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Last week I dropped by my Favorite Local Game Store (FLGS) to buy myself a few boxes of the 1st official 4e product available: the Dungeons of Dread D&D miniature game.
I purchased the Starter and 2 booster boxes.
Before I dig in my 4e post, here’s a…
Mini-review: The D&D Miniature Starter Game
You get 5 cool battlemaps that weren’t printed in previous products:
- A 1/2 size map of a Country Crossroad featuring 2 boulders and a ruined building.
- Another 1/2 sized map of a Monster Lair complete with a 3 room cave complex with campfires on one half and wilderness with trees, a boulder and a thin river on the other.
- Flooded Ruins, an underground complex featuring a large river, pits, Stepping stones (over river) and teleporters
- A dwarven Outpost, an underground cave map with a defensible building, a bridge over a lake and some difficult terrain (rubble, supplies and stalagmites)
- A jungle Temple, an outdoor Yuan-ti themed temple with Obelisks and Jungle Squares.
The game comes with 5 non-random, exclusive miniatures:
- A large Young Green Dragon
- A Yuan-ti Swiftscale
- A Human Sellsword
- An Eleven Warlock
- A Dwarven Battlemaster
A word of warning, the starter set contains combat stats for the skirmish game only and not for the 4e Roleplaying game. I was unable to find them on the Wizards website either (but here’s a full list of the 4e stats for the whole group of random minis). Instead, the back of each stat cards includes hints on playing each minis of the starter set against each other. That’s a disappointment for me.
As for the game itself, it’s much like the old one. Except creatures have better defined powers and new 4e mechanics like ‘Bloodied’ make an appearance. I don’t currently play the miniature game so I can’t really discuss it. I’ll return to it if my son and I start playing it more.
On with the 4e stuff
When going through the 4e stats of the miniatures, I got a few very interesting insights in the 4e combat mechanics.
Please note that I haven’t been digging around for 4e news all that much, relying mostly on discussions with Graham and some of the blogs I read regularly like Dave and Bartoeneus’ Critical Hits. This means there’s a chance that my observations are already old hat to some of you.
My first thought was that combat will be very different (and better fitted to my taste as a crunchy gamer) from previous editions. Here’s a rundown of my 1st impressions:
Bye-Bye iteratives!
Multiple attacks per round have been a staple of Advanced D&D and it’s descendants. Back when the game still bore Gary’s name, Fighters had 1 attack per level against 1 Hit Dice (and weaker) Monsters.
Weapon specializations, a very popular variant rule that appeared in Dragon magazine (iirc) and then in Unearthed Arcana, also allowed fighter-type classes to gain additional attacks against stronger foes.
I’ll skip 2e, I haven’t played it enough to remember, but chances are Weapon Specs were still in there.
D&D 3.0 and it’s (evil?) twin 3.5 made multiple (iterative) attack a mechanic opened to all classes. This one design decision created the strongest tactical justification for static, battle-line types of fights were players would go around the table and chuck multiple dice, nudging minis every so often to optimize the number of attacks one could dish out in a turn.
Late design sourcebooks and d20 variants like Iron Heroes, Star Wars Saga and the Tome of Battle have shown welcome alternatives to this rather boring (but oh so efficient) combat model.
Well that’s finished now. Monsters all have 1 main attack, possibly a secondary attack (like Dragons) and a slew of special attack/abilities that are conditional to spending resources or meeting certain criteria.
For example, the Bralani, a Level 19 Controller ‘monster’ has 2 attacks:
- A longsword +4 (+26 vs AC, 1d8+12)
- A Whirlwind Blast (which I assume is an arrow storm-type attack since the figurine has a bow), a 10 square line attack at +21 vs Ref for 1d6+12 damage.
and that’s it! Of course it flies and has got a few powerful special abilities… see below.
Monsters and PCs are different.
That’s one of the changes that pleases me the most about 4e; monsters that were made to be fought are now based on simpler to play mechanics that are different from PCs.
Now, there’s a possibility that the D&D stats of theses monsters are oversimplified like they were in the 3.x.
Regardless the Gnoll Marauder (a Level 6 Brute) does not feel like a level 5 Barbarian with a gnoll racial HD. It’s a fast spear warrior that gains a second attack against bloodied foes (i.e. when the target is at half-HP or less), deals more damage when attacking in packs and/or is itself bloodied.
I still don’t know if there will be mechanics to create classed Humanoids. I believe there will be in either the Core Books or in a future Savage Species-like book. Regardless, I see this change as good because it will make my job as a DM easier.
I have the Power
One thing is for sure, D&D 4e combat will be about ressource management and cool combat abilities.
While mechanically things will be simpler, the sheer number of things you’ll be able to do in combat will allow for enough complex tactical choices to make brilliant planners happy.
I’ve read a ton of complaints that D&D 4e is ripping off MMORPGs. Actually it’s more like they’ve taken notes from Collectible Miniature Games; not just D&D minis, but the clicky games like Mage Knight, Hero Clicks and so on.
The main feature of these games is that they allow faster turns than classic mini combat games (Warhammer, Battletech…) while retaining a rich number of tactical options and game effects.
For example, the Adult Red Dragon (a level 7 Solo soldier, AC 27, 136 hp) has 1 action point that can be spent to use any of it’s standard abilities (Attack or breath weapon) as a free action. Furthermore, its breath weapon is a 5 square ‘long’ cone that deals 3d12+6 Fire damage and ‘recharges’ by rolling a 4 on a d6 at the start of each of it’s turn.
Finally, when it gets bloodied (i.e. at 1/2 hp) it gets to breath fire once, as an immediate action, in retaliation.
This basically makes me think that I’ll be able to create ‘cards’ (or use tokens) for each monster that I can ‘tap’ or remove when a limited use power is used and ‘untap’ return when the power can be used again.
Simple, cool, effective, easy to manage. I like a lot!
Oh and you want to see what replaces a Save or Die attack? Here’s the Bralani’s special attack:
Curse of Autumn: Range 5; +21 vs Will; Round 1: –2 atk/Def and Slowed 1 rd. Round 2: –5 atk/Def and Slowed 1 rd. Round 3: –5atk/Def and Slowed 1 rd and dies in 24 hours. Permanent, remove as curse. Recharge 5.
Talk about a deadly debuff!
Battlefield interaction:
Finally I have this little mini here that gives a lot of insight in the various board control possibilities of 4e combat.
The HookHorror (a level 13 soldier) has a nasty attack chain:
Claw Reach 2; +21 vs AC; 1d10+8 AND Followup (that means it gets the other attack listed after it)
Followup +19 vs Fort, L or smaller; pull 1(That means it drags someone one square closer to itself on a successful attack vs Fort ) AND Restrained; only 1 at a time
Yup there you have it… that’s how Grapple is going to work it seems. Hit with an attack, roll vs Fort to pull in and prevent movement.
But that’s not all… 🙂
Secondary melee attack: Feast +21 vs AC, Restrained only; 3d10+8 (that means that if you are grappled, the Horror snacks on your PC in future attacks)
or
Secondary attack: Fling +21 vs Fort, Restrained only; 2d10+8 AND push 4 AND knock prone
That means that if it beats your Fort Save in a future attack, it throws you anywhere within 4 squares of itself on the battle map (remember that diagionals now count for 1) and drops you down.
The game will be rife with Pull (bring closer), Push (push away) and Slide (move either way, no attacks of opportunity) maneuvers. This screams ‘use the terrain to it’s full extent’ and I love it. Combat on icy ridges and hellish lava-filled landscapes will now be truly scary ordeals!
Expect to throw PCs in pits and pools of acid a lot. Expect to have the same (and worse) done to your creatures too!
Is it still D&D?
As I read over these new combat mechanics, one thing that is becoming clear to me is that the game has changed in more ways that I initially though.
Probably too many ways for some and that may hurt 4e in the long run.
There was this example In my old Cognitive Psych class, way back in college, on how much you could remove from a bird and chage it with mammal part before a child stopped calling it a bird… Well, my main remaining doubt about 4e relates to just that.
Will D&D 4e feel enough like D&D to allow me to identify to it or will it be a completely different game that that just happens to meet my current needs as a RPG player? (Much like I turned away from A D&D 1e/2e to embrace Gurps in the late 80’s)… will I feel something missing?
I’ll know in a a few weeks now won’t I?
Have a great weekend.
Wow, great article, Chatty! (Great work using the comics to keep visual interest)
I picked up my Dungeons of Dread last weekend (the starter and 6 boosters) and managed to get the mini I was most hoping to get, so that was happy.
“Probably too many ways for some and that may hurt 4e in the long run.”
I actually think it’s more likely to hurt 4e in the short run then the long run. Plenty of gamers are going to jump ship to Pathfinder right away, or pick up the books when they come out and decide pretty quickly it’s not their style. If Wizards is right, in the long run, they’ll pick up enough gamers from other sources to justify the loss (relying on simplicity and interesting play to grab new/lapsed gamers.)
“Will D&D 4e feel enough like D&D to allow me to identify to it or will it be a completely different game that that just happens to meet my current needs as a RPG player?”
Or to boil it down to the question that many have been asking, “What is D&D, really?” I think everyone has a different answer to that question.
