After my 3.5 campaign wrapped up just in time for 4e, I was already rearing to start something new. I had plenty of players who weren’t in a regular D&D campaign itching to jump in, a campaign setting (thanks to co-planning the game world with Bartoneus), and a rough outline of the campaign structure. A little after two weeks since we got our grubby mitts on the core books, my first 4e game started in earnest.
This March, I placed my game on hiatus so that I could graduate. At that time, some of the players were at 9th level and not too far from 10, so I decided to cheat a little and advance all the players to Paragon to begin the next chapter on the next tier. (I tend to be pretty liberal with my XP- as a DM, I get bored with the players being at the same level for too long). However, during the 9 levels of solid play we got in, I learned a few things about D&D 4e, at least as far as I could learn from the heroic tier. Here’s what I’ve learned about running 4e for close to 10 levels, in no particular order.
Healing Between Combats is Funky
This was my first house rule, almost right away. As far as I know and what we confirmed with James Wyatt, you can use encounter healing powers out of combat if you’re willing to spend the extra time. I wasn’t a big fan of having the PCs spend 15 minutes between combats recovering (or having to make up things that would interrupt them), so I decided to just have any leader use the average healing result to all surges between combats, and it still only takes 5 minutes. It’s still kind of an annoying situation, though. It was partly addressed in PHB2 by the maximized healing during rest feat, but that still doesn’t fix the inherent goofiness of encouraging adventurers in a dungeon to hold out for 10+ minutes.
Wizards Don’t Pass the Fun Test
This was suspected early on, and confirmed during a lot of play. We’re trying to fix this in one way, but it does lead to another broader issue…
Entirely Ranged Characters are Boring
The wizard in my game is barely ever attacked since he can stay so far away much of the time (even when the terrain has lots of walls) and the fighter does an awesome job of keeping bad guys away from him. Thus, there’s little incentive for him to pay attention to positioning and movement when it’s not his turn, and if it comes to his turn and he is engaged, he teleports or otherwise escapes. I’ve also seen the same thing happen with archer rangers and ranged bards. As counter-intuitive as it may seem, it’s just not that much fun to never be in serious danger.
Damage Doesn’t Scale With Level (But Maybe It Should)
I’m still not sure all the players understand the different between ability modifier and ability checks. On the rare occasions where I pull out a straight strength check now, it has to be walked through. On the flip side, early on, the rules were not clear that damage wasn’t keyed off the ability check modifier. However, maybe it makes sense because…
Combats Take a While
Combats tend to range from a while to a long damn time. This is a common complain, I know, but it really gets to me sometimes. We’ve started speeding things up a bit by using a public dry erase board to track initiative (handled by a player) and I’ve tried to use a combination of Chrome + Compendium to have all the monster stats at my finger tips when I need them instead of doing a lot of flipping. Still, I do think ratcheting up the damage on both sides of the equation (and I’m also in favor of the “subversive house rule” that cuts monster HP down) would go a long way, I just haven’t experimented enough.
There are a Too Many Combats in Published Adventures
The players went through Thunderspire Labyrinth, and after the first two sessions, I knew I’d have to gut a number of the fights out. I’m not interested in running the Duergar fortress for several sessions in a row, where they find another room filled with different kinds of evil Dwarves and their servants, and repeat. Similarly, I ran a modified version of Last Breaths of Ashenport, but knew that despite Dagon and his children, the players weren’t going to want to do that many fights. The concepts of the adventures/locales just don’t support that many fights . I love many of the concepts of the adventures that are put out by WotC in Dungeon and for all the standalones, but I know that any one I decide to run is going to get the number of encounters cut down by at least 2/3rds.
I Have Yet to Run a Completely Successful Skill Challenge in my Campaign (But Have Run Great Ones in One-Shots)
Yes, this might be a surprise since I maintain such a complete listing of Skill Challenges, but I’m still trying to make them click with my group. My favorite so far has been the skill challenge I call “Get the f%$@ away from the giant dragon” which formed the structure of the entire adventure (so that things advanced at certain #s of successes). The one that I think registered as the silliest for the party was meeting 3 ghosts in Thunderspire Labyrinth, one of whom was specifically noted as being impressed by feats of physical prowess (leading the Elven Fighter to do long-jumps to score successes). Then the one I thought would work the best but stymied the party was also in Thunderspire Labyrinth where a manifestation of Vecna demands secrets. I gave them the chance to avoid rolls altogether and just offer their own secrets.
