they can because that is how they design their characters. In fact finding enough actions is their constant problem. The baddies always seem to be the opposite. Lots of ways to try and kill the PCs with their standard action but otherwise they mostly have nothing and I can’t figure out why they are designed this way.
Thinking about it I’m going to go out on a limb and hypothesize that speed of play was a big factor in this design choice. 4E combats are long – after all I did recently do a post about how my combat heavy dungeon ate my campaign for closing on half a year. The reality is that 4E combats just get longer as the levels go up – the players turns get ever more complex and it starts to take ever longer to get through the turns. Essentials seemed to be all about trying to increase the speed of play so maybe here is one more way the designers tried to increase the speed of combat. OK I can understand this line of reasoning…but I don’t agree with it. 4E combats are going to be long no matter what you do and this is essentially a choice to make the combat take an hour and fifteen minutes to play out instead of an hour and forty five minutes. At first glance that might seem worth it but its just not because your trading in gaining some speed for less interesting combats and that is not a worthwhile choice when the bottom end of the scale is an hour and fifteen minutes – Its already long so making sure that this long period of game play is as good as it can be is important. Adding another half hour or whatever for a better combat is worth it. Its one of the reasons the DM should try and have 4E combats take place in scenes with conveyer belts or some such…your going to be at this one way or another for some time so own it and make it as interesting as possible. The best solution is not a mostly in vain attempt to make the combats faster but instead to have fewer of them between periods of story development.
OK so thinking about the elements that seem to so often be missing in monsters. Of all of them I think the missing minor actions are the most forgivable. I mean here it is pretty easy to just up the standard action of the monster so that it includes whatever the minor action might be. After all why have it so that the DM is making all these extra rolls or what ever for the monster. Well one reason is the players, by Paragon, have a crap load of ‘can’t touch this’ powers and a monster that can only try and get at them once in a turn probably can’t get at them at all a lot of the time.
The interrupts are the second most forgivable missing element. Interrupts tend to be real time sinks after all. Still I think its almost always a good idea to give the monster some kind of interrupt that is going to get used in the combat – its often the most effective way a monster can force the players to react to what the monster can do and make them think about how they plan to handle this new wrinkle in their perfect little plan. Its certainly been my experience that the players look at the initiative track and when several PCs are going to have a turn before the next monster they set their powers up to combo – in fact my players are so keen on this that its common to find them delaying their turns even through the monsters initiative sequence to the point where they all tend to become grouped in some part of the initiative order, then they can use delays to set it up so that they can arrange who goes in what sequence during their part of the turn. An interrupt tends to be a one time ‘throw a wrench into the plan’ event. Though one that often results in the PCs turn taking significantly longer. Essentially my experience has been that the players spend 10 minutes working out their plan – and then it gets altered by an interrupt and they spend another 5 minutes deciding how they plan to adjust to the changed circumstance. Still my feeling is that is usually worth it.
One or more defensive powers kind of fall into the same category as interrupts but I think even more important. They are yet another wrinkle in the players perfect plan but they are one that is increasingly important, I feel, as the players get ever more levels. They just get to good at messing with the bad guys – usually essentially debuffing them through the floor. By the later levels the monsters need some real help or they tend to turn into little more then bags of hps the players beat on and that can get pretty dull pretty quickly.
Finally we get to the missing move action power…this one confounds me more then any of the others. I mean we want movement in our 4E combats…so why in the world would one want to skimp in this department for the monsters? It defies commonsense or at least is such slavish devotion to trying to speed up combat that it straight out sacrifices everything, including entertainment, to that goal.
In the end though I think I’ll stick to finding actions for my monsters. I mean there is something to be said for having some differentiation between simple and complex monsters and there is nothing really wrong with an armoured Ogre that just smashes things every turn but more often then not I want the monster to stand out and be a memorable part of the encounter even when it is not a Solo and that means giving it some more powers that force the players to pay attention to what it is they are fighting. The simpler version of monsters have a bad habit of not really doing enough of that and the result eventually becomes that the Players don’t really get a feel for the difference between say an Giant Armoured Viper and a Bugbear Chief…everything is just a bag of hps and that should not be the case – it’s the powers that define the monster and trying to make the monsters one attack power carry all the weight of making the monster a unique and interesting encounter is a pretty tall order…one that I think is often going to fail to pan out. On the other hand give that Giant Armoured Viper and that Bugbear Chief a bunch of powers that play to what they are and what they represent and its much easier to make them unique and interesting…after all most monsters will not be encountered by the PCs more then once in a campaign.
Preach it, brother.
I'm sure the concern has always been that if the image conforms to the grid, everything will look blocky and artificial. IIRC, the general rule with 4E maps was any square into which a terrain feature bled was treated as having that terrain feature - unless it was water, in which case there was always enough "land" to stand on if there was some land in the square. While it worked in theory, you ended up with a lot of nonsensical cases like creatures gaining cover from a sliver of pillar that bled into their square or taking a movement penalty from the six inches of rubble in their square.
I always used 'if more then 50% of a square has terrain then that is what the square has'. Nonetheless one still spends a fair bit of time marking off the squares where its close to make sure everyone is on board.
Also I don't think this is really just a 4E problem. I might have been better off posting that rant on Gamer Life because almost all tabletop RPGs have at least some rules for dealing with terrain and this map problem applies to all of them. Maybe its more noticed in 4E where there is a lot of movement but it does apply to say Pathfinder. Hence the maps would be more usable even in Pathfinder if they did a better job of conforming to the grid.
Wish I could Playtest This
Having finished my most recent opus I find myself wondering how it will all work out. My difficulty is that its an event based adventure and one which can play very differently depending on the players actions. Problem is this type of adventure is unlike most of the ones that I have run – Any sort of adventure that changes significantly depending on what the PCs do and when has difficulty being published as this pushes up word count and creates a situation where much of the written material may not be used. So its safe to say that I don’t have that much experience running this type of adventure…and I gravitate to this sort of thing but still it’s the exception rather then the rule.
In my current opus, Telhran Inflamed, I’ve set it up so that the plot is essentially the PCs trying to track down the members of another adventuring group who has information that they are looking for – the difficulty is the other adventuring group has been targeted by the UPE, an intelligence agent who has infiltrated the capital and is running a powerful organization. The NPC adventuring group has scattered and the whole adventure is pretty much run via a time line. The PCs need to find the adventuring NPCs before X day or the UPEs agents will have found and killed them. Its all a tad more complex then this but that’s the gist.
My problem is how tight I should make this time line. Experience in other adventures (Shut in, The Oakbridge Murders) have tended to push me toward making sure that the PCs need to hustle…because they’ll hustle anyway and one might as well expect it. The problem is trying to gauge by how much…I want them racing the clock but in the end they need to be reasonably close to successful or the adventure is a failure, If its to easy then its not really interesting but it can’t be too hard. It dawns on me that my adventure essentially needs a playtest…but you can’t playtest an adventure if it’s made for your own campaign. They are always one off deals where the first try is also the last and it has to work. For a complex encounter based adventure this feels like a tall order but I won’t know if I set it up correctly or not until I actually run it.
All that said because of the above issues I inserted what amounts to a ‘you win anyway’ event. In effect no matter what my PCs do in this adventure they automatically get the single most important plot based piece of information. I need the story to go on no matter how things turn out. It does actually feel like cheating my players but I don’t see a better alternative. I’ve set it up so that if the PCs do reasonably well the fact that they would have gotten this bit of information is hopefully hidden from my players. On the other hand I suspect if they blow it completely then they may well recognize that they could not actually fail to get the main piece of information they where after. Lets hope that it is not that stark.
Holy Crap…How do I run this thing.
So I ran the first session of my opus and, while it went moderately well, I felt like the take home message was that all the various events (I called them scenes in my adventure to emphasize what I was trying to do here) were hard to keep track of. In fact one of the saving graces of the session was that, by the time the opening scenes combat was done, I only had about two and a half hours to run this adventure and my PCs got into another combat about an hour or so later. Between these points during the plot development parts I felt like I was constantly flipping pages and trying to find the next encounter. I suspect that I could have done a slightly better job, in the adventure, of indicating what page to turn too if the PCs followed up on plot line A versus plot line B but this would not have really solved my problems as my players where not being particularly linier. They tended to follow up on a lead until it pointed enough in a direction that they could evaluate it against the other options available and then make the choice that seemed most urgent.