D&D is different for everybody, Dave. But in my opinion, 4e is not D&D anymore. The previews I have read have turned me off too much. Combat is simpler, sure, but the decisions WOTC made regarding what they kept in the core books has turned me off. They sacrificed too much for the “cool” factor. Take for example the elf/drow/eladrin triangle. This whole story was pretty much the same thing as the Night Elf/High Elf/Blood Elf story from WoW. Yes I realize I just compared 4e to WoW. That was the impression I got from it.
I know people say that you can play your character however you want, regardless of creator intent. But to me…intent DOES matter. I see what WOTC intends me to do with the races/classes/items/spells in 4e and I don’t like it. I think they are putting too much of a gamble on attracting new players. Existing fan base and word of mouth do more to attract new players than mass marketing ever did.
And, in my opinion, jason, 4e is becoming more D&D that it ever has been in the past.
Like you said, it’s a bit different for everyone.
Oh, and the elf/eladrin/drow thing? WoW’s elf story is similar to the Wood Elf/High Elf/Drow from FR, or the Silvanesti/Qualinesti/Kagonesti from Dragonlance.
Honestly, you can claim all day that they stole from WoW. But all of those things? WoW stole them from D&D to begin with. So 4e is really just stealing from older editions of D&D.
As soon as I see a pack I plan to grab the Miniatures game. If it’s anything like the previous edition though, finding it here in the UK is more difficult than finding an honest politician. Anywhere.
When it comes to the shift in play-style, D&D is definitely moving more toward becoming a hybrid somewhere between Magic the Gathering, an MMORPG and…. something else. 3rd Edition managed to tread the fine line between drawing a ton of folks back to the game while at the same time enticing the majority of existing AD&D gamers to make the switch; it was a brilliant, brilliant move. While 3e wasn’t perfect, it was 98% there. Instead of just fixing the other 2%, WoTC are trying to repair everything. Any software developer will tell you patches are better than total rewrites if the foundations are good in the first place. That just means you’re just introducing more, different bugs.
4th Edition is using strong-arm licensing to force publishers (and therefore, by extension, the gamers) to make the choice between 3rd and 4th Edition. That smacks of a lack of confidence in their own product. People should WANT to change, not be told they’ve got to.
The sneak peak of the rules we’ve seen so far read too much like a committee has been asked to define “cool” in game terms. There’s no thought to Occam’s Razor (“take out everything you can and leave only the essence”), the Rule of White Space (“the gaps are more important than the noise that surrounds them”), The Rule of Impossible Cool Totality (“when everything is cool, nothing is”) or…well, anything else that makes for Good Design. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a whole load of players reaching out to my own Microlite20 (http://home.greywulf.net/m20 – shameless plug) in desperation 🙂
Despite all that, I’m still very much on the fence. I WANT it to be great and suceed. For every thing I hear which I like there’s 3 things I don’t right now. I’m still holding out hope that it will all hang together somehow.
We’ll see.
Interesting Post, I have been following 4E quite a bit, and I’ll come back and comment on your thoughts another time.
However, I have been analyzing bits of 4E for my friends, at first in email form, but now in a blog I started. Check them out if you like.
http://shadow145.livejournal.com/tag/4e
One thing I will say now, I read there will be a kind of Template you can add to the base monster stats to give them powers similar to class powers, but not exactly like adding class levels. So there may be a Cleric template you can add to a drow skirmisher or something.
The 4E and the new miniatures game are more alike than 3.5 and the old mini’s game. That can be good or bad, that’s an individual preference.
Oh I am aware that WoW took a lot of its references from D&D and Tolkien. I simply disagree with not necessarily the 4e system, but the races and classes. Removing bards and druids was a bad move imo. I don’t understand why they would do that, particularly when they replaced them with warlocks and warlords. The odd part was that they said they wanted to take a lot of the healing work off clerics, so they removed bards and druids and then replaced them with healing surges, warlocks, and warlords. Why? Clerics still have to do all the healing now. Now there are not any classes that can legitimately heal.
“D&D is different for everybody, Dave. But in my opinion, 4e is not D&D anymore.”
See, that’s exactly what I was aiming at. It’s not D&D anymore FOR YOU. That’s not the same as saying “it’s not D&D anymore.”
“I simply disagree with not necessarily the 4e system, but the races and classes.”
That’s a personal preference thing, and not a system flaw.
“Clerics still have to do all the healing now.”
You contradicted this yourself- Warlords are there, and they can heal. Healing surges let everyone heal themselves. Bards healing was a very late addition to D&D, and never fit in their concept. Druids could heal, shapeshift, and blast. Even WHEN they come back (because they’re not gone completely, just coming in a later book) I doubt they’ll do much healing.
Dave T. Games last blog post..The Teardown
greywulf –
Yeah, as the guy who made Microlite20, I wouldn’t be surprised if 4e isn’t for you. On a similar note, Microlite20 is not, and never will be, for me. And I think that’s something we both understand.
jason –
When you dig on 4e for stealing from WoW, though, make sure that it’s actually something from WoW that they’re stealing.
Bards and Druids should be back in the PHB 2. I imagine that the ultimate reason for their removal is that their design was taking longer, and they needed to finalise the PHB contents. Especially for the Druid, which is apparently focusing on Wild Shape and will be a sort of hybrid class, both of which would increase the dev time needed.
Oh, and Warlords can legitimately heal. Not quite as good as the Cleric, probably, since that is the Cleric’s strength, but good enough to fill the Leader role very well.
Heh, your post on nostalgia vs fun in relation to 4E spurred me to write a post on this very subject. I’ve been in the “not the D&D I identify with” camp for a while. The mechanics of 4E sound like they could make a fun game, and I’m going to try it out, but as a new RPG, not D&D.
Kamerons last blog post..Prestigious paragon paths
@Graham Absolutely fine with that, ol’ bean 🙂 I wouldn’t want Microlite20 to work for everyone. Heck, sometimes it doesn’t work for me either. Depends on what I want out of a game. M20 is just one more rules selection for the style of game I want to run at any particular time, that’s all.
I’m firmly in the “I want to believe” crowd. I want to see the books with my own eyes and be convinced that it’s Teh Best Game Evah. We’ll see.
greywulfs last blog post..Comments on TeaBreakInTheDungeon: We have a few, yes. They’re shameless copies of US ones, but without the superior customer service and free fill-ups of coffee. I hadn’t thought . . .
I’m with greywulf on this one. I’m trying to keep an open mind. However, I see a few things I like and a lot more things I don’t like. We’ll see what happens if I play a few sessions.
graham-
Let’s put this in perspective. No idea is new. tvtropes.org confirms that. D&D drew inspiration from Tolkien. Tolkien drew inspiration from the myths and legends. We are all clear on that. However, when I say that 4e is stealing stuff from WoW that WoW stole from D&D that D&D stole from Tolkien that Tolkien stole from myths, I am talking about my initial impression. What I am referring to is the biggest influence in our genre today. WoW is the biggest gaming influence at the moment. With over 10 million subscribers worldwide, chances are that a lot of the dev team have characters. This is where I have a problem.
I am an avid WoW player. WoW does a lot of things right. It’s got very sound mechanics (cooldown effects, defined roles, etc) for an MMORPG. Importing some of those mechanics into 4e is not a bad thing because it will both speed up the game and streamline it. The problem comes when they try to import some of the race/class ideas from WoW. The new players that WOTC is trying to import from the MMORPG realm have only the MMORPGs as a frame of reference. I think it’s going to fail because of this focus. They are going to alienate their current fan base by importing too many new things, and the new player base will either never hear about them, or call D&D players “n00bz” and go back to raiding Karazahn. It’s far too big of a gamble.
Gah.
Look, yes, 4e is taking some of the things that MMOs refined and reapplying them. As you said, WoW has some very sound mechanics. As such, I can’t see how this is a bad thing.
But I was only talking about the races.
Let’s use an analogy.
I invented the game of Monopoly. It had good mechanics. I eventually stopped publishing it, and a different company came along and published a video game (let’s call it Tri-opoly) with some mechanics stolen from/inspired by Monopoly.
10 years later, I come back, and publish Monopoly 2000, a new game with most of the same mechanics as the original Monopoly, but with some improvements.
Did I steal from Tri-opoly? Hell no, I’m just using my own ideas from my previous game. Tri-opoly just happened to use those same ideas, and who can blame them, since they were solid ideas.
Saying that I stole from Tri-opoly is ignoring the history of the ideas in the first place.
Saying that WotC stole from WoW (in this case) is ignoring the history of the idea in the first place.
Yes, WotC is taking some of the more refined mechanics from WoW and other games (tabletop and electronic). But good game design is good game design, and I have a hard time faulting them for this. It’s the same reason WoW took mechanics from D&D in the first place.
I think we’re arguing the same point, graham. I said my problem was with the “fluff” of race/class, not the “crunch” of combat, feats, and skills. 4eCrunch=good. 4eFluff=bad.
First…Chatty you are a great writer and you hit so many good points.
4 out of 5 kudos to Chatty, your a true gamer at hart and I truly enjoy reeding your blogs.