On the flip side, for one shots with other players, they’ve been a blast. I ran Depths of Madness which features an investigation skill challenge and “talking down a crazy dwarf” skill challenge, and everyone had fun and was creative. I’m still trying to pinpoint if it’s my group or just the way the ones I have ran have been written, but I really want to get it right and have those kinds of great RP experiences whenever I run a skill challenge.
Rituals Aren’t Quite There Yet
Ah, rituals. Wonderful concept. Haven’t quite figured out the best way to make sure they get used yet. The wizard in my group uses them a decent amount: Tenser’s Floating Disk was instrumental in avoiding a demon-filled river of blood, and silence has helped make a few ambushes possible. But each time, I feel like I as a DM am fudging it: 10 minutes go by uneventfully. I WANT to reward clever use of rituals, so I just let it go. I have no problem with using DM prerogative to make it more fun for everyone, but I wish the rules just slightly worked better so I didn’t have to.
Also, need to remind myself to give out rituals as rewards more often.
I Love Playing with Minis, Maps, and Tiles
Yes, it makes 4e more of a board game (almost by definition) but I really don’t care. Picking monsters out of my various containers, laying out dungeon tiles into a pleasing arrangement, and choosing the right map are all really fun to me. It’s like I’m playing with Legos again, but in a way that other people are going to play against me. Plus it provides that last bit of inspiration- oh hey, I have this Orc dude with a double-axe, he’d be perfect for here. Because of the ease of encounter building in 4e, I find this even more enjoyable than in 4e where I was never sure what the tipping point of a hard encounter was going to be.
The Errata is Important
Mostly with monsters, though I have already heard from one PC that had his Ranger multiclass nerfed because it was too powerful.
They fought a group of ogres in an adaptation of Hook Mountain Massacre, and I used the ogre stats from out of the book. Turns out that they should have been dealing more damage, and as it was, the ogres got the crap kicked out of them without posing a major threat. These kinds of situations have been few and far between (since I mainly pull the monster stats from the compendium), however, the errata still has always felt like a good idea to use.
3 Might Be the Real Ideal Number of Players
I’ve run adventures with every number from 3 to 8. While 5 is the recommended ideal number (and makes the fights a bit better), 3 seems to be the ideal number for balance of roleplaying time and speed of combat. It also forces every player to have even more teamwork, since 5 generally means that one player can zone out and not care that much about what everyone else is doing, while with 3 you care a lot about the tactical situation at all times (especially when you’re getting your butt kicked).
However, due to various circumstances, it’s unlikely that 3 will be the norm for my game, which is fine: I like playing with all my friends. I’ve yet to find a system that supports a high number of players anyway.
It’s My Favorite Edition of D&D
I know this is a lot of bitching, but I was able to come to this all thanks to the nearly 20 sessions of my game that I’ve run (plus playing in Bartoneus’s game, plus con games, demos, and so on…) and I’m still loving it while playing it. There’s no sign that the campaign is going to fizzle out now- I mean, things are just getting good (and by good, I mean that there’s a menace to the entire world that has just been revealed). It still plays faster and easier than 3.5, especially for me as a DM. I just hope that my analysis helps other people when running their games, and I also intend to revisit these issues when the Paragon tier is completed. Maybe some of these issues will disappear, and some will take their place, or more will just be added.
I want to think a bit more on the post as a whole but quickly I find your party size comment interesting. We have 4 players in our 4e game and while in general it seems okay, it’s been hard on the GM to try and balance encounters for us from the published adventures. Do you tend to wing balancing that, or do you have something more formal you use?
justaguy´s last post: Oh I’m a rambling man
I particularly agree on the between combats healing bit. It also messes up a lot with the bard’s song of rest ability. Is that supposed to stack or replace them using majestic word between fights?
I’ve been in a huge range of group sizes in 4e, from 2 players to 7 players. I think 3-4 is the sweet spot. Combats are faster, people stay more focuses and there is more freedom to roleplay.
Good article all around, also congrats on the graduation!
Nicholas´s last post: Two Problem Player Scenarios and How to Survive Them
Great article, Dave!
I’ve been complaining about the speed of battles for a while until I just started incorporating the 3/4 hps and +1/2 level damage to monsters. Houseruling on the DM side means players don’t have to even know what you’re doing although my players are now a lot more worried. Our sticky fighter lost 7 surges in one battle, going to bloodied in the first round. Fun!
Things get a little weirder in Paragon too. Now PCs deal a LOT more damage
Mike Shea´s last post: Three Tips for Thunderspire Labyrinth
Having played in The Game’s campaign from the beginning (and missing only 1 adventure), I figured it would be good to add my 2 cents from the player’s perspective.