There is nothing wrong with my players doing this…its in fact exactly what I hoped they would do…but it meant that they might double back toward an older plot path and then veer into a third option almost randomly and there I was frantically flipping pages trying to figure out where I should be looking. I’ve faced this problem before and used tables of contents but did not bother in this adventure because that has never actually worked for me…it just kind of adds another step of searching for the table of contents before returning to page flipping. Truth is I don’t have a solution to this problem but at the table it felt like I was frantically trying to find my way around my own adventure and then was rushing things so as not to leave any dead space which could sometimes mean I was missing important elements in the scene and it definitely meant that I became lost in terms of tracking the time line. As it turned out by the time I got home and sorted everything out nothing adventure breaking had really been missed though one encounter that should have occurred in the morning of Day 3 of the adventure will now take place in the evening of Day 3. Still I think I was mainly saved by luck here. I think I’m just going to have to slow things down when doing this thing and take the notes I need to take to keep on top of everything. I’m concerned that will lead to a lot of ‘dead space’ in the presentation while the players sit around waiting for me to catch up but at this stage I’m going to test that out…maybe the players fill the dead space themselves or maybe the dead space won’t really be so bad. I suppose I can hope and test this out. All that said even if its not the best in terms of game flow I don’t have a solution outside of simply not running investigative narrative heavy adventures and I’m not the DM for that…If I’m not at least trying to tell a story then I’m not a happy DM.
Focusing on all the Options
One of the things that has stood out in running this adventure has been that I seem to fall into something of a default assumptions on when a scene would take place and yet built an adventure which was pretty open ended in this regard and would play out substantially differently depending on when the players actually engaged with the scene. Part of the problem comes from the fact that the adventure changes subtly from the outline when its all filled out and this can result in other scenes not quite syncing up. Its not been too major because any big changes made to a scene resulted in me going back to previous encounters and making adjustments but small things where not always caught. Two examples that took place is that in one of the central scenes to the adventure the PCs showed up a day later then I expected and I had to improvise to make sure the PCs still got the critical information they needed to continue. I should have recognized that there was some chance that the players would not get to this scene as early as I anticipated and written the scene to make sure that the critical information was still available. In another instance I noted when I returned home that my explanation of how things played out to the PCs did not add up because the PCs dealt with the scene slightly later then expected. In this case it seems that the incongruity went over my players heads which is the best result. The worst one would have been if they had noticed the incongruity and started to play based on whatever reasoning they devised to explain it away…since that would have meant that my error had resulted in the players drawing the wrong conclusions…not good in this style of adventure.
The obvious take home message though is not really working for me. See what really needs to happen in my adventures is that they need to be completed and then I need to come back to them and proofread them a week later...and that never ever happens because I'm always so desperate to finish the adventure. In this one and pretty much every adventure I've ever ran the first session...often the first few sessions, are taking place before the whole thing is even complete.
Essentially speaking I need to run the game and while I can decide that we are playing something else for a few weeks while I work on my adventure in the end its always a case of rushing to finish the adventure even while my players are already in it. I've never managed to really get ahead of them in this regard. A lot of that is I think a character trait in me as a human being. I don't seriously buckle down until I have to - until there is a significant closing time effect. That is true of things like work assignments and homework as well, not just D&D. Thinking more about this I think It'd help to try and start the adventure off a little more linear but I can take this only so far - if I know the players will be in three set piece combats that will eat up game night for three weeks then I'll just slack off again.
Smoother Sailing
So the first session of my latest investigation heavy adventure just set the scene and then went into a combat that was still ongoing when the session ended. Simple and straightforward and it caused no problems.
The second session was a completely different kettle of fish and its what I have made several posts above about. I was flustered, loosing track of where I was, felt like I was constantly rushing, session worked out OK but I was not happy with how it ran or maybe how I ran it.
Well along comes session #3 and that goes really well. Its actually combat light with just finishing up the first combat being the only battle of the session. So I have to do a ton of role playing DMing in this session and a fair bit of game time goes by. Nonetheless, despite facing a much more challenging task things just flowed so much better.
This of course gets me thinking about why. Before I delve into that though it also got me back to some thoughts on previous investigative heavy adventures. Of the three previous ones that I ran, The Shut In (Murder on Swan Street in my campaign), The Oakbridge Murders and The Andurian Job (The Telhran Job) only the third was smooth right from the beginning. I’ve previously chalked that up completely to problems with the adventures in that first two don’t flow well…they have problems in that time needs to pass for the adventure to work and the PCs won’t stop and let it pass. I still think that is the major issue with those two adventures as the third ran great from the get go. Still I have to wonder if a contributing factor was in part that both my players and I where having a tough time getting into the swing of things with an investigative style adventure. They are off the beaten path after all and they do involve a fair bit of organization. One of the things about the investigative elements that I added to the Andurian Job was that it was really well laid out and had no time line at all. My PCs could do their investigation without me having to track much of anything because the adventure objective – break into the complex, was not really changing from day to day. The complex was the same until the PCs devised how they where going to try and tackle their B&E. In the rest of the adventures time passing is significant – things change as time goes forward and I have to keep on top of that.
Maybe part of the problem is just me and my players adjusting to this style of play? In fact that actually seems more likely in light of the third session of this most recent adventure, Telhran Inflamed. I had vowed that I’d slow things down so I could keep on top of everything even if that meant ‘dead space’ at the table. That was simply how I was going to handle this and it worked. I started by taking the time line section out of the adventure and just making sure that I worked with that and kept on top of it. Things did not actually seem to get to much in the way of dead space because, being organized, actually resulted in the game running more smoothly or faster even though I was deliberately slowing things down and insuring I kept on top of it.
Beyond this though my players seemed to have adjusted their play style with this session from ‘get to the next fight’ to ‘oh so we are supposed to role play’? They where doing a lot of that as well as talking about what they knew and such during the session…which meant that they where giving me lots of time to keep my notes up to date during periods of the session when I could work on that with one ear cocked to what they where talking with each other about.
We will see how the next sessions go but I have high hopes and this role playing thing is good stuff. We’ve got actual character development going on again – something that has not been really the case in far to long in my campaign. I love city adventures for just this reason. All sorts of opportunity for my players to get to know their, and each others, characters outside of just combat stats.
That’s not to say that the role playing was going to win anyone any Oscars…some of it was pretty awful…my players have never been exceptional in this department and it felt like the players where pretty rusty but I don’t care so much about how good they are…just that they try.
In any case the bottom line would seem to be that the third session ran smoother, in part because I was more prepared and deliberately made sure to handle things at my pace instead of getting flustered.
Possibly more surprising however is my feeling that a large factor was that my players had figured out what to expect and where now playing along. I've not really considered how significant an element co-operative players are to the smooth running of a session. Yeah sure we all know that the session breaks down if the players can't get along or some one is being a jerk. Here what I mean is that your players are trying to work with you but until they get a feel for how the game is currently being played things feel patchy and off while, alternatively, things seem to just flow when your players have figured out how they are supposed to play.
What was I thiunking?
I must be doing drugs…well the fact that I know I’m not nixes that but it’d be a good explanation for my decision to run two investigative style adventures back to back. At the moment I’m rearranging my adventure order so that the adventure that follows this investigative heavy adventure is not another investigative heavy one. I mean I think this adventure has started to go really well but it was foolishness to want to do two of this style of adventure in a row. I mean everyone knows that variety is important and that’s a big factor in this change but there are other elements playing into this decision as well.
One of which is it turns out that my players builds vary a lot in how effective they are depending on adventure type. I should have recognized that but failed to really account for it. My investigative heavy adventures tend to be big on single, only this one encounter today, type battles which really plays to nova builds where a player can just go through every power in a few rounds and obliterate some creature (also phenomenally powerful in boss fights…which explains their popularity in character optimization forums).
Hence I need to get my players into an adventure that show cases more drawn out sequences of battles as well just so that everyone gets to show off their builds and the nova builds don’t dominate so dramatically.
The final element, and by far the biggest, is DM exhaustion. This investigative adventure is maybe the biggest, in terms of word count, adventure I’ve ever created. I’m super proud of it but its eaten my life. I’ve not so much as played a video game (and I play a lot of video games) in five weeks. I spend every spare moment working on the adventure. I don’t think I can do that again so quickly after making this adventure. I need something that is just easier on me as a DM before I can try and put together another huge investigative adventure just for my own sanity (and to insure that I don’t completely burn out). I did not really think of this at all when I was setting up my adventure order but I really should have. No matter how much I love investigative heavy adventures they are hard to make and I have to remember to see to my own sanity when running the game.
Desktop Publishing Software
As I closed on the end of my most recent Opus I hit something of a snag. I generally do my work in Open Office and up to this point that has been OK but this adventure was big...really big. Ultimately it ran to just a little over 150 pages. Massive considering that it only has 6 encounters in the entire thing. Complex plot, lots of NPCs...it really adds up.
However what started to happen with me was that I was struggling with the frame options and the more I put in the more problems I was having. Open Office started to crash...a lot.