Like many of you 1e D&D and AD&D is were I started my love for RPGs, when 2e came out I looked for other games, 3.0 and 3.5 brought be back to D&D, the open skills set(class & cross class), weapon & armor proficiencys and many more features from this systems brought me back to D&D. I have my 4e books on pre-order and I want to like it, I really want to like it but there more I hear about the system the more I dislike it.
What really brought me back was the realism that 3.0 gave to the game. Sure I know average people cant cast prestidigitation but the system gave the game a reality feel to it, the fact that anyone can train and become a Fighter or Wizard was really appealing. I liked that the monsters had classes and were not mush different the the Heroes. 4e makes me feel like is taken away the “reality” feel I like. Heroes are special, the commoner can not go to the collage and become a Wizard because he is a commoner, the Gnoll is nothing but a Gnoll. Don’t get me wrong I believe that Heroes are special but I also find it appealing that the only difference between the Hero and a commoner is some training and expiriance(XP). The 3.0/3.5 rules system reflected that sense of “realism”, the 4e rule system makes me feel they went to far in to Fantasy and neglected making the game feel real.
I hope I made sense.=/
I really want to like 4e but the more I hear about it the more it makes me dislike it. I don’t know if is MY D&D anymore.=*(
To greywulf:
I totally agree with you on “4th Edition is using strong-arm licensing to force publishers (and therefore, by extension, the gamers) to make the choice between 3rd and 4th Edition.”
There is no need for it, people should WANT to change to a new system, not forced to change.
I’m probably going to back up here and just say “I agree with Graham” instead of writing a lengthy rant. The only other succinct point I have to make is that the designers can very clearly state (and have stated) why they included Race/Class X/Y and left out Race/Class X/Y, and at no point do they say “We thought it looked cool in WoW.”
Dave T. Games last blog post..The Teardown
LokyCat –
The commoner in 4e can still become a Wizard. That hasn’t gone away, unless you want it to. The only change in this respect is that, until that commoner becomes a Wizard, he is represented by different mechanics.
jason –
Your stance is 4e fluff = bad.
My stance is 4e fluff = almost the exact same as 3e fluff, 2e fluff, etc.
From everything I’ve seen, the only thing “stolen” from WoW is crunch. The fluff is either from previous editions, or brand new created for 4e.
Dave T. Game –
I assumed you’d agree with my statement about good game design. I did take it from your article on the subject, after all. 😛
The Commoner and Gnoll example was just one example(prob a bad one). I just have the feel that WotC has gone out of it’s to make the system more fantasy and less real, I know D&D is a game and is not real life and I know that people cant do magic in real life (I’m not loco) but 3.X system took in to account reality and gave the game that reality feel to it. It seems like 4e has gone deeper in to fantasy and neglected that certain reality feel that most games systems I like have.
Again, I’m not sure I am making sense but the more I reed about 4e the more it confirms this…feelings about the system. Hope I am making sense. :/
Well, you are correct that the new system will be less about simulating reality mechanically.
Most of that reality comes with flavour text, though, so don’t think that you can’t inject realism if you want to.
For what it’s worth, from everything I’ve read about 4e (quite a bit), this is the edition that I’ve been wanting. I’ve ran a few demos (from the PHB lite on enworld.com) for a few people and every one has loved it. I don’t have a lot of experience playing or running a game, but I do have enough to know running a 3.5 game often got bogged down. I know that 4e will get bogged down too, it’s inevitable when players do ‘weird’ things, but I think it bogs will be further apart and in different places.
I’m currently in a Pathfinder game and although it’s fun, after running 4e (i haven’t even played yet), I know it could be so much more. I’m pretty sure I could go on and on about both how wonderful 4e will be (I hope) and how it may not be for everyone, etc, ad nauseum, but I’ll stop here, with 4e being right for me. Now I just need to find a group that has the guts to try something new.
BTW, I’ve been lurking here for a while now, just wanted to let you know that I really dig your site.
loky, the word you are looking for is verisimilitude. depicting realism (as in art or literature)
“To greywulf:
I totally agree with you on “4th Edition is using strong-arm licensing to force publishers (and therefore, by extension, the gamers) to make the choice between 3rd and 4th Edition.”
There is no need for it, people should WANT to change to a new system, not forced to change.”
I dont totally agree with this statement. Look at paizo they have a slightly modified 3.5 versin that they are going to be continuing with. Granted their will be no official 3.5 material any longer. But there no official OD&D material out there either. And it still has a dedicated following. So I dont think really any one is being forced if you will. Besides at this point what else could be put out for 3.5? It pretty much covers the whole spectrum.
-Ronin-
(and now I’m glad I’m using my real name instead of monikers, this would have gotten confusing as hell were I using my roninkakuhito identity)
You can’t overlook the huge bloom of OGL products that are several generations separated from the d20 base material. The D20 material is in a much much better position developer wise than 2nd edition was when they switched to the D20 system.
Besides at this point what else could be put out for 3.5? It pretty much covers the whole spectrum.
You are kidding, right? With a mere 8 years of development, the surface hasn’t been scratched. We’ve got some of the boundaries sketched out and a few major roads have reasonably detailed surveys done, but since the rule set is reasonably nomic-like, even the sketched boundaries are more of a “I lack the vision to move beyond” issue than a “there is no gamespace beyond this point.”
The OGL gives D20 a strongly morphic aspect. Anything you can do with any given ruleset can be reproduced under some variation of D20. Essentially any rule set possible is a subset of any nomic-type rule set.
Michael Phillipss last blog post..feminist issues
Wow… That’ll teach me to post about 4e before I start running my game… 🙂
I knew that my last part would bring out emotions… and while I may not agree with some points of view I appreciate everyone taking time to carefully formulate them as arguments and not attacks (I’m really impressed with the level of discourse here)
I’m closest to Dave’s and Graham’s positions in general. D&D 4e is not going to be for all current D&D fans (a shame really) and I’m not trying to convert anyone here.
Mechanically speaking, the game will be fun to play and engaging. Fluff speaking, it will remain close enough to D&D… but I maintain some ‘concerns’ in regards to the amount of change the mechanics went through… and I voiced them in the post.
I won’t address all points but here’s a few thoughts:
@ Dave: Thanks for the nice feedback… I love doing those comics thignies. It’s really fun to do and those minis are nice up close.
@Shadow: I’ll have a look at your livejournal… if you see a guy names jagdell comment, that’s me 🙂
@Kameron: I had dropped by and read your piece. Very interesting indeed. Thanks for the link and the additional thoughts on the subject. I too feel like I’m moving to a new completely different fantasy action game (mechanically speaking) … and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
@Lokycat: Wow , thanks! I appreciate! I think that 3e brought order to the the absence of clear mechanics. I really enjoyed having kobolds with sorcerer levels and 1/2 orc barbarians.
But after 8 years, the work I needed to do to create them was just too much. The later Monster Manuals alleviated part of that problem by creating these monsters for me but I had the feeling I was paying for other people to do my work and not inventing anything new.
4e keeps the philosophy that monsters need to follow rules and are not based on gut feelings and whim. The key difference is that the monster mechanics will differ from the PC mechanics… but both will be based on well defined rules. Being the crunch freak that I am, I can’t disagree with that…
@spuppet: Welcome on the blog and thanks for the kind words. I don’t know about you, but I’m really like a kid who knows his X-mas presents are in his parent’s closet but has to play with his ‘old’ toys until the big day arrives…
Michael Philips –
And I think that’s where the difference in yours and Ronin’s opinion is coming down.
d20 has tons more that could potentially be done with it.
D&D 3.5 however? Not so much.
Since WotC is primarily concerned with D&D, rather than the various other genres, moving on makes perfect sense for them.
But after 8 years, the work I needed to do to create them was just too much. The later Monster Manuals alleviated part of that problem by creating these monsters for me but I had the feeling I was paying for other people to do my work and not inventing anything new.
In my case, a lot of that was alleviated by the presence of decent 3rd party software tools.
Michael Phillipss last blog post..feminist issues
I was badly burned by the 3e tool… and a lot of the 3rd party softwares I tried had hostile interfaces.
The Lazy DM range of books though would have been perfect though… they just came too late for me to keep me on the side of 3.5…
That is unless 4e is a pile of steaming crap and I run back to older d20 games… but as I repeat time and again, I highly doubt I will…
If I do, you’ll all know about it!
🙂
Graham|ve4grm
Hum… I’m not sure that’s quite true, but then I am not in a position to do a financial analysis to see if the other things you could do with 3.5 would make them any money.
For example just within their own IP, I think you could combine their old Birthright rules with the 3.5 core, mix in a different setting, and make a very fun game.
Or do a solid treatment of a setting like the Red Steel setting.
Michael Phillipss last blog post..feminist issues
-Chatty-
I’ve been very happy with YoYoDyne’s monster software and the e-tools software. Both give me nice, easy to print statblocks quickly.
Michael Phillipss last blog post..feminist issues
Michael –
For example just within their own IP, I think you could combine their old Birthright rules with the 3.5 core, mix in a different setting, and make a very fun game.
Or do a solid treatment of a setting like the Red Steel setting.
Fluff and more fluff, independent of system. While you could do tons with settings and fluff, we’re getting to the end of what you can do mechanically.
I think an analogy is in order, though.
Rifts was a very popular system, but the only things that ever changed were the fluff in the ongoing story, and the power creep.