1. Agree that the Wizard doesn’t seem very much fun. I think it would be more fun to use more blast or burst spells and less specific target spells, even though most wizard blast/burst spells will hit PCs as well as monsters, and would thus be less effective overall. But the potential Abe-like hilarity is just a critical hit on a PC away.
2. Love the minis and the maps. Always have loved them in D&D, now we get a ruleset that really encourages them.
3. Combat is a little longer than ideal, but frankly it doesn’t matter how long it is as long as it is fun. Which leads to…
4. Melee (or close range) characters are more fun than ranged characters. Characters that are versatile in combat are more fun than those that are optimized to do 1 thing really well.
5. Never really thought about the number of players. For me I had about the same amount of fun regardless of party size.
6. Agree that the published adventures have too many combats. For some of them, it just seemed like a mindless dungeon crawl, with one room of monsters entirely unrelated to the next.
7. The reason that you haven’t seen a completely successful skill challenge in your game is because your PCs don’t understand how skill challenges work. It’s really that simple. The first time you ran a skill challenge, you gave a very vague, bare-bones explanation of how they worked – which was fine at the time (no need to overwhelm the players, after all). But there should have been a more detailed follow-up the next time we did a skill challenge. Instead, no more instruction was given. You gotta remember that some of your PCs don’t even know how their own powers/items work. How many of them are really going to dig through the rules in the DMG to figure out how skill challenges work – other than me, that is :-)?
Omitted from the initial explanation was any mention of the primary skill / secondary skill distinction. Omitted was any explanation that you can use the same primary skill more than one time – even if you are successful (in fact you are supposed to do that – but observation from our skill challenges indicates that the PCs don’t understand this).
Additionally, I don’t think that the primary skills are even disclosed during our skill challenges; the PCs are left to figure them out on their own. That is fine when you are running more experienced players (read: ones who understand how skill challenges work) or when the skills are incredibly obvious, but IMO, until our group becomes more comfortable with how skill challenges work the primary skills should always be disclosed up front.
8. Damage doesn’t scale with level, but with new magic items and feats / powers, your damage should be increasing. The game expects you to be able to upgrade your weapons and armor as you level up, but in practice this is rarely possible.
9. Agree that 4th edition is my favorite. Every combat is challenging, if not for the PCs then at least for the tactical/strategic minds of the players. Every character can do cool things. Plenty of options in combat. Plenty of options in building a character. Still the same D&D feel. Looking forward to paragon tier.
10. The Game has proven once again that going the extra mile as a DM really pays dividends in terms of the players’ enjoyment. Things like music, appropriate miniatures & terrain, and putting everything on the Wiki really makes the game more fun for the players. It’s been great so far and I’m looking forward to paragon tier.
Nice article, Dave. Thanks for all the plugs 🙂 (I’m Dave’s wizard PC). While the wizard has been oh so elusive for you to harm, it may be easier now with the release of arcane power since I took the Twist the Arcane feat. Also, one means of helping scale damage would be increasing at-will power damage at each tier, not just epic…or would that be overpowered?
…and by “Twist the Arcane”, I of course mean “Twist the Arcane Fabric”.
I will add to my (very) long comment a note about why I believe melee characters are more fun to play than ranged characters.
There are several things a PC has to worry about in combat.
1. dealing damage to monsters
2. absorbing/healing/protecting himself against damage from monsters
3. movement and positioning
4. other – includes defender’s attempt to occupy monsters/protect other PCs, leader’s attempt to heal other PCs, controller’s attempt to manipulate the environment/terrain, and other special circumstances (e.g. mission objective of placing the gem in the idol’s mouth before the golem is activated, etc.).
The more important each of these things are to your character (or the more your character has to worry about these things) the more fun combat is. Thus the fighter, to whom all 4 of those things are important, will find combat very fun. The spell-slinging eladrin wizard, on the other hand, only really deals with #1 and #4 from above – movement and positioning are unimportant because all of his spells are in range and he can easily escape combat if the monsters get too close, and absorbing/healing/protecting against damage from monsters is unimportant because he rarely even gets attacked, let alone damaged.
When using a map and minis, #3 really becomes crucial. If movement and positioning are important for your character, combat will be a lot more fun because every turn will present an opportunity to gain a positional advantage on the enemy – as well as an opportunity to attack. If you are a long range character to which positioning is unimportant, then most turns will consist only of an attack.