This got me thinking about what an organization like Paizo uses to make their adventures, its not Open Office or even Word. They use Desktop Publishing Software. I figured it was time for me to take a look and I'm really glad I did. Now Paizo probably uses Adobes Desktop Publishing Software and no doubt its the bomb...but it costs an arm and a leg. $50 a month was what I was seeing and that is simply beyond what I want to pay for software that I'm just using to make adventures that are mainly for personal use.
However I looked around and found a free open source version of Desktop Publishing Software in the form of Scribus. I can see where some of the bells and whistles are missing from Scribus that, no doubt, exist in Adobe's software but Scribus is in constant development so its constantly improving and it does have most of the features one would expect. In fact the only area I really noticed as being deficient was in tables where Scribus was woefully inadequate.
Nonetheless, once I put my adventure into Scribus I was simply stunned at how good it looked. It immediately started to really look like a professional work and it did not crash when I went nuts with the all the frames everywhere. I was so impressed that I can't imagine ever going back...though I do think Open Office has better spell check. Especially for me as I'm Canadian and its actually pretty hard to find a Canadian Spell Checker. Usually I'm choosing between American or British Spell checkers and Scribus does have that problem (while Open Office has a Canadian Dictionary). Still, despite this complaint I'm going to be using Scribus for my adventures going forward and I highly recommend it to those of you who want to make professional looking adventures without paying professional fees.
...now I just need to get an editor...
Why I kind of hope that WotC discontinues their 4E support
So 5E is eventually going to come out and I’m already in the camp where I suspect that I’ll stick with 4E. Not 100% certain that this will remain true forever but at this stage I’m a much bigger fan of 4E then I am of 5E, which looks like far to much of a throw back to earlier editions then I’m interested in.
One of the questions that occasionally comes up is whether or not WotC will continue to support the adventure tools and the character builder for 4E once 5E is released. I don’t pretend to know the answer to this but in considering it I have come to the conclusion that it might be better for me, ultimately, if they actually stopped support.
Basically speaking this would be a bit of a kick in the rear for me in terms of doing more development for my 4E game. As it stands the Character Builder is an excellent product but one with very significant limitations…I can’t modify any of the data. I can’t add my own classes or my own powers, I can’t modify powers I think should be modified and, most dramatically, I can’t add Gods.
I think I could do all of these things with Hero Lab but its hard to get up enough motivation to master Hero Lab with the Character Builder around. Take away the Character Builder and I could finally begin to add and tweak 4E to better fit my personal campaign and long term that is what I really want from 4E…a system that reflects my home brew by supporting my home brew's Gods, by supporting my home brew's classes and by allowing me to tweak powers and feats so that I can address any issues (frost cheese) that crop up.
Much the same could be said about the adventure tools. I’ve always felt that the ‘tax feats’ where never necessary however at this point I use them – in part because they are there and my players like them and in part because the weapon ones are actually pretty flavourful.
The lopsided benefits for the monsters where needed on, or at least near, day one of 4E. Its essentially always been a case of OCD among the player base that convinced the designers to 'fix the math' when in fact the math never needed fixing. All the supplements have just added to the power of the PCs. The designers did a pretty good job of getting it so that the increase in power among the players remained roughly comparable – they are balanced against each other, but they are still significantly more powerful now then when the system was first launched. There was a boost to monster power from about the point when Darksun was released and this was very welcome but fundamentally I don’t think it was enough.
In particular I think that the monsters are pretty close to spot on for levels 1-5 and are reasonable for the entire heroic tier but the PCs power climbs faster then the monsters and after this point and the system has not done enough to balance that. In my opinion the one of the best ways to balance that was what was in place in the initial monster progression – non-linear advancement of monster power.
All of this brings me back around to why I would not mind seeing the Adventure Tools vanish. I could get by without the Adventure Tools (I hope) but what I really want is something that I can go into and tweak myself. It has become apparent to me that I’d actually like to do a little more to the monsters base stats then just boost the too hit and defences in a non-linear manner. I’d like to grant Paragon Monsters an average of about 15% more hps and go to 30% for epic monsters, I’d like to change things at paragon so that attacks that target defences other then AC are now calculated the same as those that target AC. So at Heroic Tier monsters would get +10 to hit AC and +8 to hit say reflex while at Paragon and Epic it would be the case that a Monster had a base +20 versus all defences. Plus I already modify the monsters defence stats to give them a good defence and a weak defence – I’d like it if I could build this in. I’m no fan of the damage algorithm – it is just not quite nasty enough, especially for the more basic attacks so I’d like to change that. Finally beyond this I’m irritated by the fact that I can only ever have 100 custom monsters in the Adventure Tools. I'd like a program that I could just keep adding too. At the moment I keep having to erase my customization as I get up to 100 monsters and I've never been able to add the Midgaurd monsters that I got when I bought that excellent 3rd party supplement.
I don’t know if some one would build a custom monster builder for 4E if the adventure tools where taken away but it increases the probability and if it was one where I could get into the guts of the system then I’d possibly be able to make a set of monster tools that actually fit the specifications for my campaign.
For all of these reasons I think I might, eventually, get a far better 4E – or at least one that more effectively catered to my tastes, if WotCs tools where taken away from me. Of course it’d be even better if the tools where made so that I could make actual modifications and save them as part of my campaign rules…but, despite a supposed emphasis on supporting home brewing DMs in 4E, that did not occur when the system was supported so its pure fantasy to think they’d make such adjustments when they are trying to put 4E behind them.
I’m subverting my own adventure!
So I realize, as my players have been going through my most recent adventure, that there are a number of encounters that I want the PCs to play through even if they are too late in the time line. Essentially I like the scenes and want my players to experience them and my fairly strict time line is making it so some of the scenes would just not take place if my players choose to investigate things later on. This is especially true in this adventure as its around 150 pages long but there are only 6 combat encounters…I want them playing through all of these encounters because I spent a lot of time and effort in this adventure and I need it to use up some significant amount of game time so that I have a chance to recharge the batteries.
What this says to me is really that I messed up in my adventures design in the first place and I should keep that in mind for the next time I make an adventure. Its clear that I should evaluate every scene and ask myself if its one that is just going to happen come what may – which is likely the case most of the time. I realize know that there are actually a mix of scenes in the adventures – scenes that occur no matter what but are slightly modified by the time line…these scenes I did correctly. But there are also scenes that, as I originally wrote the adventure, take place only if the PCs interact with them early enough in the adventure…these scenes I screwed up on. Almost all scenes should probably be designed so that they can occur but are just modified by the time line. Its to much work to design a great NPC and a good encounter and then find that the time line is saying to skip the scene and the PCs find nothing. If I really want the situation to be such that the scene ‘vanishes’ I should in fact replace it with an alternate scene. I find that I don’t mind the if/or type scenes – ones where I have two possible scenes depending on the circumstances but am loath to have scenes cease to be with no replacements.
My clogged up battlefields
I keep making these big battlemaps that always seem to ultimately end up with the players and monsters fighting it out in one corner. This is especially annoying as it has been a phenomena that is growing. Did not really have this problem much in the lower stages of the heroic tier but its been getting worse as the levels have gone up.
Thinking about it I tend to think that one of the major issues is that much of the time my players are not really trying to get anywhere in particular. They want to beat the monsters but otherwise are not actually on the move. I actually think one element going on here is that the PCs where just on the move more often early on. A lot more encounters in the Heroic tier could be summed up as ‘run for you lives’ and the battle was something the PCs where actually trying to escape along with whatever they had grabbed. This style of encounter has nearly ceased to exist in the campaign. My players are moving up to the stage where they are the big bad hero’s. I don’t stick them in encounters like this much anymore because they are straight out just more powerful then things like the armies of regular goblinoids and such that would had been chasing them around for plot reasons early on. Only the most friggen huge force of goblinoids and such would scare off my PCs at this level and I mostly don’t want to find out how many hundreds of low level minions they could kill before they had to retreat. On the other hand one does not encounter whole armies of things that scare paragon level characters very often…if such armies existed in the prime plane it’d be hard to explain why they have not obliterated regular armies of humans and such so such an encounter is rare.
So here is a big chunk of my issue – my players are not in encounters in which X number of enemies show up every round and they need to figure out how to get through the sluice gates or over the wall or whatever before they are overwhelmed. It’s a sizable loss in terms of encounter variety (and plot) to loose this style of encounter but there it is and ignoring the rise in the PCs power to attempt to keep this type of encounter on the table is not the right answer in my opinion. The situations that the PCs face must be adapted to their level.
Still this is not the only issue. Another problem is that interesting battlefields are almost always ones that clog up the battlefield. The most mobile battlefield is one that actually takes place on a featureless plain but I avoid such battlefields 95% of the time as not being all that interesting.