Eventually, they were selling new fluff to an audience that largely wanted to keep the fluff they were already playing with. Paladium (the company) is now out of business. They failed to evolve.
So, you’re right, there’s a lot more fluff that could be done with 3.5e. But I think that WotC is right in not pursuing it.
You can see this in their new plan for campaign settings as well. They’re releasing a new setting each year, but they’re only putting out 3 books for each. Campaign Guide, Player’s Guide, and Adventure, plus articles in Dragon and Dungeon. They know fluff doesn’t sell well, as it’s only applicable to a small subset of gaming groups.
As for the YoYoDyne software?
It looks to be great for printing out stat blocks, but I have the SRD for that.
What I would have wanted was software that would let me alter monsters, build them from scratch, and give me help with assigning CR based on what I made.
Graham|ve4grm
I picked two settings that had unique mechanics for a reason, specifically because of the fluff vs crunch issue. In both cases, you are using the 3.5 rules with crunch additions as large (Red Steel) or larger (Birthright) than the ones that came with Eberron.
Michael Phillipss last blog post..feminist issues
Also? Automating the CR system for anything other than fairly superficial changes in a monster really doesn’t work. It is at least as subjective as the magic item price tables (which remind you repeatedly that they are suggestions and the final results will probably need some modification to have a reasonable price.)
Michael Phillipss last blog post..feminist issues
Poor WotC – they literally cannot avoid taking some heat over this.
Many of the complaints about 4e seem directed at the “it’s too different”, “they’ve nicked stuff from WoW”, “it’s turning into a MMoRPG” variety. So these people are annoyed that they’ve changed too much.
Whereas on the other side of the fence are people like me, who (based on what they’ve heard about 4e so far) aren’t interested in it because it hasn’t changed ENOUGH. 🙂
For example: Monsters Are No Longer Like Characters. That’s hardly an innovation – that is, in fact, a direct step backwards to the world of 1st and 2nd edition (and the blue box set before that) where monsters had hit dice, their own attack table, and “Save As: Normal Man”. And when it came necessary to work out what a dragon’s Strength score was… you couldn’t. Having stats for monsters – making them play by the same rules as PCs – wasn’t an innovation either, of course (RuneQuest did it back in the 80s). There just literally isn’t anything new under the sun. But anyway, that’s an example of a change that might annoy some 3rd edition players who LIKED the fact that these rules meant you could, in theory, view the Monster Manual as an extended race guide.
Whereas to me – you’re still looking at experience points, a level grind, and a game focussed on killing things and taking their stuff. It’s as if the last three decades of development in the RPG industries just never happened – the changes look entirely superficial to me and designed to try and grab some of that massive player base of WoW. I have to honestly wonder, though, who is currently playing D&D and wishing it were more like WoW – it seems to me that these players are missing out on a lot.
But I’ve no doubt that it will be a successful product.
You’re right, Michael, adjudicating CR for anything but small changes is a PITA. This is why none of the current software works for me.
But 4e is going to make adjudicating CR/level much easier, and more formulaic.
That’s what I need in a system. That’s the only thing that can possibly make creating a monster easier.
GAZZA –
For example: Monsters Are No Longer Like Characters. That’s hardly an innovation – that is, in fact, a direct step backwards to the world of 1st and 2nd edition
While true, the fact that there are solid guidelines in place for adjudicating the monsters is a step forward.
3e stepped really far forward with this and, by many accounts, overstepped. 4e is going back, but not as far as 2e was.
Which brings up an interesting point. Many of the changes in 4e are merely redoing the changes of 3e, and either going further (alignment and racial restrictions, for example) or pulling back a bit.
Whereas to me – you’re still looking at experience points, a level grind, and a game focussed on killing things and taking their stuff.
While I see your point, I have trouble seeing how this is somehow more emphasised than in 3e. I mean, the new social and skill challenge system is a definite move away from “kill everything”.
Graham|ve4grm
Did you ever run 1st or 2nd edition? As fuzzy as CR assignment is in 3.0 or 3.5, assigning experience values for homebrew monsters was worse under those systems.
I don’t usually worry too much about getting the CR just right on my home made critters. CR is a nice way to pick an opponent out of the book, but it isn’t that reliable of a way of determining how hard even the critters whose CRs were play tested to within an inch of their lives are to fight.
Also, I’m quite fond of adding class levels and templates to existing monsters, which makes CR calculations pretty easy
Michael Phillipss last blog post..feminist issues
Michael –
Heh, no, thankfully. I came into the hobby around 2001, and didn’t DM for a couple years after that. I’m a young’un, at 24.
That said, I am aware of the “whatever feels right” attitudes of 2e and prior. I’m rather glad I didn’t have the job of assigning XP back then.
I agree that CR isn’t all that important for a homebrew monster, but to give you an example…
I just ran a “CR 8” creature from the Pathfinder adventures (check my blog for the huge rant) which had 12 racial hit dice (135-ish hp), and an AC of 26 before spells (34 after). Two sorcerer levels were added to make it CR 10, and this was a boss monster meant for a party of level 6 characters. My best hitter couldn’t even hit with a 20, so I had to rewrite the whole thing.
A couple days later, during my quest to create Chatty’s Microwave Ogre (which he used tonight), I came across a CR 13 creature that I ended up using as a base for the design. It had 162 hp, and a CR of 33. It is a well-designed monster.
But the two monsters (CR 8 and CR 13) had very similar stats.
I would really like some guidelines so that I can spot a badly-designed monster, and so that I won’t get badly-designed monsters in the books I buy.
I also like to add class levels and templates, but every so often you just need a new creature that isn’t covered anywhere else that you have access to. I’d like to be able to design one of these monsters without spending a month playtesting it.
Graham|ve4grm
In my copy of the adventure she is listed as CR 10, which means she should pretty regularly wipe a party of 6th level adventurers if they are dumb enough to get engaged in a straight up fight.
In your analysis, you left out a +2 flanking bonus, which against a boss type monster, should be a key goal for any party.
Also, by 6th level it is reasonable to assume that the party has at least a few debuffs for combat situations. Wizard or priest should be trying to dispel her buffs in the first rounds of combat.
Michael Phillipss last blog post..feminist issues
Okay, so she’s hittable on a 19 for the single best attacker in my game, and even then only while raging. Still not right.
(And yes, while that iteration is a CR 10, the base creature has the same abilities and tactics, and is a CR 8. The base one’s AC is only 24, though, instead of 26. Still crazy after buffs.)
The recommendation is that a party should be able to handle a CR of their level +4 in a tough fight. This one was an impossible fight. By the time anyone would hit her, she would have killed them with Wis damage.
If the assumption is that dispel magic will be cast, that means that every mage needs to know and/or prep dispel magic. In which case, why bother giving spell choice? And if the assumption is that the mages will dispel all the magical bonuses, why bother including them in the first place?
And what if the dispel check fails?
Bad design, period.
Wow, lots of stuff said on this already. I’ll just mention some brief thoughts of my own quickly and let you all go about your business.
4e As a Game:
Some elements certainly sound new and have clean sounding mechanics. Other things I first ran into in Earthdawn 15 years ago (some or all of them may be even older). In a lot of ways, mechanically this is what I was expecting from 3e, which is part of why it always failed to impress me. 3e added wargamer crunch that I didn’t need and largely stayed in the primitive backwoods as far as actual RPG style mechanics go. It looks like 4e is progressing a bit finally.
As far as the setting goes I think it’s nice that there is one now. The older planar setup was really quite difficult to handle. It and the racial descriptions were based on a deliberately non-setting setting. Gamers make up new fluff on the fly easily but having a solid base to start from by default (even if it is pretty simple) is a much better option than deliberately having none.
4e As a Business Product:
If I were a publisher of d20 products I would be working my buns off right now to get something stellar and engaging lined up for release about 2 months after 4e hits. Nobody will have any 4e content outside of WotC until October so all you’d be competing with would be the core books of 4e and not much else. That gap is where we’ll figure out if 4e will sail off into the sunset as a successful product or weigh anchor. If you like 3e, keep your eyes open a few months from now.
As far as the setting goes I think it’s nice that there is one now. The older planar setup was really quite difficult to handle. It and the racial descriptions were based on a deliberately non-setting setting.
Heh. Would it surprise you to know that 3e actually did have a semi-default setting, and that most of this text (including the planes) was lifted from that setting? That would be Greyhawk, the original D&D setting created by Gary Gygax.
But you’re right, it is all incredibly generic, and sounds like a non-setting.
I knew there was a reason I never cared for Greyhawk.
Yeah I knew about Greyhawk. I started with the D&D Basic (and a little bit of Expert) set back when it was current. Greyhawk was just another setting for AD&D and even so they didn’t take much from it for 3e really. Due to the published monsters the cosmology of the planes was mostly set mechanically so it was the same for all D&D worlds (and that was there from AD&D on I think, never got to play gods in the basic D&D so not sure how that worked.. companion set I think?). If they didn’t borrow the names of some of the gods and use some artifacts whose stories originated in Greyhawk I don’t think anyone would have thought Greyhawk had anything to do with it at all. And unfortunately that was about the extent of the setting they provided. Last time I tried to approach a group with such a small amount of setting detail sketched in they all gave me blank stares. 🙂
True enough. 🙂
I’m particularly glad that WotC decided to explore alternative cosmologies with Eberron, and now with 4e.