This problem is exacerbated by the fact that most PCs, being non-human, will only have 2 at-will attack powers (and until the higher levels of heroic tier very few other powers). This means that many turns the choice of attack is not really a tough choice at all. Thus, for a ranged character, may turns will simply consist of one obvious choice of attack power, and that’s it. For a melee character, there is the additional choice of where to move, doubling the number of important decisions that are made during the turn.
I sense that at higher levels, when PCs have 3-4 encounter powers, 2-3 daily powers, and utility powers, the lack of at-will powers will become less of a problem. But at the lower levels of heroic tier, I think the lack of at-will powers really makes playing a ranged character a lot less fun than a melee character.
My dwarf wizard was always catching our dwarf fighter in his spells, including critical hits, but the fighter was hard enough to take it. Dropping a web in a narrow passage was a lot of fun, too, especially when it was filled with drow.
Then there was the time I disenchanted an ancient, evil artifact weapon while the city collapsed around us because, hey, residuum!
I think that 4 people is the ideal number in any game regardless of edition. My best experiences have been running games for 4 players. But I think I could be okay with 5 (if they’re good players), though I don’t think I ever want to run a game for 6 people again (actually 6 people that are bad players in that they don’t really care about playing or anything. Man that game sucked :p)
Dave, have you considered adding some more mobility-based critters to chase down the Wizard? If the bad guys can teleport right after him, or if a bad guy he THOUGHT couldn’t teleport suddenly does, there’s a lot more danger to him. Of course, then the ranged characters can be attacked easily and the Defender feels bad…
Wyatt´s last post: Might of Eden Week Part 4: Warlord
Interesting article. For me 4 or 5 is the optimum number of players, but we’ve had some great sessions where only three have turned up and we’ve got a lot more done.
@Wyatt: I agree, I’ve suggested to Dave he should use more monsters like the Foulspawn Grue (that teleports as a move action) or the new Phase Spider (from the MM2) which can teleport also.
As a DM, and Dave is in my game as a wizard so he can tell you, I try to throw lurkers and skirmishers at the ranged PCs as much as possible. For the first 10 adventures of my game the Bugbear Strangler was one of my favorite monsters. 🙂
I solved this problem with rituals in my game with a simple homebrew feat: Ritual Preparation.
During an extended rest, anyone with the Ritual Caster feat can “pre-cast” a single ritual they know. Material costs must be paid for when the ritual is prepared, and any focus required by the ritual must be present during both the preparation time and when the ritual is actually cast.
Once prepared, that ritual can be cast as a standard action, at which point that ritual “slot” becomes available again. I call for the requisite skill check at different times depending on what’s appropriate for the spell, but generally when it’s actually “triggered” so that players don’t know what the result of the spell will be ahead of time.
There’s an additional tier-based restriction: Heroic characters can use this feat on any ritual with a casting time of 10 minutes or less. Paragon characters can prepare rituals with a casting time of 30 minutes or less. Epic characters can do rituals with a casting time of 1 hour or less. (The continuing restriction into Epic is important to avoid having Raise Dead prepped.)
Lots of great responses! Let’s see how many I can answer…
justaguy: Generally it hasn’t been a problem just to drop a monster, and my players have pretty strong characters so they can handle a bit more than they should. I have run into that problem in published adventures though and had to fudge it a bit or include allies, and whatnot.
Nicholas: I tend to agree with you about the sweet spot, and thanks! I need to update my bio.
Mike: I’m going to see how the damage works out in Paragon and try to use more recent monsters (like in MM2) and see how that works, and try tweaking from there, perhaps using your rule. I think 3/4 HP for the MM1 monsters is the right amount to cut.
Original Sultan: Thanks for weighing in! It reminds me that I should directly talk to my players about these things more often. Your comment about skill challenges is especially insightful, considering I had tried the opposite tack of pulling the rules back, but maybe I should put them more forward instead. Also agree on the melee/ranged distinction.
The O: That’s OK, because I’m just going to kill Gurias with a fireball anyway.
Wyatt: Yeah, I’ll have to give it a shot. I don’t want to continually harass his PC (well, I kinda do, but it seems bad) but I should use more encounters like that.
Saragon: I like it! I might consider something like it. Though my alternative that’s been floating around in my head is the ability to fast-cast any ritual by using a skill challenge. We’ll see if it gels.
@Wyatt and Bartoneus: don’t fill Dave’s head with such ideas!
Great article Dave – as I was just telling Danny, I can get lost in many D&D articles that get very complex without much clarity or structure, but this was a pleasure to read and left me itching to play. 🙂