Still even beyond this the powers of the PCs are doing a good job of clogging up the battlefield. What my players really want is for me to stay away from their healer and controller and the defender has gotten ever better at focusing people on him while every other PC has increasing access to powers that hinder the enemies in various ways. Thing is practically every rider on just about every power in fact acts as some kind of lock down power – only things that lower defenses or cause weakness are really the exception. In truth even powers that move the bad guys around actually clog up the battlefield because the players tend to use the movement to push the enemies away from their controller and healer which are the guys I’m usually trying to get at. Plus the PCs really want to control the battlefield and then get it so that they can get their strikers at some specific enemy and simply start to take the enemies out one by one through mostly focused fire.
If I look at their tactics its really that the cleric debuffs ‘Primary Target’ then the Rogue, Ranger & Barbarian tear it apart. The Controller hits all the bad guys with something that slows them up so the enemies can’t interfere with this tactic and the Defender keeps some of the main bad guys locked down.
I’m also pretty sure that my choice of monsters might be playing into this – to many front line bad guys. I should at least experiment with powerful artillery monsters along with some ‘defenders’ of my own to see how this would work out. Plus giving the monsters defensive positions the PCs need to storm. Might get some interesting results…but even here I have to wonder if I’d still find that mostly the battlefield is stationary – it’d just be stationary where the monsters started – My PCs rush that location. They move a bit but its not a swirling or mobile battle. I might just have to accept that there won’t be many such mobile fights now that my PCs are not spending a big chunk of their adventuring career running away.
I finally got around to reading the last half-dozen entries, I have some thoughts I'll post later, if you're interested.
I finally got around to reading the last half-dozen entries, I have some thoughts I'll post later, if you're interested.
I'm always interested.
On the subject of unused encounters:
I think these are a great opportunity to illustrate that the characters adventure in a living, breathing world. If the players get to a scene too late, having them stumble across the aftermath can be a lot of fun and leave them scratching their heads. For example, let's assume from your previous adventure that the PCs fail to reach one of the NPCs before the UPEs get him. Imagine, as the players, coming across the aftermath of a scene similar to the opening of Watchmen (the murder of The Comedian by Ozymandias). Sometimes it's a nice change of pace to glean clues from a murder scene rather than a living NPC. It can also drill home the time constraint the PCs are under. They've missed this one; can they afford to miss another?
On the subject of static combats:
While 4E did some things to alleviate this (they were way more prevalent in 3E), fights always seem to end with the monsters and PCs toe-to-toe trading blows. It's partially because combats are generally against monsters defending their lairs. The defenders aren't in a hurry to give ground, and the PCs aren't in a hurry to push ahead until the current threat is dealt with. Chase scenes are one way to encourage movement, but they require some set-up and must be used sparingly.
My recommendation is to take some pointers from Gygax himself. If you read through the original AD&D Monster Manuals and Fiend Folio, you'll notice a lot of critters that are designed specifically to counter common PC tactics. On the one hand, it's basically meta-gaming. At the same time, though, it makes evolutionary sense. Just like animals in the wild develop hunting strategies specific to their preferred prey (seriously, check out some of the crazy stuff orca whales are doing), D&D fantasy monsters probably do the same thing.
I can imagine some beasties have probably developed things like immunity to marking, shoot-and-move techniques that immobilize or slow, powers that extinguish light sources, immunity to troublesome and/or deadly terrain features, etc. I'd check out the Adherer, Crypt Thing, and Dark Creeper/Stalker from the Fiend Folio to name a few.
On the subject of unused encounters:
I think these are a great opportunity to illustrate that the characters adventure in a living, breathing world. If the players get to a scene too late, having them stumble across the aftermath can be a lot of fun and leave them scratching their heads. For example, let's assume from your previous adventure that the PCs fail to reach one of the NPCs before the UPEs get him. Imagine, as the players, coming across the aftermath of a scene similar to the opening of Watchmen (the murder of The Comedian by Ozymandias). Sometimes it's a nice change of pace to glean clues from a murder scene rather than a living NPC. It can also drill home the time constraint the PCs are under. They've missed this one; can they afford to miss another?
I'm not really arguing against your point here - my issue is slightly more subtle then that. I don't mind that the PCs get their info from the aftermath of a scene when they are in fact to late. What I really still want much of the time is some kind of an encounter. So I mention the idea of having two scenes and note that this does not bother me so much - if its a matter of option A or option B that is not really such a large issue. Though its worth pointing out that I don't want to write two adventures in order to be able to run one. For example I had exactly this in my recent adventure...its fine for a few encounters but in one case the PCs would show up and their would be a big battle defending the Temple of Suymanea (lizard folk god - temple acts as both centre of worship for expat lizard folk and the local for their community with the rest of the mostly human city) and in another case the PCs are too late and they are actually talking with The Watch and looking over the aftermath of the battle with all these dead Lizard Folk while the Watch and a local military commander argue about the crime with the military commander sprouting some nonsense about his theory that this was a hate crime. Good scene, interesting NPC and maybe the PCs can pick up the trail. Downside is all this dialogue and descriptive text runs 6 or so pages and that is a lot of work for a scene that might well never even come up. Done a few times in the adventure and that is OK but two full alternate scenes for every encounter is to much work.
The other issue is I don't want to loose too many combats when there are only 6 total in a 150 page adventure. I can deal with this by either designing 8 combats and expecting only 6 to occur or I can have it so that a combat takes place whether or not the PCs are on time but whether they find the NPC alive or dead or what they are looking for is still here is dependent on whether they showed up in time. Its knocking things down to four combats because the PCs are too late that was what I was avoiding and where I failed in my adventure design.
On the subject of static combats:While 4E did some things to alleviate this (they were way more prevalent in 3E), fights always seem to end with the monsters and PCs toe-to-toe trading blows. It's partially because combats are generally against monsters defending their lairs. The defenders aren't in a hurry to give ground, and the PCs aren't in a hurry to push ahead until the current threat is dealt with. Chase scenes are one way to encourage movement, but they require some set-up and must be used sparingly.
You don't actually have to use them that sparingly but the campaign needs to support the theme. If the PCs are getting out of dodge with the goods and there is an entire army on their tail they won't be thinking about how it sucks that they are running away - they'll be euphoric that they just barely managed to get out of dodge with the goods in hand. If you think about it our D&D games are kind of exceptional in how rarely this theme comes up. Watch the Tolkien trilogy again and half the movie or more is essentially the hero's trying to escape while bad guys are hot on their tail. Every heist movie ever made works with this theme and most of the car chase movies as well. The key is having them buy into the idea that they are awesome because they escaped by the skin of their teeth with the goods in hand with hordes of baddies hot on their tail.
In my case their are evil armies invading and the PCs are usually hotfooting it out of the falling city with the widget of interest even as everything comes down around their ears...but one could probably get the same feel in a city campaign where the rulers was an evil tyrant and the PCs where constantly one step ahead of the fuzz with the goods. In both cases this style of adventure has to transition to something else though as the players gain levels and power because high level characters are not going to get much excitement from being one step ahead of the fuzz if they could actually stop and kill hundreds of them.
My recommendation is to take some pointers from Gygax himself. If you read through the original AD&D Monster Manuals and Fiend Folio, you'll notice a lot of critters that are designed specifically to counter common PC tactics. On the one hand, it's basically meta-gaming. At the same time, though, it makes evolutionary sense. Just like animals in the wild develop hunting strategies specific to their preferred prey (seriously, check out some of the crazy stuff orca whales are doing), D&D fantasy monsters probably do the same thing.I can imagine some beasties have probably developed things like immunity to marking, shoot-and-move techniques that immobilize or slow, powers that extinguish light sources, immunity to troublesome...
I was thinking along the same lines recently actually. Specifically its dawned on me that as my players started to gain a fair number of levels I really had to consider the Defender in every combat. Its actually pretty extreme in that I practically don't do an encounter where there is not at least some thought put into how to handle the parties defender and do this much less for the rest of the group.
It says something about 4Es design that if the Defender works as advertized the encounter is just a blow out. A good mid to high level defender shuts down everything.
In any case its certainly worth pointing out that 4Es monster power system is actually really good at being sculpted to make giving adventures a headache since one can make mark nullifying powers or give out powers that allow a creatures will defense to be boosted once per round or even stuff like powers that won't allow the characters to be targeted by healing under some circumstances etc. Whatever the DM can think of really - its easy to mess with your PCs. All that said while I have no trouble messing with my players that rarely results in mobile battlefields.