@Micheal P: Like Graham says, i would need a template manager and Class adding program to do the tweaking crunching for myself. I use the Hypertext SRD for the rest.
@Gazza:
WotC has been the big dog for a long time, it stands to reason that whatever they do, a significant vocal minority will scream murder and another will do the exacty opposite. This series of comments is a small microcosm of it all.
I disagree, the mechanics have evolved (by borrowing from others, tweaking what works in the industry and doing some innovations). However, I don’t wish to argue this ad vitam eternam.
D&D has never been for anyone and this one won’t be any different. It will always be about killing stuff and taking loot because that’s a successful formula.
It’s fun way of passing an evening with friends for many. To me, that is reason enough to warrant, after 8 years of design evolution, a new edition that appears to my eyes (a guy who’s been playing for 25 years and who knows what he likes) to become better at what it does… killing stuff in cool, dynamic ways, and still allow a group of buddies to weave a story around that.
@Lanir: My next post on 4e will likely be about the non-world (points of light) of the Core D&D setting. Having never been a fan of campaign settings, the more generic a core setting is, the better it is. So Far the point of light and proposed cosmology appeal to me because it allows my inner world builder a very large canvas to work from, while still having enough startup fluff to get me going.
Once again people, thanks for sharing your thoughts on it. I may not agree with some (or most) issues brought up but in no way do I find any them invalid.
I’m just shocked at the intensity of the polarization on 4e but I guess the same happens when WoD goes through a new Edition or when people talk about Fallout 3…
“Like Graham says, i would need a template manager and Class adding program to do the tweaking crunching for myself. I use the Hypertext SRD for the rest.”
Argh, yes, I’ve NEVER found a satisfactory template adding program for 3.0 and 3.5. It always drove me nuts because it just needed to add to numbers and add blocks of text! WHY WAS THIS NEVER IMPLEMENTED???
“I’m just shocked at the intensity of the polarization on 4e but I guess the same happens when WoD goes through a new Edition or when people talk about Fallout 3”
While there are always exceptions, the WoD edition changes never seemed to generate this kind of anger. And I had no idea about Fallout 3 until last June, but yes, they’re certainly comparable…
I actually used the maps on Thursday for the climax of my Savage Worlds campaign. The two cave ones (Flooded Ruins & Dwarven Outpost) fit together, end to end, surprisingly well, and created a nice gauntlet that the PCs had to run through to reach some prisoners. Also used the jungle ruins as an underground temple where the baddies were trying to summon something and take over the world.
Then, after a series of betrayals (including a PC betraying the rest), the entire universe ceased to exist, devoured by a cthulhu-like entity.
I doubt WoD new editions cause anywhere near as much comment, for a very simple reason: despite what WW would like you to believe, everyone besides D&D is a bit player in the RPG market.
And anyway, the only reason I rag on D&D so much is because that’s what this blog is about (I assume, right?) The thing I LOVE about D&D players is that, generally speaking, they’re reasonably polite. Even over on the WotC boards – which attract the largest audience, therefore also the largest number of idiots – you will generally find someone willing to answer questions, engage in friendly debate, or whatever. This is part of the charm of D&D – few people take it incredibly seriously, most people realise it’s just harmless fun, and the fact that it’s gone through several editions probably helps to deflate any hard core fanaticism.
I’ve been known to run the odd game of Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, Wraith, or Changeling in my time. But I certainly never bought into the “holier than thou” attitude that seems to permeate White Wolf and many of its more fanatical fanbase. Suggest changing even a fairly minor mechanic over at the WW boards and you’ll get nothing but abuse and accusations of being a power gaming munchkin (as I recently discovered, to my amusement). There are people on those boards that claim to truly believe that Vampires, Werewolves, and Faeries exist (in other words they treat White Wolf as a documentary producer).
Which is all the more amusing, because most people that I know who play White Wolf games generally end up ditching the angst and playing it as superheroes with fangs. At some level White Wolf themselves must be aware of this tendency, as there really isn’t any other reason for them to have produced so many supplements with escalating power levels (the Elders stuff from the “Old World of Darkness”, for example). And if you actually look at some of the adventures that White Wolf produced, many of them could be fairly painlessly adapted to D&D dungeon crawls. So much for the Storytelling revolution.
D&D will never be a favourite game of mine, but I’ve rarely met any D&D players that would be unwelcome at my table. As long as they’re prepared to play something else occasionally. 🙂
@ Asmor: The Elder Evils win once again! Yay! It’s cool that you used those maps already… I did too when I threw my brand new Microwave Ogre at the PCs when they were running out of Zelatar… I used the Crossroad’s map.
@ Gazza: Amen to that! The blog is a lot about D&D ‘cuz that’s the game I play now. It will also feature some d20 WoD as we gear up for a new game soon.
Apart from d20 WoD, I’m not much of a WW customer (I played 1/2 a Vampire game) but the do seem intense!
I got to say, I’m not a huge fan of this d20 revolution. Don’t get me wrong, I see that there’s an advantage (especially to casual gamers) in not ever needing to learn more than 1 system, it’s just that I don’t think d20 is a particularly good choice for something universal.
As near as I can tell, the reason that the d20 system exists is primarily because historically d20 was used to resolve “to hit” rolls and saving throws. Grafting a skill system on to that started with the Dungeoneer’s Survival Guide in 1st edition, and it reached its fruition in 3.0.
The problem is that it doesn’t really work all that well outside of combat and saving throws unless you “hack” it with the take 10 and take 20 options – experts fail at simple tasks too often, and novices succeed at difficult tasks too often. You really want a bell curve or something for a generic task resolution system – a linear distribution doesn’t really capture it properly, in my opinion.
I don’t really expect to ever play D&D without the full set of polyhedrals – they’ll take spellcasting out before that! – but I don’t really think that the system used for D&D really generalises as well as (say) something like FUDGE, Hero, GURPS, or Basic Roleplaying does. YMMV, of course.
@Chatty- I think we’re in agreement about the setting details for 4e then. So far (and the gods only know whether this will carry through to the finished product or not) they seem to be providing mostly a wonderfully consistent series of nudges. Actively defining the One True Setting would actually work against one of the game’s strengths. It’s just that in past editions you had to either go with literally no setting outside of a few oddball spell names (Mordenkainen and Bigby ought to sue for royalties – never argue with a mage who can give you a hand or split things into their component parts) or you bought a setting book which had tons of setting in it. The middle ground is very welcome to (compulsive and) fluffy world builders like me and the people I game with.
@Gazza: I don’t think that d20 does wide Generic very well. I really don’t. What it does is action heroics. d20 Modern, Iron Heroes, Star Wars, Mutant and Mastermind are all action oriented themes… All have in comon that they need their own core books to come alive. I wouldn’t want a catch all d20 game that tries to cover all bases like Gurps does (i.e. be playable out of one book).
As for the linear thing of polyhedral, you have a point. The 3d6 resolution of Gurps was better statistically… it’s just a pity that task resolution in Gurps was just so darn boring (non-combat) or just too long to play out (combat)…. I know I played that damn game for 10 years! 🙂
I actually had hacked Gurps into 6 second combat rounds when I read the 3.0 PHB and saw they had done the exact same thing… I then threw away my Gurps Hack and embraced d20…
@GAZZA
You’re right, d20 isn’t a perfect system, but it’s become a standard for 2 reasons.
1) It’s simple. For the most part, “roll a d20, add modifiers” covers it pretty well. Some of your mentioned systems (coughGURPScough) could do with some streamlining.
2) It’s familiar. Almost everyone who roleplays has played D&D at least once.
Is it the best choice? Not at all. But it’s a good one, for those reasons.
@Lanir
There are also the fluffy world builders that are resenting any attempt to include fluff in the books at all.
Can’t please everyone, I guess.
Heck Mike Mearls has once said that a Fluff entry should never be more than a paragraph… I’m sure that he’s way up there with Ed Greenwood and Wolfgang Baur!
🙂
-chatty-
Like Graham says, i would need a template manager and Class adding program to do the tweaking crunching for myself. I use the Hypertext SRD for the rest.
The second official software project from Wotc, the E-tools one? While not perfect, does just that. There were a lot of rulebook expansions available for it before support was dropped, and it has a fairly robust interface for adding new classes/races/abilities/templates/spells/magic items/etc.
-Graham|ve4grm-
Sorry to take so long getting back to this. I wrote up a post last night and my browser ate it.
Okay, so she’s hittable on a 19 for the single best attacker in my game, and even then only while raging. Still not right.
This is if and only if she is given a perfect chance to prepare for the fight. Her lair happens to be well designed to cater to her skills, so a party who barges in and goes toe to toe with her is likely to get creamed since she’ll be ready and waiting for them. This strikes me as fair.
The recommendation is that a party should be able to handle a CR of their level +4 in a tough fight. This one was an impossible fight. By the time anyone would hit her, she would have killed them with Wis damage.
One important issue? That is a fresh party with average resources. At the end of the fight they should have expended the majority of their resources and you should expect one or more dead characters in a CR +4 situation (at least at lowish levels, cr holds up less and less well as you advance in level.)