I got some 4E books…to bad they don’t excite me
So I keep buying up 4E books from Paizo slowly filling out my collection. I just received the Dragonborn supplement, Metallic Dragons and Hero’s of the Forgotten Kingdom. Not done much more then just skim over them but I’m really feeling the problems with WotC’s product…I mean I’m such a huge 4E fan and even I can’t drum up much enthusiasm for WotC’s products. A big part of the problem is I could care less for their default campaign world…in fact I’d go so far as to say I don’t like it. This would not be such a problem except that the books I’m picking up are so drenched in this default worldview. It seems odd that this is the case because, way back when, WotC seemed to be emphasizing how well 4E would support homebrew DMs. In the end though they never managed to live up to that promise and it can be difficult to tease out the elements of the default world in order to input ones homebrew sensibilities. True this is not an impossible task by any means but this is part of the problem with the books I’m buying. In the end I find myself reading about Io the original God of Dragons and yet this has nothing to do with the mythology of my homebrew…where Dragons made Gods (indirectly) and not the other way around.
OK so the background material is not of much use to me…worse yet it often seems so far removed from what I’m doing in my homebrew that I can’t find even bits I’d like to use…background wise I generally had much more luck in 3rd, where the material might not line up with my homebrew but at least I could often find elements I wanted to use.
Then we get to the crunch elements and yet much of the time I’m just really skipping this stuff…it does have flavour problems as above and anyway its in the character builder.
Finally…at least in the case of Metallic Dragons, we have monsters…all of which are ‘out of date’ to begin with, available in the adventure tools for seconds, and have been superseded by better concepts for Dragons (I guess this is really back to ‘out of date’). I mean looking over these Dragons mainly emphasizes why the ones in Threats to Nentir Vale are so good…because these are such cookie cutter Dragons and Threats to Nentir Vale recognized that one could treat each and every Dragon like a named baddie…make each and every dragon unique…and awesomely powerful as befits a dragon.
In the end I have to think all of this helped to contribute to the demise of 4E as early as it clearly went out. Not that I think this is the only reason by any means…I love 4E as a base system but the reasons I love it – its ability to be a narrative based game, just does not appeal to a huge chunk of its fan base and I don’t think that is going to change. I want narrative D&D…most groups it would seem do not. Still this sort of thing…where even some one who loves their system is not all that impressed with their books can’t have helped.
It essentially speaks to some serous flaws in their business model. I mean they have a game that is phenomenal for narrative based gaming but they fail to support the creative elements behind that…they don’t support my desire to do my own thing with their base system. They are invested with a cookie cutter default setting and its impossible to get around their setting unless I want to use one of the small handful of other official settings.
Then they stick with a book model alongside their subscription model – but their focus – much admired by me – of constantly fixing and updating their game means that the books are out of date all to soon after they are released. I wonder how they’ll handle this in 5E? Do they make base Dragons and then stick with them through thick and thin…even, as was the case with 4E, when they ultimately come up with a better way? I’d think that would be unfortunate for the players of the game – after all if a better way comes to light they should follow that. In 4Es case it results in the older books being of much less value but it did make it so that the game, ultimately, was much better then when it was first released.
My feeling is that they should probably have given up on the book model completely and charged more for the subscriptions but then have done more work on improving what the subscriptions had to offer. Quite literally updating the adventures and all the monsters and everything else when they made their improvements.
Ultimately that is what I’m planning on doing with 4E. Eventually I hope to have what amounts to my own ‘master monster book’ that includes all the monsters with all the changes and improvements I have made – but it’d be a living book. If a monster power did not work in actual play I’ll update it for next time. Same deal with the rules, powers and on and on until I’ve built the version of 4E that I want to play. I’ll bring my players in on it and hopefully…one day…we’ll have the 4E that we all really want to play. At its core it will still be 4E…just the version ideally suited for our tastes. Its unfortunate that WotC was never able to make 4E the game that supported this journey and instead always seemed to be either ambivalent to that or actually standing in the way. I think they would have had more success if they had supported every group in making this journey.
The initial promise of 4E seemed to suggest that this might be possible and the on line tools showed a lot of promise in this direction but they never fulfilled that promise. Oddly enough they seem to once again be suggesting that this might be possible with 5E…but I strongly have my doubts. Instead they are really just offering a game that, instead of catering to each group’s tastes, tries to cater to some broad theme of different styles of D&D. Sort of 4 or 5 different ways to play but each of those different styles ultimately being closed…and even that promise is becoming less clear as time has gone on. It’d take a lot of resources and it is not clear that the D&D Brand still has access to those kinds of resources.
Finally a 4E Book that might have some use
So I was sprouting off a post or a few back about how unexcited I was by the 4E books and mentioned that I had just got a few, skimmed them and that was the inspiration for that post. OK at this point I’ve actually read through (well more or less) two of the books, Metallic Dragons and the Dragonborn supplement.
Metallic Dragons was, however, quite a pleasant surprise in that I actually found at least some material there that peaked my interest and influenced the way I play. Not that I’m saying I’m planning on eating my words regarding the ‘unexciting books’ post – I still think most of that rant is pretty much spot on and the fact that one of the books had something of interest does not change the fact that most of them are meh (except the Darksun book – whatever they where smoking when they made that book they should get more of because Darksun was awesome).
OK so I managed to find some value in the Metallic Dragons books – which surprised me since it was to be a book about Dragons I traditionally think of as ‘good’. This is one of the reasons I’ve only now gone and picked it up. I picked up (and was disappointed in) Chromatic Dragons years ago. I think I’ll dissect this book and point out what inspired me and what did not and why.
The book starts off with a section on origins, psychology, religion, life cycle demeanour etc. of the metallic dragons and then goes into a bit of detail on the twelve (!) types of metallic dragons. It was actually parts of this section that caught my attention and made me pause and rethink Dragons in my campaign world. Part of this was useless to me…religion and origins has no value for me as I have my own origin mythology for my home brew and, when it comes to D&D, every campaign, practically, specifically addresses Dragons and their place in the cosmology. 4E uses a kind of default view of Dragons just being significant creatures in the campaign world which might also suffice for an explanation more or less for the Forgotten Realms and Grayhawk, as opposed to say Krynn where Dragons are much more fundamental to the creation myth and this is true of my campaign world as well which could reasonably start with a sentence ‘In the beginning there where dragons…’ Bottom line – Dragons from a Dragon God is useless to me...
Still the book then goes into material on psychology and here I became interested. I kind of think what was being used here was a case of a stopped clock being right twice a day because what I found useful is an element of 4E that I normally don’t agree with actually being somewhat inspiring in this particular case. Basically speaking the whole idea is that Metallic Dragons are not necessarily good. Now in 4E they did this with a ton of monsters from Coutles to Angels to Unicorns to Dragons and in most of the rest of the cases I was not so sure I was following along for the ride. I mean angels as being specific to their God actually works for me as well but Unicorns, for example, should be good.
The motivation behind the designers making every single monster in the game (just about) either evil or unaligned never really sat well with me. I mean the idea is that all the monsters should be available to fight the PCs but I think that’s just bunk. I mean traditionally 90% of the monsters are there to be fought and its not an issue if 10% are not normally combat enemies of the PCs. Truth is this actually more true (IMO) in 4E then it was in earlier editions because, in my experience, 4E works pretty well when the players have allies for an encounter. Better then a lot of the earlier editions worked. Hence I actually think that the developers should have designated some monsters as good and then specifically statted them so that they would work well when they are playing alongside the PCs. Pretty much make sure their stat block followed many of the guidelines put forward in the companion rules in DMG2. Also good monsters would be allowed to have more healing powers and access to some of the powers that are close to verboten for ‘opposition’ monsters.
In any case the developers decided to make it so that metallic dragons where not good in order to have it be more likely that the PC could fight them. Thing is here I felt it kind of worked. The basis for their explanation often went along the lines of ‘Dragons are so powerful and so long lived that chances are you just don’t rate much in their thinking’. In effect PCs might end up in opposition to a good Dragon because the Dragon was trying to use them as a pawn in some grand centuries long scheme or the Dragon could decide that it needs something specific they have for the greater good and if they don’t cough it up it decides to eliminate them. Or a whole bunch of scenarios involving the Dragons innate and habitual greed (need to increase their horde) and their condescension toward humanoids. This line of thought…that Dragons are so powerful that humanoids rarely actually rate as significant actually falls well in line with my campaign mythology…’In the beginning there where Dragons…’ implies that the Dragons view themselves as far more special then everyone else.
This whole line of reasoning pretty much opened up some space in my thinking about how to handle the traditionally good dragons as having them always be working alongside humanoids for the betterment of humanity does not fit into my campaign mythology. In fact outside of Krynn it kind of does not work for most D&D campaigns I suspect. Hence 4Es take, in this case, was something that shored up a conflict I was having without even really realizing I was having it. I even liked the section where they did a write up on the different philosophies for the different metallic dragons. Not sure I’ll use them all as written but there are some good ideas there. I mean I do like the idea of Silvers being the exception to the rule that Dragons don’t usually work with humans and Golds as philosopher/long term schemer dragons, as an idea, is an oldie but a goodie. I’m unlikely to use straight out ‘I’m an evil metallic dragon just here for a fight’ but I can at least see some plot opportunities which could put the PCs in conflict with a good Dragon and am reasonably convinced that there might well be lots of unaligned metallic dragons wandering around.
Then we get a whole section on Dragons as patrons…seriously I don’t need this book to teach me how to be a DM. Save it for the DMGs or a book specifically designed for DM tips. Really there just is nothing here that is not blindingly obvious.
Then a bunch of stuff on how to manage the XP budget with Dragons…really? Like I don’t know how to use the XP budget already? Plus what its blathering about here is hardly specific to dragons…its basically a really basic look at handling solos. Again wrong place.
Then we have Draconic Skill Challenges. I’ll give this one a C. Probably won’t use it myself but at least I don’t think its straight out wasted space. Rather they had made a whole book on potential Skill Challenges though and anyway I prefer to make my own.
Draconic Traps…meh…for one thing this stuff is really dated. Trap design in 4E got a lot better near the end of the edition so I’m unlikely to use this stuff and anyway I always just use the compendium for traps (but rarely look at older traps because they are not nearly as good as the later ones).
Next up are draconic adventure and campaign ideas. They stick this in tons of 4E books and I can never figure out why. Seriously if you want to make a module then do so. Bare bone ideas always struck me as useless. There are more adventures in D&D then anyone could ever run…heck there are more excellent adventures then anyone could ever run. If the DM is looking for adventure ideas they should start flipping through back issues of Dungeon or their module collection. If they are not doing that I have a hard time believing that many DMs plumb the depth of these outlines looking for an adventure and even less so for a campaign. I’ve got more campaign ideas then I’ll ever manage to play – I hardly need more bare bones ideas. Fleshed out ones like a Paizo AP are something else and I enjoy them but whole sections on how to make a campaign that happens to feature some Dragons? Seems useless to me.
I’ll give the Draconic Organizations and artifacts a pass…did not really inspire me much but I do think that organizations and NPCs are useful for DMs. Campaign Worlds are big and the DM needs ideas to flesh them out.
Next up Draconic Lairs…again a pass. I might even find a place to use one of these lairs in my campaign at some point. Dragon Lairs do make reasonable small adventure locals and I’m coming around to the idea that smaller adventuring sites are a good way to play 4E. In fact I think I might upgrade that mark to at least a B. I comment quite a few posts back that my big Dungeon was an issue because it was just too large and big damn dungeons tend to be just oversized for 4E. Hence an adventure that is essentially a series of ‘one day’ encounters representing 3-6 combats has a lot of appeal. Come to think of it with this in mind I might go back and check some of my other 4E books for the short adventure sections because this style of smaller locations somehow linked into a full fledged adventure seems like something I ought to at least test out…furthermore I’m going to up this section from a B to at least a B+, maybe even an A-. Looking over the premises of these dragon lairs we see something that occurs all to rarely in 4E adventures…interesting plots. Almost all of these adventures feature some good twists. Its actually the result of the adventure writers having to come up with why the PCs would be facing off against Dragons that are not traditionally evil…but whatever…in this case it means the adventure is much more then the usual – go forth and slay the dragon and that is all for the good. The mark does not get higher because they are dated but at least there is something to build on.
Next up a bunch of monsters including a slew of dragons – all showing how dated they are by being completely out of date both in terms of their stats but also in terms of simply having good unique dragon designs. Then a bunch of dragon like creatures – all dated though I did use the Draconians (heavily modded) a lot in my campaign (I got their stats from the adventure tools). I’d have liked to have seen a Draconian for all the metallic Dragons but not all are included. Outside of the Draconians I doubt I’d really use these monsters since monsters that are from this early in 4E tend to make lousy base creatures even to mod. Your better off using a more modern creature.
We then see a handful of unique dragons – a few of them from the history of Dungeons and Dragons. All of these have bad designs but they do at least help with ideas for making some unique Dragons. In this they could prove useful – its not actually that easy to make a really good unique 4E dragon. I find that having some inspiration to work from is helpful so I could see myself using this section just to mine for unique dragon ideas.
The book then goes on to explain how to turn a Dragon into an elite monster…DON’T…seriously unless you have a REALLY good reason never downgrade a Dragon. Dragons should never be push over creatures…if you can’t make it fit then just use another creature. Only reason I could think to do this is if the PCs are facing a bunch of hatchlings or some such. Otherwise I’d just avoid this completely – personally one of the low points of when I was a player in the last campaign was when we started to fight ‘elite’ dragons. It was the epitome of anti-climatic and it just pissed me off that we where facing off against ‘cheapened’ Dragons. A Dragon should never be a cheap throw away encounter.
The book ends with a bunch of ‘alternative’ powers. Mine this for additional powers to give your Dragon as the standard fare (with the possible exception of the ones in Threats to Nentir Vale) don’t have enough powers to keep such a powerful monster interesting.
Bottom line here is I did get some use out of this book...often not as the designers intended but I guess I can live with that. Even so though its worth pointing out that more then 3/4s of this 'useful 4E book' will never have any value to me whatsoever. I'm essentially getting excited because 1/4 of the book might actually have some value...
and now a look at two other books
So I did a post on the Metallic Dragons book and noted that it was not all that bad for a WotC book and how much that surprised me. I also noted that I had picked up the Dragonborn supplement and Hero’s of the Fallen Lands. Unfortunately these two books are more in line with my experience with WotC books. Really this could be summed up as ‘I found them pretty much useless’.
I went through the Dragonborn supplement in more depth an it really epitomizes much of my difficulty with the WotC books. A whole history of the origins of Dragonborn that did not line up with my homebrews mythology, then sections on the philosophy of Dragonborn that don’t necessarily seem all that in line with how I’d envision them for my homebrew and never really struck me as something even my players where considering when making Dragonborn characters. The one I have in my group is a Barbarian because the race lines up well with Barbarian even though the Dragonborn book wants to claim that few Dragonborn are Barbarians (sense they are part of an ancient civilized race).
After this we get into concrete powers and such all of which I did little more then skim because they are in the character builder. Finally we have paragon paths and such that are particularly problematic because they don’t really line up with my mythology…and anyway they are in the character builder. The themes and Backgrounds are an area I really see as improving (along with Gods) if I finally stopped using the character builder.
Now admittedly the Dragonborn supplement was particularly problematic in that it runs very strongly at cross-purposes with my campaign world. Not all supplements would be so juxtaposed.
Hero’s of the Fallen Lands got little more then a cursory glance from me. None of my players have decided to make essentials characters and they are plain just not that popular with my group due to their lack of options. The book is well written from the parts of it I have read though I was not particularly inspired…still maybe that was the point – as a basic starter book it actually looks pretty good its just that this is not something I have any use for. The reality beyond this is everything in this book that is important is either on the character builder or explained in more detail in the Rules Compendium so I pretty much put this one on my shelf to gather dust as I can’t really see when I’d have a need to refer to it.
Maybe that is the biggest indictment against so many of WotCs books…I just don’t see when I’m likely to pull them off my shelf.
Uh Oh…Looks like I took things a little far
Its pretty clear from my posts that I think 4E is really good at doing both epic battles and having monsters on team good. Seems like I may have taken this element overboard because some of my players complained about this aspect in a recent session.
Now my players where not all in agreement that this was a problem but the gist was that in the last four combats there has been a major battle (the reverse dungeon I mention many posts back) in a dungeon with the players controlling about 30 minions and the enemy team clocking in at around 75 creatures. Then there was a big fight in the Cavalier Lodge that not only involved a bunch of player controlled allies…but only actually involved one player (the party member who is part of the Cavalier Council) – I let the other players run the good NPCs, then there was a reasonable fight and next up there was what amounted to a pitched battle in the Temple of Suymanea with there being buckets of player controlled NPCs.
Of course in the cases where there are buckets of player controlled NPCs there are also buckets of bad guys. The Temple Battle took something like three sessions to run and, while our sessions are shorter clocking in from 2 ½ to about 3 ½ hours that is still a pretty long battle. In essence one of the players that was complaining pretty much focused on the fact that in the entire session he only got two rounds (I think he was exaggerating – I think we did three rounds of combat that first session).
OK…so I can kind of see the players point. As the DM I don’t really notice this sort of problem because I’ve got an entire army to command and while I think I do my team pretty quickly I’m still taking some time. Especially more recently as the monsters have been increasing in complexity and its getting harder to run them really fast.