If the assumption is that dispel magic will be cast, that means that every mage needs to know and/or prep dispel magic. In which case, why bother giving spell choice? And if the assumption is that the mages will dispel all the magical bonuses, why bother including them in the first place?
No, the assumption is that a 6th level party will have the resources to dispel magic at least once in a fight. This does not require the mage to memorize dispel magic (and if a character is going to memorize Dispel magic at 6th level, the mage is a poor choice from a resource management position. The cleric is n the best position to cast that spell at 6th level, though I think you could make a strong argument for DM being the first 3rd level spell you have a sorcerer learn. There are spells that are more generally useful, but not many.) But it is reasonable for the party to chip in for a few scrolls of utility “save our butts” spells for whoever the party’s caster is, and at 350 gp, Dispel Magic is one of the big ones. A Wand of dispel magic with 10 charges would cost 2250 gp and could be used by a bard, a cleric, a druid, a paladin, a sorcerer, or a wizard without trouble. That is 6 of the 11 core classes and a fairly small outlay for a group of adventurers. (Almost every group I’ve run with set aside a partial share for utility gear like that. We’ve always kept everyone who could use them outfitted with wands of cure light wounds (Bard, Cleric, Druid, Paladin, Ranger) and someone has been given scrolls of all of the “we’d be fine if we just had access to:” spells that we could afford. Vials of antitoxin, feather fall trinkets, getting the local temple to raise or depetrify or what have you characters, that sort of thing.
The ability to debuff a target is part of what makes buffs balanced. A well prepared character with multiple buffs is likely to lose some of them against a well prepared party, but that is why you layer your buffs.
And what if the dispel check fails?
Dispel magic is just the first line of offense, and in this case, the odds of it failing outright are low. Let’s say that the party got cautious after the bells. They decided to be sneaky the rest of the way up. She knows they are there, so she has cast (at CL 8) Mage Armor, Shield, and Fly. Furthermore, she wins the contested listen check 2 rounds before they reach her, so she gets off mirror image and haste before the party arrives. Let’s say she is lucky and rolls a 4, for 6 images, this means that realistically, the party will spend 2 rounds pinning down which one is her. After the last mirror image goes off, the person with the scroll reads dispel magic for the target dispel. She has 4 active effects, each with a 30% chance of being dispelled by a cl5 scroll. That means that there is a slightly better than 3 in 4 chance of at least one spell dropping to the dispel, given no other modifiers. That is pretty good odds, and it includes all of the cases where more than one spell drops. This is focusing on the dispel case, but that is only one way of dealing with a magically empowered difficult opponent. I personally think every caster except for rangers should probably keep a means of dispelling magic at hand because it is an incredibly useful spell, right up there with enlarge.
(Looking at the map of the tower, if you manage to dispel her fly spell, enlarge suddenly gets a huge bonus. You enlarge the barbarian and he bull rushes the no-longer-flying snake woman right out that opening in the side of the room. And he has a better chance with that strength check than he did with the attack rolls, assuming you didn’t dispel the mage armor. 200 feet is less than a round of falling and she lacks feather fall or any feather fall type items. 20d6 falling damage means she’ll have to make a fortitude save or die of massive damage most likely. As a DM, I’m pretty sure that being thrown out of her own tower would trigger the “if things go poorly for her, she runs away and becomes a recurring menace” clause in her description. )
Bad design, period.
Bad design only if the toe to toe slugfest is the only route you encourage your party to take in a fight. Personally, I try to discourage that by creating encounters where that isn’t a likely method of winning.
Michael Phillipss last blog post..feminist issues
Ahem.
First off, it wasn’t my design, and the book’s design was for a toe-to-toe slugfest. Bad design.
Making the encounter doable relies on having access to a specific spell, Dispel Magic, whether memorized or as a scroll. A spell which, when cast, stops the flow of the game for 10 minutes while you figure out its effects. Bad Design, partially on the part of Dispel Magic itself.
If the specific spell wasn’t met or failed, the party’s best hitter, under ideal conditions, needed a 19 to hit, and nobody else could hit without a 20. Bad Design.
It was placed after a tough golem battle, a boring faceless stalker battle, and a 16d6 bell trap! Bad Design!
Look, it’s bad design to assume that a party is capable of a single specific action, and then to base winning an encounter off of that action. Nobody would create an encounter that required Smite Evil to win, because the party doesn’t necessarily have a Paladin. Nobody would create an encounter that requires an Assassin in the party, or an Archmage PrC, because not every party has that.
An encounter that is only winnable by a certain party configuration is (say it with me now)
BAD DESIGN!
Oh wow, that was longer than I thought it was going to be… Oops.
-Chatty-
One major problem with systems that approximate bell curves is that modifiers become a lot harder to judge.
Where a +2 modifier in a d20 system gives a 10 percentage point bonus, a +2 modifier in a bell curve can be all over the map. That and none of the reasonable bell curve systems are all that bell-curvy. 3d6 doesn’t give a particularly continuous range of percentages.
(Looking at a 3d6 system, if you have a difficulty of 11, that means you have a 50% chance of succeding. If you apply a +2 bonus, that jumps to about 75%, and if you give a -2 penalty, that moves to ABOUT 26%.
If the difficulty is an 8, though it becomes 83, 95, 62, and if you raise it to a 14, you get 16, 37 and 4.5.
So in the cases that aren’t the middle of the curve? A 2 point penalty is not the same amount of penalty as a 2 point bonus, and a 2 point penalty or bonus isn’t the same at all at two different points along the curve.
I’d far rather have a straight probability and make sure that the target numbers make sense.
Michael Phillipss last blog post..feminist issues
*edited* Edit in bold
Except, again, dispel magic was one, and only one, potential route to bring her to a more reasonable challenge. Since more than half of all classes can access dispel magic by 6th level in one way or another, it is not an egregious assumption, but it isn’t the only way through the fight either. It isn’t all that hard to adjudicate unless no one ever uses it.
Want another one?
Assuming no one in the party uses summoning spells (and if a primary caster lacks even one summoning spell, he or she needs to have some other spell type that makes up for that lack) then you can give the barbarian a +6 additional bonus to hit with minimal work. If there are no wizards, have the party surround the bad guy. The Barbarian delays to go after the rest of the party and the other 3 use aid another to provide a +2 bonus each (must hit an AC 10 with a melee attack. Not unreasonable for a level 6 party.) You can provide both the flanking and the aid another bonus. With a wizard, I’d expect him or her to send the familiar out to do the flanking while he or she provides magical support.
Michael Phillipss last blog post..feminist issues
Alright, so now the Barbarian can hit once, the swordsage (who could be doing more useful things) isn’t doing anything, the bard is tied up, and the sorcerer and cleric are probably not helping with the melee attacks, but rather healing and casting.
The sorcerer’s spells are doing nothing thanks to the Lamia Matriarch’s high touch AC and +15-ish saves. The cleric is healing the barbarian every round, if he gets hit physically. But he won’t get hit physically.
Instead, the Lamia Matriarch spends 2 rounds touching the barbarian, for 4d4 Wis damage, likely dropping him. If not, then 3 rounds.
After that, we have a 34 AC, and our next-best attacker has a +9 to hit. Let’s say the cleric joins in now for Aid Another, giving a +4 to the swordsage’s attacks with the bard. +13. +15 with flanking. Requires a 19 to hit.
A few more rounds pass, and the Swordsage is also dropped from Wis damage.
You see where this is going?
Aid Another is a fine strategy, but it only works when you can whittle away at the target’s hp without being in danger of falling in 2-3 rounds.
In any case, though, you’re highlighting one of the main problems with 3.Xe. Some spells (dispel magic, summoning) are so incredibly useful that a party should never be without them. Those same spells are also very complex, making it so that my party in particular never wants to bother with them.
Why should a mage (including clerics) be somehow crippled solely because they didn’t prepare one specific spell that day?
Folks, I think we’ve entered the nitpicking stage of the discussion… and we should conclude this.
While your points are valid Micheal, a lot of your theoretical scenarios assumes good intel of the boss monster, synergistic efficiency in player strategies , sufficient resources (i.e. the cleric’s Dispel Magic wasn’t used to heal the 16d6 bell trap) and lack of luck of the solo monster.
That’s not what you expect from the average 6th party after going through a hard 5 room dungeon.
Having played the monster as is with 10th level PCs controlled by 15 years D&D/Gurps veterans (and it was still a boss fight) and since Graham actually spent time on analysing this under various angle.. I definitively agree that this Boss Monster spelled TPK for the average gaming group.
Let’s move on please…
@Dave T. Game – when WW ended the world I stopped playing….or more accurately, when they DIDN’T end the world and left us with the extra-angsty losers who didn’t manage to do anything effective for all their planning except change the names of their clans/tribes/whatever. 😀
@GAZZA – yep, superheroes with fangs/claws is pretty much how we played 😀 , but I did find that people tended to come up with fairly detailed backgrounds (even the ones who normally would just say ‘parents dead. town guard.’) and tended to be more descriptive in general about their character’s actions in and out of game time. We never got around to the ‘all-angst, all-the-time’ one-shot we’d planned, but I did run them through a dungeon 😉
@ChattyDM: you said: While mechanically things will be simpler, the sheer number of things you’ll be able to do in combat will allow for enough complex tactical choices to make brilliant planners happy.
this worries me that it could make combat slower and more complex as people wade through their choices and that it could put pressure on and steal fun from those of us who aren’t brilliant planners. Do you think this seems likely? (although I’m guessing you can’t answer as a non-brilliant planner 😀 )
move on?! pah! 😀
Far be it from me to try to rob you of your entertainment… I just have this thing for arguing after a certain point.