In any case the whole thing led to a bit of a rigamarole regarding combat lengths etc. Here I think my players have not considered the full deal. All of them want the kinds of complex tactical combats that 4E is so good at and the focus on non-essential characters mean they want complex characters. So I pointed out that part of what was going on here is that every 4E combat at paragon is going to take some time and I focus on fewer larger ones because it makes some sense to go bigger and more epic if even small and trivial takes an hour and a half.
Still…yeah they have a pretty good point too. I mean two or three rounds in a whole session is too slow. I have six players so that is an element (in both directions – I need a lot of power to challenge a six person party and that usually means lots of baddies right there) So I promised I’d dial back team good monsters and keep the really big epics to ‘once every two adventures’.
Another issue I’ve had is I think I’ve been taking a bit to long with my monsters as well. This had actually been something that had been an issue last campaign when I was a player – the DM really enjoyed the tactical aspects of the game and, while I understand that – I like this element as well – I think the DM can’t be allowed to use well thought out tactics too much except in the case of exceptional monsters like Dragons or Vampires Lords and such. Otherwise speed has to be the order of the day and the threat level kept up with more powerful monsters. This does not mean that the monsters can’t use any tactics…just that the DM should not stop to ponder monster moves. Do the first thing that comes to mind. Sure no matter what the DM does things are going to get slower as the levels go up – lots of monster powers and interrupts and such will see to that and since this is true of the players as well its going to lead to longer combats but here I think I had lost the focus on speed and needed refocus on that and make it a priority.
One element of this that some of my players advocated for but don’t think I can go with is more boss style fights. If one has six players then there is a sense that the average encounter should have between four and eight monsters and, especially eight, is still a pretty significant number of baddies. Its very difficult, I find, to head toward the lower end of that number, especially to less then four, as my players are just so good at debuffing single monsters through the floor. There was another combat after the run I mentioned above and it was 30 odd minions plus two major baddies and the major baddies barely managed to do anything. My players just completely shut them down. The minions on the other hand where tearing my players apart. It really stood out just how completely ineffective this group is against minions, even the controller seems to be merely moderate at best, while they are just unbelievable against single enemies.
Hence in this I think I’ll just have to stick with the larger number of baddies in large part to help convince the players to balance out their builds a little more in order to more effectively handle the numbers and, in turn, become a little less effective against the single targets. That is not to say that I won’t give them any single baddies or very small elite groups but for the time being the tendency will need to remain on larger numbers.
I'd suggest using the smaller fights as a reward for successful skill challenges. The players still should get them once every few fights to vary the pacing. As DMs, we often focus on making every fight a challenge, but the players need some easier fights or the campaign starts to feel like a slog.
I'd suggest using the smaller fights as a reward for successful skill challenges. The players still should get them once every few fights to vary the pacing. As DMs, we often focus on making every fight a challenge, but the players need some easier fights or the campaign starts to feel like a slog.
With my group I tend to get contradictory feedback in this department.
If I ask my players what they want in this department they tell me variety is the spice of life. However if I run them through a low challenge fight and then let them get a full rest they complain that the whole thing was a waste of their time.
I think part of the issue might be the fairly short sessions we run. They go from 2 to 3 1/2 hours with 3 hours probably being the mean. There are just not going to be two fights in a session and the players like to go home thinking that the session mattered in some manner. If they overcame the odds they get this if it was a forgone conclusion when they rolled initiative then not so much.
Now part of the issue is that this desire for challenge is not universal. Most of the players want to be really pushed while one player gets frustrated when that happens. One of the players (different then who I just mentioned) is actually fine with easy fights but is OK with tough ones too and one of the players pretty much likes fights that are not to tough but what he really wants is for the fight to be super hard but then for his awesome character to do something that totally makes it not so tough because his character is awesome. Considering that his characters design is not actually great for that sort of scene its not a common occurrence. I'd say the other three players tend to feel that I'm wasting their time if the fight was too easy.
I also suspect that you can usually get some easy and fun ass kicking fights with minions in most groups...but mine is shockingly bad against minions.
A Rare Example of a Draw
So my players did something that they rarely do in a combat encounter last session – in fact its something that I have seen only a handful of times in all my years of roleplaying. The impromptu draw. Basically this is a situation where the PCs start negotiating with the enemies for a cease fire, but one which the DM did not specifically set up to be a cease fire. There are an absolute ton of things that work against this result. A lot of the time neither the PCs nor the bad guys would ever consider the option. Its simply understood that one team is going to die…or at least run away. Then if that hurdle is jumped we actually need to see a circumstance where both team evil and the PCs are not so sure they are going to win this fight. And there needs to be some room for negotiation. Both sides need to feel that a cessation of hostilities does not so harm their objectives that it’s a worthwhile option.
In my case my PCs had gotten into a fight with an criminal Oriental Triad but what they really wanted was to get to an NPC that they believed the Triad had in their clutches…and when pressed further what they really, really, wanted was the documents that they knew this NPC would have on him.
What essentially happened is there was a combat – well the first four rounds of one in which the PCs kill two of the five bad guys but in turn take insane amounts of damage and blow through all their healing. By the point round four came around both my bad guys and the PCs where very unsure about the outcome and one of the players who was fighting team evils leader starts negotiating. A reasonable diplomacy roll later and the idea that all we want is the NPC…he is dead…OK all we want was some documents on him…(that are not significantly valuable to the Triad) and there is the rare example of a negotiated settlement.
PCs got their documents and everyone kind of backed away slowly.
Something that struck me and my players but did not really come up was that the players could have just gone away - taken a short rest - and then come back to a much easier fight. They would have most of their healing back and team evil would still be out the two high damage dealing bad guys who where dead. That said if they did that I might well pull something like reinforcements or some such out of my rear and anyway it made no sense in terms of role playing. The PCs had what they really wanted so they left.
What, Exactly, is Wealth by Level?
One of the more interesting elements that was brought to my attention by the negotiated settlement above was a question that I have never really seen a definitive answer too in modern versions of the game. My players fought to a draw in a fight that was due to give out treasure. The Triad Leader who lived through the fight had magic armour and the Triad Base was worth a lot of gold once looted.
So what exactly happens when Wealth by Level is missed? Do the player’s just loose out on it? If the answer is yes then we are actually rewarding players to retire characters every so often as new characters show up with correct wealth by level. Not to mention that it can cause annoying (and slow) play as the PCs make sure to turn everything in the adventure into kindling to make sure that they don’t miss out. Very 1st edition but I never found hours of players trashing the dungeon trying to make sure they wrang every gp out of it to be where the fun was found. Maybe worst of all its sort of taking roleplaying off the table – as my players pointed out when I mentioned to them that we where now in this uncharted territory. If they might miss out on wealth by level they are incentivised to view encounters that might or might not be combat encounters as combat encounters because they need to be sure that they loot the bodies.
All of these are compelling arguments for ‘wealth by level’ chases the PCs around but there is something rather unnatural in this state of affairs…Gygaxian Naturalism it sure ain’t.
Admittedly it dawns on me that you can get around some of this by actually giving out more treasure then Wealth by Level. In fact it dawns on me that I do give out more treasure then wealth by level…or more accurately I give a slightly higher version of wealth by level as I hand out treasure as if the PCs are a single level higher then they actually are…this in part to compensate for the fact that I give random magic items. That handles the ‘bring in new characters’ element as I make new PCs come in with correct wealth by level and then randomly hand out their three starting magic items (though they are always usable by the character – I keep rerolling to insure that). Hence in my game their is a punishment, though only a very minor one, for starting a new character.
Still this does not deal with the issue of the PCs eschewing some roleplaying opportunities to make sure they get the treasure nor the PCs tearing the furnishings apart. One could, of course point out that they get more wealth then standard to compensate for loosing out on some…but that would not matter to my players anyway…the issue is missing out on potential treasure not specifically on meeting wealth by level…they want all the possible loot. In the end I don’t really think there is a correct answer here, which is likely why the rules don’t spell out the method that should be employed. If your players are not going to overreact (like mine will) to the potential loss of treasure and you give out a bit extra to make up for any they occasionally miss then I’d say that sticking with Gygaxian Naturalism in this regard makes sense. If, on the other hand, they will go crazy then its probably time to bite the bullet and have the wealth by level chase them down.
Some Deconstructing of Combat Encounter Difficulty
So in the posts above I note that my players hit an encounter that they found unusually difficult when it turned into a draw. This actually was something of a surprise to me. Heck the encounter was supposed to be harder then it actually was and was weakened at the last minute when it became clear that I had forgotten to include a stat block for one of the creatures in the combat.