Graham would point out that it’s my tendency to step in when there are no actual problems to fix… yet 🙂 What can I say, I’m a conflict adverse negociator…
Anyway it’s a free internet… go right ahead…. I’m not one to complain about comments on my blog! 🙂
this worries me that it could make combat slower and more complex as people wade through their choices and that it could put pressure on and steal fun from those of us who aren’t brilliant planners. Do you think this seems likely?
I’ll say that this was definitely not the case during the demo game I participated in. Every round, you had 2-3 good choices. Each was viable, some were better than others at certain times, but none was bad.
But I never had a situation where I was overloaded with choices (after I got used to the character, at least, which took a couple rounds), and I never had it come down to “this is the only thing you should be doing this round, no questions asked”.
(Though against undead, radiant damage is the way to go. And alongside a cliff face, pushing monsters off instead of fighting them was a big plus.)
-chatty-
very well.
My overall point was that it isn’t particularly bad for a CR 10 creature. The dungeon may be overly hard, but the base assumption for CR is always fresh, well balanced party. I expect my parties to retreat from overwhelming odds and work out new routes of attack unless. *chuckles* If we kept going after the bell trap (which would have convinced me that we needed to take a different approach) I’d probably have insisted the party flee from the flying unhittable monster. Probably rouse the town guard to cordon off the tower until the fly spell was likely to have worn off and then torched the place with great torchyness. Lateral thinking.
Michael Phillipss last blog post..feminist issues
but the base assumption for CR is always fresh, well balanced party.
Really? When did the DMG-stated 4 encounter per day go out the window?
If we kept going after the bell trap (which would have convinced me that we needed to take a different approach) I’d probably have insisted the party flee from the flying unhittable monster.
Note two things.
1) My players are mostly pretty inexperienced, and none of them are really tacticians (though the swordsage does a good job at that when pressed).
2) This was a pre-published adventure, with no additional information for alternate options. While I usually plan for this sort of thing as well, the only reason I’m using Pathfinder in the first place is because I really didn’t have time to deal with balancing issues and alternate route planning before the games due to university.
Also, by the time they would have corydoned off the place, the mayor would probably have already been ritually sacrificed.
On a related, lateral note, when I upgraded my campaign from 3,0 to 3.5, the players were in the last parts of Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil (they were level 10 or so)
There was this Cornugon Devil (a CR 9 in D&D 3.0 or close) that got upgraded to CR 13 (or whatever, I’m not checking the SRD on this)… I decided to keep it as is…
Well he ended up being the Campaign’s next BBEG when the players obviously couldn’t deal with it anymore.
@Chatty – it just takes me so long to write a comment everyone’s over it by the time I’m done 😀 mediation is good 🙂
@Graham – ok, so while there are choices it’s not a matter of whipping out the spreadsheet to make sense of it all, particularly once you’ve worked with the character a bit….that’s really good to know actually, thanks! 🙂 (radiant damage eh? will remember that 😉 )
@Graham and Mike: Sigh…
Chatty unlocks the gun cabinet and leave it opened. He leaves, brings back a bucket and a mop and leaves again
Please clean up after you’re done boys. 😉
@ Sandrinnad: Good strategy! As for the things you can do, what Graham didn’t mention is that there also seems to be rules to interact with the environement (kick chairs, crash columns) that can also spice up a fight if a DM plans the battle environment accordingly… much like battle traps…
Graham|ve4grm
Really? When did the DMG-stated 4 encounter per day go out the window?
When they started talking about the percentage of party resources used in an encounter, also in the DMG.
On a further analysis, a party level equivalent encounter (EL = Average Party Level) which they were talking about in the section about 4 encounters per day, is much much easier the first time it hppens in a given day than the 4th. As your resources decrease, your real effectiveness decreases as well. An encounter with an el of the party level +4 is hard, almost overwhelming if your party is fresh. It is no longer almost overwhelming if you are at 40% of your resources. (Not to say that I wouldn’t try it anyway. Winning against nearly impossible odds is great fun. )
It is my understanding that her plan to sacrifice the mayor is in the nebulous future. (It says she is in the early planning stage.) Containment and torching as a tactic implies a fairly minimal time frame between the containment and the torching.
Michael Phillipss last blog post..feminist issues
and oops, I’d really meant to stop a post ago. At least these are much more meta-points than the earlier posts…
Michael Phillipss last blog post..feminist issues
An encounter with an el of the party level +4 is hard, almost overwhelming if your party is fresh.
…
Winning against nearly impossible odds is great fun.
I think that’s the big difference here between our points.
This encounter is not “almost overwhelming” if the party was fresh. It is overwhelming. This encounter was not “nearly impossible”. If the Lamia Matriarch is played even half-intelligent, this encounter is statistically impossible without Dispel Magic.
This is even if the party was fresh. Putting it at the end of the dungeon was just icing.
-Graham|ve4grm-
A more complete analysis of the CR and EL assumptions is something that I really wish the DMG2 had contained, or possibly the Core Rules book. (Core rules would have been a great place for that because it is full of behind the scenes material anyway.)
Michael Phillipss last blog post..feminist issues
Agreed on that.
Unfortunately, even the designers admitted that CR was basically a guessing game until playtesting happened.
Graham|ve4grm
I just noticed that the adventure has a way for the PCs to get a lot of intel on the tower (Golem, Faceless Stalkers, the Lamia’s abilities) if they are willing to be talky instead of stabby earlier on.
Michael Phillipss last blog post..feminist issues
True, but only if they both realise that Ironbriar is charmed and have a means of breaking that charm. Again, we come back to needing to cast Dispel Magic (or Break Enchantment).
And without the casting of Dispel Magic, there is no indication that Ironbriar is willing to talk, as he fights to the death while charmed.
So it basically comes down to casting Dispel Magic on Xanesha spontaneously, or casting it on Ironbriar so that they know to cast it on Xanesha.
(By the way, my biggest issue with uberbuffed monsters is that the PCs have no way to know that they’re uberbuffed, instead of being that tough normally. Unless the mage casts Detect Magic (usually seen as a waste of an action in combat), that creature could fly through magic, or through their own supernatural ability. A beholder, for instance, wouldn’t fall if he had Dispel Magic cast on him. The Lamia Matriarch would. But how would the PCs know that?)
Graham|ve4grm
But how would the PCs know that?
A Lamia Matriarch is a Magical Beast, so a DC 22 Knowledge Arcana Check (the creature’s base HD+10)
Knowledge skills are your friends.
A DC 25 sense motive check with even minimal conversation with Ironbriar gives the information that he is under some sort of charm effect. He’s not interested in making deals, but engaging in banter? That’s classic fight stuff there. Worst case scenario? His charm can’t last more than 10 days. Page 45 of the adventure gives further pointers on exactly that question.
Michael Phillipss last blog post..feminist issues
The knowledge arcana check would indeed reveal that she’s a spellcaster. But if they aren’t aware of the lamia before the battle, this hardly helps.
The DC 25 Sense Motive check is useless, unless Dispel Magic is already prepped. Hearing some of the banter can be useful, but is still not enough to indicate a magical charm effect. So they’ll likely end up facing him anyways, and fighting him unless they have Dispel already prepped. They can beat him into unconsciousness instead, so that’s an option. But all of this also relies on someone in the party being trained in Sense Motive. So we’ve moved from requiring “someone has dispel magic” to “someone has dispel magic or sense motive”. Not much better.
As for the 10 day limit? Really? You think that Xanesha wouldn’t refresh her charm effect occasionally? It’s an at-will power for her. She could do it every day if need be.
You asked specifically how they would know if she could fly on her own or not. Knowledge Arcana would cover that. What the party is prepared to do with that information is up to them.
The sense motive gap is why the book includes alternate routes to figure out that there is something wrong with him. This isn’t something that the PCs must do to complete the adventure, it is something that makes it easier to do so, and that rewards role playing.
I will note that I find it quite amusing that none of the iconic characters in an investigative campaign have ranks in sense motive.
The 10 day limit assumed they had beaten him unconscious and couldn’t come up with a dispel effect any sooner than that.
Michael Phillipss last blog post..feminist issues
You asked specifically how they would know if she could fly on her own or not. Knowledge Arcana would cover that.
True, it would allow them to find out that her flight isn’t natural. But they would have no way of knowing that she could fly from spells before she actually did it. And the flying isn’t a problem anyways, it was just used as an example. The buffs are the problem. And Knowledge Arcana would not be able to say what a specific lamia matriarch’s spells known are.
In any case, it still requires them finding out about her before facing her. This is possible, as we’ve discussed. But as written, the adventure makes it very difficult, if not actively discouraging it. And, unfortunately, without finding out beforehand, we hit the situation where the encounter is essentially not winnable.