This got me thinking about what amounts to the encounter design and why my players had such a tough time versus this encounter when they have been able to handle ones with higher XP budgets with comparative ease.
In the end, as will be no surprise to any D&D group, this type of disparity between the mechanical rating of an encounter and the difficulty in actual reality became pretty clear from the point when encounters started to receive mathematical designations meant to represent their difficulty with the advent of 3rd edition. It was pretty well known that in 3rd edition the actual CR rating of an encounter and its difficulty in reality where only moderately correlated. In reality single enemies tended to suffer in the action economy department while really large numbers of weak enemies simply had to low a chance to actually hit the PCs to really represent a threat. In the end it was a moderate sized group of enemies that was the most powerful.
Its interesting that 4E, while technically designed to handle these balance issues, still faces them. Now its worth emphasizing that 4E faces this issue far less then 3rd edition where the CR was almost a fantasy number and it was not that uncommon to hear about PCs defeating encounters with truly extreme CRs if the target was either a single enemy or was practically an army of weak creatures.
4Es design did in fact address the most salient of these points – although this is really far truer of the late 4E monsters then it was of the early monsters. In 4E the weak monsters, i.e. minions, still have a good chance to hit and deal out good damage. That said they are so easy to dispatch that at this point I’d argue that their XP cost is a miss and would instead house rule that instead of 4 minions being worth 1 standard monster I’d go with this number changing by tier. 4 Minions to a standard monster in the Heroic Tier, 5 Minions to a standard monster in the Paragon Tier and 6 Minions to a Standard Monster in the Epic Tier. I might even consider something more extreme for most groups though with mine this seems to be about right, so far anyway.
At the other end of the spectrum one finds Solo’s. Creatures that have been designed from the ground up in order to be able to fight a large group of PCs. This is generally done by granting Solo’s multiple ways to combat the PCs nerfing abilities as well as granting Solo’s phenomenal powers meant to allow the Solo to challenge the PCs. In reality there is no such thing as an action economy for the DM beyond what the DM chooses to accept since its possible to design monsters with as many attacks as the DM wants through careful wording of the powers, and traits etc.
Still, despite all of these changes, it has become clear to me that, at the end of the day, 4E still seems to result in large numbers of weak creatures and/or very few creatures being weaker opposition then a moderate number of fairly strong creatures. In reality if one uses non-minions and just goes with low power monsters (worse then 4 levels below the PCs) one eventually gets the same result as was found in 3rd. The monsters don’t have enough of a bonus to their hit chance to hit the PCs and even when they occasionally do the effect is not strong enough to really perturb the PCs. Mostly this is a pretty minor issue. Its enough less pronounced then 3rd that mostly the DM can just avoid using such encounters and anyway it makes a certain amount of narrative sense to simply turn the monsters into higher level minions that still present a challenge. Eventually though it does kick in. Essentially one can stretch the narrative only so far. Eventually it is just a better idea for the DM to keep the PCs away from the weakest creatures then make them into minions. Turning Goblins into powerful minions is reasonable up to a point but no one wants to see 16th level normal goblin minions. It is just to jarring. There comes a point when the PCs should just not be facing off against goblins except maybe to show off how awesome the PCs really are. As a rule I allow minions to go to about double the level of the standard version and cap things there. If Goblins are normally 4th level then they would be 8th level minions. This is actually supposed to be the same monster its simply relative to the PCs. At one point these goblins where 4th level standard monsters vis a vis the PCs and later the same goblins would be 8th level minions. This however is the cap...these goblins don’t get better then 8th level and would be 8th level minions even if 16th level PCs met them. This of course means that against the 16th level party pretty much no amount of goblins is going to be a real challenge or at least the PCs could probably cut down hundreds of them.
The weakness of the Solo, on the other hand, comes about because, no matter how many benefits the DM gives the Solo, it is difficult for any Solo to really handle the slew of nerfing powers the players are going to bring to bear. In effect the DM can give a solo all sorts of mitigating powers to help out the Solo but the players can just layer on so much that vit still won't stop the players from nerfing the Solo for four or five rounds and they should be able to kill it if its been made ineffective for that long.
What the Solo really needs is not a way to mitigate what the Players are doing to it – what the Solo really needs is practical invulnerability and that is a real problem. Practical invulnerability to some subset of the PCs powers is one thing but practical invulnerability to everything except damage is just going to really frustrate the players. Ultimately for the encounters to be fun the DM has extreme difficulty making Solo’s that will challenge a whole party – since fun is the reason the players play the DM is generally better off simply conceding that Solo’s all alone are just not particularly viable. Though possibly if the encounter allows the monster to get the drop on the PCs and open up with truly devastating attacks then maybe…but even here I’m doubtful – eventually the PCs get their turn and they lay down with the nerfing powers and we end up in the same place.
Now its worth noting that I am talking about level appropriate Solo's. There is some kind of balance point that seems to somewhat work with Solo's that are over leveled, like 6 or 7 levels above the PCs. Somewhere in there is something of a sweet spot where the monster is getting really hard to totally shut down because the players only have a 30% chance to hit with their attacks.
Still, despite that caveat and when dealing with the actual XP budget, what we find is that in 4E, like 3rd before it, the most challenging encounters are ones where there are a bunch of quite powerful creatures. Probably elites and such equal to about 1 less to 1 more then the number of PCs in the encounter. I’ve always noticed that PCs –1 worth of elite creatures tends to really push the players to the limit of their capabilities. This allows for enough elites that the players can’t really nerf them all, at least not for long, and the elites have enough hps, mitigating powers and devastating attacks of their own that they can really start to tear into the PCs. Here we finally have the enemy group that have enough numbers to avoid being effectively nerfed and enough hps that the PCs can’t, at least not quickly, remove monsters from the table and hence the PCs tend to really start sucking down damage – enough damage that their own healing and defenses start becoming overwhelmed. The healing being burned to fast is almost always the first barometer for the PCs that an encounter might well go south. When they can look at the damage they are taking and their healing resources and realize that their healing is being outstripped faster then bad guys are being removed...well that is when you know things are going south.
Thinking about 4Es Monster Fundamentals
So I just ran my players through an encounter with a bunch of Drow and my players just stomped the encounter despite the fact that it was ranked as pretty hard by the XP budget. This got me thinking about the fundamentals of 4E monsters. By this I mean their starting statistical basis. Now in many ways I like how 4E monsters are designed but with constant use I have to say that I have some issues. For starters by late 4E their base statistics still feel a bit weak. Admittedly there is always a problem in this regard because the stats are essentially trying to address more then one audience and its never clear exactly which audience they should be made to handle – the novice player group with a certain amount of fundamental flaws in their character design? The laid back group that chooses to spend some feats and such on flavour options or the hard core min-maxer who makes sure that every feat choice synergizes with the rest of the build in order to achieve the most powerful possible effect.
In some real sense this is where the problems start and its something of an intractable problem which WotC more or less deals with by making the base statistics lenient and then allowing the DM to up the potency of the powers to increase the challenge.
This works but its not a particularly elegant solution for the DM who does have more experienced players. For that DM dealing with the base statistics are a better option but its not there to begin with. I actually covered this in my post on why I might not mind it so much if WotC discontinued the online support for 4E. At that point I could deal with this element of the fundamentals to make the monsters more potent.
Something I did not touch on but that really stood out with the Drow combat my players where involved in is how boring the monster classes are. In theory there are six monster classes: Soldier, Brute, Artillery, Controller, Lurker and Skirmisher.
Thing is from my experience there are actually only three classes. Soldier’s have great bonuses to AC in their builds and your players are going to notice just how hard these guys are to hit. That’s a good monster class. Brutes get crap defenses a ton of hps and dish out sick amounts of damage. Yeah here we have another good class. The problem is the other four classes might as well be called ‘and all the others’. They are not exactly identical but I honestly could not tell you what their deal was without looking them up and I have run hundreds of 4E combats by this point. Reality is each of these classes feels exactly the same and that is disappointing. One of these classes might be worthwhile as a ‘base’ class that does not as it stands stick out in any meaningful way but four classes like that is just a waste of potential…potential to make interesting monsters.
I don’t – at least yet – have ideas for what I would do with each of the classes but some ideas that cross my mind would be that artillery should get a brute like boost to damage but leave the rest of it as is. If there is artillery in the room the players should fear its damage dealing power. Controllers I would give a serious bonus to all its defences except AC which would stay the same. This would be a class it was hard to pull off ‘special’ moves on. That leaves Lurkers and Skirmishers. One of these should be left as the ‘base’ class but the other could use some kind of interesting refinement to make it distinctive. Maybe give the skirmisher a hp boost might do the ticket.
My feeling is even with just these changes we’d get more interesting and therefore more memorable monsters.