I mean, I’m not arguing with a lot of what your saying. Including things like that is definitely a good way to advance plot and make things more interesting. (Though I don’t agree with your assertion that the encounter is fair, that’s another point.) I’m merely saying that the adventure doesn’t include those things, and as such becomes a poorly-written encounter with little option given to come at it differently, and no help for if you try to do so.
It is quite amusing that none of the iconics have ranks, though. Very silly.
You know, now that this is winding down, I had a revelation. We probably should have taken this to email or something quite a bit ago, though I do like the concept that there are other eyeballs out there at least potentially chiming in if either of us gets too far off base. (“Um, you seem to be missing something” is much easier to process from a 3rd party than from whoever is taking the opposition position.
Heh, another alternate route: DC 25 climb check and 200 feet of knotted rope
Michael Phillipss last blog post..feminist issues
Is the shooting over? 😛
*looks around and discretely kicks a cartridge under the chair*
Shooting?
I didn’t see any shooting, just a polite if spirited conversation.
Did you see any shooting Graham|ve4grm?
Michael Phillipss last blog post..feminist issues
Nope, no shooting here. *hides bazooka*
I think the forums would have been a good choice, maybe. But it’s all good. I think I’m basically the VP in charge of shit-disturbing here, anyways.
That, my friend, might be the understatement of the year!
🙂
It’s all good.
Chatty pokes his head in the room. It’s spotless clean and everything seems to be calm…
Good job boys… 😛
Talking about the mechanics in Chatty’s Original Post
I said I’d be back.
Wow, that exploded. For the record, my stance on 4E is “cautiosly optimistic” and “why should I be exclusive to one or the other”. But I am in a unique position where I am going through a major move and will have to find what to play when I move to my new locale. So I don’t have to argue one way or the other (Cop out, I know). But I am a rules junky and enjoy reading about 4E, pathfinder, Monte’s BOXM, etc. Note that all these are examples of professional designers approaching the same question (how do we make the game better) from different angles. It is fun to see the different approaches.
As for mechanics, just commenting on Chatty’s original post:
Iterative Attacks
Monsters seem to get multiple attacks by way of special abilities, specifically followups if they successfully hit (like the mentioned Hooked Horror), or a special standard actions that allow them to take multiple attacks (the Angel of Valor on the WOTC site today gets this with a sword and dagger attack as a standard action). Players I imagine would get similar powers, where they get a power to attack with two weapons as a standard action. But usually the powers grant extra damage instead of an extra attack. And you could always spend an action point to get an extra standard action you could use as an attack. Action points are much more generous in 4E.
One of the biggest changes between 3.5 and 4E is that characters (and monsters for that matter) generally have a default power they use at will as a standard action over and over. The simple attack roll is really only used for Opportunity Attacks and such. Characters have other powers they may use once per encounter or once per day to supplement this default power. Similarly, monsters have some powers that may be used once per encounter, or once until recharged.
Monsters
Monsters are created individually, not off a template. However there are some mechanics in place. Monsters have specific roles, soldier, controller, brute, etc. These may determine certain specific stats like hit points, maybe attack bonuses. They have a level that is also indicative of relative power. So a 5th level Skirmisher no matter what the creature has the same amount of HP. There are also specific templates that add to the monster. Minions, Leader, Elite, Solo, maybe a few others can change the stats, however these should be relatively simple changes (like double HP, att +2 to attacks, AC, and Defenses, etc). Then you have templates like the Lich and Vampire Lord that were shown on the WOTC website. Those seem more like the templates in 3.5, maybe a tad simpler. It also appears that adding a template like this automatically makes the creature elite. Finally, you have class templates, I read somewhere about them, maybe a post on EN World by a developer, and I think they give a few token powers or abilities to a monster to simulate the class powers of a hero.
Also, just a quickie, generally recharges are the number or higher, so that dragon recharges on a 4,5,6. They want him breathing a lot, he is a dragon!
Grapple
You’re not quite right on that. Remember that monsters work different than heroes. So that “restrained” is the monster’s equivalent of grapple. Grapple for heroes is now “Grab”. From the PHB Lite v2.1 (And admittedly I don’t know where they got this from): “It is a Strength attack versus Reflex to grab someone. Acrobatics vs Reflex or Athletics vs Fortitude can be used to escape. You can attempt a grab check with anything that is within one size category of you. This also doesn’t provoke an Opportunity Attack. If you fail, nothing happens. If you succeed, you cause your target to be “Immobilized” for one round. The target can escape his immobilized condition using an Acrobatics vs Reflex or Athletics check vs Fortitude as a move action. You may move the target 1 square by succeeding on an additional grab check in the following round. Immobilized by a grab attack – Deciding to immobilize a target is essentially like a PC deciding that he would like to spend his combat rounds as a Tanglefoot bag. An immobilized target can still attack normally, but cannot move. Foes around an immobilized target receive Combat Advantage against him.”
I suspect there are other options to do to a grabbed/immobilized opponent from powers or such that simulate grapple options.
I hope you found that interesting, and that I was mostly right in my comments. We’ll find out in june! For now, you can return to your regularly scheduled Bazooka vs Machine gun bloodbath.
shadow145s last blog post..4E mechanic of the moment: Warlord Powers
@shadow145
Actually, from everything that’s been put out, recharge is on that number only. So a creature with “recharge 4” recharges only on a 4, while an ability with “recharge 5,6” recharges on either a 5 or 6.
This hasn’t been confirmed, but is the (IMO reasonable) assumption based on the information we’ve gotten thus far. There’s no other reason that we’d see both “recharge 5” and “recharge 5,6”
That said, some of the minis stats do seem to be from a prior version of the rules, so they may not all be 100% correct. Similarly, it may be that the dragon should be “recharge 4,5,6”, but how it’s written, it’s only a 4.
I heard that the 4/5/6 was the way it was, and never saw anything contradicting it. So I assumed the mini’s stats were shorthand. There are no mini’s stats that have multiple numbers, and some powers should recharge faster than others. I’m not saying you’re wrong, I’m saying I am not 100% certain I’m right. But as I was discussing this with someone, it opened up a lot of questions. Some monsters have multiple powers that recharge on similar numbers. I assume you only roll 1 die for monster, as opposed to one die per power, otherwise you slow down play ridiculously. So if you roll a 6, do all your “6” powers recharge (including your 4,5,6) or do you choose one? The recharge mechanic is definitely something I hope to see fleshed out soon. I think it is a great idea, and would even consider modifying it to 3.5 as a house rule for rechargable powers like breath weapons. Anything to reduce tracking rounds is good in my opinion (as I am lazy).
shadow145s last blog post..4E mechanic of the moment: Warlord Powers
Actually I totally see using tokens and cards to keep track of monster powers by moving them around (like tapping a Magic the Gathering card) and I’d actually put dice on them for the recharge…
Of course I’d much prefer having a dragon recharge it’s breath 50% of the time!
WOTC has announced cards for the PC’s with their 4E character sheet product. You would fill them in, but the example specifically talked about tapping them. I haven’t heard anything like that for monsters though.
I bet they release Power cards someday, probably as decks for each PHB that comes out. Or as downloads (with subscription?). You can already download cards for the Book of 9 Swords classes. I don’t think a 3rd party could do it, but that’s a GSL arguement that we can’t have until we actually see it.
If the damage is less, recharging 50% of the time is feasible. 3d12+6 is 25.5 average, I have no idea if that is less than a comparable CR 7 dragon because the HP scale is different, healing surges, and all that.
shadow145s last blog post..4E mechanic of the moment: Warlord Powers
We use Magic Lands with post its for the Tome of battle maneuvers (I have 2 martial classes in my current group). I’m sure it will be easy and usefull to rig something similar for monsters.
The hit points have gone down on monsters… but then again, the iteratives are gone (Phil dances a little jig)
What I like the most now is that everyone can do ‘Move and X’ each turn!
So if you roll a 6, do all your “6? powers recharge (including your 4,5,6) or do you choose one?
Fro everything that has been deduced thus far, all of them.
Example time!
Creature X has three abilities with recharge.
Ability 1 has recharge 4,5,6
Ability 2 has recharge 4,6
Ability 3 has recharge 5,6
Rol a d6. On a roll of 1-3, none recharge. On a 4, 1&2 recharge. On a 5, 1&3 recharge. On a 6, all recharge
This is as far as the folks at ENworld have been able to tell so far.
Note, as well, that the Dungeons of Dread figures are definitely using an older ruleset for their stats, and thus are not quite correct. The just-released Angels preview proves this, when comparing it to the angel from the minis set.
http://www.enworld.org/showpost.php?p=4190768&postcount=64
Specifically, there seems to be a bit of a math rebalancing, with higher hit points for monsters and lower damage for those monsters’ area attacks, along with a number of other changes.
Oh, and from here:
http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/4ex/20080425a
“The D&D Character Record Sheets package contains not only character sheets, but also perforated cards to write your powers (and magic items) on.”
They’ll likely have printable ones online as well. If not, there will be fan-made ones. And if not, I’ll make my own in Illustrator and post them for you all.
Since the powers depend on your stats for attack and damage, and your weapon and implement for damage and magical enhancements, the cards will likely be blank templates for you to write powers in, rather than pre-written.
I like the blanks better anyways.